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

As I have reported to the House before, the government has made it an absolute priority to make sure we can protect Australian children. One of the ways we're doing that is to invest significantly into the Australian Federal Police, and the other agencies within Home Affairs, to work closely with their police colleagues around the states. We have been involved now in a number of operations where a record number of paedophiles have been arrested.

You can imagine the devastation of the police and the investigators, but most importantly the victims, their mums, their dads and their family members, when those offenders go to court and in many cases receive no jail time at all. The government has spoken to a lot of victims' groups and to a lot of individual police officers, about how this work has scarred their lives, in many cases forever, and all of them say to us, 'Please do whatever you can to increase the jail time for those sex offenders'. So the government was shocked last night in the Senate when the Labor Party opposed the bill that we had put in place. When the Labor party went completely back—

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