Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Defence. Can the minister update the House on how government is supporting the work of the Australian Defence Force with strong and consistent border protection policies? Can the minister also tell the House what impact alternative approaches would have on the work of the ADF?

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for his question. It's extremely unfortunate that the Labor Party is trashing our border protection and national security policies in order to win a cheap political stunt in the House of Representatives. That's exactly what we're seeing today. Labor have proven they are not fit to be in government, because they would rather have a cheap political win in the House of Representatives, in the Canberra bubble, than protect our borders and our national security and support our service men and women of the Australian Defence Force and, in particular, the Navy. That's where the Labor Party's leadership has taken the Labor Party at the end of the sitting year. It is absolutely disgraceful.

Labor cannot remember back before 2013. As the Minister for Defence, I don't want the service men and women of the ADF, in particular the Navy, recovering the dead bodies, in the sea north of Australia, of people who paid people smugglers to come to this country on dangerous boats and vessels. Who can forget the work that the ADF had to do, during Labor's period in office, recovering bodies? Has the Labor Party forgotten the boat crashing on the rocks at Christmas Island? In December 2010, of the 92 people on board, 48 people died. How can Labor forget? In October 2001, there was SIEV X: over 350 people perished south of Java.

The ADF and the Navy had to do this work of protecting our borders from people smugglers, and they had to do the work of cleaning up Labor's mess, literally, because of the deaths at sea. Because of the cheap political stunt that Labor wants to pull today to impress their friends in all sorts of parts of the Left agenda in this country, they are prepared to make our service men and the women of the ADF do that work again. It is disgraceful. As the Minister for Defence, I call on the Labor Party to see the error of their ways, to withdraw this threat in the Senate to use their numbers to damage our border protection policies and to dismantle offshore processing. That's what the Labor Party is doing; they are dismantling one of the three legs of the stool that has stopped people smugglers and their evil trade.