Coalition wants to make criminals of anyone helping families of ISIS fighters return to Australia
Updated ,first published
The coalition will challenge Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to take further steps to stop the return of so-called Islamic State brides to Australia and introduce laws criminalizing the actions of NGOs or advocates who help people linked to terrorism return to the country.
New Liberal leader Angus Taylor sought to increase pressure on Labor after Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke insisted on Sunday the government had failed to assist 34 Australian women and children linked to the Islamic State who were trying to return except where legally required to do so.
The proposed laws mark Taylor’s first move to “close the door to people who don’t share our values”; That was the promise he made when he took the Liberal leadership this month, as polls showed Coalition voters switching to One Nation.
Burke and Albanese take a harsh stance against women and children trying to leave the devastated Al Roj camp in north-east Syria, but point to legal requirements and bureaucratic processes to explain why the group received Australian passports.
“We don’t want individuals in Australia,” Burke told the ABC. insider program. “Legally, you cannot prevent a citizen from entering your country. Legally, if a citizen applies for a passport and the authorities do not think that the thresholds to prevent this have been exceeded, the passport will be issued.”
The coalition is also pressing the government to use temporary exclusion orders to prevent the group from re-entering. The orders are designed to protect Australians from national security risks.
Burke said Sunday that one of the women would be banned from entering the country under such an order because intelligence agencies deemed her to be a higher risk than the rest of the group, but said none of the other 33 group members met the threshold for an exclusion order.
Asked if that meant they didn’t pose a threat, he said: “True… If the agencies decide at any point that I get another briefing, I would deal with that immediately.”
Burke said agencies have been tracking women and children for a long time, and each has different backgrounds and moods.
“One of my concerns about how the opposition is handling this is that they are saying that the minister has to effectively compensate for this…as if somehow you have to ignore your national security intelligence and law enforcement in the national security portfolio.”
Still, he said, “We don’t want them to come back.”
Asked if he had taken action to stop their arrival, Burke said he was confident the government “didn’t do anything to help them.”
“Other than a temporary exclusion order, there is no legislative power to prevent an Australian citizen from entering Australia,” he said. “So, effectively that question comes down to whether we broke the law, and the answer is no.”
The coalition’s home affairs spokesman, Jonno Duniam, said the opposition was willing to work with the government to write new laws as necessary to prevent the group’s arrival.
“These are people who we think should not return to this country and who pose a risk to our country. Now if the government is serious and the minister said again today, ‘We don’t want them to return here,’ do something about it,” he said.
The bill, introduced by the coalition on Sunday, would make it a criminal offense to facilitate the re-entry of people with ties to terrorism hotspots or terrorist organisations, or who have committed terrorism-related crimes.
This will target non-governmental organizations and advocates, such as the aid agency, who are trying to help women and children leave Syria as the situation worsens. Save the Children and Dr Jamal Rifi, a man close to Burke and the families in Damascus who were trying to organize the ill-fated family’s repatriation.
“We will take action and we will not allow people who have left Australia to support Islamic extremist terrorism overseas to come here,” Taylor said on Sunday. “Anthony Albanese must come to the table and support these laws.”
Burke dismissed reports in a News Corp article claiming high-level briefings had been going on for months between NSW, Victoria and federal agencies to repatriate the Syrian group.
“In this [News Corp] The report claims that we made a repatriation process. We are not. He claims that we are in talks with the states for the purpose of repatriation. We didn’t,” Burke said.
“Our officials are consulting with state officials to ensure that we are prepared if the risk to national security is likely to increase.
“When the conditions of the camp started to deteriorate and there was a possibility that some people might get out, which they did… the national security teams, the joint counter-terrorism teams, come together for public safety, as they did under the previous government, as they do now.”
A NSW Premier’s Department spokesman confirmed state agencies were working with the federal government on law enforcement and security arrangements for the group’s potential return.
“NSW has well-established arrangements for managing returnees, where community safety is a priority. These arrangements were successfully implemented in 2019 and 2022. [when other cohorts returned to Australia].”
Former Home Office chief Mike Pezzullo told a 2022 parliamentary inquiry that states and the federal government were working collaboratively on these issues.
“If a state government chooses to say, ‘We don’t want to proceed,’ then I would think the Commonwealth would take that quite seriously because we have to rely on them for education, trauma support, counselling, public health support and so on,” he said. “So this is done based on consent. All this information is given to them and they will give us the authority to proceed or act otherwise.”
Natassia Chrysanthos is a Federal Political Correspondent. He has previously reported on immigration, health, social issues and the NDIS from Parliament House in Canberra.Connect with: X or email.
