Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to be speaking on this motion that the member for Cowan has put forward. Our approach to terror and extremism should be, as far as we can, bipartisan; it should be free of grandstanding and fearmongering; it should not be the basis for knee-jerk decision making, which somehow curtail the rights and freedoms that we have in our very solid and stable democracy; and it should be based around building moderation and not fuelling extremism.

We know that there are a range of issues in the world at the moment, particularly in the Middle East with the battles in Iraq, the Levant and Syria. Sectarianism and religious extremism are now increasingly driving the violence and the warfare that is going on over there. Australian citizens who take up those causes are criminals under Australian law. We have a wide variety of laws, like the foreign incursions act 1978, that have been updated to deal with people who commit criminal acts in the name of extremist causes whilst overseas.

The best way to deter people from taking up those causes and taking up arms in other nations, whether for religious reasons or other extremist ideological reasons, is the application of those criminal laws. That is the best way of deterring people and the best way of dealing with people who go and fight. It is important to use the language of criminality and not call them extremists or Islamists and ascribe a religion to them, because mostly what they are doing is not in accordance with those religions but outside those religions. They are criminal and murderous acts often, and we should label them as such.

At first blush I can understand why the member for Cowan would say that the easiest thing to do is revoke their citizenship. I can understand that in front bars across this nation and in other places that might find some support initially, but we have to think through how we deal with criminals. If we were to say, 'We are going to revoke the citizenship of person X on the basis that he is a criminal because he is fighting in extremist causes,' then the Australian public could quite rightly ask: 'Why don't you do this for murderers, rapists, thieves or fraudsters? Why don't you revoke their citizenship too, because we do not want any of them back in the Australian community?'

It passes the front bar test pretty well. The problem with it is that if every nation started doing that we would end up with an army of stateless criminals that no nation could properly account for or deal with. When we hear about international obligations it is important for us and the public to realise that those obligations are not just the obligations we have to other nations but the obligations that our community receives as well. Regularly the Australian government has deported criminals who have foreign citizenship. We have seen criminals deported to the former Yugoslavia countries—Serbia I think it was. There were a number of Lateline programs about an individual who had been deported. Those are the sorts of initiatives that we do now under those international obligations. If we were to turn our back on them then that would give other nations the exact excuse to do the same to us.

So, while I accept the member for Cowan is well motivated in providing this for us to debate in the parliament, I think we should take a step back and deal with these people who take up arms for foreign causes as criminals. We should deal with them that way because that is by far the most effective way of dealing with them.

See this speech in context