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

I thank the honourable member for his question and acknowledge the hard work that he does in his local community. Like every member on this side of the parliament, the member for Bonner believes in having strong, secure borders, particularly in this day and age,

There is an alternative approach, and we saw it under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years, where, tragically, 1,200 people drowned at sea, there were 8,000 children put into detention, and 50,000 people came on 800 boats. You would have thought that the Labor Party might have learnt their lesson, but clearly they haven't. We have cleaned up Labor's mess, we have stopped the boats, we have stopped the drownings at sea, we've got those children out of detention and we've closed 17 detention centres. So I think most Australians would be amazed to hear that the Labor Party is proposing to walk away from the successful policies that we've put in place to keep our borders secure.

It should come as no surprise that the shadow minister has been in his role now for 583 days but hasn't had the ability to ask one question on how all of this works. I don't know what the problem is—whether he's not allowed to ask a question or he's embarrassed to ask a question because maybe he knows that the Leader of the Opposition is preparing to trash the policy which has stopped the drownings at sea, stopped the kids going into detention, and stop the people smugglers being in control of the situation. It's not only the coalition that is saying that Labor will undo the policies and the boats will restart under the government that Mr Shorten may lead after the next election. It is important—

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