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

I thank the member for Robertson for her question. It's a pity that when she was asking the question the Leader of the Opposition said, 'Oh, dear, let's talk about this,' and he turned around with a piece of paper, which I think is blank, and is pretending now to have a conversation with the shadow Treasurer and the member for Sydney, because, I suspect, he doesn't want to hear about this particular topic. The Australian public now understands that the Leader of the Opposition says one thing to an audience in one part of the country, because he thinks that's what they want to hear, but when he jumps on the plane he feels that he's cleansed himself and he travels north, normally to Queensland, where he says the complete opposite to that which he's just said in the south of the country. It's hard to keep up with the positions of the Leader of the Opposition, and the Australian public get that this guy is duplicitous at best. He has doublecrossed every colleague he has ever shaken hands with. He has worked for and against union bosses. You don't become the chief union boss of this country without skeletons in the closet, and this fellow has plenty of them.

When it comes to border protection, we know that the Leader of the Opposition is down in Victoria, in the inner-city seat of Batman, where there's a by-election and where the Labor Party fears that the Greens will win that seat from the Labor Party, telling them that the Labor Party will go soft on border protection.

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