Vince Connelly (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. Will the minister outline to the House how the Morrison government is building Australia's border protection resilience through its stable and certain policies, and is the minister aware of any alternative policies that would put our borders at risk?

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Stirling. He has real commitment to his questions. Well done. Thank you very much. I'm very proud of the fact that this government, under the Prime Minister's leadership, has been working hard for a long period of time to clean up Labor's mess on our borders. When the Prime Minister was Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, and when I took over from that position, we had a very significant issue, given that people still want to get on boats today. We had a very significant problem, because we knew that under Labor some 1,200 people had drowned at sea, 50,000 people had arrived on 800 boats and 8,000 children were in detention. We set about making sure that we could clean up that mess, and we have, to our best ability, dealt with Labor's problems, but there is still a way to go.

Twelve months ago, almost to the day, the Labor Party sided with the Greens to weaken our border protection policies by voting into legislation the medevac law. It provided no option for the minister of the day to discriminate against people who would be of bad character. The government was compelled to bring those people to our country, and, worse than that, once people had received medical attention, they couldn't be sent back to their country of origin or to either Nauru or PNG.

We had already in place a regime that allowed people who required medical attention off Manus and Nauru to receive that medical attention, either on Nauru or in PNG, through multimillion-dollar investments that we made to provide support to upgrading of facilities and to provide support to medical staff on the ground. People received that medical attention in either of those two countries, perhaps at the international hospital in Port Moresby, or in Taiwan. In some cases, if they weren't able to be dealt with offshore, those people came to our country for medical attention. In total about a thousand people—not just those who were in need of medical attention but support members from their family groups as well—did come to our country, and we were providing those people with the support that they needed. So it is evidenced through this whole debate that the medevac law was never about providing support to people who needed medical attention; it was always a backdoor way to get into our country.

Today we saw the Labor Party and the Greens yet again unite to try and weaken our border protection policies by opposing our proposal to abolish the medevac laws, as bad as they were. The Labor Party, even to this very moment, say, with a foghorn, to the Australian people that they have no capacity to deal with the threats off our coast and they have no ability to keep our borders secure. The Leader of the Opposition today proved that he's just as bad as any of his predecessors. (Time expired)