Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Make no mistake: what we are seeing here is Labor and the Greens teaming up to weaken our border security and the sovereignty of this nation. We have seen it today. We saw attempts at it last year. There's no question about it. I listened to someone I respect and trust on the issue of border security, someone who knows what they are talking about, and that is Senator Molan. He know what's he's talking about. He has seen it firsthand. He spoke about the people who were the victims of the last Labor-Green government's border security policies, and that is what we are seeing—a return to those sorts of arrangements, which will undercut and undermine the security of this nation. Anyone who believes what's being said—that it isn't a weakening of our border security and that it doesn't change the policies—is being played for a fool.

They say: 'Trust us. Take us at our word.' But I think the best way to measure and test whether these people, the Australian Labor Party, propped up by their mates down here, the Australian Greens, can be trusted on border security—this is a group of people, too, I might remind those listening, who are seeking later this year to win the next election—is to check the record and see what happened when they were running the country and were actually in charge of our border protection policies. As we've heard countless times in this debate, 50,000 people arrived here during the time of the last government. There were 800 boats and up to 8,000 children forcibly put into detention as a result of their weak border policies. They go out there and they say it's about compassion and fairness and doing the right thing by disadvantaged people, but the only people who are getting something out of this are the people smugglers—the people who make money off the misery of others, the people who were the conduit for those people who paid money to come to this country, many of whom died at sea. We know of 1,200. How many more do we not know about? How many of those who pushed off from the shores of the lands they left and never made it here were never accounted for? As Senator Molan pointed out, what medical treatment is available for those people who fell victim, by way of death, to that awful policy?

So look at the record, see what they did last time they were in government, and then you will know where we are headed. This is the first step towards that awful set of arrangements which weaken our country's security and sovereignty. Those opposite are telegraphing their punches before they're even at an election. This is what they're going to be like. We will have weaker borders, and our country will be weaker for it. I urge all Australians—and senators contemplating how to vote on this—to think twice before they trust Labor or the Greens on this issue.