Labor has started the New Year with amnesia when it comes to their legacy of 50,000 people arriving on 800 boats.
At the height of Labor’s incompetence up to 1,000 people a week off smugglers’ boats were arriving and not being properly processed by Mr Marles’s Labor Government. It will take years to clean up this mess and Labor wiping their hands of a problem they created demonstrates they are not fit for Government.
Labor had almost 2,000 children in detention and the total number of people peaked at more than 10,300. We have reduced that total number in detention to just under 1,800 which includes seven children off boats and 72 children off boats who are here temporarily and are due to return to Nauru.
There are some people held in immigration detention because they have committed criminal offences, whose identity has not been verified or who are subject to adverse ASIO assessments. Mr Marles should nominate which of these individuals he wants to release and then explain the consequences to the public.
Mr Marles demonstrates the same weakness as his predecessors who were incapable of dealing with these issues.
As a former union boss Mr Marles is part of the praetorian guard around Mr Shorten and their dodgy deal with the CFMEU to get the numbers at conference to adopt a soft version of turn backs is a con.
The people smugglers are desperate for Labor to win the next election because they believe they will be back in business. Labor just doesn’t have the capacity or will to deal with the ongoing threat posed by people smugglers.