Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition will not be supporting this. Having just come back from overseas, I have to be honest and say that the units that are used are far less confronting and invasive than having to be searched. At one stage I had to go through the indignity of the search and, to be honest, I would much prefer to stand in the booth.

The reason that everybody is going down this path is that some very bad people decided to fly a plane into a building and then to fly another plane into another building. They persisted in that, with breaches right up until Christmas Day in 2009. People have now gone to the next stage and are trying to take different liquids in different forms onto planes so as to create combustible materials. The result of this is that people die. Also, a pervasive sense of unease has come over international travel. People are not doing this because they want to; they are doing it because of the public demands that safety be paramount. If these issues were not there, we would not even need metal detectors, and there was a stage where we did not have them. This has been brought about because of the global circumstances in which we unfortunately live.

As stated, if there is a clear medical reason why someone cannot go through the scanner, they still are able to be searched. But I think this will become part and parcel of international travel, just as metal detectors are. We come into this building every day and we go through a form of security. If we had talked to people about it 10 to 15 years ago, they would not have comprehended it, but nobody actually blinks an eye at it now. We have to make sure that our duty is, first and foremost—as onerous as it may be in some instances—to the protection and security of the Australian travelling public and, second, to be part of the international effort in making sure we make the confines in which terrorists operate as narrow as possible and as marginal as possible.