Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Justice, Customs and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to respond to some of the things that the just said in his speech on this matter of public importance discussion on border protection. I have heard his arguments on this issue before. The first thing I want to refute—and I want to refute it in the strongest possible terms—is that somehow we do not want to see the boats stop coming illegally to Australia. The Labor Party has put this. The minister just put it. Other ministers have put it at various points. I can assure the minister and I can assure the Australian people that that is complete and utter nonsense. We do want to see this issue resolved and we would always be prepared to work with the government to resolve it. But, if we are going to work with the government, they need to embrace policies that are actually going to work, something that has completely eluded them for the whole five years they have been in government.

We know what policies are going to work, because we implemented them in government when we were faced with a similar situation. You know what? They actually worked to resolve this problem. The whole reason that this problem recurred, the whole reason that we went from having four people in the detention network when the government changed and an average of three boat arrivals in any given year of the last six years of the Howard government, was that when the Labor Party came to office, in an absolute fit of some form of moral superiority—they wanted to put their credentials on display about how they were so much better humanitarians than the Howard government—they instituted a series of policy backflips that undermined the robust system of border protection that they had inherited, and that led to the re-emergence of people smuggling. People smuggling was dead and buried under the previous government. When the Labor Party came to office, they restarted people smuggling by not understanding the implications of the policies that they were pursuing.