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

I thank the honourable member very much for her contribution and I pay tribute to the way in which she has conducted herself in relation to this debate and, in particular, her deep and sincerely held views, thoughts and care for members of our defence services. In Nola Marino you have a local member who really concerns herself very deeply about these issues—particularly where there was a significant impact on the naval staff, on other members of the defence force and on members of Customs and Border Protection during the period when Labor was in government. It must have been truly horrific for those staff to be literally pulling from the water bodies who had been half-eaten by sharks and had drowned in dreadful circumstances. As the honourable member rightly points out, 1,200 people in total, that we know of, lost their lives at sea when Labor was in power. It is beyond me, and I think beyond all of my colleagues here tonight, why Labor would want to revert to the failure that resulted in deaths at sea, an $11 billion blow-out and those 800 boats coming. Ultimately that was driven by the fact that half a billion dollars under Labor was put into the pockets of people smugglers. It was a truly shameful period of Labor maladministration. We have been able to turn back boats where it has been safe to do so and introduce temporary protection visas. Those two measures in relation to Operation Sovereign Borders—and other measures, but in my judgement primarily those two measures—has resulted in the success we have seen with Operation Sovereign Borders.

As the honourable member would know, there is an internal blue going on within the Labor Party at the moment. There is one almighty fight going on between the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in relation to turn-backs where it is safe to do so. The National Conference of the Labor Party is coming up. If we need to understand why Labor cannot adopt the successful Operation Sovereign Borders strategy, we need to understand what is happening internally. Again, I do think there are sensible voices within the Labor Party who are begging and pleading those on the Far Left of their party to come to a sensible centre, to adopt the success of the Liberal government. I honestly believe that. I have no evidence of it but I suspect it. I offer support to those people who might be appealing to the better side of their colleagues on the Left, but I suspect, sadly, that the Left is going to prevail. And, if the Left prevails, as they did during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, we will see deaths starting again at sea if Labor is re-elected at the next election. We will see those 50,000 people coming on boats again. We cannot allow that to restart. As the honourable member pointed out in her question, we cannot allow it to restart for a number of reasons, primarily because of the impact that it has on our personnel. We do not want to put our personnel into that situation and, under this government, we will not do that. That is our commitment to our defence personnel. It is why we have repeated, on a number of occasions: if you cannot control your borders, you cannot control national security. Labor did lose control of the borders. We got control of the borders back and we are doing all we possibly can at this time of heightened threat of terrorism to keep the Australian public safe.

All of the briefings that we receive in the National Security Committee of Cabinet and all of the advice that we receive from the intelligence chiefs say to us that we are living in a very different time and we need to stare this threat down. This government, as the Prime Minister has demonstrated from day 1, commits us to making sure that we do not return to a loss of control at our borders or a loss of control in relation to national security matters, particularly given that Labor ripped out hundreds of millions of dollars from those programs. We in government have been able to restore a lot of funding to our agencies to make sure that they can stand up to this current threat. That is what we do within this budget. We provide additional funding, as I said before, around biometrics in relation to a number of other programs but including, importantly, Operation Sovereign Borders so that we make sure that we never revisit a situation where people are drowning at sea and where our naval and our Customs and Border Protection staff are subject to that sort of horrific scenario.

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