George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Sunsetting Review and Other Measures) Bill 2021. The Australian government has a duty to the people of Australia to keep the community safe. I note that at the heart of this bill is the desire to keep the community safe from foreign threats, to keep our community safe from those who have gone overseas and fought in foreign wars and perhaps been radicalised while in the hands of Islamists and who come back to our nation here and perhaps try to do harm to those in this country. It's very, very important that we are well aware of the danger that radical Islamism poses to our country. There is not really much to be said about the substance of this bill apart from it extending the sunset clause by another year. There obviously has to be more review done on the powers that have been given to police in this regard, and that extra year will allow for that review to be done.

But one of the foreign wars that we had Australians go over to fight was to train with the Taliban, perhaps to train with terrorist groups, and obviously that resulted in the attacks that we saw on 11 September 2001. I remember it vividly. It is something that is now scarred into the memory of people in the West: the sight of planes flying into the World Trade Center, and the World Trade Center tumbling to the ground and taking with it thousands of people who were working in it; the sight of the Pentagon, with that massive scar in the building from where a jet plane flew into it; and to think, as the Leader of the Nationals spoke so eloquently about earlier in question times, of those brave men and women who took it upon themselves to end the terror flight that they had suddenly found themselves on, and they ended it in the most devastating way, crashing into farming fields instead of crashing into perhaps the Capitol building or perhaps the White House. We'll never, ever know what the true destination of that flight was.

That resulted in the Afghanistan war, which I know some people in this chamber have served in. I don't want to do a big, long rollcall, because I'll miss out some names. But I make particular mention of the member for Herbert, my good friend, who was a veteran of that war and has certainly opened up my eyes to some of the issues that veterans still suffer from following that conflict. And with that conflict coming to an end and the disastrous way in which it was ended, and what has resulted—the collapse of that country, being handed back to the Taliban—I'm certainly not one who is against ending the presence of our troops and US troops in Afghanistan. I've got to say, at the time I was probably someone who supported our going in there. In retrospect, as many of us can say, it probably was not a good thing; it probably could have been achieved quite differently with other actions. And I am certainly no longer a proponent of the 'forever wars' that the military-industrial complex out of the United States seems to forever want to be engaging in.

So, it was good that it came to an end, but the way in which it was ended has led to this outright human misery, and we're going to see long-lasting ramifications from that indeed. We need to ensure that the people who assisted us, who were our allies during that conflict, find a safe haven, whether here in our country or elsewhere. I know that's been done. A lot of criticism has been thrown. Maybe some of it's justified. Perhaps some of it's not, because we're not all privy to what the Department of Defence and the Army and the people on the ground were actually doing there. But I know that well before this popped up in the media I had received, through contacts of mine, concern and requests that I put direct to the defence minister. I let him know about that, and he advised me at that time—we're talking about right back to the beginning of June—that work was underway to try to assist those people. Perhaps it didn't come quickly enough, but that is probably because no-one, not even the President of the United States or, it seems, the Joint Chiefs of the United States Defence Force, realised how quickly Afghanistan would fall—but they should have; they really should have. Withdrawing everything and seeing your equipment, your vehicles and perhaps even your weapons just handed over to the enemy that you've been fighting against and them retaking control of the country—it has just been disgraceful. But I do echo the words of others in this place earlier to all of those men and women who stepped up in uniform to go over to that country and fight in the name of this nation: it was not in vain. We say thank you to them, because they held back further terror attacks from occurring out of that nation. They did do that. And that is an achievement, because, if that didn't happen, we simply don't know what other terror attacks may have happened or what deaths may have occurred.

The whole Afghanistan issue is quite a vexed one, and that is going to play out into the future. What we don't want to see is any encouragement of more people who might be radicalised to the belief system of Islamism, which is very different to the religion of Islam, I might mention. Islam, as we hear many times, is a religion of peace. Islamism is a violent ideology that splits the world into the house of peace—those who have submitted or subjugated to Islam—and the house of war, which is waged against those who are yet to submit. That is a very, very violent and extremist ideology that needs to be confronted and needs to be countered. One way of countering it is actually stopping people from leaving our shores to go over and fight for renegade nations like Afghanistan and the Taliban, ISIS, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah—a whole heap of different groups that cropped up waging this war in the name of the ideology of Islamism. I know that this bill, as I said at the start, deals with these people returning here and the risk that they pose to people, but having laws in place which deal very swiftly and very justly with those people will be a deterrent in itself. That's why this is to be commended.

Can I just speak a little bit more globally on another issue that's linked to this, and it is with regard to increased power for police around detention and search and seizure. I urge caution to the government. Whenever we give authorities more power against citizens, there is a chance that that power can be misused. That's why I hope that, over the next year, as this sunset clause is extended, we look very, very carefully at the powers that we've bestowed upon our police force. I trust them. The Australian Federal Police are a brilliant outfit. But wherever you give some extra element to an authority to go checking into the lives of people who may have done absolutely nothing wrong you open it up for abuse, so I think that there needs to be a long, hard look. I have no issue when control orders or search-and-seizure orders are done as they would normally be done in the criminal justice system, which is with an order from a court. A judge's order has at least been looked at by someone, a man or a woman, who is steeped in the law, understands what people's legal rights are, is able to look at the evidence that's being presented to them and is able to give a professional and experienced view with all of that jurisprudence behind them. When we simply move to a situation where we're not having that check and balance in the system, I do get gravely concerned. That needs to happen. That's not a commentary specifically on this bill; that's just a philosophy that I have around people's privacy and people's rights.

Going back to the specifics of the bill, I know that the intention is to keep Australians safe from those who have been radicalised—not just radicalised but almost weaponised, you could say—by going off into foreign nations and fighting wars for extremist, violent, radical Islamist organisations and outfits. That is what this bill seeks to pull up, and, hopefully, it will pull it up. We have seen some high-profile arrests of people who have returned. We've seen a lack of this activity in our country, and that's probably also due to the fact that, under former President Trump, ISIS was smashed. We've only just seen the resurgence of the Taliban now. I'm not sure whether or not that's going to lead to radicalised Islamist Australians going overseas, or attempting to go overseas when they can, to fight for such causes as the Taliban, but this bill, once again, becomes the deterrent. If you go over there, you may as well stay over there, because when you come back you're going to be going behind bars, and it's going to be a very, very rough time indeed for you. You have committed a criminal act, and the book is going to be thrown at you.

You can't just saunter over to another country and wage war in the name of such a violent, extremist, radical ideology as Islamism and expect that you can come back here to this country and have all the rights and freedoms that you otherwise would enjoy. What you'll be coming back to is, firstly, a police interview room, then a courtroom and then a cell, and it's going to be a very, very long stay for you indeed if you do that, because, as I said at the start of this debate, the only other option is to let these people roam free in our community, radicalised and potentially weaponised as well, knowing the arts of war after being engaged in those conflicts. And the question is: what sort of actions could those people take against Australian citizens, given that their belief would be that we currently sit in what Islamists would describe as the 'house of war'? We've seen potential incidents like that around this country. We've seen the Lindt cafe siege. We saw the attempt on the plane that was foiled because authorities got hold of information. Thankfully, we have been spared any significant incident in this country and the loss of life that could come from terrorism that is acted out by one of these foreign fighters.

With those words, I do commend the bill but with reservations around people's privacy and people's rights, and I hope that the government takes that in the manner I have given it. I thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker Andrews, for allowing me to speak.

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