Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. It's nice to win a vote in the chamber here, so thank you for that ruling, Mr Speaker. It's very generous and very apt, because this is an incredibly important point of business, this matter of public importance, for the chamber to contemplate.

Our country has a very reasonable expectation, long-held, that the leader of our country, the Prime Minister, in his first responsibility must make sure that every decision goes to keeping Australians safe. It is a fundamental principle; it shouldn't need to be debated in this chamber. And it's telling that the Prime Minister has raced out of the chamber already. But we know that the direction 99 issue is one of the Prime Minister's own making.

The Australian public watched the Prime Minister, in question time today, duck and weave but not answer the question. The fact is that what happened was that there were continuous representations from the then Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and from the High Commissioner from New Zealand at the time, who was making representations to me as minister, to the Prime Minister of the day, to my predecessors and to his predecessors, along these lines. We resisted and rejected the proposal by the New Zealand government, and for good reason because, if an Australian citizen in Germany today—even if that person had been born here and moved as an infant to Germany—was now a 35-year-old and committed some significant offence in Germany, the obligation, as it is on any origin country, is to take that person back as a matter of principle and a matter of international law.

What has happened here is the Prime Minister has decided that he will listen to the special pleadings of the New Zealand Prime Minister and allow people who had been charged with committing serious criminal offences in our country to stay here in our country. It's not without consequence—and the Prime Minister is an educated person. If you allow these serious criminals to stay in our country are they likely to commit offences again? Of course they are. And that is exactly what's happened. So has the Prime Minister kept our country and our people safe?

Opposition members: No.

No. Has he made our country less safe?

Opposition members: Yes.

Absolutely, he has. There's no question of that. But the Prime Minister doesn't have the guts to stand up here and to admit that they've made a mistake. What he neglected to say today was that they're going to revoke, or at least significantly refine, direction 99. Why is that needed if there's no problem here? Why is he backflipping on the position that he took and that he agreed with Jacinda Ardern on? Why is that happening?

As we know, because he has appointed somebody to the portfolio of immigration who doesn't believe in enforcing the rule of law, he knows that he has created an almighty mess. And putting the political points and the rest of the debate to one side, the most important point to remember here is that, behind every one of these cases—whether it's somebody who has committed a sexual offence against a young girl or against a child, whether it's a domestic violence incident or whether it's a serious drug importation—there is a human being and a victim behind each of these crimes. And in many cases there are multiple victims over a long period of time.

We should stand as one to condemn the Prime Minister and Minister Giles for this catastrophic mistake. When he's been asked in media interviews to apologise, Minister Giles flatly refuses to apologise to those victims. And the fact is that we have seen mistake after mistake from this minister. The 153 criminals were released not because the High Court had directed the minister to do so. That is a complete and utter concoction. There was one case, NZYQ, where the High Court, because the minister hadn't given the appropriate evidence—quite surprisingly, from a minister who doesn't believe in this area of law—and he failed to answer the questions put by the High Court, the High Court did find in relation to indefinite detention on NZYQ. The minister used that case, that judgement, to extrapolate out to 152 other cases to release those people into the community.

He came in here and he gave commitments that these people were going to be monitored—'They would be continuously monitored,' to quote his words directly. As it now turns out, as we know from that cohort, there are at least two murderers in the community without electronic monitoring. They didn't need to be in the community. We know that there are at least two murderers who are also exempt from curfews. How are you continuously monitoring somebody when they don't have an ankle bracelet, there is no curfew in place and there are no reporting conditions? What of the 39 sex offenders—part of the 153 that the minister released? We now know that 26 are no longer being electronically monitored and 27 also no longer have a curfew imposed. These people have committed additional offences against Australian citizens. These are people who should not be in our country. We have a great migration program in this country if it's properly managed.

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