I rise to speak on the Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023. I think that most senators will have gone to a citizenship ceremony. That’s one of the more rewarding events that a member of parliament can attend. There’s always a lot of joy, of course—they’re almost as joyful as wedding days, really. People are very excited about becoming Australians, and it gives you a fair amount of pride yourself to see so many people happy about joining our country and joining our nation. It gives hope that we’re actually a pretty good country, after all is said and done. This is demonstrated by the fact that a lot of people want to become Australians and they’re proud to do so. Despite the rhetoric we often have to engage in in this place, and, at times, the criticism of what’s going, when all things are considered and we’re benchmarked against almost any other country in the world, this is a great place to live, to be born in and to have the fortune, potentially, to become a citizen of if you’ve moved here.
At those ceremonies, an oath is taken. Many of us, as senators, would be officially involved in the taking of that oath by new Australians. The oath that is read by a new citizen of Australia says:
I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,
whose democratic beliefs I share,
whose rights and liberties I respect,
and whose laws I will uphold and obey.
That is an oath—an oath which is sworn, sometimes on a Bible or a religious text and sometimes on a Constitution of Australia. But it is a serious matter to swear that oath, and, as a serious matter, there should be consequences when such a serious oath is seriously breached.
The bill we have before us today deals with individuals, Australians, who have breached their oath as a citizen of this country—in particular, as to upholding the laws of this country and as to respecting the rights and liberties of others in this country. In some cases, they’ve breached their oath as to our shared belief in democracy. So I welcome the government’s bill, which provides scope to establish consequences for any serious breach of this oath. This has become a major issue in the past few decades, where we have seen, unfortunately, a very minor number of individuals in this country seeking to not respect the rights and liberties of others, in a serious and coordinated way.
Obviously, this is not about each crime which might be committed by Australians; it arises only in those circumstances where people seek, fundamentally and indiscriminately, to kill or maim other Australians, and/or to engage in conduct that would seek to destroy the country we have and which others enjoy. If you do engage in that conduct—if you seek to undermine our country and our country’s values; if you seek to spread fear and terror among otherwise peacefully-living Australians—then there should be consequences for that. In some circumstances, where such individuals have dual citizenship, we have the right and ability, in my view, to take away the citizenship of Australia that they have been granted, because they have failed, in a substantial way, to live up to the oath that they swore.
The former government in 2015 introduced such a process, to deal particularly with individuals engaging in terrorist conduct. That law was used in some circumstances—including in regard to an individual called Benbrika, who was planning terrible terrorist attacks, including at the AFL Grand Final. Clearly, there were some reasonable grounds for Mr Benbrika’s citizenship of Australia to be revoked. He had dual citizenship with Algeria I believe. Now that has been challenged, as is Mr Benbrika’s right. And the High Court has ruled that—for some technical reasons as to what should be justiciable and what should be decided by a minister—those laws that were introduced don’t give the minister the full power to do what had been done, at least in that case.
It is not unusual for the High Court to have a different view from this place. We have that separation. Indeed, one of those democratic values we share is the separation of powers between the institutions. We do have a disagreement here, so there’ll have to be a different approach taken by the parliament to deliver the same consequences. The same desire is shared, I believe, between the Liberal and National parties and the government of the Labor Party, to ensure that people do live up to their oaths as Australian citizens.
So, as I said, I welcome the government bringing this bill forward—albeit it has taken a little time since the decision. I do have some questions, though, and I believe the shadow minister is in discussions with the government about some gaps that we see in this legislation. I don’t quite understand why the legislation can’t be made retrospective. My understanding is that it’s looking only at future cases that might arise. Just in the past couple of weeks we’ve passed legislation relating not just to asylum seekers but also to people here without citizenship, who don’t have a legal reason to be here, who we are seeking to deport.
In terms of this issue, we’ve had a High Court decision that has called into question our ability to keep such people detained. The government has rushed through legislation to deal with the fallout from this. They’ve been caught a little bit flat-footed, and it’s been a bit embarrassing, but we’re getting there with this legislation. That legislation is retrospective. It’s being applied to those people who have previously illegally arrived in Australia or illegally overstayed visas and who we are seeking to deport for various reasons. They’re applying that legislation retrospectively. So I’m not sure that there’s really a matter of principle involved here because the government is applying their new laws here in response to the so-called NZYQ case, but it’s refusing to apply the laws we now have before us retrospectively in regard to terrorists.
I think the Australian community have been shocked at the government’s complete lack of preparedness for hundreds of violent criminals or suspected violent criminals to be released onto our streets. As a result of the NZYQ High Court case, paedophiles and suspected murderers have been released onto our streets, unfortunately in an ad hoc manner. The government is right to seek to correct that and to at least put some obligations or restrictions on those individuals that are released or, now that we’ve seen the judgement, to look at re-incarcerating these people. That seems to be an option we’ll see in new legislation. They’re right to do that. That’s all retrospective. So, if it’s right to retrospectively act against suspected murderers and paedophiles, why isn’t it right to act retrospectively against terrorists? That would seem to be at least as serious a crime, if not more serious, in terms of its impact on our underlying unity, peace and tranquillity as a nation. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t make any sense at all that we can’t also apply these laws to the likes of Mr Benbrika, who has clearly proven himself to be someone who does not live up to the oath of being an Australian citizen.
There are other gaps in the legislation as well, in our view, which the shadow minister is taking forward. We welcome and support the laws applying to those planning, or engaging in, terrorist activity, but there seem to be other serious crimes that would also give rise to at least a question as to whether someone should retain citizenship. As I say, we’re not seeking that the entire Criminal Code should fall into this category or that every crime would necessarily give rise to someone losing their citizenship. It should be reserved for serious crimes. There are a number of crimes already listed in the Criminal Code, including child sex crimes, slavery, military training with a foreign government, engaging in or planning the violent overthrow of a government, dealing with dangerous weapons and torture, that are very serious matters. It’s not clear why crimes like this would not, similarly, give rise to someone being deported or having their citizenship revoked, if they are a dual national.
I note, in this regard, that we have had an outbreak of distasteful debate in Canberra. We’ve seen a desperate government that has been found to be weak and unprepared in the last few weeks lash out and begin accusing the Leader of the Opposition of protecting child sex offenders. That’s what Minister Wells has been claiming, and another minister might have repeated that claim in the last 24 hours. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It is condemnable behaviour and conduct from a desperate government. They have nothing to respond with, so they’ve gone to the gutter.
I’m not accusing the government of protecting child sex offenders, but, if they want to throw out those kinds of claims and accusations, maybe there should be a focus here on why the government doesn’t think child sex offenders should have their citizenship revoked. If they’re willing to make those accusations about the Leader of the Opposition, why are they leaving this gap in this piece of legislation that means that being a child sex offender won’t be grounds to have citizenship revoked, even though terrorism will? The government is completely lost here on these matters. They have absolutely no control of what’s going on, they have no control of their arguments or their debate, and they’re losing their authority as a government right in front of our eyes. That is very, very sad for our country.
We have seen, over the past 18 months, the government simply not manage basic matters with regard to our borders and our migration intake. This government has botched the emergence of this country from the COVID pandemic. They came to government at the end of COVID, and it was basically all over by the time they got there; they were luck in that regard. All they had to do was make sure that we could recover as a nation, and that was always going to be a given. People were going to open up, travel again and get going. But the one thing the Australian government has a responsibility for, almost more than anything else, is to control our borders, control how many people come here each year and make sure that we can, as a nation, take a certain number of people, provide for them and make sure that Australians themselves aren’t disadvantaged by migrants coming here and competing for scarce resources like land, housing and infrastructure.
This government has totally botched it. They’ve been letting a number of people the size of the population of the city of Canberra into this country every year. That’s around 500,000 people a year coming in. It’s completely out of control. They’ve not even tried to moderate the numbers to make sure that Australians themselves, who are here, are not disadvantaged. We have seen over the last 18 months a shocking increase in homelessness among Australians, even among Australians who have a job and, in other words, should have no reason not to be able to afford a home. But there just aren’t homes available, because we’re taking in a number of people the size of Canberra every year, and we’re not building the number of houses we need to accommodate those people. I’m not blaming the number of houses on the government. There are a lot of regulations, red tape and local planning laws that the federal government does not have control of. They can’t themselves immediately change the number of houses being built in this country every year. But they know that. They know those constraints exist, and they know and can see the forecast of how many houses will be built and what housing will be available for Australians in the year ahead. Despite having all that knowledge, they’ve done absolutely nothing to control our borders. They’ve just opened the floodgates and let everybody in.
Obviously, they’re under pressure from big business. Big business want these people in because they want cheap labour. The universities want them in because they want more student fees. Good luck to them, but we need to make decisions on our migration intake based on what we can accommodate for Australians as a whole—not for the vested interests of big business and/or big universities. They are running the show right now. The government are not in control of it themselves. I hope that we can come together and pass legislation in this regard. As I say, there are still some issues in bills before the parliament that we are seeking to raise to, I think, improve the bills. I hope that, as occurred the other week, we will work together on these types of laws to make sure that we keep our country safe and keep Australians secure.
Regardless of that, the more important point here is that the government get its overall act together on migration. It came into government thinking that it didn’t have to do the hard work to secure our borders. The government felt that these issues were largely resolved by the Abbott government, who did stop the boats, despite all the criticism. Imagine if that was still happening, and the boats were still arriving. We’d be in a big world of pain. But, thanks to Tony Abbott and his government, we stopped the boats. We did all that. But I don’t think the government realise how hard and diligent a government has to be to make sure that our borders stay secure over time. They’ve been asleep at the wheel on a number of migration matters in the last few weeks. Let’s hope they get their act together very soon, before Australians are harmed by the criminals that the Labor Party have released into our streets and by the lack of control they have over the numbers of migrants coming to this country.
