Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. It's obviously a very serious issue, given the law that Labor passed does weaken our borders in this country. There's a lot that our sailors, our border protection staff, have been doing for a long period of time to clean up Labor's mess from when they were last in government. Twelve hundred people drowning at sea is not something that should be discussed lightly. The reality is, as was pointed out by the Deputy Prime Minister earlier, that four people were in detention when Mr Howard left office in 2007. Because of policy changes, 1,200 people drowned at sea—women and children included—and we had 8,000 children going into detention. Yet the Labor Party is now going to the Australian people, promising to repeat it all again. That's the reality of what Labor promised last week.

Worse than that, they go further. They go further because they have weakened the provisions within the Migration Act that would normally provide the minister for immigration with the ability to deny entry into our country to people of bad character. Under the Migration Act, section 501 has 12 subsections. The Labor Party has discounted 11 of those and included only one, which means we could stop somebody hopping on a plane in Singapore today who had been accused of molesting a child, offload that person from that plane and deny them access to our borders. But we can't do that with people coming from Manus and Nauru, under Labor law. The reality is, as we've seen—

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