Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Will the Prime Minister explain to the House what is required for strong borders and for keeping Australians safe and secure?

Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Canning for his question and I thank him for his service, as I do all service men and women in this place and outside of this place and veterans. We thank them for their service. They understand, as I hope all people in this chamber would understand—and I certainly know government members understand—that to have a national security policy to keep Australians safe and secure you need to understand and appreciate the threats that the nation faces, you need to ensure that you have a plan to address those threats—and on Monday this week I outlined to the National Press Club the plan under our government that has been working for Australia to address those threats—and you have to be prepared to resource that plan by ensuring you have economic policies that provide for a stronger economy and that you have the budget management skills to bring the budget back into balance so that you can support those important investments to keep Australians safe and secure.

These are all incredibly important elements of having successful national security policy in this country. But there is one thing more important than all of those things. You have to have the conviction to take the action and follow through. That's what you have to have. You've got to have the metal, you've got to have the ticker and you've got to have the resolve to actually see things through and implement these decisions and not roll over to whatever wind may blow you away to make you compromise Australia's national security and trade it away.

That will never happen under a Liberal-Nationals coalition government, but it did happen in this place this week by the leader of the Labor Party when he rolled over and compromised and traded away Australia's border protection. I wondered why he would do that, but I think it's pretty simple to understand: you don't value what you never built; you trade away what you don't value. The Labor Party do not value stronger borders, because this week they traded them away. They just threw them away carelessly to try to solve some internal political problem for the leader of the Labor Party, who couldn't stand up to the voices within in his party, let alone those outside his party, to stand up for stronger borders. If you haven't built it, you don't understand and you're happy to let it just fall into disrepair.

That is what would happen under this leader of the Labor Party. He is a weak individual when it comes to national security—always going for the lowest common denominator. Every time we have brought legislation on national security into this place, he has always sought to drag it down to the lowest common denominator and then claim some form of bipartisanship. There is not a cigarette paper's difference between us; there is a phonebook when it comes to national security.