Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The bill is designed to strengthen Australia’s border protection, and it does of course mean that we want to ensure that we keep positive cooperation with Indonesia. I might take the opportunity to repeat what your leader said a few years ago, in 2001. This is what he said:

... in the end the only solution to the problem that we now confront resides around the relationship that we have with Indonesia and the attitudes that develop in this region to illegal people movement ...

He went on to say, ‘What we need to do is exercise leadership’—in other words, get our relationship with Jakarta on a positive footing, so this could all be fixed by a good relationship with Indonesia. And now, Senator, you seem to be saying, ‘Throw it in the bin’—a complete regional irresponsibility.