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

I am not sure whether the member for Mitchell was saying that ASIO is not in this House or that Mark Textor is not in this House. I suspect they are both here very regularly. ASIO is very welcome to provide briefings, information and the best intelligence available, and it should do so. When we get all the governments of Australia agreeing on a recommendation as to where the balance is right, departure from that is a big step and something you do not do lightly. You do not change the balance of national security arrangements simply because some polling or some political edges say it might be a clever thing to do. That is exactly what we are faced with with these amendments. That is why Labor will not support the amendment that changes the period from three years to four years. Eligibility rules and criteria for Australian citizenship are important issues which we argue for in this House.

I might say that Australia has not always been so tight on citizenship. We used not do it as well as we do it now. My seat, the seat of Watson, is named after somebody who was not a citizen. The third Prime Minister of Australia, while we know him in the official records as John Christian Watson, was actually Johan Christian Tanck. He gave a false identity. He was not a citizen of the empire, which you had to be in order to vote. Instead, he gave a false identity which allowed him to vote, to run for parliament and to become Prime Minister. Citizenship then was not done nearly as well as it is done now. While I am pleased that we did have the first Labor Prime Minister in the world, I am sorry that there was a fudging of citizenship at the time to do it. I might add that, had it not happened that way, because his father was German Mr Tanck would have been locked up during the First World War. We deal with citizenship very seriously these days, as we should. Citizenship is part of the essential fabric that makes our nation. It is part of the essential fabric that welcomes people. Those of us who regard this as being the best country in the world know that citizenship rules go with responsibilities and rights in being a part of that important and essential community. It is too important to play games with.

If there is an argument that the premiers and the Prime Minister got it wrong after the London bombings, I want to hear it. If there is an argument that updated security advice says that the 10-point plan that came out of COAG should be changed, I want it to be taken to COAG. What I do not want to see is an appalling display—as though there is a passionate difference between three years and four years and that is enough to abrogate what was clearly a decision taken in a national security context. I am pretty confident that I know where the briefings came from and I am pretty confident that you are more likely to find the director of Crosby Textor than you are to find a director of ASIO behind those briefings. That is not the way to deal with Australian citizenship. I want to see citizenship valued; I want to see it held up. I want to see it as something that people really take notice of. I do not want to see it used as a political game.

I suspect we could have avoided a political game if Labor had simply said that we were not going to support the change to three years. But once the government got a shock and thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to vote for it,’ what did they do? First, they waited. They waited more than 12 months to render the original change, which had been called for in a national security context, almost irrelevant. They said: ‘There have been bombings in London. These are the points that we need to change. Here’s one of them.’ It was not the most important one—I think we all agree with that—and it was not the most urgent one, but surely it was important enough to bother bringing the legislation on for debate. Yet the change from two to three years was so urgent, so important, that more than a year later it has not been voted on in either house of the Australian parliament. So then we get the change to four years. No context and no reasons were given. If the change from two to three years was important, the legislation should have been brought on immediately. Instead, when the government realised they did not have the political wedge that they were hoping for, they turned a blind eye to something that they had proclaimed as an important national security change.

I want to know from someone in the government why this legislation has been lying on the backburner for more than a year. Why go to all the trouble of getting the public servants to draft the legislation and put it together to fix some important problems affecting some communities in Australia and have an amendment which is also featured in our national security priorities to then say, ‘This legislation will be debated the week after next’? It has been listed for the week after next for more than a year. It does not get brought on for debate until the government comes up with an amendment that Labor will not support.

National security is too important; Australian citizenship is too important. The way that the government has handled this undermines the original reasons that were given for it to be introduced. The way that the government is now seeking to amend it undermines the justifications that were given. Labor will not support an amendment that devalues Australian citizenship. Labor will not support an amendment that ignores changes that were given and agreed to by the leaders of every government in this country in a very specific and particular context following the London bombings.

The government might think that it is fun to play games with those issues but we do not and will not. Had we known at the time we agreed to send the debate to the Main Committee instead of this chamber that this amendment was going to be there, we would have looked at it quite differently. Unlike the government’s attitude to COAG, we view an agreement as an agreement and therefore will continue to allow and not object to it going to the Main Committee. But the government should make no mistake: we oppose the change from three to four years. We will not see a national security agreement undermined because the former national secretary of the Liberal Party thinks there is a political edge in doing so. I hope that the final form of the bill is as it is now, with our amendment, and not in the form that the government proposes. I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1)

opposes the increase in residence requirement to 4 years;

(2)

notes that the Government consulted with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) on increasing the period from 2 to 3 years on national security grounds but undertook no consultation on the increase to 4 years and has given no adequate reason for this measure;

(3)

opposes the discriminatory treatment of people who lost their Australian citizenship under section 17 of the old Act (acquisition of citizenship of another country) and those who lost citizenship under section 18 (renouncing of citizenship) given that it fails to provide equitable treatment for a number of groups, but particularly the Maltese community; and

(4)

notes that a stateless person would be denied citizenship if convicted for an offence of greater than 5 years even if it were a trumped up conviction under a brutal and oppressive foreign regime”.

I would like to commend the bill in its full form to the House. It is not all bad; there is enough in there that we will make sure we support it in whatever its final form is, but I certainly hope its final form does the right thing by the Maltese community and that the bill in its final form does not undermine the national security agreements of last year.

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