Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question and note the $12.4 million to be put into the Indigenous rangers program, which is so vitally important to how we keep our borders strong and protected. We note also that at Boigu Island, in the member's electorate, you can actually see the boats leaving Papua New Guinea. The same Indigenous rangers work as part of the process of making sure that we maintain the sentinel herds and keep our nation free not only from people but from the things they might bring in on the boats—things such as pigs, which could carry foot-and-mouth disease, issues such as screw fly and diseases that could come into our grain crops. It is vitally important, because it is not just the people who create the problems; it is also the things they might be carrying.

This is why we have the migration legislation amendment bill. We want to make sure that we close the circle on giving our nation strong borders. Strong borders are vitally important for making sure that we keep the biosecurity requirements in place and also that we keep our borders secure. It is interesting that we always believed we were on a unity ticket with the Labor Party, but that unity ticket with the Labor Party seems to have been put aside. However, today they did manage to come up with a unity ticket with Senator Jacqui Lambie and One Nation. So we now have Senator Jacqui Lambie—

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