Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion relating to national security policy as circulated.

Leave not granted.

Pursuant to contingent notice standing in my name, I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to a national security policy.

That is a grave matter of urgent public concern. Labor's move to secretly repatriate people who joined with the Islamic State has sparked widespread concern among Australians. This raises serious issues which the Senate should immediately debate: issues of transparency, of a government cover-up, of national security, of border integrity and of the risk to Australia's community. We must debate it now because we have a prime minister refusing to answer questions about it, and we have a Labor government even saying they're not actually responsible for it. How could these people even have a chance of returning here if the government wasn't permitting them to and wasn't facilitating it?

It is our job to debate these issues and ensure the government keeps our community safe. We must never forget the savagery of the Islamic State terrorist group. They burned innocent people alive. They took innocent girls as sex slaves after killing their families. They recruited evil people from around the world to join them. They ordered or inspired deadly terrorism right here in Australia. In September 2016 they deliberately told their followers in Australia: 'Kill them on the streets in Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown and Bondi. Kill them at the MCG, the SCG, the opera house and even in their backyards.'

Some people in Australia responded with enthusiastic depravity. Islamic State inspired an 18-year-old man to stab two Victorian police officers at Endeavour Hills in 2014. They inspired the siege of the Lindt Cafe in Sydney's Martin Place, in which two innocent people died. Islamic State praised the actions of the hostage taker, calling him a righteous jihadist. They inspired an Iranian born youth to murder Curtis Cheng in Parramatta in October 2015. They inspired two teenage boys to murder a service station worker in Queanbeyan in April 2017 and injure three other innocent people. They inspired a Somali born man to murder a receptionist in Brighton in Melbourne in June 2017. They inspired a Bangladeshi woman to stab a man in his sleep at his home in Mill Park, Victoria, in 2018. Australian authorities prevented others radicalised by Islamic State from carrying out many more attacks and plots.

Perhaps what horrified Australians even more was that some people living here heeded the call of Islamic State to join their so-called caliphate. We cannot forget that photograph of one of them in the wastes of Iraq, posing with a big grin and his young son holding a severed head. The very idea that anyone from Australia who joined in this lunacy should be allowed to come back is just as depraved as Islamic State was, yet it's already happened. The coalition let it happen first, in 2019, repatriating the family of that same terrorist who was grinning with his son and a severed head. Labor repeated this shame in October 2022. And now Labor is doing it again, cloaking the move in secrecy because what it is doing is shameful, reckless and directly risking the safety of Australians in their own country. What these Labor and coalition governments have done is say that people can join a savage terrorist group, commit the most depraved acts of murder and then be forgiven, brought home and reintegrated into Australian society. They'll be allowed to have more children and radicalise them.

Here's a message a Hamas terrorist, a local imam, gave at a pro-Palestinian rally last year: 'I ask you to continue all the actions that you started one year ago, and do not stop until we see the crumbling of Zionism and the end of the Israeli forces.' How can anyone possibly believe that people exposed to the savagery of Islamic State do not pose a risk in Australia? Where are our guarantees? These enemies will be monitored, surveilled and restricted to ensure that risk is minimised.

These people should not be released into our suburbs and our towns. They should have been left where they are, in the place they chose to go to join Islamic State. If they must be brought here—and I totally oppose any of them coming into this country—then they must be put in prison and never allowed to know freedom again. For those of you in this chamber unfamiliar with the concept, these are known as consequences.

Honourable senators interjecting—

Isn't it quite interesting to hear how people on the other side relate to this. The Greens are so un-Australian. They do not support this.