Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canning for his question. He has, for many years, been a keen advocate in this place for strong border protection.

The previous government left behind a considerable mess on many fronts, but there is no greater mess than the one they have left behind on our borders. Over 50,000 people turned up illegally by boat under the previous government. The secret the previous government never wanted to share with the Australian people before the last election is that 33,000 of those people who arrived on their watch remain onshore, unprocessed and undetermined—leaving behind a massive backlog of chaos to be addressed by an incoming government. They simply wanted to dump the problem on a future government. My colleagues and I are all having to deal with the problems they have dumped on us as we go through the process of seeking to restore sense to government policy, particularly in this area.

When you leave 33,000 people in immigration detention, on bridging visas and in community detention, that has a profound impact on the way the system works. It draws down heavily on the resources of the immigration department and impacts on their ability to address the many other areas of important work we do. But the single greatest impact on the immigration program caused by the failures of the previous government was that the loss of confidence Australians had in our border protection led to them questioning the immigration program itself. That is a tragedy. What we are doing is restoring that confidence in our borders and restoring that confidence in our immigration program. The way we are doing that is by moving to restore temporary protection visas.

Mr Stephen Jones interjecting—

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