James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, as the previous speaker has said, we are in a farcical situation where this legislation has been thrown into the parliament with the slimmest consultation whatsoever as the government is desperately playing catch-up on a situation they should have been absolutely adequately prepared for.

We know that a few weeks ago the High Court handed down a decision. That was imminent, and you never know exactly how courts are going to determine things, but you certainly make contingencies. When it comes to the safety of the people of this country, you absolutely make contingencies. If there was any chance—the slightest chance—that a court decision could have resulted in hardened criminals such as murderers, rapists and paedophiles being released into the Australian community, a responsible government would have had a plan in place to do whatever was necessary to update the Commonwealth legislation to prevent that from happening. We know that, instead, the government was caught in a state of shock about the decision and had no plan whatsoever to do anything to address that situation until the Leader of the Opposition stepped in and provided the leadership that the government should have: to insist on this parliament taking every opportunity to immediately address the circumstance that we are in.

I agree with the Leader of the Greens: the Opposition Leader is running the country on this issue, because, if it weren't for the Leader of the Opposition last sitting week and the happy coincidence of the Prime Minister also being out of the country, action to pass legislation couldn't have been taken with no Prime Minister here and the acting Prime Minister acquiescing to all of the things that we suggested needed to be done to take the necessary immediate steps that the parliament could take to try to keep Australians safe. That's what happened, and I commend the Leader of the Opposition for the leadership that he brought to the parliament that day, for the action that was taken on the initiative of the Leader of the Opposition and other shadow ministers, who governed in an absence of the actual government, which should have had all the advice and all the preparedness that we assume that they would have had to take action if that decision were made. We nonetheless were prepared to immediately step into the void left by the government and insist on this parliament doing what ultimately we did the other week.

But now we find ourselves in a farcical situation where we are being asked to pass through this parliament this other legislation that no-one really knew anything about until today. We've got a lot of concern and hesitation about this government's competence when it comes to legislating in this area. Two weeks ago, they didn't even want to legislate at all, and we shamed them into it. We said there are dangerous people out there who pose a risk to the safety of Australians—people who are out there tapdancing down the streets of the major CBDs of this country; convicted, hardened criminals who are not Australian citizens and who should not be in this country at all but particularly should not be freely walking the streets in and amongst the Australian community, at a huge risk and threat to them. At that point, the government was going to do nothing until we shamed them into it. Now we've got a situation where legislation is before us that we know hardly anything about and have hardly any understanding of its justification.

We now hear that the High Court will be handing down the reasoning for their determination tomorrow. Yet we're debating this bill right now in a conflated period of time and in an environment where, I have to say, we've got very little confidence in a government that has mucked up this issue from go to whoa.

The first job of any government is to keep the people of their country safe, and this government has failed on that spectacularly. The people of this country have not been kept safe through this whole tawdry ordeal, where hardened criminals have been released into the community. We've been talking in this parliament today, quite appropriately, about violence against women, and at the same time we've got a situation where convicted rapists are in our community, at risk of reoffending. So, we as a parliament want to do everything that's necessary to protect the people of this country. We've been taking the lead on this, and through the leadership of the opposition leader we saw legislation pass through this parliament in the last sitting period that goes some way, in the limited time we had and through the limited options we have as a legislative body, to keep Australians safe. But we don't have a government that is prioritising that. People have lost confidence in this government to do the fundamental most important thing that governments need to do, which is keep the people of this country safe.

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