Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will not be supporting this legislation. The bill before us today, the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023, amends the Australian Citizenship Act to introduce a new mechanism for the cessation of a dual-national's Australian citizenship. It repeals the previous mechanisms which were held to be invalid by the High Court. It also makes consequential amendments to related legislation.

In the cases of both Alexander and Benbrika, the High Court found two things: first, that the loss of one's citizenship is at least as serious as detention; and, second, that the discretionary powers for ministers to strip migrants of their citizenship were designed to punish persons for their crimes. Under the separation of powers provided for in the Constitution, the imposition of punishment for criminal behaviour is a responsibility of the judiciary. I note that is a ruling in a very similar space to the other ruling of the High Court which has consumed a lot of the parliament's attention over the last few weeks. I also note that in a healthy democracy that kind of separation of powers, where the power to impose punishments for criminal behaviour rests with an independent judiciary, is a keystone of the concept of the separation of powers.

In the cases of Alexander and Benbrika, the High Court essentially found that the minister had acted unconstitutionally by punishing the two relevant people on the basis of past criminal behaviour. The government is now coming in to legislate, in effect, to remove the power of the minister to strip citizenship from a dual national and provide that power, under certain circumstances, to the courts. It is worth noting here, though, that this bill also proposes to extend its citizenship-stripping provisions to minors—people as young as 14 years old—and also to provide further punishment in addition to a criminal sentence. What neither the government nor opposition have done is make a case for these powers or at least for what these powers would achieve by way of community protection. They have failed to clarify the amorphous content of 'allegiance to Australia'. They are not proposing to require judges to consider factors broader than a person's offending—for example, the length of time they've been in Australia, whether their family is here in Australia, and whether they have other connections to the community such as jobs, membership of community groups, business connections and so forth.

On the notion of anyone, be they a minister or a court, having the power to strip someone of their citizenship, the Greens want to make this point very clearly. What this does—and we've seen other legislation before this parliament in the last few weeks that we have made the same criticism of—is create two different classes of people within our country who are treated differently under the law. In the case of this bill, if you are a sole Australian national, you will not be caught by the provisions of this bill, and rightly so. You shouldn't be able to render someone stateless by stripping their citizenship if they are just an Australian citizen—a sole citizen of Australia.

But the other group of people that this bill creates is the class of people that are dual nationals in this country. If you're a dual national, you'll be treated differently under the law to someone who is just an Australian citizen. If you're a dual national and this bill does pass and become enduring law in Australia, which I suspect it will, and depending on what the High Court has to say about it, and I expect the court will be asked to think about this in due course—pending those two matters—it will create two different classes of people that are treated differently under the law. Again, it will do that because of the confected political panic caused by the opposition, magnified by the Murdoch press and acquiesced to by the Australian Labor Party.

There is a pattern here. When you are engaged in a race to the bottom on human rights, refugee policy and immigration detention policy, we all know how that plays out. We've seen it repeatedly in this country. It plays out in refugee rights and human rights being trampled. You end up with people being exiled to places like Manus Island and Nauru and being deliberately dehumanised in detention prisons that are run with the explicit intent to make people's lives so bad and so difficult that they actually choose to go back to the persecutions they were fleeing from in their home country to start with. That's where you end up. Or you end up with a system of indefinite immigration detention in Australia, where people are just warehoused with no end date and kept indefinitely in appalling conditions. That's where we end up, folks, when we take strides down this path. And here we are again, taking strides down this path. We already did that in the last sitting week with Labor's anti-refugee legislation. We're going to do it again next week, as has been flagged, when Labor's bill to create a preventive detention regime for a very small group of people in this country comes before this parliament.

We are engaged in a race to the bottom on human rights. One of the reasons we are engaged in a race to the bottom on human rights is that, alone of all the so-called liberal democracies in the world—alone all of those countries—Australia does not have a charter or a bill of rights. We don't have legislated protection of our rights in this country, and we don't have constitutionally embedded protection of our rights in this country. We are the only liberal democracy in the world that does not have one or the other of those things. That means that our rights get eroded away from under us because politics wins the day. The base politics of fear and division win the day. They win the day through that pattern that I spoke about before. This time it's Mr Dutton who is going out, confecting an emergency in the community and creating fear amongst Australians. The Murdoch press act as an amplifier and a megaphone for him, and the Labor Party cravenly capitulates. We saw it on the Tampa. We saw it on offshore detention. We have seen it time after time. We're going to see it on this bill, and we're going to see it on preventive detention next week.

I might add that preventive detention—let's be very clear about what it is—is a future crimes scenario. The government is going to create a system where you can be detained—as in, have your liberty removed from you or severely curtailed—because of something you might do in the future.

If you'd proposed this 20 years ago, if you'd told someone 20 years ago that this is where we'd be now, you'd have been laughed out of the building. The legislators of that day would quite rightly have said that's just anathema in a liberal democracy—that you can be imprisoned and have your liberty removed, one of the most fundamental human rights there is, because of something you might do in future. But here we find ourselves.

The other thing that this legislation does, of course, is it provides a framework to export our problems to the rest of the world. Ultimately, this will make the world a more dangerous place. The risk here is that we will cancel the citizenship of a dual national who will then go back to the other country for which they hold citizenship and become more radicalised in that country than they would have if they had stayed here in Australia. So this is Australia seeking to export its troubles to the rest of the world and, in doing so, risking making the world a less safe place.

I make the point here that it's not only Australians in Australia that this government and parliament have a responsibility for; we have a responsibility for Australians' safety wherever they are in the world. And what you are doing here is risking making the world a less safe place, which could impact on the safety of Australians who are not inside Australia. Again, these logical arguments, I am confident, will fail to carry the day because parliament is again legislating in a panic and legislating in a reactionary way.

It is also worth making the point that last year Australia's terrorism threat level was lowered from 'probable' to 'possible'. So all this is being done in the context of, according to the official advice from the professionals we trust and empower to keep us safe, the terrorism threat level in Australia reducing. In fact, at the time the threat level was lowered, the head of ASIO, Mr Burgess, said:

Their conclusion is relatively straightforward: while Australia remains a potential terrorist target, there are fewer violent extremists with the intention to conduct an attack onshore.

So the terrorism threat level is lowering, and the government response is increasing because they don't want to get wedged by Mr Dutton as they have been wedged on immigration detention policy and refugee policy over the last few weeks.

We won't be supporting this bill, because we don't believe these powers should be available to any public institution in this country, whether it be the minister or the courts, and also because this bill is being rammed through—at least, the government is attempting to ram it through—with indecent haste.

I can't let the opportunity slip by without responding to Senator Paterson's comments on the need for proper scrutiny of legislation like this. I'll just refer Senator Paterson back to the previous sitting week, and I'll also cast forward and refer him to next week, where I have no doubt the Liberal Party will collude to jam through a preventive detention regime without any kind of decent scrutiny availability at all.