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

I thank the honourable member for Berowra and I thank all of those members across the parliament who support our agencies who work day and night to keep Australians safe. It is the fact that we, like any Western democracy, have faced a significant threat, and we still do today—we will do for all of our lifetime—in terms of those people who would seek to do us harm.

We have seen some terribly tragic events in the United States, across South-East Asia and across Europe and we are not immune in this country. I want to make the point today that we have Australian citizens—people who have been born in our country and people who have been naturalised—who have gone off to fight in Syria and in Iraq and would seek to come back to cause serious damage, carnage and death in our country. So we've provided support to our national agencies, not only through financial support but through the ways in which, in this parliament, we've been able to pass 17 tranches of significant pieces of legislation to support those agencies.

This government went to the election, as we go to every election, saying to the Australian people, 'We will do everything within our power to keep Australians safe.' We made that promise at the last election. We will live it during the course of this term of government and for many years beyond. We do it because we have had seven attacks in our country, and we've had 16 major disruptions in relation to imminent attacks that had been planned in our country, since September 2014. We know that 73 people have been convicted of terrorism related offences since 2001 and we know that 98 people have been charged as a result of counter-terrorism operations since 2014.

That is why the government is now asking for the support of this parliament to introduce legislation, which has been used in the United Kingdom, to temporarily exclude those people who we believe would come to our country to cause death and carnage in Australia. The parliament deserves to support this legislation, because the Australian people deserve that support. That's the reality.

Mr Dreyfus interjecting—

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