Turnbull and Dutton discuss closing loopholes to stop Islamic terrorists returning to Australia

UPDATE: Malcolm Turnbull has written to Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton asking him to strengthen anti-terror laws to stop IS terrorists returning to Australia.

PM Malcolm Turnbull (right), pictured today at Avalon airshow with Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne, has asked Peter Dutton to look at ways of toughing anti-terror laws to prevent Islamic terrorists returning to Australia. Picture: AAP

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PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull wrote to Immigration and Border Protection Minister Peter Dutton to ask him to strengthen anti-terror laws to stop Islamic State terrorists from returning to Australia.

In an interview with Ray Hadley on 2GB, Mr Dutton confirmed he had spoken to Mr Turnbull about how to “strengthen” the laws after The Daily Telegraph revealed there were grave loopholes that made it difficult to strip dual nationals of their Australian citizenship.

His comments came as, over on the Today show, the Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne expressed concern that beefing up the laws may leave a terrorist “stateless”.

Mr Dutton said the government had stopped the boats and now needed to “be tough at the borders to stop these terrorists from coming back to cause harm to Australians”.

“I think there is an argument for there to be some strengthening and the Prime Minster’s already written to me, and we’ve already spoken about ways in which we can strengthen that legislation,” he said.

“It was the toughest law that we could get out of the committee, out of Labor Party support, but as I say the Prime Minister has written to me, we’ve had a number of conversations about how we might improve the legislation and to do that we need Labor’s support.”

Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton is blaming Labor for watering down anti-terrorism laws. Picture: AAP

The Daily Telegraph today reported that Australia faced being swamped by some of the world’s most bloodthirsty Islamic terrorists after tough laws to keep them out of the country had failed.

Intelligence experts have warned the federal government there is nothing stopping scores of barbaric homegrown jihadists, including brutes waging war for ISIS, from lawfully returning to the country, despite laws designed to strip them of their citizenship.

So far, only dual national terrorist Khaled Sharrouf has had his Australian citizenship removed, and that was because of co-operation from the Lebanese authorities.

The federal government has failed to remove the citizenship of any of the other 100 Australians fighting in Iraq and Syria. It is estimated about half of those 100 have dual national citizenship.

“The threat increases over time, as people attempt to come back from the Middle East and if they’ve been fighting in those areas they pose a greater threat when they get back to our shores because they’ve become more radicalised,” Mr Dutton said.

Mr Dutton blamed Labor for weakening the legislation, which went through 27 amendments before it was introduced to Parliament.

“I think to speak frankly, the Labor Party’s got a real problem with Mark Dreyfus and the Left of their party, so they won’t support the full suite of products in this space that we would like,” he said.

“So the PM and I are having a look at the legislation it was in. We may make changes to strengthen it, if that’s required, because as you’d expect we want the strongest possible response to stop people from coming back or from stripping their citizenship.”

But divisions appear to be emerging among cabinet ministers about moves to strengthen the anti-terror laws with Mr Pyne expressing concern that it may leave a terrorist “stateless”.

Mr Pyne directly contradicted Mr Dutton’s comments about the need to beef up laws.

“Well you have to prove Karl that somebody has two citizenships in order to be able to take the Australian one away,” he told Today host Karl Stefanovic, of the current laws.

“That is the law and of course that is the case, otherwise you would leave people as stateless people.

“What are you proposing Karl? That we should take away the citizenship of people when we don’t know if they’ve got another citizenship? You can’t make people stateless.”