Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. The question goes squarely to the use of 457 visas, which is what I am commenting on. Following up the xenophobic claim of ‘foreign workers coming here’, we want Australians to be able to go and get jobs overseas, and we should be able to accept other people coming here. It works both ways. We heard their spokesperson talking about bringing in people from Beirut, Bombay and Beijing—and it was not a question of needing alliteration, because if you wanted to you could have said ‘workers coming from Blackpool, Brighton and Bristol’. But, no, the opposition have chosen consistently to refer to places in the Middle East, the subcontinent and Asia, referring to foreign workers and trying to cause some concern. Let us have a look at one of the claims. Let us just go directly to one of the claims. There was a claim published about Halliburton, a company operating in mining in South Australia.