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

What we've seen this week is a course of conduct by this Prime Minister, and it's a deceptive course of conduct. When the Australian people voted for this Prime Minister they believed him to be a man of integrity, to be forthright and to be honest with them. What he's demonstrated over the course of the last 2½ years is that he is anything but.

The Prime Minister promised the Australian public a reduction in their electricity prices—gone. He promised the Australian people he would provide detail on the Voice—he deliberately made a decision not to provide detail. He said to the Australians in three budgets that he would have a plan to help them out economically. He has failed on each front. Interest rates have gone up on 12 occasions. Inflation is not contained in this country, and yet interest rates are coming down in the United Kingdom, are on the way down in the United States, and they've already come down in New Zealand and in Canada.

The reality is that this Prime Minister now has broken his golden promise at the election. His golden promise at the election was to keep Australia safe, and what we now know is that the Prime Minister has made our country less safe.

We are a welcoming country. When we brought the 12,000 people in from Syria, when we brought countless thousands of others in from around the world to be a part of our society—to be a wonderful part of our society—we did it in a structured way and we did it in a way where, when there were people in the queue who had a compelling story to put but who were not classified as anything other than a safety risk, we excluded those people from the line. We excluded those people from the line. We made the tough decisions that needed to be made.

But what this Prime Minister has done is he's made us less safe, and the motive is obvious to all. The motive is for domestic political gain. That's what the Prime Minister has done here and that's what he's been called out on. The Prime Minister decided to bring people in—as we now know because the Minister for Industry and Science pointed it out on the weekend—on a tourist visa because we get people here more quickly, not a humanitarian visa where there are greater checks. This Prime Minister has sold the Australian public out, and for that he should be condemned.

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