My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer to my previous question: why is this serial rapist, who is on a visa here in Australia, still here? Why won't the Prime Minister accept responsibility for his government's failure to protect the community from non-citizen criminals?

Order! The member for Wills will leave the chamber under 94(a). The Leader of the Opposition is entitled to be heard in silence and shown the same respect as any other member. To give commentary like that with remarks that I just spoke about is completely out of order.

The member for Wills then left the chamber .

I'm glad that this has been asked again, but I suspect the Leader of the Opposition won't be by the time he hears and is reminded of details.

The Leader of the House will pause. The Manager of Opposition Business, on a point of order?

Speaker, it was a very specific question, and it wasn't about the Leader of the Opposition. The way that the minister started that was completely inappropriate and not relevant to the question.

Yes, the manager is entitled to raise that point of order. If we're going to raise standards, that's fine. We will ensure that we get straight to the answer. Out of respect for the Leader of the Opposition, I'm going to get the Leader of the House to get straight to the answer. He's had 16 seconds, and I'll be listening carefully to make sure he's within the standing orders.

We are determined that, when a minister calls in one of these cases to make a ministerial decision, it is one that absolutely stands up in court. That means you have to wait for the ART to release its decision before the department can prepare the brief for the minister. That's what you have to wait to do. If you don't do that, you end up failing because they appeal the decision you make to the court, and they stay because you haven't taken into account all the relevant information. So you have to wait for the ART decision.

Allow me to also say this: in the earlier question which the Leader of the Opposition referred to, he referred to ministerial direction 110. That has already been superseded by a decision I made a couple of months ago, ministerial direction 123. That is to take into account and to give direction to the ART on this new line of reasoning that's trying to say, 'Because you are now sending people to Naoero if you can't send them back to their home country, that's too harsh.' We stand on our sovereignty—on our right to deport somebody who no longer has a valid visa—and the Naoero arrangement is our way of doing that. We make no apology for making that arrangement, and we are glad that the government of Naoero made that arrangement with us.

In direction 123, we have gone to the absolute limit of the law of being able to make sure that this is not taken into account into the future. Allow me to say this: there has been a letter which was agreed to, asking whether we would change the law on this exact issue so that we could give an even stronger direction to the ART. That was a letter that came to us from the Leader of the Opposition. We agreed on that. Ministerial direction 123 goes as strong as we are able to right now, but we are waiting for the day when the opposition will agree to vote for legislation that they wrote to us asking for.