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

There is a fair amount of content in the honourable member's question, and I want to do justice to the reply. The honourable member first raised the issue of the Syrian intake. As a general comment, let me say that, as the United Nations has pointed out, there are 65 million people in the world who are displaced and would seek to come to start a better life in our country tomorrow. That is understandable for a number of reasons. In Syria, for example, there are 6½ million people who are displaced, and the thought that a country like Australia—or even the United States, the United Kingdom or France—could take all of those people is just not realistic. So Australia has announced that we would take 12,000 people as part of an international effort, which put us—even in real terms, but certainly on a per capita basis—pretty close to the top of the tree. Each year, along with the United States and Canada, we settle more people—again, in real terms and on a per capita basis—than almost any other country in the world. So there is a lot for us to be very proud of.

The first charge for me as the minister responsible for immigration and border protection is to make sure that I protect our own people. As we have seen in Belgium, as we have seen in Germany only in the last fortnight and as we have seen in France and elsewhere, people are passing themselves off as refugees when really that is not their background and it is not who they are. They are going to cause disruption and we are not going to allow that to happen in our program. I am not making any other comment about other countries' screening processes or the way in which they have conducted their intake, but it is the case that because we have been scrupulous about each of the applications that have been made we have discovered people of national security interest and risk. I think, had we not conducted the thoroughness of the process, we would have ended up with some of those people here.

The difficulty for all of us in the modern age, and this will be with us for our lifetimes, is that it just takes one person who has crossed our border with ill intent to go into a shopping centre or public place or—speaking of our children—playground or school or somewhere else. We have seen this overseas. The tragedy of such circumstances carried out would not only disrupt and destroy lives but also undermine the confidence the Australian people have in the intake of migrants into this country. What all of the longitudinal work shows is that the Australian public's confidence in an increased number of migrants coming into this country each year tracks very closely to the government of the day's competence in maintaining control of our borders. So we have been meticulous in the process and we have been able to bring people in.

I am advised that between 1 July 2015 and 7 October this year 14,047 visas have been granted. There are the 12,000 within the program, but within the 13,750 base program we already have 4,850 who come from Syria and Iraq—8,313 of those go towards the additional 12,000 places, and there are 884 under the 2016-17 humanitarian program. In this time, 10,244 people have arrived in Australia—5,235 as part of the additional 12,000 places and 1,816 arrivals in 2016-17. As at 7 October, a further 6,126 people have been interviewed and assessed as meeting the threshold requirements for a visa and are awaiting the outcomes of health, character and/or security checks. So the program is going well, but we are not going to rush it. We were encouraged by the Labor Party early on to push through this program and get these people here. We have been very clear—I was very clear to our people in the posts as I have been to the officers within the department here—that we are not going to compromise, (a) because we have the potential of bringing a security risk in and (b) because we would displace somebody who was actually a refugee and deserving of that place and would be left to languish.

In relation to the matters on Nauru, as I have said before, we are absolutely determined—now that we have stopped boats, we have the situation under control and we have the assets and the political determination to deal with this threat ongoing—to get women, children and family units off Nauru. It is the absolute priority of me, the Prime Minister and the government. We have no control over who Nauru issues visas to, as the honourable member would well know. I do not accept advice from the New Zealand minister or from the PNG minister about who I should issue visas to, and this is entirely an issue for the government of Nauru. I would mention that of course the arrangement was set up in 2012 under Prime Minister Gillard. We have tidied up that mess. We have stopped the 1,000 people a week arriving on boats and we have presided over a much more humane arrangement than Labor set up in the first place. (Time expired)

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