Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Sturt to his commitment to community safety. One of the main reasons we find that people want to come to Australia is because of our great reputation of being a safe and fair society. But community safety is absolutely a priority of people who have been here a long time and people who have come to our country as well, and I thank the member for Sturt for this question.

The government has put forward, for three years now, legislation to increase the government's ability to protect Australians and community safety from serious criminals in so many categories that I have outlined to the House before. I want to update the House that this bill will come back here and that we will continue to pursue this legislation every day and every week until we're able to do this, to secure better laws to protect Australians from serious criminals who don't come from Australia and to stop people from ever coming here in the first place who pose a great risk to Australians. These are straightforward laws; they're serious laws and they're serious crimes that we're talking about. The bill is well constructed, and the Labor Party knows that.

In terms of contrary approaches, though, we have seen from the Australian Greens a particularly contrary approach in recent weeks. In fact they seem to hate the bill and everything it represents. Senator Mehreen Faruqi says that the bill is damaging and toxic, and is glad that the bill didn't pass—a law to protect Australians. Nick McKim says we're stigmatising and persecuting people. In a sense, he has that right: on people who are perpetrating crimes against Australians, the government does take that view. In other ways, we heard the Greens say that this is early onset fascism, putting forward laws to protect Australians from people who will commit serious, violent and sexual offences.

A government member: Why does Labor vote with the Greens then?

In the Senate, of course, we've seen Labor vote with the Greens on this, and in the House we've seen it in as well. That's why it was interesting last week to see an article by AAP entitled 'Greens target balance of power under Labor'. We've seen this movie before. This isn't a Hollywood blockbuster that we're watching again. It's like watching all 10 seasons of Friends again. In the article, the member for Melbourne was asked—in terms of contrary approaches—

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