George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this matter of public importance: the impact of the record numbers of people illegally entering Australia by boat under this government. No other issue that faces the Australian people today better illustrates the outcomes of the chaotic, divided and dysfunctional government. What better manifestation of an incompetent government could there actually be than the deliberate removal of policy walls that were protecting our home and our nation, just as we have seen under these Labor Rudd and Gillard governments? Perhaps tonight's budget might actually be a better manifestation, but let us not forget the impact that losing control of our borders is going to have on tonight's budget, and all the budgets. More than $5 billion of border protection blow-outs have occurred since the last election, and all that has contributed to the substantial black hole that the Treasurer will preside over tonight.

The blow-outs result from Labor's remarkable ability to spot something that has been solved—something that is fixed—and turn it into a problem, and then quickly turn it into a crisis. Having watched the former Prime Minister, John Howard, effectively stop the flow of illegal boat arrivals, this Labor government proceeded to dismantle the solution and create a problem. It has turned into a crisis, and the boats keep coming and coming and coming.

Since November 2007, when the successful Howard government ended, we have seen a staggering 40,772 illegal arrivals in our country. The sheer scale of Labor's border protection failure now surpasses the population of most towns in my electorate of Dawson. The Labor Party must be wishing that those illegal arrivals could all vote, because they must have imported almost half an electorate in the past 5½ years.

But I have to tell you that the other 150 real electorates around the nation are not so impressed. People have genuine concerns about their country throwing its doors open to economic refugees and throwing the immigration program over to people smugglers, human traffickers and perhaps terrorists. In this post-9/11 world we see airport security getting tighter and tighter, but in the post-Howard years we see Australia's maritime border security getting looser and looser. When this government sets new benchmarks for porous borders on a daily basis, Australians rightly question how many illegal arrivals are genuine refugees who will become tomorrow's citizens and how many are using the back door to become a threat to our nation.

Illegal immigration through people smuggling is a threat to all Australians. It is a threat because it raises serious security and criminal concerns, it raises quarantine and health issues, it costs time and money in processing and a lot of time and a lot of money under this government. Most importantly, it infringes on our nation's sovereignty and gives us less control over who comes into this country.

These are not actually my claims: what I have paraphrased there is from the Australian Federal Police website. To rebut what was said by the previous speaker, the member for Moreton: arrival in illegal people-smuggling vessels is actually different, and more of an issue, from illegal arrival by plane. We know who you are when you get here by plane; you have to have identification to get on the plane. We probably know where you are from as well. When you arrive by boat, without identification, there is a serious issue in working out whether you are a security risk to this nation.

While those on the opposite side would have us believe that all of these concerns are just unfounded, the facts actually speak for themselves. Last week on 7 May, Nine News reported that four Vietnamese asylum seekers, including a teenage boy, were on the run after escaping from the Darwin detention centre. What about the public revelation in April that recent unauthorised arrivals included a Sri Lankan man who allegedly fled his home after killing his girlfriend, an Egyptian man who was the subject of a high-level Interpol red notice for terrorism activities and an Iranian man accused of drug trafficking in Teheran?

A month ago I noticed a report that asylum seekers who had actually been branded as national security threats were protesting and asking the government to release them from detention or kill them. The article where I read about this went on to say that most of the asylum seekers had been in detention for two or three years following adverse security assessments from ASIO. They were among 56 in Australia who have been deemed threats to national security, without the ability to challenge those decisions. But they have been deemed by our agency which looks after national security as national security threats.

On 4 September last year the Australian reported that asylum seekers with violent histories were being released on bridging visas or into community detention. One was even allowed to marry in detention and make home visits to his wife. The 31-year-old was considered by ASIO to be a risk to security. Again, on 16 August last year the Australian reported that asylum seekers travelling to Australia had been identified by Sri Lankan authorities as members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The identification of the terrorist group members was based on photographs of new arrivals published in the Australian media. Back in 2010, on 14 July, the Australian reported that Indonesian authorities believed they had captured a senior Afghan al-Qaeda link figure posing as an asylum seeker and trying to reach Australia. There is this overwhelming body of evidence that Labor's open-doors policy is a real and direct threat to our national security and our way of life.

We can look to the experience in Britain to see the impact of unfettered illegal immigration. In an op ed piece back in 2009, the foreign editor of the Australian, Greg Sheridan, wrote about a discussion he had had with the then British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. Miliband said to him that 75 per cent of all terrorist plots that were aimed at Britain actually originated in the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan. He noted that some 800,000 Pakistanis lived in Britain. He said:

The vast majority, it goes without saying, are law-abiding citizens. But there is a link between uncontrolled Muslim immigration and terrorism.

The real historic significance of the illegal immigration crisis in our northern waters is that this could, if things go wrong, be the moment Australia loses control of our immigration program, and that would be a disaster.

If we are importing potential security risks because we are too scared to be labelled racist, bigots, dog whistlers or whatever then we are condemning this nation to an inevitable terrorist attack. The real danger that we face is that most Australians are too scared to mention the elephant in the room and this Labor government is too gutless to acknowledge that the elephant they rolled out the red carpet for is a very dangerous thing to actually have in your room.

Never one to wear the gutless tag, the former member for O'Connor, Wilson Tuckey, said, in 2009, he believed terrorists could be masquerading as asylum seekers. His reasoning was:

If you wanted to get into Australia and you have bad intentions, what do you do?

You insert yourself in a crowd of 100 for which there is great sympathy for the other 99.

You go on a system where nobody brings their papers, you have no identity, you have no address.

At the time, the member for Griffith, then Prime Minister, predictably condemned those comments, but the fact is that Wilson Tuckey was right. The facts speak for themselves.

The Gillard Labor government, not content with having the worst border security crisis in the history of our nation because of their dismantling of policies that worked, are now trying to pull the rug out from our national security agencies. These are the agencies charged with the responsibility of ensuring those who arrive illegally on our shores do not pose a risk to our nation. This is what the Labor Party wants them to do. On 1 May, two weeks ago, Radio National reported that Labor backbenchers were pressuring the government on ASIO assessments. It said the federal government was considering calls by its own backbench for increased scrutiny of the way ASIO makes adverse assessments of asylum seekers. They are upset because those 55 alleged asylum speakers I spoke of before have no prospect of release in sight because they are deemed by a national security agency to be a threat to this nation. So, far from recognising the dangers of security threats to this country, the Labor Party wants to ignore what ASIO says and just let them in.

We ignore the advice of ASIO at our peril. I am reminded of a story printed in the Australian on 4 September 2001, a week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It reported that the US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs, James Kelly, said the flow of illegal immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East into Indonesia was a source of concern. He said:

If it's easy to move people under strange identities around, that's a capability that terrorists who we know exist can then use.

Labor has removed our border controls. They have put this nation at risk. A nation without borders is like a house without walls. Anyone can get in. (Time expired)

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