Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Passports Legislation Amendment (Integrity) Bill 2015. I would like to start with a little bit of an anecdote. Some years ago, I was on a sales trip travelling through the United States. I had to go and visit a customer down in Birmingham, Alabama. The best way to get there at the time was to fly into Atlanta and hire a car and drive from Atlanta to Alabama. I did that. I remember it was a couple of hours drive. I hired the car and came back. When I made it back to Atlanta, I realised that I had misplaced my passport. I believe that it probably slid down behind one of the seats in the car that I was driving. I had lost my passport. I thought, 'This is a little bit of an inconvenience.'

So I called up the Australian consulate and reported that my passport was lost. From there, I basically jumped on a plane and flew from Atlanta across to Los Angeles. I thought I would be stuck there for a couple of days waiting for a new passport, but they said to go straight to the airport. I went up to the Qantas check-in desk in Los Angeles and told them: 'I've rung through. I've lost my passport.' They said, 'No problems.' They gave me a boarding pass and I was able to go through customs in the USA without a passport at all. I hopped on the plane and when I arrived back in Australia I lined up in the queue with everyone else and said, 'I am sorry—I've lost my passport,' and was waved straight through.

I think those days are long gone. The security situation that we face today, where we have issues of international terrorism and international drug smuggling, means we must ensure that we have the most stringent controls on Australian passports. That is what this bill does. It strengthens the integrity of the Australian Passports Act 2005 and makes a number of minor amendments, although important amendments, to a number of Commonwealth acts. It also repeals the Australian Passports (Transitionals and Consequentials) Act 2005.

The bill includes four principal amendments and a number of minor amendments. I will go through them one at a time. Firstly, the bill provides that the minister may issue a travel document to a person on the minister's own initiative if there is a lawful requirement for that person to travel. Secondly, it aligns the definition of 'parental responsibility' more closely to that of the Family Law Act 1975 to provide more certainty about who is required to consent to a child having a passport. That is a more and more important issue, unfortunately, as we see more and more children of single parents and more and more cases going through the Family Court. Thirdly, it provides that a minister may refuse to process a passport application on reasonable suspicion of fraud. Fourthly, it revises existing offences to add an offence to strengthen the government's ability to respond to the fraudulent use of travel documents. That is a most important issue. We need to send a very loud and clear message that anyone—

See this speech in context