Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

(1) notes that:

(a) the Government prioritised party politics over the protection of Australians by dismantling the Home Affairs portfolio after the 2022 election;

(b) only the Opposition took a commitment to the 2025 election to undo the Government's damage and restore Home Affairs to its rightful place as the preeminent domestic national security policy and operations portfolio; and

(c) the decision to reconstitute the Home Affairs portfolio following the election, and the Prime Minister's acknowledgement that there were issues with information sharing during the Dural caravan incident are an admission that the national security architecture that was put in place by dismantling the Home Affairs portfolio failed at a critical time; and

(2) calls on the Government to apologise for putting party politics over Australia's national security by changing the Home Affairs portfolio three times in three years in a pointless factional tug-of-war.

It gives me no pleasure to move this motion. Our national security is such a fundamental job of the Commonwealth government that it's troubling that we even have to talk about this today, but here we are. We are dealing with a monumentally incompetent Labor government led by the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and we're calling it out today.

We're calling it out because we have seen a debacle over the last three years. From its very first day in office, the Albanese government set about demolishing the national security architecture that was established to protect Australians. I'm talking about the Department of Home Affairs, which was established in 2017. I remember it very clearly because I was the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that shepherded that legislation through the parliament, working very closely, in fact, with people who were very senior, like the former Attorney-General.

Now, the Department of Home Affairs, with elements of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, was consolidated with other counterterror, counterespionage, cyber and national security functions. But, under the thumb of the former Attorney-General, the Prime Minister undermined Australia's national security by gutting the Home Affairs portfolio in 2022, moving the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre into the Attorney-General's portfolio. The only operational national security agency which remained with Home Affairs was ASIO.

These machinery-of-government changes were never put to the people. They were never taken to an election. They were never discussed with the Australian people. The Prime Minister stood idly by while his Attorney-General gathered power to himself and dismantled an important department central to Australia's national security, and the consequences were serious and immediate.

Take, for instance, the listing of a terrorist organisation. This was a straightforward process under the coalition. If there was a terrorist organisation that needed listing, we got it done. We ran a low-drag high-speed operation. But on Anthony Albanese's watch, the process became convoluted and sluggish. The new process required the Attorney-General's and Home Affairs departments to ping-pong advice and submissions between each other and their ministers. As a consequence, the time taken for ministerial consideration of a terrorism listing completely blew out. In one embarrassing stuff-up, the former minister for home affairs was left out of a terrorist listing altogether, being completely absent from a terrorist relisting process. You can't make this stuff up. It's the sort of thing you watch on shows like Yes Minister or Utopia. But here we are; this is the Labor government. These kinds of basic errors on one of the most fundamental counterterrorism tools never happened under the previous Home Affairs construct.

But the Prime Minister decided he hadn't done enough damage quite yet. After he sacked the former minister for home affairs and the former minister for immigration for their botched handling of the NZYQ and direction 99 saga, the Prime Minister actually went further and said, 'You know what? We'll strip ASIO out of Home Affairs too.' You can't make this up. That meant that the Minister for Home Affairs was minister in name only. He had no agencies to deliver on the counterterrorism mission they were responsible for. In fact, the portfolio was completely stripped of the operational elements required to keep Australians safe. Perhaps this was the reason why the Minister for Home Affairs was missing in action from the major announcement in August last year that the terrorism threat level was being raised, on ASIO advice, to probable.

What's going on here? Australians would be asking: 'What's going on here? Why are they running such a ramshackle government and compromising our national security?' The answer is very simply that this is a government that prioritises factional and party politics over the protection of Australians. As a consequence, our national security agencies have languished under a lack of strategic direction from a weak Prime Minister. Whether it comes to terrorist plots on our shores or foreign naval vessels circumnavigating Australia, the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, is not across the details when Australia needs him most to be. The Prime Minister even kicked out key national security agencies, including ASIO and ASIS, from the National Security Committee of cabinet. Guess who was brought on? You can't make this up. He replaced them with the Minister for Climate Change and Energy. This is a government which is hopeless on national security. It's hopelessly divided by factional party politics. And it's compromising— (Time expired)

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