Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Madam Speaker, my question is to the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection. Will the minister inform the House how many days it has been since the last illegal boat arrived? What factors have contributed to that success?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Longman for his question. It is not a question those opposite tend to ask me in this place. On that side of the House they have no real interest, it would seem, in how long it has been since a successful people-smuggling venture has made it to Australia. I can inform the House that it is 67 days. That is how many days it is. It is 67 days as of today, 64 as of last Friday, and the reason I say that is because we have not had a consecutive period where there has been no successful venture like this since before the previous government got rid of the policies that worked under the Howard government. The measures that we have put in place are working and they are stopping the boats, and the lead in those matters is what we are doing at sea. I am not going to rely only on our own experience in this. I am going to make reference to Gillian Triggs, who said today: 'I suspect that the real cause of the capacity to save lives has been the stopping of the boats in the physical sense.' And we know what she is referring to—she is referring to our policy of intercepting vessels that seek to illegally enter our waters and removing them. This has been the watershed policy that has been responsible for the success we have seen over the last 67 days.

Those opposite like to refer to offshore processing, but those opposite had to be dragged kicking and screaming to offshore processing. Now they talk about it as the cornerstone of their policies. It was the only stone they had in their policies and they had to be forced to put it back in place. That measure remains important; it is a backstop measure for any potential vessel that may happen to get through. But for 67 days that has not happened.

The other measure relates to temporary protection visas for those of the more than 30,000 that the current opposition, when in government, left behind for this government. And those opposite still, to this day, are seeking to frustrate the mandate of this government to remove the possibility of permanent visas for people who have come to this country illegally by boat. They betray themselves, but this government is not going to be intimidated into walking away from our policies. We are not going to be intimidated by the weakness of the Greens or the double-mindedness and hypocrisy of the Labor Party. We are not going to be intimidated by any violence that occurs in any centre anywhere or at sea. Our policies are working. They are stopping the boats and our resolve is absolute.