Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make a short statement in relation to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security's report into the citizenship bill.

Leave granted.

I am very pleased to speak to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security's advisory report on the Citizenship Amendment (Allegiance to Australia) Bill 2015. This bill, which provides in several ways for the revocation of the Australian citizenship of dual nationals involved in terrorist activity, was introduced into the parliament in this place on 24 June and immediately referred to the committee.

The committee received dozens of submissions from community organisations, human rights groups, legal experts and the legal profession itself—in particular, from the Law Council of Australia, the peak body of Australia's lawyers; and from the Australian Bar Association, the peak body of Australia's barristers.

The committee held three days of public hearings. The committee conducted its private deliberations with the conscientiousness and seriousness that you would expect for a bill of this character, and I am very grateful for the hard work put in by my colleagues on that committee.

Deliberations were not easy. There were, as you would expect, a variety of strongly held views about this bill, but I am happy that through many hours of deliberation and negotiation we were able to conclude a unanimous report. I acknowledge in particular the chair of the committee, the member for Wannon, and the deputy chair, the member for Holt, Mr Byrne. I believe that the hard work of the committee on the many difficult issues presented by this bill is more than evident in the lengthy, considered report that has just been tabled and especially in its 27 substantive recommendations. I also want to add my voice to that of the chair, the member for Wannon, in thanking the staff of the committee, who worked under considerable pressure to assist the committee in producing this substantial report in a very timely way, working to a very tight timetable.

If the government accepts the recommendations in this report—and I urge the government to do so—this bill will have a far more refined and focused operation than it would have had the bill in its current form proceeded. The legislation to be produced if the government does accept the recommendations will incorporate greater checks on executive power. It will be a bill that produces a law with far greater oversight and far greater transparency. I want to briefly note just some of the recommendations in the report so that the House can see how significant they are.

First and, I think, most significantly, the committee has recommended that the conduct provisions of the bill—that is, those provisions that would strip citizenship in the absence of a conviction in an Australian court—will only apply where a person has gone overseas to engage in terrorist activity or where a person has engaged in terrorist activity here and then fled overseas. Only then will a person be able to lose their citizenship in the absence of a conviction. The committee's recommendations set up a very clear division in the law as it is intended to operate in respect of those Australian citizens who are in Australia and in respect of who a conviction will be required before a ministerial discretion can be brought to bear and for those Australian citizens overseas who now, if this bill becomes law, will have the possibility of losing their citizenship in respect of conduct.

The second recommendation that I draw attention to is the recommendation of the committee that the offences which the conviction provisions of the bill deal with are to be considerably narrowed. In its original form the bill proposed—I think incredibly—that a person could be liable to cancellation of their citizenship when convicted of offences such as intentionally damaging or destroying Commonwealth property. That is obviously inappropriate, and the committee has recommended that the offences be narrowly targeted to serious terror and national security offences. In addition, to make the point even clearer that the law for cancellation of citizenship ought to be concerned with serious offences only, the committee has recommended that the conviction based provisions apply only where the person concerned has been sentenced to more than six years imprisonment.

The committee has acted on concerns expressed by many of the submissions about rule-of-law issues. The committee has recommended, for example, that notice is required to be given in all cases of cancellation of citizenship other than where there is some national security reason for the delay of giving of notice. The committee has recommended that reasons be given in all cases and that the review rights which will be available to any Australian citizen affected by these cancellation of citizenship provisions be set out in the bill.

There are other recommendations. Submissions put with great force and clarity the recommendation that the term 'service', which appears in one of the conduct based provisions, be clarified so that there is not by reason of this legislation an unintentional catching of the Red Cross or other humanitarian workers who as part of their humanitarian work will potentially be working with terrorists. We would not want that humanitarian work to be caught by a cancellation of citizenship provision.

As the chair has mentioned in his remarks, in addition, the committee has made recommendations to ensure that Australia's obligations under the international Convention on the Rights of the Child are tended to and made recommendations to ensure that none of the provisions of this bill will catch children.

I think that is sufficient to give to the House a sense of the very substantial work that has been done by the intelligence committee on this bill. I say again that I urge the government to accept each and every one of the recommendations in this report. They will make the bill that the government brought to this House on 24 June a better bill and better law. I commend the report to the House.