Peter Dutton Quotes (1970-)

“Somebody once said to me that the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags up on Nauru waiting for people to collect when they depart.”

“I’m hardly going to take morals lectures from the extreme left, who frankly are just as bad in this circumstance as people like Fraser Anning, they should equally be condemned.”

“Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC, and on The Guardian, Huffington Post, can express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it. They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me.”

“The spotlight is given to people like Fraser Anning or like this senator [Faruqi]. The comments she’s made and the desire to extract some sort of political advantage or attention seeking out of this circumstance, I think is appalling.”

“The reality is people (in Melbourne) are scared to go out at restaurants of a night time because they’re followed home by these gangs, home invasions, and cars are stolen and we just need to call it for what it is. Of course, it is African gang violence.”

“The reality is Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in the 1970s and we're seeing that today. We need to be honest in having that discussion. There was a mistake made. Lessons from past migrant programs should be learnt for people settling in Australia today.”

“The matter has been to the high court. These people came by boat. It's been made clear to them at every turn that they were not going to stay in Australia and they still had children. We see that overseas in other countries, anchor babies so-called: the emotion of trying to leverage a migration outcome based on the children.”

“They won't be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that. For many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it so there would be huge cost and there's no sense in sugar-coating that, that's the scenario.”

“New Zealand don’t contribute really anything to the defense effort that we’ve got where we’re trying to surveil boats that might be on their way to New Zealand, so I hope that (NZ Justice Minister) Andrew Little reflects a little more on the relationship between Australia and New Zealand where we do a lot of the heavy lifting.”

“If there is a particular problem that people can point to within a certain community, and we’re talking about a significant number of people in that community who are doing the wrong thing, then clearly mistakes have been made in the past. The reality is that Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today. We need to be honest in having that discussion.”

“Some people are trying it on. Let’s be serious about this. There are people who have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru. They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here and the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court which injuncts us from sending them back.”

“It’s going to mean that people who need medical services in Australia are going to be displaced from those services. Because if you bring hundreds and hundreds of people from Nauru and Manus down to our country, they are going to go into the health network, I don’t want to see Australians who are in waiting lines in public hospitals kicked off those waiting lines because people off Nauru and Manus are now going to access those health services.”