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

I've got to say that I'm really shocked at the behaviour we just saw in the chamber here from someone who pretends to want to be the Prime Minister of this country. I would like to ask all of us to just elevate the tone of this debate a little bit. The Leader of the Opposition speaks, on the one hand, about real people in the community who he cares about and then, on the other, comes in and attempts a personal character assassination of the person who sits next to me, one of the most qualified people who has ever served as Attorney-General of this country.

It is unnecessary, it is unseemly and it disrespects every person who is in the gallery and every one of the people that we represent in this chamber. I would invite him to do better. We deserve better from the person who seeks to lead our country.

Now, the debate today is ostensibly about community safety, and that's the debate that I want to participate in. That's the debate that the Prime Minister and our government want to participate in, because we will happily compare our record any day of the week with the safety record of the Leader of the Opposition.

There is no doubt that we have heard today and we've heard many times before the Leader of the Opposition coming and say very angry and very aggressive things about his feelings about crime and community safety, but there is a problem. The problem is that there is a vast chasm between what the Leader of the Opposition says he cares about and what he did when he had the power to make the Australian community safer. I don't want this to be a 'he said, she said' debate between two politicians. I want to turn to the views of three eminent Australians who have written extensive reports about the state of the Department of Home Affairs which utterly prove that there is a complete disconnect between what the Leader of the Opposition said and what he did as Minister for Home Affairs.

The first I want to refer to is the Parkinson review, a landmark review into our immigration system, authored by Martin Parkinson, who was the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet under a Liberal government. The opposition leader spoke of an 'almighty mess'. He doesn't need to use those words, because that is essentially what the Martin Parkinson review told us about the state of the migration system left to our government. He said this was a system 'not fit for the delivery of a better future for our country'. He called the system 'fundamentally broken' and, most importantly, he made it abundantly clear who it was that broke the system. He said that the system was broken because of almost 'a decade of wilful neglect'. Who ran this system for most of the time over the last decade? It was the Leader of the Opposition.

Dr Parkinson told us that this it was going to require a 10-year rebuild to fix this system, and we have wasted no time. No matter what you may say about our government, one thing we are serious about getting on with is immigration reform, and we are undertaking masses of it to fix the mess left for us by the Leader of the Opposition.

I want to talk about the Nixon review, authored by Christine Nixon, a highly respected former police commissioner in Victoria. Christine Nixon looked at integrity problems in our migration system and she found that those integrity problems were so rife that organised crime actually viewed problems in our migration system as a key benefit to them operating in Australia. If any report shows the Leader of the Opposition up to be the complete fraud that he is, it is the Nixon review, because the Leader of the Opposition spent the better part of a decade talking about what a tough guy he was on the borders and the Nixon review showed us that, while he was speaking those words in the parliament, in the cabinet room he was cutting funding to the immigration department, cutting funding into the home affairs department and degrading immigration compliance in particular. In fact, while he was minister, we saw in our parliament a halving of the number of people who were conducting immigration compliance activities.

I want to tell you about one of the cases that Christine Nixon talked about in her review: the case of Binjun Xie, who was a convicted human trafficker. He was a Chinese triad leader who was known in the UK as 'The Hammer'. He walked into Australia while the Leader of the Opposition was running our migration system in 2014. He proceeded to set up organised crime rings in which women were trafficked into Australia and forced into prostitution. Can we agree that sexual slavery is one of the worst crimes known to humankind? The opposition leader oversaw the system that let this person into the country and allowed him to stay here while he had no basis to be here. I kicked him out and gave him a lifelong ban from ever returning to our country.

I have never heard the Leader of the Opposition utter a word of contrition for the role that he played in allowing these crimes to flourish. He seems to want people on this side of the chamber to express contrition about everything that goes wrong when migrants commit crimes in this country, but we never hear anything from those on the other side of the chamber.

I want to mention briefly the report done by Dennis Richardson—again, one of the most esteemed public servants ever to serve Australia. He did a report on home affairs contracting that showed that, while the Leader of the Opposition ran the home affairs department, hundreds of millions of dollars were taken from taxpayers all around our country and funnelled into companies which were likely committing bribery and trafficking in guns, drugs and human beans. All of this happened on the watch of the Leader of the Opposition. He paid no attention to it.

Now let me turn to one of the issues that has been prominent this week, and that is the release of people from detention. The opposition has focused, really, on nothing else for the last six months, nothing other than 153 people who were released from detention by order of the High Court. There has been supposed endless outrage from those opposite on the way in which this been handled. This exposes what is one of the most profound hypocrisies that I have seen in my time in politics, and that is the willingness of those opposite to set standards for others that they do not anywhere near meet themselves. From the reaction of those opposite, you would have to believe that while they were in government not a single convicted criminal was released from immigration detention. Am I right? I mean, they've gone on about nothing else for six months, nothing other than 153 people. Yet what we have learned in the last two days is that, while the Leader of the Opposition was in charge of this system, 1,298 convicted criminals were released from immigration detention. Of those, 102 were sex offenders. Sixty-four of those were child sex offenders. There were 40 domestic violence offenders and four people who were either murderers, alleged murderers or accessories to murder. If the opposition leader alleges that releasing, by order of the High Court, 153 people from immigration detention made the community less safe, what did it mean when 1,298 convicted criminals were released on his watch?

We've also heard some critiques of the monitoring system—the extensive monitoring system—that our government has set up. Within a number of weeks of the High Court decision we had created a preventive detention regime. We had put in place monitoring that had never existed before: curfews, ankle monitoring bracelets. Working with the Attorney-General we had put in place a $255 million investment in ensuring law enforcement could monitor these people. That was for 153 people that we released as a matter of law. So I have a question. There's been outrage this week from those opposite because some people in the NZYQ cohort are not wearing ankle monitoring bracelets. I would like to know: of the criminals and other dangerous individuals that were released on the Leader of the Opposition's watch, how many had ankle monitoring bracelets attached to their release? Obviously, it must have been all of them if there's outrage about some of the people in this cohort not having them. But, no, there were no people of that 1,298—not that I'm aware of, at least—that had any conditions at all attached to their release.

Those opposite speak of community safety. The cold, hard truth, the fact of this matter, is that it took our government to set up a regime which monitored people who might have been a danger in this situation. Those opposite let 1,298 people out of detention, none of whom were subject to any monitoring, and somehow it is us who are making the community less safe! It doesn't make sense, it is total hypocrisy, and it needs to be called out for what it is.

We have seen this week, in question time after question time, and indeed for the entirety of the six months since the NZYQ decision, a rolling drama of breathtaking hypocrisy from those opposite. But, of course, that is absolutely nothing new, because we have known about this hypocrisy, this vast chasm between who the opposition leader says he is and what he actually did, for some time. We know that the opposition leader has modelled himself as a tough guy on the border but, while minister, gutted funding for immigration compliance. He drove our migration system into a ditch and walked away. He oversaw an offshore processing system that funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars into guns and drug trafficking and human trafficking. Don't forget that while he was defence minister he oversaw projects that were a combined total of 97 years late on delivery.

The Leader of the Opposition speaks of accountability. I think it's time we saw some from him. The truth is that if he went anywhere near the level of accountability he sets for our government he would have resigned from this parliament a long time ago.

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