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

I am sure I speak for all honourable members and, in fact, for every Australian when I say that we do not want to see people self-harming. We do not want to see them self-harming in our country; we do not want to see them self-harming on Nauru, Manus or anywhere else. Equally, though, all Australians do not want to see people drowning at sea. The reality is that we need to deal with very tough situations in relation to movements across our borders. We need to make sure, particularly in this day and age, that there is a secure border management system in place and we need to do that because we need to have a safe community.

The United Nations tells us that there are some 58 million people around the world who would seek to come to a country like ours because they want a better life for themselves and for their children. All of us can understand that. The reality is that we are a population of 24 million and we have one of the highest per-capita intakes in the world of refugees. Along with Canada and the United States, we take people in record numbers. Thirteen thousand seven hundred and fifty refugees will come to our country this year and, within two or three years, that number will grow to 18,250. In addition, we are bringing 12,000 Syrians in—we are conducting rigorous security and health checks to make sure that these people will be able to integrate successfully into our community—and we should be very proud of that.

But what the government have been absolutely adamant about is that we are not going to allow people smugglers to dictate the refugees who seek to come to our country. We have said from day one—we were elected, in fact, on this platform at the last election—very clearly and very definitively: the Australian people want secure borders. They want to offer a helping hand to those people who are in a desperate situation, and we do that through the refugee program. We bring refugees to our country by plane, not by boat. We will work with the Nauruan authorities and with the PNG authorities to provide opportunities for people there who have been found to be refugees—in the case of PNG, to integrate into Papua New Guinea society, or, on Nauru, to either stay on Nauru or move to Cambodia. We are working on third-country settlement options, but we need to structure any arrangement in such a way that it will not create a pull factor or an opportunity for people smugglers to get back into business. We have dozens of health workers working on Nauru at the moment, including mental health workers and support people, who are providing support to refugees and to people on Nauru but also delivering a very clear message—and that is that they are not going to settle in our country.

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