Scott Morrison ramps up rhetoric on border protection and says Shorten will be responsible for any new boat arrivals

Scott Morrison says the government will reopen the Christmas Island detention centre and reinforce border defences as the Senate on Wednesday followed the House and passed the medical evacuations bill.

While ramping up the rhetoric, Morrison also declined to counter misleading claims about the practical impact of the new law, or even confirm a fact spelled out in the new legislation – that the new medical evacuation procedures only apply to the cohort currently on Nauru and Manus Island, not to any new arrivals.

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Morrison, who suffered an historic defeat on the floor of the House on Tuesday, has subsequently doubled down on the politics of border protection in an effort to frame the looming election contest with Labor.

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Anticipating a second legislative defeat in the Senate on Wednesday morning, Morrison called a press conference to say he had convened the national security committee of cabinet in order to strengthen the capacity of Operation Sovereign Borders “across a whole range of fronts” – but declined to go into detail.

Morrison said the Coalition would repeal the law if it won a majority in May, and said his job now was “to do everything within my power and in the power of the government to ensure that what the parliament has done to weaken our borders does not result in boats coming to Australia”.

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The prime minister contended the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, would be responsible if new boats arrived because “he led this process to weaken and compromise our borders”.

But he also said if no boats arrived, the government would be responsible, because he and the home affairs minister Peter Dutton “remain standing here to ensure that they don’t come”.

Asked how he could say if a boat arrives it would be Labor’s fault, but if boats didn’t arrive, that would be thanks to the government, Morrison said: “Because that’s true.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scott Morrison arrives at a press conference on Tuesday to announce he had convened the national security committee of cabinet. Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

Asked several times whether he would confirm the new medical evacuation procedures passed by the parliament do not apply to new boat arrivals, only to the existing cohort “for the sake of deterring new arrivals”, Morrison said: “I’ll be engaging in some very direct messaging as part of Operation Sovereign Borders with people smugglers and with those who might be thinking of getting on boats.”

He said this clear messaging would tell people smugglers “that my government is in control of the borders”.

In parliamentary question time, the attorney general Christian Porter ramped up the attack further, arguing the legislation was deficient because the home affairs minister lacked discretion to stop the medical transfers of people being “investigated for, charged with, or on trial for, or even awaiting sentence, for a serious criminal offence”.

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He cited three cases of “potential transferees” being charged with criminal offences, and said it was “absolute madness” to pass a law where “ministerial discretion is reduced over serious criminality”.

The new law allows the minister to stop a medical transfer if the person has a substantial criminal record or the “minister reasonably believes the person would expose the Australian community to a serious risk of criminal conduct”.

The home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, also hit the airwaves to say the new procedures were unnecessary because the government had spent “literally hundreds of millions of dollars providing medical support, people being evacuated, people claiming that they had stomach problems, came to Australia, it turned out the diagnosis was constipation”.

Dutton declared the passage of the legislation meant “one of the main pillars of Operation Sovereign Borders, the reason that we’ve been able to stop boats, is being pulled from under us”.

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The shadow immigration minister, Shayne Neumann, said Labor remained committed to the architecture of Operation Sovereign Borders including offshore processing, turnbacks when safe to do so and regional resettlement.

Neumann said Morrison’s “ridiculous decision to open the Christmas Island detention centre is a hysterical and unhinged response from a desperate and dishonest prime minister”.

“He is encouraging the people smugglers to restart the boats and should be ashamed of himself,” he said. “Our parliament should be good enough to approach these matters in a grown-up and rational way – which is what Labor has done.”