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

I'd say to the parliament that I have been here now for 10 years—not as long as some of those who are yelling at me opposite—and I can say with absolute honesty that I never saw the former government act with this speed and substance on anything that they did. I never saw it. There are a lot of people around politics at the moment taking a little bit of interest in a little program called Nemesis that runs on Monday nights on ABC, and I can tell you why. We now all understand why the former government was incapable of achieving anything at all: because they were all too busy fighting amongst each other, bitching like a bunch of mean girls to each other and trying to claw and hang on to power. I have to say it was unedifying but, importantly, it made me really bloody angry, because we went from a decade of continental drift under those opposite, and now they're coming in and trying to give us a lecture about how to run the Australian government.

I am not going to take a lecture from the Leader of the Opposition, this week of all weeks, on the management of our migration system. I'm just not going to do it, because this week we received the third of three reports by eminent Australians, which makes hundreds of pages of evidence of what a disaster area the Leader of the Opposition was when he ran our migration system.

I want to speak first about the Richardson review, a truly extraordinary report that was released this week. I have it here; I'm going to table it into the public record. This landmark review by Dennis Richardson, an eminent Australian, shows us—the Leader of the Opposition laughs. I assume he agrees with me that Dennis Richardson is a person of unbelievable integrity.

He's calling him a Labor hack. I wonder about that! This is a landmark report, and what it shows is that under the Leader of the Opposition the home affairs department paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money on companies and individuals that dealt in arms and drugs and trafficked in human beings. This all happened under the watch of this supposed tough guy on the borders, this person who's coming into the parliament today and giving us all a lecture about how tough he is on crime. Well, under his watch, hundreds of millions of dollars were funnelled into these companies.

A lot of people out there will be thinking: 'What the hell? How did this happen under his watch?' We got a little bit of insight into that this week during estimates. What we heard in estimates is that the department actually raised these issues with the minister. They raised issues about a company that was about to be awarded a contract worth more than half a billion dollars for the management of an offshore processing centre. He was told in a report that the company had never been awarded work of anything like this kind. I understand that this company was actually headquartered in a beach shack on Kangaroo Island. Under him, they got a half-a-billion-dollar contract.

Honourable members interjecting —

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