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

The reason for that is he knows—like the Liberals who are running for the Senate in Western Australia, the now Minister for Defence, the Assistant Minister for Immigration and Border Protection and Linda Reynolds, who has 30 years experience in the ADF, know—the importance of strong border protection measures. They have demonstrated that with their actions. It is the A-team, if you like, of the Western Australian ticket. If you are interested in national security and strong border protection laws, then they are the people you can support in Western Australia in that election.

I can report to the member for Canning that we are getting results because we are doing what we said we would do. We went to the election with a strong commitment to put in policies that we knew worked, that did work and that are working again. The result of that is 90 days since we have had a successful people-smuggling venture to this country. It was three months ago, on 19 December last year, when we last saw a successful venture; in the same three-month period 12 months ago, 2,591 people turned up on 47 vessels under the previous government's policies. As a result of this we have been able to establish another 4,000 places in the Special Humanitarian Program to give visas to people who were waiting under their laws and their failures. There are four centres that we have been able to close, and we will be closing more on the mainland because of the success of our policies.

But there are frustrations—and those frustrations sit opposite. They still want to give permanent visas to the more than 30,000 people who turned up on their watch and still sit here in this country today. That is their policy. Yesterday in the Senate they teamed up with the Greens again and they voted against the restoration of temporary protection visas.

Some leaders of the opposition are referred to as small targets. This Leader of the Opposition is just small. He is not big enough to rise above his union background, and he is not big enough to let go of the policy failures of the Labor Party when they were in government. He should free himself from the shackles of Labor's policy failures on border protection and he should support the policies of this government that are delivering stronger borders and are stopping the boats.

See this speech in context