Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

as 'within a reasonable period'. We saw earlier this week the Minister for Home Affairs—this same Minister for Home Affairs—table a report on the retention of metadata by agencies between July 2016 and June 2017. Presumably this minister believes that tabling a report two years late is within a reasonable period. Labor does not. That's why not only did the Labor members but also the government members of the intelligence committee unanimously recommend that the appropriate amendment to be made to this legislation was to require that a return permit be given as soon as practicable upon receipt of an application. So, amendment (25) that's before the House implements the committee's second recommendation by requiring the minister to give a return permit as soon as practicable.

I come now to recommendations 3 and 12 made by the Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security. They're dealt with in amendment (10). The third and 12th recommendations of the committee would have seen the bill amended to prevent the making of a temporary exclusion order unless the decision-maker reasonably suspects that the person is or has been involved in terrorism-related activities outside Australia and making the order would substantially assist in preventing the provision of support for, or the facilitation of, a terrorist act. Recommendation 12 as made by the committee would have also prevented the minister from acting as nothing more than a rubber stamp for security assessment.

These recommendations were rejected. They have been rejected by the government, and the particular rejection is very telling. Over the last several days, in talking about this bill, the government has said that the targets of this bill are people who have been fighting with groups like the Islamic State group in Syria, but that directly contradicts what the minister's own department, the Department of Home Affairs, told the intelligence committee in public hearings. The department told the committee in the public hearings that any person who is known to have engaged in active fighting in conflict zones in Syria or Iraq or both would not be subject to a temporary exclusion order. Such a person would be allowed to come back to Australia, arrested at the airport, charged, put on trial and held in jail in the meantime while that trial was pending. The government has to be honest and straightforward about what this bill actually does and the problem that it's actually seeking to address. The rejection of this particular proposed amendment—the recommended amendment by the committee—illustrates the fact that, to date, the government has not been open, honest and straightforward about these matters.

As to the second part of these recommendations, which would have prevented the minister from acting as a rubber stamp, we know this Minister for Home Affairs is lazy. We also know that when he's required to make a decision under an act of parliament, he often gets the decision wrong. The host of cases under the Migration Act where this minister's decisions have been set aside by a tribunal or by a court is evidence of that. The Intelligence and Security Committee quite sensibly proposed an amendment that would actually require the minister to turn his mind to the task of issuing an exclusion order. We can understand why this lazy and incompetent Minister for Home Affairs would not like that part of recommendation 12, but the fact that his colleagues would agree to back his position, which is to ignore the recommendations of the intelligence committee to give him a licence to not do his job, is disappointing to say the least.

There's something else about recommendation 12 that I need to mention. The government has repeatedly said that this legislation is based on, and follows, the United Kingdom's law for temporary exclusion orders that the United Kingdom parliament managed to pass in 2015, some four years ago. If ever we wanted better proof of the incompetence of this government in taking four years to bring this legislation to the parliament, it is that they cannot even understand the basis for their own legislation which directly here, in relation to this matter, does not follow the model that has been provided to us by the United Kingdom parliament, in that their legislation directs itself and directs the attention of the issuing authority to whether or not a particular proposed subject for a temporary exclusion order had, in fact, been involved in terrorism activities. (Time expired)

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