Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Home Affairs. Why is it necessary for the government to introduce legislation to strip the citizenship of people convicted of serious crimes against Australia? How else is the Albanese Labor government keeping Australians safe, and what obstacles does the government face?

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. The member is correct; we are introducing legislation that will enable Australian citizenship to be stripped from individuals who represent a serious danger to our country. The way these laws are framed is that they articulate conduct that may occur which is actually so offensive to the values of community safety and to the values of Australian citizenship that the individual at the heart of the matter themselves repudiate the fact that they are Australian.

Now, this legislation is very important, and the House would be aware that there is a long and, frankly, highly politicised history of this matter being dealt with by the parliament.

In fact, those opposite had two completely failed attempts to deliver laws that affected this exact outcome—one in 2015 and one in 2019. I'd remind the parliament that the laws that were introduced in 2015 were actually so unworkable that the government that introduced them repealed them completely four years later. The second go, which the opposition leader led, didn't do much better. It was ruled unconstitutional over the past 18 months. So we had two citizenship laws introduced in 2019, and both of them were ruled unconstitutional by the High Court in the last 18 months.

I'm asked if the bill that we're introducing is the only thing we are doing to keep Australians safe, and of course that's not the case, not by a long shot. The primary purpose of our government is to ensure the safety of Australians. We came to office with an enormous set of issues facing us—in particular, in the home affairs department. One of those was the broken migration system that I've spoken to the House about before. We had a system which a report by Christine Nixon, a former police commissioner in Victoria, told us was enabling sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Thanks to the Nixon report, we know just how much wrongdoing actually occurred under the Leader of the Opposition when he was running this portfolio. What we saw was that many of the individuals that were engaged in the most egregious infringements on human rights and safety of people in our country came into the country under the Leader of the Opposition's watch. Instead of dealing with what were very serious issues, not just highlighted by the Nixon review but in fact highlighted over a series of reports that spanned almost the entire life of the former government, the Leader of the Opposition talked a big game, but, when it came down to it, he cut funding for immigration compliance and made sure that our borders were not secure.

Our government is taking a very different and deliberate approach. If there is one thing that we can take from the citizenship matter that will be before the parliament this week, it is this: laws that don't work don't make us any safer. They actually make us more dangerous. What we are doing on this side of the House is doing the hard work in making sure that our laws actually are constitutional in order to protect our country. That's what we're here for.