Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise to talk about Operation Polaris. We have just seen a very good indication that this is a shadow minister who does not have any idea about what he is doing. This is quite remarkable for him to get up and waste five minutes telling me about the importance of Operation Polaris—an operation that I am very committed to supporting, an operation that I have supported very publicly in the past, an operation that I have discussed with my New South Wales counterpart—when it was Minister Ayres and now with Minister Grant—on several occasions, and an operation that I have been very pleased to announce over a month ago that I was going to continue to fund. We made the announcement in a letter to the New South Wales Deputy Premier that was actually reported in the paper, but it does show you that this shadow minister has absolutely no idea what is going on. Three million dollars will be allocated to Operation Polaris, as per the announcement that was made and as per stuff that appeared in the media.

What do you do in your office? Do you actually have anyone helping you who might advise you on these matters before you walk into this chamber and put on such an embarrassing display? You had no idea that the government had already addressed this question over one month ago, even though we had done it a very public way.

Operation Polaris exists to make sure that our waterfront is secure. One of the reasons that we have problems on our waterfront—obviously, airports and ports remain very significant vulnerabilities for any country—is when we came to government that the Labor Party had savaged the resources that were available to Customs to screen cargo and do their job at our ports and airports. On top of that, of course, because some of the unions involved in ports in particular are constituent members of the Labor Party, the Labor Party has its hands tied about taking action against people on our waterfront who, quite frankly, should not be there because of their criminal history.

An honourable member: You are walking on very thin ice with that.

This is from a shadow minister who apparently has no idea what is going on in the justice portfolio whatsoever, who comes in here and spends five minutes lauding Operation Polaris, which we have already announced that we are going to fund via a $3 million injection.

The point I was making is that our ports are vulnerable, because of the cuts that were made by the Labor Party when they were in office. This is the point that the NSW police have made to me repeatedly, and they were very concerned during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years that the resources available to Customs to protect our ports from infiltration from organised crime were consistently being degraded in budget after budget by the incompetence of the Labor government that preceded us. The funding cuts that were made to Customs were not just money—700 staff were cut from Customs at a time when their responsibilities were increasing because of Labor's border protection debacle. What happened was that, in the north-west of the country, Customs officers had their attention diverted to dealing with the people-smuggling crisis that had been precipitated by Labor's policies. Then we had Customs trying to backfill, dealing with the savage cuts that had been made by the Labor government to their funding and to their personnel.

An opposition member: Talk about Polaris!

I am very happy to continue to talk about Polaris. After that incredibly embarrassing display where you would walk in here and say, 'Are we going to continue funding Polaris?' when we made a public announcement a month ago that we were going to do exactly that. Seriously, if you have no idea what is going on within the Justice portfolio, then for goodness sake relinquish your responsibility and give it to somebody else who shows an interest.

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