Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The bills were introduced into this place on Tuesday, as a matter of fact, not yesterday—whoever made that ridiculous comment down the end of the chamber there.

The point is this was put on the books. It's been there for colleagues to consider, to consume, for a number of days, and this is not a new issue. It's an issue that's been around for weeks. Australians are asking for answers to these questions. Australians are seeking assurances from the government around the protection of our borders and our national security, but the government are not going to play ball. They're not going to be transparent, not going to provide information and not going to allow us to debate this legislation today, which is why we're moving this motion to suspend standing orders to allow us to debate this legislation.

This legislation, of course, is important. For three days now we've had the government doing the Sergeant Schultz on the issue of ISIS brides—not knowing a thing. They haven't able to give us a single answer to a single question we've been asking in the interest of national security and in the interest of protecting our way of life. We've been asking, 'Who issued the passports?' They said, 'We don't know.' We asked them, 'Who carried the passports to Syria to these people?' 'We don't know.' We asked them who these people were, and they didn't know. We asked them, 'When are they coming back?' They don't know. They know nothing! Instead of allowing us to have an hour and 10 minutes of the day to interrogate these issues and actually get to the heart of the problems this country is facing when it comes to who comes in and under what circumstances they come in, the government refuse to allow us to debate this.

As I said, every day in question time we've given the government an opportunity to clear things up, provide some clarity, provide assurances, provide some certainty to the people of Australia, who are wondering who is coming into this country, but this hands-off approach applies not only to providing information and not only to clarifying these issues but to border security. We used to have a government that managed border security and determined who would come in, but now we've outsourced all of that to groups like Save the Children, who are out there on their own providing repatriation services on behalf of the people of Australia and the Australian government with no security, no intelligence services and no vetting of individuals. They've been left to do it because the government won't.

The other interesting part about all of this is you've got the government talking out of both sides of its mouth on this issue. You've got the minister who said, as he said on Insiders a couple of weeks ago, 'We don't want them back,' when talking about this so-called ISIS brides cohort. He said that—'We don't want them back.' Then do something about it, Minister. You are the Minister for Home Affairs. You are able to do something. You can determine who comes in and who does not. The application of temporary exclusions orders is something very much in the domain of the home affairs minister and something he refuses to do. He's done it for one of the 11 adults in the cohort, not for the rest—that baffles me.

But they have an opportunity today to support this legislation to end this loophole, which is allowing third parties to determine who comes back here. Those third parties are providing support services for these individuals to come into Australia. These are people who've turned their back on this country and gone to a declared terrorist hotspot to support a death cult. These are the so-called ISIS brides. They're not friends of Australia. If the government are serious about national security, they'll support the suspension, and they'll support the bill. (Time expired)