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

I thank the honourable member for his question. There has been a lot of hard work and the government has taken many tough decisions in relation to stopping boats. We took very seriously the responsibility bequeathed to us by Labor to clean up their mess. When John Howard left office in 2007, as my colleagues know, there were four people in detention. John Howard had stopped the boats and he had dealt with the problem. Under the Rudd and Gillard governments, of which the Leader of the Opposition was an integral part—remembering he both supported and stabbed in the back both of those Prime Ministers but was central to the decision making in those cabinets—the fact is that the Labor Party started the boats up again. They gave a green light to people smugglers and, tragically, 1,200 people—men, women and children—drowned at sea.

We are coming up to close to four years in which we have not had a successful people-smuggling venture. We have not had deaths at sea. We have closed 17 detention centres, and we got the 8,000 children out of detention that Labor put into detention. You would have thought, given all of that success and given the years it has taken to correct Labor's mistakes, that Labor would at least have the decency to say that they are not going to change those policies again. You would have thought the Rudd and Gillard governments demonstrated that you should not undo the coalition policies in relation to Operation Sovereign Borders. But, unfortunately for this Leader of the Opposition, he is wholly and solely owned by the Left of his party. We're seeing a by-election in Batman at the moment where, as we've warned before, the Leader of the Opposition will be saying one thing in that inner-city seat in Victoria and saying something very different when he gets up to Longman, Lilley and other seats in Queensland. This is interesting to note because, if you undo these policies and allow people to come from Manus and Nauru, people who Labor put there, you will restart the boats. That's very clear. It's very clear on the intelligence available to us that, if you close down regional processing centres and if you don't turn back boats where it's safe to do so and have the resolve we've shown, the boats will recommence.

Interestingly enough, at the last election and since then, the Leader of the Opposition has been trying to convince the Australian public that in fact he wouldn't change the coalition's policies. But I note a tweet that came out from the Clifton Hill Labor branch that says:

Bill Shorten promises Nauru and manus detention centres will be closed under a Labor government.

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