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

Any minister faced with this kind of issue would ask more questions. Surely any minister would ask more questions. But what did the Leader of the Opposition do? He didn't ask a question. He didn't ask for a meeting. He didn't ask for a further briefing. He just said, 'Noted,' and on he moved. And after that, half a billion dollars went into that company.

There are many other examples, but I don't want to dwell just on the Richardson review, because there are many other things that need to be put onto the public record here. I want to talk now about the report that Christine Nixon wrote into the exploitation in our migration system, and again I table that for the parliament. In some ways, this is actually the most damning report into the Leader of the Opposition. For almost the whole time he has been in parliament, his whole public persona has been puffing himself up as a big tough guy on the border. But what did the Nixon review find? It found that there were serious and systemic problems with exploitation in the migration system. It found that the system had been used to perpetrate some of the worst crimes that there are—sexual slavery and human trafficking—under the watch of the Leader of the Opposition, our so-called tough guy on the beat. She found there was delay and dysfunction in the system. She also found something very interesting: for all the tough talk that we have heard over previous years from the Leader of the Opposition, he halved immigration compliance funding to the Department of Home Affairs. Have you ever heard of anything more hypocritical than that?

I don't want to finish without talking about the Parkinson review. In fairness to the Leader of the Opposition, I don't think he has ever pretended to actually care about the central importance of migration to the future of our country. It has just never been a particular interest of his. And, of course, the Parkinson review told us that our migration system is fundamentally broken. Martin Parkinson said that this was due to a decade of deliberate neglect under the Leader of the Opposition. We've got some critiques today for the Leader of the Opposition. I want to table for the parliament—

An opposition member: Another one!

Yes, another one, mate. That's how bad it was. We have hundreds of pages here, which—for the HansardI now table, which are an unbelievable indictment of the entire record of the opposition leader.

But don't let me just stick with Home Affairs, because of course the wreckage and ruin that the Leader of the Opposition left is actually strewn all over the Australian government. Speaker, let me remind you about defence. This is a guy who likes to think of himself as a real tough guy on national defence, but what did he do when he was minister? He left behind a litany of delayed projects, which I believe were up to 97 years late by the time Labor came to office. Seriously, what a fraud.

Let me not forget the most important one of all, perhaps, for many Australians, which is the catastrophic failure in our healthcare system. There is only one person in this parliament who has been voted the worst health minister in the entire history of Medicare, and he sits in the chair opposite me. This is someone who tried to trash Medicare, and it's only because of Labor that Australians are not paying $5 on top of every other fee every time they go to the doctor. He shakes his head, but it's a matter of public record that this is what he did.

We shouldn't suspend standing orders, at least not for the substance of the matter that has been brought forward, because the truth is that the person with questions to answer here is the Leader of the Opposition. But what we see time and time again is that he is a pretend tough guy who's afraid to answer the tough questions.

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