Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

From the moment one enters this place, representing 100,000 constituents and their families, a sense of responsibility rests on one's shoulders. It is the gravity that in this place the decisions we make directly affect the security and safety of those who entrusted us to be here. Parliament has a responsibility to do all it can to maintain Australia's record of preventing a successful terrorist attack on mainland Australia and to prevent Australians from, and if necessary punishing Australians for, committing terrorist attacks overseas.

Last month, the Foreign Fighters Bill was referred to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, who subsequently released 15 recommendations on the bill. I must commend many of the people, including the member for Hughes, who just spoke, and the members for Isaacs, Berowra and Holt, who pointed out that the joint committee had suggested the amendment of the bill to require: the AFP to provide the Attorney-General with a summary of the facts when seeking consent to apply to the court for an interim court order, including any facts indicating why such an order should not be made; the retention of the requirement for the AFP to explain to the issuing court the reasons for each condition in a draft control order, as the bill, as introduced, would have effectively reduced judicial oversight by not requiring the AFP to justify the control order as a whole; the shortening of the period for notification of the relevant minister where agencies issue emergency authorisations; and the government urgently to appoint a new Independent National Security Legislation Monitor. These are the sensible recommendations of people on the intelligence committee from all sides of parliament working maturely in the interests of their constituents. They are not those who seek to make political gain against the corporate wellbeing of their fellow Australian citizens.

My colleague Mark Dreyfus, the shadow Attorney-General and member for Isaacs, said earlier today in this chamber:

… the recommendations will improve the accountability and transparency of decision making by national security agencies. The recommendations will also ensure that control order applications are closely and appropriately scrutinised.

Again, these are the mature actions of mainstream political parties—an issue I want to come back to when I refer to the contribution of the member for Melbourne.

It is a sad reality that a handful of Australians born, raised and educated—indeed, shaped—in Australia, as one of our speakers said, have taken it upon themselves to travel to Syria and Iraq to join a group that beheads captured enemies and slaughters men, women and children with any group that does not fit in with its perverse and perverted world view. It enslaves women and children for sexual gratification. It trades these victims with each other. Daesh kills people arrested for smoking or for playing music. They are systematically destroying millennia of Muslim antiquities across the Middle East, including recently blowing up the tomb of Jonah in Mosul—a tomb that has existed for more than 1,000 years. It is truly the march of the barbarians.

Tens of thousands of foreign fighters have gone to Syria to fight and to kill. Deluded, they imagine they are soldiers. They are not. They have none of the professionalism and code of conduct strictly and proudly maintained by the men and women in Australian uniforms. These people think they are fighting war for Islam. They are a disgrace to the names of the great soldiers of Islam, like Saladin and Kemal Ataturk, whose honour and honourable treatment of the enemies was praised even by their opponents. Daesh does not face much resistance when they come up against unarmed Christians, Yazidis and Shi'ites. They are slaughtered. Its shameful conduct and its victims are then boasted about on Facebook. Now, they are coming up against the US and Australian air forces and local fighters like the Kurdish Peshmerga, who are advised by our special forces. Nearly all MPs will wish the men and women of the ADF every success in suppressing these IS fighters, regardless of where they come from, including the cursed figures from this country who hold up the heads of locals they have killed and, even worse, who encourage their poor children to do the same.

The ADF has been the recipient of information from Australian intelligence services for years. This helps it do its job. The law, as currently rendered and which this legislation seeks to change, needlessly forces ASIS to jump through hoops to provide information to the ADF. The signals directorate and the DIO, which fall under the Defence minister's responsibility, do not have to jump through these hoops. But ASIS, which falls under the foreign minister's responsibility, does. All these organisations are on the same side. We in this parliament should be making it easier for them to do their job. As the member for Isaacs pointed out in his address today:

Australia’s counter-terrorism efforts are supported by our open democratic society. There are inherent strengths in our society that make Australia resilient to the divisive worldview of al-Qa’ida—

and Daesh. He also said:

More pages in the statute books will not make ours a more resilient community.

We know from experience that the terrorist narrative may resonate with a small number of Australians. It is incumbent upon all Australians to work together to reject the ideologies that promote violence no matter where they arise or what purpose they aspire to. I praise in particular some courageous members of the Sydney Muslim community who have been at the forefront of this resilience project. Building this sort of resilience in the context of the foreign fighter threat is an even higher priority that when the white paper was written. This is a threat which is clearly increasing, as we have some 250 Australians, according to The Economist magazine, who wanted to participate either from this country or who are already over there. We have seen the damage that these kinds of people can do, as the member for Berowra pointed out, when one of the torturers from Daesh in Lebanon returned to Belgium and murdered four citizens in the capital of that country.

Remember why we are doing this. There were 88 Australians killed in the 2002 Bali bombing; 10 killed in the September 11 attacks; three killed in the 2009 Jakarta bombings; one killed and nine injured in the 2005 London bombings; two murdered by terrorists in the Mumbai terror attack; and one Australian, Malki Roth, killed in Jerusalem in 2001. Let us remember the report of the Council of Australia Governments, released in 2013, that said 35 Australians had been charged for terrorism offences, 26 of whom had been convicted. So we have a real problem overseas and a real problem with Australians who have already been affected by this.

Thank heavens, because of the work of this parliament, our security services and our military, we have not had a successful attack on mainland Australia. It is our responsibility as legislators on both sides of this great parliament to see that that continues, by passing legislation that will enable the ADF, ASIS and other people to work together to prevent that happening. This is not Hollywood. We are not basing our analysis, as the member for Melbourne seems to think, on the series Homeland. The proposed changes do not seek to change the ADF's rules of engagement.

The shadow Attorney-General and opposition have worked diligently to shape this and previous legislation that enhance the ability of our security services to work effectively and efficiently to stop these terrorists before they go there or to gather evidence about their activities while they are there. That way, when people return from the battlefield claiming they were in Syria for humanitarian reasons, they can be punished to the full extent of Australian law, and they ought to be. The necessity for acting on this problem arises from all of the reasons I have just set out. It includes the number of Australians who have already been killed in some of the terrible incidents, the number of people that are going over there to fight and the success of our laws—as the member for Berowra pointed out—in taking so many of those people who would seek to do these kinds of things in this country and under a system of law and arresting, charging and trying them and then having them convicted.

I want to end with this discordant note. It is not surprising to see the Greens political party lead the charge against this proposed legislation. In my view, the Greens seem to have an automatic Pavlovian kind of reaction to undermining the intelligence capabilities of our country. People like the Greens political party's Senator Ludlam have publicly supported self-appointed protectors of privacy and trust—stalwarts of moral standing like Julian Assange. Of course, the Greens' backing of Julian Assange and his ideological stablemate Edward Snowden has not exposed a single piece of evidence of the abuse of privacy or citizens' rights in authoritarian countries like Russia. Mr. Assange, the Greens' hero, used to host a program on the Russian disinformation network RT. To give you a flavour for his content and his policies, his first interview gave an armchair ride to Hezbollah's feared terrorist leader, Sheikh Hussein Nasrallah.

Indeed, it is delicious irony that the Greens' other hero, Edward Snowden, preaches excessive oversight and accountability but chooses to reside in Russia, of all places. He destroyed his credibility when popping up on Russian TV a few months ago to give another soft-serve Dorothy Dixer to the new Russian tsar, Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the Greens believe Russia is actually a bastion of human rights. Certainly, Senator Rhiannon used to believe that. I am honoured with the fact that Senator Ludlum has put a fatwa on the Greens speaking to me because I pointed out Senator Rhiannon's political similarity to the wife of the Romanian dictator, Elena Ceausescu. But the main point I make about her is she has never dissociated herself from her membership and participation in the pro-Soviet Communist political party in Australia. It was a seamless transition to the Greens.

Of course, the serious people in this parliament can smirk about Snowden's choice of patrons and about Assange's presence on RT. But it is hard to believe that here, in this House, we have parliamentarians that oppose legislation and seek to foil the efforts of our Defence forces and cooperation with our security services overseas. It occurs to me that the Greens political party ought to be more concerned about people losing their heads than about the people holding the swords. We had the appeasers in the 1930s. Eighty years later we have the Greens.

I have asked in this parliament a number of times why Mr Snowden and why the Greens support the release of material about how the Five Eyes, the Western intelligence services, intercepted telecommunications in northern Iraq prior to Daesh's conquering of that area. This is completely inimical to the safety of Western civilians. It has nothing to do with privacy. These questions have been raised by reputable publications like The Christian Science Monitor and The Washington Post. I fear that Daesh was able to change the pattern of its telecommunications as a result of the Snowden revelations in order to evade monitoring by security services like Australia's, like the American security services and like the British security services. Therefore, the pattern of murder and mayhem that they have wrought across northern Iraq has, in fact, been facilitated by the Snowden revelations, which were completely unnecessarily made about how we have intercepted telecommunications of terrorist organisations in northern Iraq.

This is a place to have serious debates about serious matters. Matters such as increasing the security services' capability do need scrutiny. They have had scrutiny at the intelligence committee by serious people who have come back to this parliament and made their recommendations. I congratulate the government and the opposition for our practical and judicious approach, including the shadow Attorney-General for his cooperation with the Attorney-General in the framing of these laws and the recommendations of the intelligence committee. These are matters too serious to be left to the mouthpieces of Assange, Snowden and the Greens who, once again, have proven their wish to continue their irresponsible approach to national security. When we use grandiose words like 'national security', what do we mean? We mean the safety of innocent Australian citizens—our constituents who we are duty bound to care for and to seek measures to protect from any incident happening here in Australia, as has happened to them overseas.

These are measured steps to see that the human rights, above all the right to security, of all Australians are enhanced in this additional piece of legislation. I commend it to the House. I commend the government and many of the speakers who have been on this side, as well as the opposition, for considering the safety and security of Australians above all and, in a measured way, taking into consideration matters of civil liberties and privacy which were done by the intelligence committee in a very responsible way.

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