Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I remind the Prime Minister of the admission yesterday from immigration officials that 63 asylum seekers have escaped from immigration detention in the last year and 25 are still on the run. Can the Prime Minister guarantee that all these people had undergone comprehensive ASIO security checks prior to the escape into the community?

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We are clearly back to the kinds of tactics that the opposition was engaged in yesterday. To the member who asked the question, Australia has operated a mandatory detention policy for some time now. The member was not here during the days of the Howard government, but if she had been she would recognise that during those days there were occasions when people left immigration detention, not in an authorised way—there were, in fact, a number of quite big break-outs under the former government.

Under this government, we of course have worked on detention policy. Obviously from time to time there are some issues, but to ply this low road and to try to increase community concern and fear is truly a despicable thing to do. What the government do of course is engage with detention policy in a way that means we have security managed detention centres and we have security assessments for asylum seekers. The member asking the question should know that, and I would once again counsel her not to engage in this dreadfully low politics.