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

I thank the honourable member very much for her question. She is a very accomplished person and will make a great contribution in this parliament.

Obviously, we are all working closely with our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and that is certainly the case for Border Force. We have CTU officers at our eight international airports—in fact, 100 officers now. The threat is real, and government and opposition—every member, particularly senior members—need to act in our nation's best interests. It is inconceivable that any person in this place could fall under the spell of any foreign national.

It is funny, because during the break I watched a great TV miniseries by Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis called Secret City. It was a six-episode series. It was filmed in this very building, as it turns out, and it was based around a character called Mal Paxton. He was a defence minister in a Labor government. He was very familiar. He had close contact with a foreign national and was influenced by this foreign national, perhaps even to the extent of accepting financial payments. He even changed his position on national security policy, as I recall. It was a great watch, and congratulations to Chris Uhlmann and to Steve Lewis!

I thought it was a fictional plot. I thought it went a bit far. But it turns out that it may have been a documentary, because imagine my surprise when I read that Senator Sam Dastyari had received a payment from a third party and had changed his view, and expressed a different view from that of his own party, on national security policy.

Ironically, the first episode within this six-episode series by Mr Uhlmann and Mr Lewis was called 'A donation to the struggle'. Another episode was called 'Ghosts in the machine'. But my favourite episode was 'Falling hard', and if this Leader of the Opposition has any leadership skill at all then that is exactly what will happen to Senator Sam Dastyari.

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