Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for McMillan for his question and for his very deeply held beliefs in relation to keeping our community safe. The government of course has no higher priority than keeping Australians safe and secure. The largest single group, I regret to say, of suspected jihadists attempting to leave the country bound for Syria and Iraq have been intercepted at Sydney Airport by Australian Border Force officers. The suspected jihadists were flagged by ABF officers at the Immigration checkpoint. The government's new counter-terrorism units were then alerted to intercept these people and to stop them from boarding their flight. Allowing these people to go to foreign shores to be trained in acts of terrorism would mean that when these people returned to Australia they would pose an even greater threat. People are seeing on their television screens right now the situation unfolding in Bangkok and the way in which innocent people have lost their lives to terrorists there. People in our country understand that the threat here is as great as it ever has been, and it is why we need to make sure that we provide more support to our frontline officers.

I commend the work of the 80 counter-terrorism unit officers who have been stood up at the eight international airports around the country. We have put significant funding back into Customs. Regrettably, when in government Labor ripped out $700 million from Customs. We have boosted counter-terrorism funding for our agencies by $1.33 billion—indeed, by $600 million in the last budget alone. We are investing more than $40 million to counter violent extremism, along with $650 million dollars for settlement services and social cohesion. We have provided the ABF with funding of almost $50 million over four years to establish these CTU teams, who are doing exceptional work. As we have seen from recent events, the teams are making a real difference. In the 2014-15 financial year, the CTU teams have assisted in 336 passenger offloads, they have conducted 133,000 real-time assessments and they have conducted 9,200 patrols.

Our message as a government is very clear to people who would want to go to other countries to fight and to engage in terrorist acts—we will apply whatever resources are available to us to keep the Australian public safe. This government is determined to make sure that our borders are secure, and we are providing every assistance possible to our frontline officers to make sure that we can stop these people from going. Through the citizenship laws that we are proposing, which will be introduced into parliament in the next sitting period, we are proposing wherever possible to stop from coming back to our shores those people who would seek to conduct terrorist attacks here to kill and maim innocent Australians.