Subjects: Labor’s visa and immigration policy shambles; the Prime Minister’s weak leadership; the PM’s misleading Question Time shocker.
E&OE.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Joining me now live on 6PR is the Liberal Leader, Peter Dutton. Good afternoon.
PETER DUTTON:
Good afternoon, Oly. Nice to be with you.
OLIVER PETERSON:
The Prime Minister says, ‘You sow fear and division’. Do you stand by your calls to pause refugee arrivals from Gaza?
PETER DUTTON:
Yes, of course I do. It’s in our country’s best interests. The Prime Minister today confirmed that the Government’s changed its policy – that is, that they will allow people into our country who are sympathisers with the listed terrorist organisation, Hamas. That’s nothing that John Howard would ever have done in relation to Al-Qaeda, or that Paul Keating or Scott Morrison or Tony Abbott would ever have done. It is a very dramatic departure from the way in which we’ve assessed people coming in before.
The Prime Minister confirmed that a number of people, perhaps all of them, didn’t receive face-to-face interviews before they were brought in to Australia as well. It’s without precedent that people would have been brought in on a tourist visa from a war zone controlled by Hamas as a listed terrorist organisation. What we now know, of course, is that all of this happened under the now-sacked Minister, Andrew Giles, the guy who brought in or who released into the community the 152 criminals – and you’ll remember the case in Perth, where that elderly lady was assaulted by one of those 152 – those people were released into the community unnecessarily.
So, I just think the Prime Minister’s all full of bluster, and a lot today, and trying to put all of the personal attacks out there that he conducted. All he’s doing is trying to distract from what has been a monumental stuff-up by this Government – but it’s a dangerous stuff-up because we need to know who’s coming to our country – and unfortunately, he has made, I think, our society less safe by allowing people in that we don’t truly know their allegiances and then their beliefs.
OLIVER PETERSON:
So, the Prime Minister, he says though, the process that his Government has in place is the same as what you just pointed to – the Morrison and the Abbott Governments. Is it different? Is it a different process?
PETER DUTTON:
It is. And again, we demonstrated today that the Prime Minister had misled the Parliament because the Prime Minister said, ‘Oh, well, this is just the same process as what happened when the Abbott Government brought in people from Syria’. But, I was the Home Affairs Minister then. We brought people in from Syria. We didn’t fly them directly into Australia. We processed people in Jordan, in Amman, in north Iraq, and we conducted biometrics tests. We sent that off to the United States and Canada and our other Five Eyes partners. It took over 12 months for us to go through that process. Many people were excluded because they came up with a hit off the database, and we didn’t proceed with those applications. Those people came to our country, and they’ve done so safely, and they’ve been great migrants and contributed well to our society.
Now we find out that the Prime Minister hasn’t even done face-to-face interviews and he’s flown people on a tourist visa into Australia – almost 500 of them have now claimed protection visas – which means that people will then be eligible for welfare and housing, etc, so, I mean, the Prime Minister can protest all he wants and he can throw all the personal attacks out that he wants. But I think he’s made a catastrophic mistake here. It’s nothing like the process that we had when the Coalition was in Government. It’d be like landing boats into WA and conducting the processing of their applications there. There’s a reason that we stopped boats from getting to the mainland – that is, once they get into the legal system and start claiming protection, it’s very hard then to deport those people, even if they’re of bad character.
Effectively, what the Prime Minister’s done, or what Andrew Giles did, by allowing these people to come from a war zone controlled by Hamas – where it’s reported that somewhere over 50 per cent of people have sympathy for Hamas and the terrorist ideology that they espouse – that they’ve been allowed to come to our country without even a face-to face-interview.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Why is the Government using the tourist visa and not a humanitarian visa?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, mate, it’s very hard to explain that because that would be the approach that you might take. The Government abolished the Temporary Protection Visa, which was a key part of Operation Sovereign Borders. I know the PM wants to come around and say, ‘Oh, look, you know, we’re just a carbon copy of the Coalition when it comes to Operation Sovereign Borders, and there’s no difference in the policy’. But again, that’s not true.
They abolished Temporary Protection Visas and the beauty of the temporary protection visa –as we knew in the Howard years and the Abbott years and the Morrison years – we used the Temporary Protection Visa to provide a safe haven for people. When the conflict was over, they were able to return back to their place of origin. So, the Tamil Tigers, for example, when the civil war came to an end in Sri Lanka, those people were able to go back to Sri Lanka. In many cases they don’t want a permanent outcome in Australia, they’re happy to go back and try and rebuild their country.
But we need to be very careful about who we’re issuing visas to. I’m not aware of any precedent in our country’s history where people coming out of a zone controlled by a terrorist organisation would be allowed to come here in huge numbers on a tourist visa. It’s quite unbelievable and it’s dangerous.
OLIVER PETERSON:
You mentioned the Syria example before when you were the Home Affairs Minister. So, should a third country be used now to process and assess the humanitarian refugee applications before coming to Australia from Gaza?
PETER DUTTON:
Well, my judgement of looking at what’s going on at the moment, is it is prudent for our country to pause the migrant intake from the terrorist-controlled territory. We need to understand who people are, and that can take many months. There may be a time into the future where we can take people through the humanitarian programme. We take people now and we’re, on a per capita basis, the second most generous nation in the world, second only to Canada in terms of the numbers of migrants that we settle.
But in some cases, it can take years for those applications. People are in camps, and literally there are tens of millions of people who want to come to our country. We knock people back because we’re worried about security aspects of their character, if they’ve committed crimes, but ultimately they go through a process, they’re issued a visa, and they can come to our country in an orderly way and be provided support to settle successfully.
That’s not what the Government’s doing at the moment. It’s highly disruptive. I really think that the Prime Minister has been found out here, and he misquoted today, the words of the Director-General of ASIO, by deliberately missing out part of a sentence, which essentially disproved what the Prime Minister had claimed in Parliament. But the Prime Minister tried to change those words to suit his own position.
So, it’s a pretty sordid arrangement and pretty tacky, to be honest. I don’t understand why the Prime Minister has taken the position that he has. Whether he knew about what Minister Giles was doing, I don’t know. But Minister Giles obviously has been sacked. But it’s on top of the 150 criminals that they released that we’ve now got people, about 3,000 of whom have been issued visas and, in many cases, they’ve just not even received a face-to-face interview.
OLIVER PETERSON:
Peter Dutton, thanks for your time.
PETER DUTTON:
Thanks Oly. Take care mate. Thank you.
OLIVER PETERSON:
The Liberal Leader, Peter Dutton, joining us live from Parliament House in Canberra.
[ends]