Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

He's so focused on his portfolio that—and I never thought I'd say this—he should go back to making car fetish videos. At least it's relevant to your portfolio. But I will tell you—because you were looking this way, we were looking that way—clearly that was an audition, because you could see the calculation on the faces behind you. 'Is the current Leader of the Opposition going to last? Should we go with this bloke? Did we make a mistake? Should we go with this bloke? We'll see.'

Again, I'll say it in very small sentences. The government doesn't want these people back. The government is not providing assistance. The government takes advice from security agencies and, difficult as I know it may be for them to understand, we follow the law. If any of these individuals find their way back to Australia, the agencies are prepared. The agencies will act in the interests of community safety and within the law. The agencies never stop watching and collecting intelligence, as I know the shadow minister well knows because we've both served on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and, in previous times, we have been briefed on these issues.

As a matter of public record, but I will again say it here, the agencies assessed one of these people as meeting the threshold for temporary exclusion orders, and the Minister for Home Affairs acted immediately—the same approach that the former government took. These people should know that if they find their way back to Australia, they will face the full force of the law. If they've committed crimes, they will face the music. I feel very sorry for the children involved, deeply sorry, because their parents made dreadful choices, horrific choices. But the hypocrisy and the gaslighting from those opposite is staggering. It's exactly the same regime that operated under their government, the same laws, the same agencies. We trust the agencies to do their job. If they don't, they should just say so.

And let's be clear: under their government numerous people, dozens and dozens and dozens of people, returned in exactly the same circumstances, they were issued passports, but the difference is they included fighters. Men who had picked up guns and fought with ISIS were allowed to come back under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison regime. They were issued passports and they were allowed to come back—one of them after Scott Morrison was secretly sworn in as the minister for Home Affairs. They had two ministers for Home Affairs, but none of them seemed to know that these people were coming back. There were no complaints, no screaming, no shouting under their government. They asked to be repatriated; we said no. They took the government to court and lost and we still said no.

On passports, as you know, public servants follow the law. Let's get a couple of facts on the record about the truly bizarre private member's bill that was introduced earlier today. We sat through an hour and 20 minutes of question time and we didn't hear a single thing about the most important thing that the Leader of the Opposition thought should stop the parliament, which was his own private member's bill. They didn't ask a single question about it. It wasn't raised. It's very telling that there were no questions on their big bill, because who would the bill criminalise? When you actually read the text of this genius bill that the Leader of the Opposition introduced, it would not have actually criminalised the people who fought for ISIS with the guns. It wouldn't have criminalised the cohort that they're now saying must be stopped from coming back—the cohort that the government doesn't want to come back, the cohort that was welcomed back on the watch of those opposite in exactly the same circumstances. No, it would have criminalised the pilots—the Qantas pilots. I mean, that's a clever move. It would have criminalised the flight attendants serving water and coffee on the plane, doing their job. It would have criminalised the baggage handlers. It would have created a really weird legal conflict for the poor old Customs officials—do they follow this law and stamp the passport of an Australian citizen and let them through, as is the law, or do they follow that law saying that, if they do so, they'd be committing a criminal offence? Perhaps the weirdest bit is it would have criminalised the entire US government and all of our American allies, who've been the main people calling for these camps to be emptied and for foreign governments to take these people home when they're citizens of other countries. It really was a genius move!

The question then gets asked, and you have to reflect: was the Leader of the Opposition's introduction of the bill a mistake? Was he just a bit hasty? Or did he know and just didn't care? Incompetence or deliberate? It is a question for the opposition, a serious question. If someone exercises their rights as an Australian citizen—which those opposite well know can't be cancelled to some degree by the parliament or certainly by governments, and they know that because their own citizenship cancellation laws were struck down as unconstitutional by the High Court. They well know that the things that they've been out running around the community saying, and putting nonsense on social media for the last few weeks calling for, are unconstitutional. But if someone exercises their rights as Australian citizens—which can't be cancelled—why are they furious now but weren't when they were in government? That's what it boils down to.

ISIS are a vile, bloodthirsty organisation. Every single one of the despicable acts that the shadow minister read into the Hansard before, the government condemns and every decent Australian condemns. But what's really going on here is the unedifying three-way that the nation is now enduring from the three far right parties. I'll conclude on this: you can't out-Pauline Pauline. 'One Nation light' won't work. We just had a minute's silence for Senator Ron Boswell, and if anyone could have taught you that, surely, it would have been him.

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