Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak to the motion moved by the member for Canning, which makes very clear that the Albanese Labor government has completely the wrong instincts when it comes to the Home Affairs portfolio and our national security.

When Labor were elected in 2022, one of their first decisions was to begin to dismantle the Home Affairs portfolio. They did so by removing the Australian Federal Police, financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission from Home Affairs. In 2024 the Prime Minister went further, transferring Australia's domestic spy agency, ASIO, out of Home Affairs to the Attorney-General's Department. The PM defended this shift by saying that ASIO needed to be in the same place as the AFP. Of course, there was no admission that he was responsible for separating the two agencies. It's noteworthy that these changes were not taken to the 2022 election but had consistently been on Labor's wish list. As we know, they've always been uncomfortable with the coalition's strong national security agenda.

Fast forward to today, and the Attorney-General has been marched to the back bench and Labor have backtracked on their changes, now bringing ASIO, the AFP and AUSTRAC back into Home Affairs. Common sense has finally prevailed. Why? Because, according to the Prime Minister, there were issues that arose out of information-sharing during the Dural caravan incident. This is a damning admission by the Prime Minister, acknowledging that the national security changes he introduced by dismantling Home Affairs failed when it mattered most. While the caravan incident turned out to be a hoax, the outcome could have been catastrophic if it had been real and the system had still failed.

This wasn't the only issue with the new arrangements. Previously, the listing of a terrorist organisation was known and was a straightforward process. But in Labor's first term this became convoluted. The new process created a back-and-forth loop between the Attorney-General's Department and the home affairs department, blowing out the time required for a decision to be made. In one instance, the Minister for Home Affairs was left out of a terrorist re-listing entirely—absolutely hopeless. These issues should not have been a surprise to the government, and they should apologise.

When we first established the home affairs department in 2017, it was designed so all the intelligence and security agencies would fall within a single department and be responsible to a single minister—sounds like common sense, I'd say. That's why we committed, before the last election, to restoring the integrity of the Home Affairs portfolio—unlike those opposite, who made no such commitment.

Unfortunately, this is not the only example of Labor's failure regarding structures protecting our national security. You only have to look back at the nonsensical changes to the composition of the National Security Committee of Cabinet.

Under the coalition, Australia's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies both served as permanent members, as you would expect. But, to add insult to injury, those intelligence agencies were replaced by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Mr Chris Bowen. Can anyone really argue that Minister Bowen has better insights into our security challenges than the heads of our intelligence agencies? Honestly, this is just nonsense. Those opposite, unfortunately, suffer from a general predisposition to oppose the coalition's initiatives before realising we were right all along and having to backtrack. As the shadow minister for cybersecurity, I think an obvious example was the initial criticism from Minister O'Neil calling our SOCI reforms 'bloody useless' before going on to say other countries asked her how they could construct something similar—not so useless it would seem.

This trend goes back a long time, with the most notable example probably the Rudd-Gillard government's rejection of offshore processing, which culminated in 50,000 illegal arrivals by boat and over a thousand deaths at sea. Our government, under the leadership of former prime ministers Abbott and Morrison, as the relevant minister, successfully cleaned up this mess with Operation Sovereign Borders.

We on this side understand that the No.1 priority of government is to keep our citizens safe, and we are not afraid to make the tough decisions that are required or to invest properly in our defence and national security infrastructure. We hope this government takes national security seriously.

See this speech in context