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

I thank the honourable member very much for his question and recognise the work that he does, particularly in Western Australia. It's very important to Western Australia because Western Australians, like all Australians, recognise that we have a vulnerability with people coming from Indonesia at the hands of people smugglers. The reality is there are 14,000 people in Indonesia right now waiting to get onto boats. We know that the people smugglers are looking very carefully at this election. If I were a people smuggler in Indonesia, I'd be getting down to Sportsbet in Jakarta and putting as much money as I could on the Labor Party getting into government. I suspect that's what they're counting on, because, if Labor gets back into power, the boats restart. That is the bottom line. You're seeing images out of the United States at the moment, with kids in detention. You're seeing the tragedy of people drowning in the Mediterranean, with hundreds of thousands of people trying to move into Europe. Don't forget those are exactly the scenes that we saw on our television screens only a few years ago, and yet, for over 1,400 days, because of the policies of this government, we have not had a child drown at sea. Twelve hundred people drowned at sea under Labor, and the Labor Party wants to undo the policies that have resulted in the stopping of the boats.

Dr Mike Kelly interjecting—

Mr Falinski interjecting —

We've heard from every Labor member about how they want to dismantle—

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