Immigration minister says voters forgot the good work that had been done by government on border protection

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Peter Dutton says the Coalition was a “victim of its own success” during the election campaign because few people thought border protection was worth voting for.

He says more voters were concerned about the future of Medicare in the election because of the “grubby Mediscare campaign” run by the Labor party.

Speaking on Sydney radio on Thursday, the immigration minister said there were lots of messages from voters from the election, and the government had heard those messages and it promises to work on a number of policy areas.

But he thinks voters have forgotten the good work the government has done on border protection.

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“In part I think we’re victim of our own success,” he said. “The fact that we stopped boats and got children out of detention, we’re cancelling visas of bikies and others to make our community a safer place, and essentially the issue had gone off the radar.”

Dutton was given a scare in the election, suffering a 5.6% swing against him in the Queensland seat of Dickson. He now holds the seat on a margin of just 1,627 votes.



He says the leftwing activist group GetUp had people flown in from Sydney and Melbourne to try to “scare old ladies at night into believing they weren’t going to have their Medicare cards come Monday”.

“They spent a lot of money ... they ran full-time on the ground for eight weeks at a cost I’m told of close to a million dollars,” Dutton said.

He roundly criticised the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, for allowing the “Mediscare” campaign to go ahead.

“He is the leader of the Labor party and a decision was made by the Labor party to send out what amounted to a fraudulent text message, purporting to be from Medicare itself, and that would have had an influence on people,” he said.

“And in marginal seats ... where the vote can come down to one or two hundred, that can decide whether one party forms government or the other.”

With 11 days left in the bitter election campaign, the Coalition broke its self-imposed information blackout about “on-water matters” to tell voters it had intercepted a boat of 21 Vietnamese asylum seekers recently.

On 22 June, it said the boat, intercepted by the navy earlier in June in the Timor Sea, was the third from Vietnam to be intercepted by Australian authorities in the past 14 months.

The boat was the 28th known to have been turned back since the Coalition took office in 2013, and was the first to arrive since the start of the election campaign.

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said Labor “didn’t have the willpower” to stick to its formal policy of asylum seeker boat turnbacks.

“Bill Shorten is weakening already,” Turnbull said at the time of the announcement.

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“He has 50 candidates and members and senators who are on the record as being opposed to our border protection policy. How can he, in government, in alliance with the Greens and independents, possibly resist that?”

Dutton said on Thursday that the Coalition had worked hard in the campaign to explain to voters how divided Labor was internally on its official asylum-seeker boat turnback policy.

He predicted voters will soon see those divisions become more acute.

“We highlighted on a number of occasions that 50 members within Bill Shorten’s own party were vehemently opposed to our policy on border protection, and I suspect some of them will rethink their position and be strongly against the government’s position on borders and boats,” he said.

“I think they will, without the impost of an election, without the discipline of an election, I think you’ll see breakouts from the left of the Labor party now on this issue, and it will be an important test of Bill Shorten to see what legislation he supports and what he doesn’t in the parliament.”