Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Hawke for his question and for his brilliant advocacy for his local community. I have talked to the House a number of times this week about the horrific exploitation and abuse that was allowed to occur after the opposition leader ignored report after report into failures of our migration system while he was the responsible minister. The member asked for some examples of this.

Our border protection agencies recently identified a criminal syndicate that operated a network of brothels. They were recruiting and employing vulnerable foreign nationals who entered Australia under false information. The syndicate in this case controlled the workers through debt bondage and intimidation. The behaviour was highly abusive—essentially, modern slavery happening right here in our country. Another investigation identified a human trafficking ring that was bringing sex workers to Australia using professionally produced bogus documents. These are just a couple of examples of organised crime targeting vulnerable people, facilitated by failures the opposition leader oversaw in his broken migration system.

One of the central aspects of our government's response to these challenges is operation Inglenook. Inglenook is an ABF-led, multiagency taskforce which has stopped both of the criminal enterprises that I talked about today. In the case of the brothel network, for example, when the syndicate head, his partner and a key recruiter travelled offshore, their visas were cancelled, preventing them from ever returning to Australia again. Operation Inglenook has had a fantastic success—83 people have been refused clearance at Australian airports and 45 have had their visas cancelled offshore, which has prevented their arrival into Australia.

Managing our borders is a very complex task, and our government is committed to building and maintaining a proper system of border control—a system that was laid waste to by the Leader of the Opposition. We have built up resourcing for this system. We have reorganised our department to focus on these problems, and the results have been outstanding. The approach of the Leader of the Opposition was very different. We know that he likes to talk a big game, he likes to beat his chest and he likes to say that he is tough on crime.

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