Peta Credlin: Government’s secret ISIS bride plot is a dangerous deception
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke asked a public servant to leave the room during discussions about ISIS women's return to conceal government involvement, writes Peta Credlin.
There is a sinister game being played inside the Albanese government and it involves radical Islam.
As you know, Australia has granted more visas to Gazans than any Muslim neighbouring country, despite being on the other side of the world and even though these people come from a terrorist-controlled war zone with limited security checks.
The government appointed a special envoy to tackle “Islamophobia” when it’s not mosques being bombed or Imans being stabbed, and is even considering calls to water down the definition of terrorism after 15 Muslim organisations demanded the change, arguing it unfairly targets their religion.
But it is the undercover return of so-called ISIS brides that is the most troubling because revelations last week have exposed just how involved the government was, at the same time as they denied any role.
Tony Burke is Home Affairs Minister, responsible for immigration and domestic security in this country. Like several of his colleagues, his seat of Watson in Sydney’s west has a high percentage of Muslim voters and it’s hard not to form the view that he runs his portfolio with this fact top of mind.
For example, I can’t find a single instance where he has deported any of the radical preachers who populate mosques in Sydney and Melbourne and market their anti-Australian hate.
It was Burke who let in the 3000-plus Gazans and remarkably even went out to the airport to greet the latest planeload in person.
And it’s Burke who has been uncovered as the government’s pointman on the return of these ISIS women and their children, despite public assurances to the contrary.
Trying to cover its tracks is the sure sign of a government acting in bad faith. But that’s what Albanese and Burke have tried to do ever since news broke that these women planned to return to Australia.
Having had many security briefings about women like them who left their western countries to join Islamic State when I worked for a previous prime minister, let me tell you these women were often as radicalised as the men. None of them should ever return here and their banishment should serve as a future warning because the risk of Australians travelling abroad to mix with Islamist terrorists has not gone away.
But that’s not the view of Tony Burke. Despite earlier insisting that the Albanese government would do nothing to help these ISIS women, documents released last week reveal he held a secret meeting about this very issue. According to the official notes taken by a public servant in the room, Burke “stated there may be a way to achieve the same outcome without government undertakings”.
When one of the group asked “to speak frankly” with the minister, the Home Affairs department note taker recorded: “At this stage, I was asked to leave by the minister to enable a frank discussion to take place”. Earlier, the official had noted Burke saying that “the thinking is, if people are able to get out, there are no blockages to them returning”. Burke was also recorded to have said: “the government doesn’t want to be perceived to have been paying to have them smuggled out” and also, to have been grateful that the group had been publicly silent on repatriation plans.
Politicians asking public servants to leave the room doesn’t happen often. But when it does, it’s because they want to say something they do not want recorded, something they want to be able to potentially deny in the future, something they do not want the public to know.
And that’s what happened; despite assuring Australians that their government was not going to help these ISIS supporters return, it did just that when, two months after this June meeting, six women and children returned to Australia via Beirut where they were issued with Australian passports and are now living in among us.
And they won’t be the last if Burke has his way, with up to 40 still in Syrian camps wanting to return and, as reported in September, “senior federal government officials are assisting the operation quietly in the background and intend to work with families of those in the camps and not for profit organisations to issue travel documents”.
Upon arrival, the report continued, “multiple state and federal government agencies will work together to support and appropriately reintegrate the group into the community”.
Yet Burke has insisted, then and subsequently, despite the emergence of these secret meeting notes, that the government has never been involved in “providing assistance to this cohort”.
What the Albanese government doesn’t seem to grasp is that these women, by their actions and attitudes, have rejected the values that are supposed to characterise Australians. They defied laws prohibiting citizens from supporting terrorist groups overseas and, if there’s been any repentance, there’s been no evidence presented by a sneaky government eager to pretend it’s had nothing to do with their return.
But there’s a wider problem here that no Australian government has yet been prepared to confront. To what extent is any strict Muslim able to live in a liberal, pluralist democracy given that Islam – in its more literalist interpretations – is opposed to freedom of religion and secular government.
Sure, a humanitarian case can be made for allowing back into Australia people facing a miserable existence in wretched encampments; but what about the bigger question of bringing into Australia people whose belief systems are hard to reconcile with the way we live?
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