Mr CHRISTENSEN (Dawson) (17:04): Threats to national security are very important to any nation. But we are faced with this Labor government that simply cannot grasp the serious nature of the issue that is before us right now. The Australian people have watched on as the government took a perfectly good solution—the border protection measures that were put in place by the Howard government—and dismantled it. They tore it down. They threw away a perfectly good solution and created for themselves and for the nation a problem, an escalating problem—a problem that is so out of hand that the very issues that were actually raised in this place by way of an MPI a couple of weeks ago pose a serious threat to the Australian public. The budget, as we all know, is in crisis. The $5 billion border protection blow-outs in the budget, resulting from this government's poorest border policy, are a threat to the Australian people. It is the taxpayers who have to fork out for this waste and this largesse. It is the taxpayers who have to stand by and watch their government open the doors and windows and invite terrorist threats into their country. Every time someone gains illegal entry into Australia without documentation, without identification, without knowing who these people are and what their background actually is, we open the door to a potential national security threat. When we open the door to two of those unauthorised entries, that threat is doubled. If three illegal entries sneak through the back door, then it is tripled. The reality is that, in the last week alone, 900 security threats entered through the doors. And that is this government's legacy. Since November 2007, when the term of the last government ended and this government came to power, we have seen over 42,000 illegal immigrants arrive on Australian shores. The population of the Whitsunday Regional Council in my electorate is smaller than that! The sheer scale of Labor's border protection failure now surpasses the population of most towns in my electorate of Dawson. And people in my electorate have genuine concerns about their country throwing its doors open to economic refugees, to people smugglers, to human traffickers and, potentially, to terrorism threats. We have had 22,000 illegal arrivals come to this country so far this financial year. That is a figure that the department of immigration has admitted could blow out to 25,000 by 30 June. Yet we have the government pretending in their budget that somehow they are going to get it down to 13,200. That is simply not going to happen. This month is the second consecutive month in which more than 3,000 people have arrived by boat in Australian waters. That is going to continue as long as this government remains in power. But, as I said, people in my electorate have genuine concerns about this issue and about the potential security threat. And so they should because, in the post 9/11 world, we see airport security getting tighter and tighter and tighter, and we see all of these measures in place, but we see border security, under this government, getting looser and looser and looser. When I warned of potential security threats to our country when I spoke on the last MPI, it was not just my view. This is what the Australian Federal Police have to say about illegal entrants gaining access to our country. They say it raises serious security and criminal concerns. It raises quarantine and health issues. It costs, obviously, time and money in processing. Most importantly, they say, illegal immigration infringes on Australian sovereignty, giving us less control over our own borders. As I said, they are not my claims; they are statements found on the Australian Federal Police website in relation to people smuggling. The Gillard Labor government, not content with having the worst border security crisis in the history of our nation because they dismantled the policies that actually worked, are now trying to pull the rug out from under our national security agencies. These are the agencies that are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that those who are coming illegally to our shores do not pose a risk to this nation. This is what the Labor Party wants to do about those agencies. At the start of this month, on 1 May, there was a report on Radio National headed 'Labor backbenchers pressure government on ASIO assessments' in which we heard: The Federal Government says it's considering calls by its own backbench for increased scrutiny of the way ASIO makes adverse assessments of asylum seekers. These guys—and I presume there are some backbenchers over there who are amongst them—are upset because 55 asylum seekers are being detained by ASIO because they are security threats to the country. They want them released into the community. So, far from recognising the security threat to this nation, the Labor Party wants to ignore what our national security agency, ASIO, is saying, and just let them in. Mr Champion: You voted to let them in. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member for Wakefield will have his opportunity in three minutes. Mr CHRISTENSEN: Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker, for defending my honour! The member opposite will get his opportunity. But I have to say that he and every other member of the government ignores the advice of ASIO at its peril. I am reminded of a story which was printed in The Australian on 4 September 2001. That was fortuitously one week before the infamous 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre. That report was titled 'Bin Laden code red in Jakarta'. It said: INDONESIAN and foreign military and government officials are concerned the organisation of notorious international terrorist Osama bin Laden is looking to Indonesia as a potential springboard for terrorist operations. It quoted the then US Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, James Kelly: Mr Kelly said the flow of illegal immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East into Indonesia was a further source of concern. “If it’s easy to move people under strange identities around that’s a capability that terrorists who we know exist can then use.” That is what he said. Speaking about these issues, earlier this month the world watched in horror as scenes unfolded in the UK of the brutal slaying of a British soldier in the middle of London. There are two suspects in this barbaric atrocity, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo, both Muslim converts of African descent. Intelligence agencies warned of copycat attacks. But the intelligence services themselves have actually come under fire over in the UK for allowing these two men to slip through the net in the first place. According to reports, both of those men were on the radar of intelligence agencies but were not considered to be serious security threats. A similarly revolting attack unfolded earlier in the year at the Boston Marathon where the accused perpetrators were family members of men granted asylum in the US. Russia had strongly opposed the US's decision to grant those people asylum, but America had ignored the warnings. The Adelaide Advertiser reported yesterday that a suspected terrorist wanted by Interpol had lived in Inverbrackie with his family for about nine months, in a detention centre with the equivalent of a pool security fence. He was able to go out into the community, to go out to the local mosque, I assume, and on trips to the library—that was the level of security around that fellow. We cannot go on ignoring these warnings. We cannot continue to expose our citizens to unnecessary elevated risk. The Liberal-National coalition has a plan to restore the borders, but I fear that the crisis that this government has created means that we are actually going to have to go much, much further than the Howard government went. Mr Champion interjecting— Mr CHRISTENSEN: Adult governments need to take the concerns of their citizens seriously. Adult governments need to take the most important concerns and the important responsibility of national security seriously, because a nation without a border is like a house without walls; a house without walls is not a house, and a nation without borders is not a nation— (Time expired) The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr S Georganas ): I call the member for Wakefield.