Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an absolute disgrace. The last thing any member of this House would want to see would be Australia paying an awful price for its failure to take terrorism seriously and to ensure that things like containers are X-rayed, but that is the risk we are running. Wouldn’t it be a practical step in trying to combat the threat of terrorism for us to be assured about the crew, the ships and the cargo coming into the country and that containers, whether they are high risk, medium risk or average risk, were being X-rayed to remove that element of doubt?

I ask the minister at the table: what differentiates a high-risk container from a moderate-risk container from an average-risk container from a low-risk container? What are the proportions of containers coming in in the different categories? What gives you such certainty that physically examining 1.8 per cent of the containers is going to leave Australians safe in their places at night? I have no confidence in this regime.

I wanted to speak about a couple of things. I know that other colleagues have given more fulsome contributions on this matter and that the honourable member for Holt wants to make a contribution. I will point out again the tragedy that we have had one coalition speaker speak on this bill, and not one National Party member has made a contribution.

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