Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the parliament today, we are seeing something rather bizarre—the Labor Party wanting to set the agenda. They want to talk about border security! I would be very happy if the Labor Party were to talk about border security every single day between now and the next election. My colleagues might be able to help me out. In 2007, when the coalition last left office in that year—does anyone know how many boat arrivals there were?

Government Members:

Government members interjecting—

Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Only three in the last year—you missed it by that much. How many people were in detention when we last left government?

Government members interjecting—

Two? Zero. You could have got it right the first time—not a single person in detention. This is a very serious policy issue. Nobody wants to see deaths at sea. Nobody wants to see people going into detention and, under us, there were none. We went out of government. The Labor Party came to power, and we saw over 700 boats. We saw over 1200 deaths at sea. We saw tens of thousands of people go through the detention process and thousands of children go into detention centres.

We came to government and we are removing that backlog. We are getting people out of detention, increasing our refugee intake and stopping deaths at sea. But of course, if the Labor Party was elected, we will go back to the policies of the former Labor government and we will see more deaths at sea, more boats arrive. Our country does not want to see that.