Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Just to go through the facts, to explain them to the Australian public: when Labor was elected in 2007, they inherited from the Howard government a situation where four people were in detention, and none of those people were children. That is the first point to make. The second point, which the Labor Party do not like—and we saw the demonstration of that before—is this fact: over the course of the Labor government, having been elected in 2007, 50,000 people arrived on 800 boats. Our intelligence agencies were pushed to the limit and indeed beyond. This is a very, very important fact, because at the same time, Labor ripped out $700 million from our border protection agencies. They hamstrung the agencies with dysfunctional policies and the worst administration that this country had seen since federation. What has happened since the election of the Abbott government—let me tell you this—

Mr Champion interjecting—

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