Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely not. What the minister needs to explain now, in the context of there being no departure from historical practice here, is the meaning of that question time brief. There are eight key points and three of them are about politically positioning Labor. The words 'national security' do not appear in it at all. This is all about a political document, and from what we have seen, from former minister Morrison flying a kite on this issue last year to the various backbench members who have been flying kites ever since—including the member for Bass, I think, and the member for Wannon—and the various comments that we have heard from both the Prime Minister and the minister aimed very much at positioning the Labor party, it is all about politics.

I just want to ask the minister: how does that fit within the historical precedent, the historical practice, of bipartisanship, with both sides of politics working together on an issue of national security? There are some key questions here. We want to know: how does this legislation work or how is it proposed to work in terms of reconciling it with the foreign fighters legislation which was passed last year? The thing is, part of the foreign fighters legislation was granting the ability or empowering our country to prosecute people for having committed terrorist acts by virtue of their citizenship. If you remove citizenship from people, it raises the question: will that still enable us to pursue people in the way that the foreign fighters legislation was enabling us to do? It is a reasonable question. Maybe the government has a really good answer for it; we would just like to have that conversation. We want to make sure that there are no unintended consequences of this legislation, and I am sure that we can have a very reasonable conversation with the government about that.

But in circumstances where there seems to be advice from the Solicitor-General suggesting that this legislation may be unconstitutional, where we have the author of the report which was the basis for these reforms, Bret Walker SC, the former Independent National Security Legislation Monitor, saying that he thinks the advice he gave in that report has been misunderstood by the government—all of these raise really significant questions. There is a perhaps even more fundamental question than that. It goes to ensuring—and I am sure the government shares this concern—that this legislation does not lead to the perception out there that there are two classes of Australian citizens. Obviously an enormous number of our population have dual citizenship. They need to be considered in this as well. That is the conversation we want to have, and we want to know when we will be able to have it.

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