Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to dealing with the challenges of people smugglers we will tackle it globally through our global cooperation. We will do so regionally with our partners in Indonesia and in Malaysia—which on an earlier occasion, it seems, the member for Curtin was all for, but not recently. Also, we will tackle this problem through our own national means and the policy and resources that we have deployed.

I remind those opposite that in recent times the amount we have invested in maritime surveillance—in air surveillance of the air-sea gap between ourselves and Indonesia—is considerably in excess of that which was put prosecuted under the previous government, because we take our responsibilities across this spectrum seriously. It is a difficult challenge. It will not go away because someone on the other side of politics chooses to wave a political magic wand and hope that this global problem, including a civil war which has been bloody and violent in Sri Lanka, simply did not occur. They are not interested in these facts. They are interested in the politics which were circulated in this document yesterday: the politics of stereotyping, the politics of dealing with special interest groups, the politics of not policy discussions, because they do not work, but the politics of fear.

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