Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have a question for the Minister for Home Affairs. Will the Minister update the House on the importance of strong and consistent border protection policies? 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 honourable member for his question and he, like all members on this side of the House, supports a government with strong border protection policies. We are not going back to the days where the people smugglers were in charge of people coming on boats into our country. We aren't going to go back to the Labor days where 1,200 people drowned at sea and 50,000 people arrived on 800 boats. We are not going to go back to that dysfunction where 8,000 children ended up in detention. But that is what is being proposed by those opposite in their watering down of our policies around Operation Sovereign Borders.

There are people flooding into the Labor Party who support a watering down of policies which have restored integrity to our borders and have stopped the people smugglers in their tracks. If the Australian public believes that the people smugglers have gone away, look no further than what is happening in Europe. So a consistency of policy is absolutely essential. It's essential, as we've demonstrated over the course of the last few years, where we've been able to get all of those children out of detention, we've been able to close 17 detention centres, we're getting people off Nauru and Manus—that Labor put there—and we are making sure that there are no more deaths at sea.

Who was one of the key architects of the dysfunction within the Labor Party in the Rudd and Gillard years? Let me guess. He's the 'man of the moment' at the moment who is trying to slug 300,000 Australian pensioners with a new tax; he's the Shadow Treasurer, the member for McMahon. Under his watch, as minister for immigration in this country, 25 of the 50,000 people arrived on 400 boats and he was personally responsible for putting 4,000 children into detention.

It didn't stop there. If you have a look at the track record of this man and this man sitting here, who wants to be Prime Minister of this country, they were in lock step in the dysfunctional policies that they presided over when they were in the Rudd and Gillard governments. The Australian public remember well what happened in the Rudd and Gillard years. I can say about this Leader of the Opposition, as we used to say about Mr Rudd, as we used to say about Ms Gillard: 'Don't look at what a Labor leader says, look at what they do.' They presided over massive debt. They are proposing a tax on housing. They are proposing a tax on small business. They are proposing a tax on 300,000 pensioners and, through their reckless actions, they are proposing to restart boats where people will drown at sea again, where kids would be back in detention and where detention centres would be reopened. And this Leader of the Opposition knows that the Australian public has worked him out as being completely duplicitous. (Time expired)