Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) | Hansard source

without any options on the table for the government to turn to. They knew a decision was coming from the court and they knew that they could address it somehow through legislation or through support from a third country to export people. They took up none of those options. They decided instead—in all their incompetence and because of their ideology—that they didn't want to see these people locked up. They wanted these people released. What has happened is that these people have now committed offences against Australian citizens. That is a very serious claim to make against a government and against a minister.

We move today in this parliament that the minister should be dismissed, and so he should. His incompetence has resulted in Australians falling victim to crimes by these offenders. Do you think that the Prime Minister could be here to defend his minister? Do you think that he could have taken this suspension of standing orders during question time to defend his minister? No, he could not, because he knows that this minister is not worthy of defence, and he doesn't want to tarnish his own reputation with what the minister has presided over here. I have not seen anything like this in my time in parliament. During my time in parliament it is hard to imagine a more incompetent act from a minister.

We know that these criminals, 149 of them, will go on to commit further offences. We can say that much with certainty. The minister was asked if he knew where these 149 were. He was asked, 'Could you tell me where they are?' It was a simple question. No answer. He didn't know where they were. He then carried on with this fiction that people are being continuously monitored. He repeated the statement that the 149 criminals out in the community were continuously monitored. What happened when they were committing the offences? Were they being monitored while they committed offences against Australian citizens? If that's the revelation, it's even worse than we first thought. We know that the minister hasn't taken one case to the Federal Court to make an application regarding one of these individuals—not one of these sex offenders, not one of these paedophiles, not one of these rapists. He has not sought to petition the court to return one person to immigration detention—not one of them.

I think the Australian public, at the moment, is rightly concerned about a wave of crime across our suburbs in many of the capital cities. Many Australians are falling victim to crime rates that, frankly, are completely and utterly unacceptable. Many older Australians are worried about their homes being broken into, their keys being stolen and their car being stolen. We know that many of these young offenders, in particular, will post Instagram photos of themselves standing in someone's bedroom or making sure that they're taking a car so that they can get a photo—

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