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

Can I say thank you very much to the member for Brisbane, and, like all members on this side of the House, he can be assured that, through the actions of this government, we are making communities across the country safer. We went to the last election saying that we would secure our borders, because if you cannot secure your borders you cannot provide security and safety to Australian families. This government stopped boats. We stopped drownings at sea. We stopped people going into detention, including children. There were 17 detention centres that we closed. And we cleaned up Labor's mess.

Labor is still divided and dysfunctional when it comes to border protection policy—and, indeed, when it comes to immigration policy. They presided over a failed program. We have restored integrity to that program, and this government will continue to make the tough decisions that are in the best interests of our country. We will make decisions that will make Australians safer. For example, I have cancelled the visas of over 2,000 noncitizens, which, over the course of the last two years, is up by 1,200 per cent in the case of visa cancellations and 425 per cent in relation to refusal on character grounds for those visas to be issued.

As to the Labor Party, when it was in government, there are members on this front bench of the Shorten opposition that were issuing visas to outlaw motorcycle gang members when they were ministers for immigration in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years—the 'glory years', as the Labor Party refers to them; the glory years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd period! We have cancelled the visas of 138 noncitizens who have been involved in outlaw motorcycle gangs. Why have we taken that stance but the Labor Party did not? We know that the CFMEU and other unions use the bikies, to this very day, as muscle on building sites, to bash carpenters and to bash tilers, because that is the way the CFMEU do their work, and the CFMEU donates millions and millions of dollars to this Leader of the Opposition and this Labor Party. And the fact is that the CFMEU owns and operates, to this very day, the Australian Labor Party. The Australian public will not forget this at the next election. But we have picked out those bikies because we are not interested in seeing them employed in illegitimate industries—

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