Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to this motion about the chaos that is being driven by the Albanese government. Let's put a little bit of a history lesson out there. We have to remember that most of these detainees are people who came here under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, whereby 50,000 refugees ended up in detention and over a thousand refugees drowned at sea.

This isn't about vilifying refugees or anything like that. As a matter of fact, the last time Australia lifted its refugee intake it was under former Liberal minister Julie Bishop, who increased the number of refugees that Australia took. Australia has a very generous refugee policy and it's worth noting that we owe it to those refugees who are waiting in refugee camps around the world—who have done the right thing—that they are given priority. They are trying to do the right thing. They're in those refugee camps and they aren't paying refugee smugglers tens of thousands of dollars—and where refugees find that kind of money, I don't know—to do the wrong thing and bring people in illegally to this country. That is how this policy started. This is how we have got ourselves into the situation.

No-one was talking about this issue six months ago until the current Labor government completely dropped the ball on this upcoming court case, which is no doubt funded by activists who are trying to undermine our strong border security. If you want to know how bad it can get, just take a look at the number of refugees that die in the Mediterranean every year while trying to cross the Mediterranean. Look at the number of refugees that are flooding the southern border of the great country of the United States of America.

This is not the sort of behaviour that governments who care about the welfare of their own people engage in. So to sit here and somehow claim that it's the Liberal Party and attack Peter Dutton over the fact that we are trying to protect our borders and keep people safe, and we don't want to be wasting money paying for the incarceration fees of these people. This is not what we want. We want a methodical, fair process for having immigrants come to this country.

That leads us to the other part of this MPI today, about border control in general. Just last week the ABS, the Australia Bureau of Statistics, released figures that show 55,000 immigrants came to Australia in the month of January alone. If that's extrapolated for 12 months, it's an immigration rate of up to 660,000 people. You have to ask yourself why the Albanese Labor government is letting so many immigrants into this country at a time when we have so many homeless Australians living in tent cities. You can't walk around my home town of Brisbane nowadays without seeing tent cities everywhere. I'm getting constituents contact me about it. I had a constituent contact me just last Saturday morning to tell me that they were on their morning walk in Bundaberg and they noticed that a mother and child were living in a tent under a bridge. This is not the Australia that I know. This is not the Australia that our constituents want to see. This is not the egalitarian way.

Why is Labor allowing so many immigrants into this country? Why are they not stopping them? They said last year they'd lower the immigration rate, and they haven't. So we've not only got homelessness but we've got increased rents and people who have jobs who can't find a place to live. And, because we have inflation, we have the RBA sticking up interest rates. That's sending our builders broke, because our RBA is completely clueless. They're not only smashing demand; they're smashing supply and so our builders are going broke. We've not only got an increase in demand; we've got a reduction in supply, making the matter worse. I recommend that people support this motion because the Albanese Labor government is nothing but chaos when it comes to protecting Australia's borders and putting Australians first.