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

I thank the honourable member for his question. All Australians know that the people-smuggling scourge is an issue not just within our region but right across the world. People have seen the images of young children drowning on the Mediterranean. They have seen the reports of 1,200 people who drowned when vessels went to the bottom of the ocean trying to traverse from Indonesian to Christmas Island or to Australia at the peak of Labor's unravelling of our border protection policies. The officers from my department and from the Royal Australian Navy were pulling 1,000 people a week off boats and putting them into detention. Tragically, not only did 1,200 people drown at sea but 8,000 children ended up in detention and the 50,000 people who came on 800 boats were just the start.

Fortunately, through some tough decisions that we've had to take, we've been able to stop this scourge, but the problem has not gone away. So if the question is: what is the threat to border protection and border security in this country? It's not just the people smugglers who haven't gone away, who are prepared to get back into this evil business tomorrow; it's also a weak leader in the Leader of the Opposition, who is standing up at the moment delivering messages which are being heard by people smugglers that the Labor Party, if elected at the next election, would be prepared to undo the measures we have put in place which have stopped those drownings at sea, which allowed us to get every child out of detention and now take the people off Manus and Nauru that Labor put onto those two islands. I was amazed when I saw some reports yesterday from a Labor branch that reported comments by the Leader of the Opposition when he was down there campaigning for the Batman by-election. I thought it was a joke but it is not.

This is how the reports of the Leader of the Opposition's comments went: 'Bill Shorten promises Nauru and Manus detention centres will be closed under a Labor government.' It was reconfirmed by people at the meeting, yet that is the complete opposite of the statement that the Leader of the Opposition made during the course of the last election campaign and every day since.

The people smugglers can sniff out weakness and a lack of leadership from many miles away. They saw it in Julia Gillard, and they saw it in Kevin Rudd. Now this Leader of the Opposition promises to be a complete image of Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard. It would be a disaster for our country. There's been a lot written about the past of the Leader of the Opposition. There've been many people in the Leader of the Opposition's life who have had that trust broken, including workers. We've seen all sorts of examples in this place where he's ripped off workers in favour of big companies. He stands condemned on this as well. (Time expired)

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