Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Bonner for his question. Everybody on this side of the House understands that you need to get border protection right. We need to make sure that we don't see kids drown at sea or go into detention. This government has worked day and night to stop people arriving illegally by boat. We've got the kids out of detention. We have closed 19 detention centres. We don't want to see a return to the desperate days when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard were in control of the Labor Party, but I fear we are watching a re-run of that train wreck under this Leader of the Opposition.

As people start to look at the implications of the bill that was rushed through by the Leader of the Opposition and the Greens in this chamber and the Senate this week, people will realise how dangerous that piece of legislation was. At the moment, the government has the ability under the Migration Act to stop somebody accused of sexual assault, for example, hopping onto a plane in Dubai, Wellington or Washington, or wherever it might be, to come to our country. That is a reasonable prospect in any circumstance and, I believe, in any reasonable person's mind, a power that should be vested in the government of the day. There's no doubt about that. Nobody could argue against it. But it derives from section 501 of the Migration Act, and there are 12 parts to that act. The difficulty is that, with Labor's approach, they have abandoned 11 of the 12 sections. It means somebody coming from Manus or Nauru, under the Leader of the Opposition's now law, could come to our country. I don't believe that the Australian public support that. I don't believe that the Australian public want to see kids back on boats or drowning at sea.

But I can say that what has happened this week is that the Labor Party has completely undermined their own credibility. They went to the last election promising the Australian public that their policy would be no different to that of the coalition. The reality is that they have abandoned temporary protection visas. That is a central pillar of our success with Operation Sovereign Borders. They have walked away from it. There are only two remaining pillars. One is in relation to offshore processing. This week they completely abandoned it. That leaves one pillar, and that is turning back boats where it's safe to do so. Does anybody believe—in this chamber, around the country—that this Leader of the Opposition would be able to turn back boats where it's safe to do so? Of course not. The people smugglers understand that Labor's weak on border protection, and the Australian public this week have seen it on full display. (Time expired)

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