Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023. This is a result of Labor's mismanagement of immigration. This isn't anything new. We saw it under the previous Labor government, under Kevin Rudd, when Chris Bowen was the minister for immigration. We saw over a thousand people die at sea because of Labor's mismanagement of border protection issues. As a result of that, we also saw 50,000 people go through detention facilities. I'm not sure if there are still some of those people there now, but it took almost a decade to reduce that figure to less than a thousand.

This causes immense hardship, it causes immense tragedy and, of course, it wastes billions of dollars in taxpayers' funds. With this Labor government, this year we're on track to have almost 600,000. We're currently running at half a million, but we may very well end up in the next 12 months with 600,000 immigrants because Labor will not control the borders.

In relation to the High Court case, there was plenty of warning that the High Court could possibly make the decision that it did make, but what was the Labor Party doing? They were off virtue-signalling about the Voice. It was all feelings and not facts. The great disappointment of the Australian Labor Party under Anthony Albanese is that their first 18 months in government has been all about virtue-signalling and not dealing with the basics of running a government. It's very easy in opposition to cast slurs and mock people when they actually go into the detail, but, when you're in government, you've got to drill down into the detail. You've got to take the day-to-day concerns of people very, very seriously. Australians take their border protection and law and order very seriously. It is not a joke.

Some of these people who have been released are hardened criminals. It isn't a question of equal rights or anything like that; it is about applying law and order. Already, we've had one particular person involved in sexual allegations, and another person who is a convicted sex offender has been contacting juveniles on social media. That the Labor Party was asleep at the wheel when these people were released just isn't good enough. So we need to amend the legislation to correct the High Court's decision. I'm not sure why and how they come to these decisions. Heaven only knows, but I well remember that the Mabo decision was a 4-3 outcome. It is the highest court in the land, and it was a split decision. That's the problem with the courts. It's all very much based on feelings and not enough logic. I don't know how many times you've seen in the High Court major decisions split down the middle. You've just got to wonder sometimes how such important matters can be so divided amongst supposedly the best legal minds in the country.

I want to make one particular point about this bill. When someone who has a monitoring device removes their monitoring device, there is a carve-out in this particular legislation from treating that as a serious offence. I think that, if anyone is released on parole with a monitoring device, they should have to keep that monitoring device on. If they deliberately remove that device, that should be considered a serious offence. It's not unreasonable, especially when, as I've just pointed out, some of these people have already got convictions and have already engaged in misconduct since they've been released—