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

I say to the Labor Party: how dare you accuse the coalition of politicising Sovereign Borders. It was under the Labor Party that we had over a thousand deaths at sea—under the reckless Rudd government, which relaxed our border control. Over 50,000 people ended up in detention camps, and it has taken over a decade to effectively reduce those numbers. So for the Labor Party to come in here and accuse us of playing politics is sheer hypocrisy.

The other thing we should note here is that Australia actually has a very generous refugee policy. We take almost 20,000 refugees a year, on a humanitarian basis. There are certainly, if not millions, hundreds of thousands people out there around the world in refugee camps who have done the right thing and have tried to apply for a visa. When we have people smugglers smuggling people through the back door, many of whom aren't even genuine refugees—when I looked at the photos of the guys that rocked up last week, they didn't look too hungry to me. I think that this is something the Labor Party should take very seriously and not mock the fact that we actually lose control of our borders. If you look at what has happened in Europe, Africans are dying when they cross the Mediterranean from places like Libya to Italy. You get thousands of people dying at sea. So it is much better to have a strong border policy, to make sure that people don't—