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

I thank the member for Tangney very much for his question and his dedication to making sure that Western Australians can live in a safer society. That is what this government is about: to make sure we can take decisions which will make our country safer. It was an absolutely deliberate decision for us to seek out people who are non-citizens, that is, people in our country on visas, who commit criminal offences against Australian citizens, and to cancel their visas. I am pleased to report to the House that we have cancelled a record number of visas over the course of the last year. But we have only just started, and we will continue to work with state and territory policing authorities and intelligence agencies to identify those at the top of the tree and to work with the policing agencies to identify paedophiles and people who have committed serious offences including rape and murder. We will cancel the visas of those people, because we do not believe that they deserve to be in our society.

We have taken advice from the intelligence and policing agencies about those who are most organised in criminal activity. The advice from the agencies is that the people who are the biggest distributors of amphetamines—that is, drugs that end up in the arms of young Australians and destroy the lives of Australian families—are outlaw motorcycle gang members. The advice is very clear, and that is why over the course of the last 12 months we have taken action in relation to 106 bikies, members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and we have cancelled the visas of those individuals. We will not stop, because we are going to continue to work with those agencies to clean up the sector, to make sure that we can deal with these outlaw motorcycle gang members so they cannot inflict the pain and agony on young children and families around the country. We are not going to be deterred in that process. That is why Australians look with absolute bewilderment at the Leader of the Opposition, because he is one of the few Australians that support these bikies so vehemently. It is an absolute outrage, but ask yourself the question—

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