Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I pose these questions to you on those moral grounds. Answer these instead of taking the high moral ground and playing the Christian card as you would have it. Where is the morality in giving succour to the people smugglers? Where is the morality in encouraging desperate asylum seekers to make that perilous journey? Where is the morality in soft laws that encourage people to cross that perilous sea when we know that so many men, women and children do not make it? Where is the morality in delaying or preventing those in refugee camps overseas coming to this country? Ask the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, who called boat arrivals ‘queue jumpers’. They are not my words; they are his words. How are you fulfilling the responsibility you have to the Australian people with regard to border security? Why don’t you answer those questions? Why doesn’t the person who made the interjection come back and answer those moral questions? (Time expired)