George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Lambie, as I think you know, we do a great many things to fight terrorism, including the deployment of Australian forces in the international coalition to defeat and destroy ISIL, and many brave Australian service men and women are deployed in that international coalition, both in assisting and training the Iraqi Army and in the RAAF as part of the international coalition of air forces that are striking ISIL positions in northern Iraq and now in Syria as well. We do many things to fight terrorism, but one of the ways in which we need to thwart terrorism is to ensure that there are no terrorists on our streets. The way we do that is to ensure that we have strong criminal laws and well-resourced police and intelligence agencies that can arrest those people and put them on trial and put them before courts and lock them up. But this is a belt-and-braces approach, and another way we can seek to thwart terrorism is to ensure that people who are citizens of nations other than Australia lose their Australian citizenship and, as you say, can be—you used the word 'deported'—placed in the hands of the government of the other nation of which they are citizens. Senator Lambie, I do not think you would find very many people in Australia who think that we should not be doing everything we can to take terrorists off the streets of this country.