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

My question is for the Minister for Home Affairs. Could the minister outline to the House how the Morrison government is equipping our law enforcement agencies with the resources needed to keep Australians safe? At the risk of chagrining you, Mr Speaker, is the minister aware of any alternative approaches?

Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question. All Australians know that the Morrison government is determined to keep Australians safe. In particular, we're determined to keep kids safe online; to make sure that we can support small businesses who are operating online and to make sure that we can support older Australians as they do their banking, or they share photos or emails with their kids who might be in another part of the country or overseas. We know that this is an incredibly important environment for Australians to operate in. Increasingly, of course, because of COVID people are spending more and more time online. In this budget we have taken decisions to invest more into protecting Australians online. It doesn't stop there. We have been able to invest, this year alone, $8.2 billion in the Home Affairs portfolio. In the 2019-20 budget the government provided an additional $571.4 million over five years to security agencies to help keep Australians safe.

One of the proudest outcomes of this government, in my judgement, is the fact that we have been able to manage the budget well over the course of the last number of years. With the Prime Minister—as Treasurer, now as Prime Minister—in this budget we have prepared Australia as best we can, not only to deal with COVID but also to deal with the threats, including terrorism, which have not gone away. The investment that we've made additionally into the Australian Federal Police, which is significant in this budget, $300 million over four years to enhance the AFP's search capacity and ability to respond to emerging threats, is designed to defeat those terrorists. It's designed to defeat paedophiles. It's designed to defeat all of those who are involved in activities that most Australians don't know anything about: the underworld, the dark web, the networks that these criminal syndicates operate seek to do us harm, seek to profit at the expense of Australian citizens. We've invested in a way that the Labor Party was never able to do. We have created a strong budget and we have put ourselves in a position as a country where we're able to deal with those threats.

When the Labor Party was in government they ran out of money to list important medicines. They ripped $128 million out of the Federal Police. They had $30 million removed from the Australian crime commission and 88 staff. They took $27 million and 56 staff from AUSTRAC. They took $735 million and 700 staff from the then customs agency. They did it because they had to spend $16 billion on the border failures that they presided over and the decisions that they made otherwise—pink batts, all of that crazy spending—that meant that the Labor Party ran out of money. They can never manage money. They can never manage the budget in this country.