Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Vice-President of the Executive Council) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr President. I'm not concerned about Senator Carr. What this is all about is Bill Shorten demonstrating to the Australian people that he will, at any time, sacrifice Australia's national security on the altar of his political tactics and on his short-term, self-perceived political interests.

In pursuit of a little tactical victory, Bill Shorten is losing sight of what actually matters. What matters is that we maintain our strong border protection framework here in Australia. When we came into government, we inherited a mess at our borders from the Labor Party. We inherited chaos at our borders. More than a thousand people died at sea because of the mess that the Labor Party made with our border protection policy framework, and what Mr Shorten is signalling to the Australian people today is that he will go back to the failed and discredited policies that Labor pursued in the past. People across Australia cannot trust Mr Shorten with our national security. People across Australia cannot trust Mr Shorten with our community's safety, as they can't trust Mr Shorten with keeping the economy strong, creating more jobs and keeping the budget in surplus over the medium and long term.

A whole series of amendments to this bill have been circulated. This is a very important bill. There are many pages of amendments. Many of them are quite complex amendments, and I think a number of second reading amendments have been moved by senators asking, for example, for inquiry and report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to review the amendments that have been circulated so that we can actually make a decision in the full knowledge of the implications of voting for or against those amendments. There's been a second reading amendment moved that we should defer consideration of this bill until the Senate has received advice from the director-general of ASIO and from the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police. Of course the Senate should do this. We should not be dealing with this government bill today until the proper work of the Senate and the proper consideration by the Senate have taken place.

Of course, Mr Shorten actually knows that this is a reckless move when it comes to our national security, but he's quite happy to sacrifice our border security. He's quite happy to sacrifice our strong border protection arrangements, including the offshore processing arrangements which were put in place as a late fix in the dying days of the last Labor government. The Rudd Labor government came into government in 2007, and we warned them: don't dismantle the Howard government's strong border protection policies—don't touch them. But, of course, they did. And do you know what happened? As we predicted, boatloads of illegal arrivals arrived on our shores and more than a thousand people died. There were 50,000 illegal arrivals on about 800 boats. That was the consequence. Of course, in the lead-up to the 2013 election, Mr Rudd was so embarrassed that he reintroduced offshore processing. He said that nobody on Manus Island would come to Australia under a Labor government. Of course, that is precisely what Labor is now supporting.

Opposition senators interjecting—