Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday our government released a landmark report by Dennis Richardson AC, who I think everyone in this chamber would agree is a person of absolutely unimpeachable integrity. Our government commissioned that report in the face of genuine questions being raised about the integrity of contracts in our offshore processing system. Mr Richardson was asked to review the contracts and examine whether any wrongdoing had occurred.

The findings in this report are genuinely extraordinary. Mr Richardson found that, under the stewardship of the Leader of the Opposition, potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were funnelled into companies which were engaging in alleged criminal wrongdoing. Let me say that again: this is taxpayer dollars that your constituents and my constituents worked hard for, paid to the government in good faith, and under the Leader of the Opposition hundreds of millions of dollars of it were put towards companies which are suspected of drug smuggling, arms dealing, and money laundering. We know from Mr Richardson that massive profits were skimmed off these contracts.

The member for Bruce asked me how this is possible. That and other questions about this incredible report are rightly directed to the Leader of the Opposition, because this happened on his watch. He set up and oversaw a system that facilitated great harms to Australians and to people around the world. The questions that the Leader of the Opposition needs to come forward and answer are: what did he know about this and when; and why does it appear that, after almost a decade in positions of leadership, he never asked a single question about any of it? It is a reprehensible dereliction of duty.

What makes these questions so critical is what we see: an unbelievable gulf between who the Leader of the Opposition pretends to be and who he really is. This report exposes the Leader of the Opposition as an absolute fraud, someone who oversaw a system funnelling taxpayer dollars into drugs, guns and human trafficking, all while marketing himself as a tough guy on our borders.

Of course, this joins the Parkinson review and the Nixon review, two reports that showed that, for all the tough talk, the Leader of the Opposition drove our migration system into a ditch and walked away, leaving me and the immigration minister to clean up his mess. Don't forget, he was voted the worst health minister in living history. He ran a defence department that oversaw years of endless delays. He clearly can't run a government department. I'm not sure why he thinks that he should run our country.

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