Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. Will the minister update the House on the steps the government has taken to protect the community from dangerous visa holders? Why is the advice of independent agencies important? And is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the great member for La Trobe for his question and thank you him very much for the tireless effort he puts into keeping his community safe.

It has been a great year for 371,500 Australians who are in a job today and weren't in a job 12 months ago, but it's been a bad year for thousands of visa holders who have committed crimes. We have been able to cancel now a record number of visas of noncitizens—people who have committed crimes, including armed robbery; 246 visa holders have had their visa cancelled, 478 for drug offences, 56 for murder and almost 250 for child pornography and child sex offences. We are making Australia a safer place, and we are doing it off the back of expert advice. We have spent a lot of time with the law enforcement and intelligence agencies in this country to work out how we can keep Australia safe—not only how we can keep our borders secure but how we can work across the community to identify people who have committed serious offences against Australian citizens and, most importantly, against women and children, and deport them from the country so they no longer pose a threat to us. The advice is that this will have a positive intergenerational impact on crime in this country.

So we have listened to the experts. We have stared down the Labor Party, because they are dictated to by the Greens; they've been overtaken by Left ideology in this country. That is why we have knocked them out of the way. We have stared down the naysayers in the Labor Party and we have made this country a safer place. The reality, as has been demonstrated this week, is that the Labor Party has not learnt the lesson in relation to border protection. They ignored the advice from the experts, and people drowned at sea. Fifty thousand people came on 800 boats. They ignored the advice when they were in government and they refused to cancel the section 501 visas of those people that had committed serious offences.

This government has acted on advice. Similarly this week, as we have demonstrated, we have acted on the advice of the experts in relation to energy. We are listening to the Australian public, to mums and dads, to families in small businesses, to people across the country who are hurting; people who are hurting with higher electricity bills; people such as those in South Australia who are having their lights turned out by a Labor government policy which is crippling small business and families.

What has this Labor leader learned from his South Australian counterpart? Nothing at all! He is now proposing a $66 billion tax on consumers and small businesses across the country, which will drive up electricity prices and drive down reliability. It's about time that this Leader of the Opposition— (Time expired)

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I ask that further questions be placed on the Notice Paper.