Prime Minister, according to the Australian newspaper, a Congolese serial rapist who abused his 13-year-old daughter has been allowed to stay in the country thanks to the government's direction 110. The man arrived in Australia on a refugee visa in 2008. Over a hundred other hardened criminals, including rapists, paedophiles and drug lords, have also been allowed to remain in Australia under the same direction under this prime minister's watch. Prime Minister, how on Earth did you let this happen?

I am so glad that this has been raised because the information and the conclusions that are drawn there are just plain wrong. I want to explain why, because a lot of people understandably have seen articles like this and have presumed that the ART decision is the end of the road of the decision-making in these processes.

First of all, the only reason any of these people have been before the ART, the Administrative Review Tribunal, is that, under exactly that direction, the department had cancelled the visa. Otherwise, there would have been nothing to appeal. So the direction is the reason that this process started, because the department—and I back the decisions that my department have made in cancelling visas for exactly the sort of people he just described. That's the starting point. I know you're bewildered and shaking your head. It's actually how the system works. You can't appeal unless the decision has been made against you in the first place. That's how they get to the ART. It's not complex.

Then, once they get to the Administrative Review Tribunal, if the tribunal looks at the decision in a different way to how we did, what happens is the minister calls the decision back in. Look at the record over time of what happens when those decisions are called back in. When the cancellations ultimately happen from the ministers, as it happens, we don't end up with the same front page in the paper. That's an editorial decision. That is what it is, because these articles only ever come at one moment in time. Look at each of these cases. Go through the history of them. You get the initial banning, the cancelling of a visa, by the department. Most of those decisions stay at the ART, but some of them the ART overturns. Then, overwhelmingly, you find it gets called up to the minister and the visa is cancelled again and the person is taken into detention and leaves this country as they should.