Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to add my comments to this. Firstly, I will go to the minister's response in blaming the Liberal Party and especially Mr Dutton for the way this has all come about. Over the years we have had illegals going back to John Howard with the Tampa, and then with Rudd there were 50,000 people that wanted to come out to Australia—boat people, illegals, those seeking refugee status in Australia basically for economic reasons, not really because they were refugees. We saw 1,200 people die because of it. This has been a real problem in our country.

But I will go to the person in question here who we are speaking about in the chamber, NZYQ, and why Minister Watt is saying, 'We're cleaning up the mess of the Liberals.' I was in this chamber when we actually dealt with a lot of these issues and I remember there was bipartisanship. I agreed with this legislation as well and I saw Labor agree with this. What we were trying to do was make Australia a safe place because we didn't know the character of these people, who they were and whether they were former criminals from other countries. We didn't know. So we passed laws that were basically to look after the security of the nation. Labor were there. They voted every time. They supported this. I didn't hear them stand up and make comments about 'constitutional' and 'unconstitutional' or whatever. They didn't. They went along with the consensus of the time, the way the public were going and whichever way the wind was blowing. They knew they couldn't do any different but go along with it, which they did. It galls me to hear this comment now blaming Peter Dutton for this.

Also, NZYQ came into this country under the Labor Party because they lost control of the borders. They were warned about this. We had sovereign nation—