Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 deal with a number of issues, some of which are not controversial, some of which are very much welcome and some of which, given some recent government amendments, raise deep concerns. The bills were first proposed following the London bombings. When they were introduced to this House, COAG had met and had made a number of statements concerning what I think amounted to a 10-point plan of different antiterrorism measures which the leaders of the governments around Australia, having received the best available intelligence, decided were all issues which the parliaments at state and federal level should enact.

One of those points was to move the time delay for citizenship from two years to three years. Time delay on citizenship is always going to be an issue of balance. There are two competing concerns, both of which matter. The first concern is that citizenship is a way of integrating people into our society, making sure that they do not feel estranged and that at every level they feel part of the Australian community. It is also something that, once confirmed, is a permanent decision that Australia has made and therefore something that we do not want to take lightly.

Having received the best available intelligence at a time of genuine international concern on security, the governments of Australia, including the one represented here and all the state and territory governments, agreed that one of the things that should happen was that the delay for citizenship should be moved from two years to three years. In that context, Labor announced that we would support that change. Two things have happened since then. More than a year passed since this bill went on the Notice Paper before the government bothered to find time to debate it. This is something that was held up in the context of the London bombings as being an important piece of legislation and as being relevant to our national security. It was so important to move the citizenship delay from two years to three years that we have waited more than a year to implement it. Anybody who only had two years of residence in Australia, at the time that we were told this was a national security issue, now has three years anyway. For anybody who was in the situation that the governments of Australia decided was worth pursuing, because of whom the governments thought that as a national security measure we had to go from a two-year delay to a three-year delay, we have delayed the bill anyway.

So, in the context of one of the most frightening international events that we saw in London last year, the government put it on the list. People were sceptical. Some people were sceptical as to whether or not this genuinely was a national security issue but, notwithstanding that, when all the governments of Australia agreed in that context—and it is a matter of balance—Labor was willing to support that bill. In that time, when the government said this was something that had to be done but could not be bothered doing it, 117,000 people have been granted citizenship. I do not know how many of those people would have been caught by the two-year to three-year change—I suspect the government does not know how many people would have been caught by the two-year to three-year change—but, notwithstanding that, it was something that we were told was significant to our national security, it was important enough to put in the 10-point plan and it was important enough to put in the list of things that need to be done; it just was not important enough to do.

Now, a year later, the government has put in an amendment to that bill. An amendment was brought into the House, as I understand it, by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, who is sitting opposite, the member for Goldstein. That amendment says: ‘Let’s not go to three years; let’s go to four. Let’s make the change to the delay before somebody can become a citizen—a delay of four years.’ I would love to know how something that was a national security issue, where the government was determined to get the balance just right in a meeting of the leaders of all the governments in Australia, then finds itself being introduced to the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia, with a change to that balance from three to four years, not on the advice of the best intelligence available to Australia, not on the advice of a COAG meeting of the leaders of all the governments of Australia, but because a parliamentary secretary reckons it is a good idea. I would love to know—and, curiously enough, none of this has been reported so far—exactly what intelligence briefings were made available to the parliamentary secretary to change part of that 10-point plan. I would love to know—and the parliamentary secretary has made none of these reasons available publicly—why it is that the premiers and the Prime Minister got it wrong a year ago or, if they got it right, whether there is now new intelligence that says the balance should be set somewhere differently.

Was the real reason this amendment was introduced to move it to four years that the government were frustrated that Labor had agreed to three years and they wanted to push that a little bit further until Labor said, ‘Hang on, we cannot support that’? If the latter is what the government are doing—and I suspect it is—then they got their win because we will not go beyond what was nationally agreed to as the right balance in a national security context. We will not agree to four years. If the plan was to get the Labor Party in a position where they were just pushing us too far, they got it. But make no mistake: the reason they had the agreement of three years, and the reason they will not get an agreement from this side of the House in delaying citizenship to four years, is that national security is too important. We are not going to have a situation where you get the most detailed briefing being given to the leaders of all the governments of Australia, where they agree as to where the balance should be struck, and then a parliamentary secretary wanders in and says, ‘Hey, I have a different idea; let’s whack it in.’

I have no doubt that the government has been planning these sorts of changes to a political end for some time. Just before the change was moved to three years, a citizenship ad campaign started to run very suddenly, with a tag-line which I cannot remember seeing previously. It might have been there previously, but I cannot remember seeing it. For years Australian governments of both sides of politics have tried to encourage people to become citizens, but the tag-line at the end of the TV ad changed and became ‘Australian citizenship: it’s never been easier.’ I mentioned to some people up in the press gallery at the time that there was no doubt that the government was about to try to make Australian citizenship harder to attain. That was the only reason to have that tag-line in the TV commercial.

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