Peta Credlin: Why didn’t Albo give a heads up on ISIS brides?
By readmiting the ISIS brides without any stated precautions, this federal government doesn’t take seriously its most important job –keeping the people of Australia safe, writes Peta Credlin.
It not the crime that gets you but the cover-up – and Anthony Albanese would do well to remember that as he makes lying to Australians an art form. How else do you describe his repeated rejection of claims his government was assisting with the return of Islamic State “brides” as “not accurate” when it’s now been revealed by officials that this has been happening for months.
In secret.
And it’s not as if the assistance was trifling. It’s the highest level of support that any federal government can provide – the right to call Australia home.
Last week in Senate hearings, for hours on end, Foreign Minister Penny Wong tried to stonewall but, eventually, under oath, public servants relented and revealed the scale of Albanese’s largesse. New Australian passports for the women who chose to live with a brutal terrorist organisation over our country and Australian citizenship for the children who these women travelled to the Middle East to breed.
Thanks to Labor, these women and children are now our problem, free to live among us, free to access all the welfare support they like because who really expects them to get a job?
Remember the child of former ISIS fighter, Khaled Sharrouf, who held up a severed head for the cameras?
What sort of damage then will these young people return with, what horrors they will have seen?
Yet still they’ve come, and more are likely to follow them, says the Albanese government. To date, not one minister or official has been willing to confirm any detail regarding these individuals, we are not even allowed to know what state they’re living in – but both NSW and Victoria Police have admitted they were consulted, so make an educated guess.
Ask yourself this, why the denial of basic information?
Sure, no one is expecting identifying information at this stage but where is the PM’s press conference with security chiefs to reassure Australians that the return of these women and their ISIS progeny will not further inflame already febrile community tensions? Aren’t we at least owed that, given it was an Australian government under Tony Abbott that deployed our military in the fight against Islamic State, including against these women?
Under our laws, ISIS remains a listed terrorist organisation, meaning that these women should rightly be closely scrutinised for living with this death cult.
Instead, Albanese has rolled out the welcome mat.
In the House of Representatives on Thursday, eventually the admissions came, with the government forced to admit that passports and other services had been provided to the returnees but claimed that this was not “assistance” or “repatriation”, because the government had not provided flights.
Honestly, as if a flight somehow trumps the granting of Australian citizenship in the hierarchy of help!
There are three issues here: First, what responsibilities should the Australian government have to people who have left our country in ways that constitute an obvious rejection of Australia and its values; second, how should the government actually discharge any duties it may have to such people; and third, whether it’s kept its fundamental duty to be upfront with the Australian people about anything that might put the community at risk.
I strongly believe that leaving Australia to live with a terrorist organisation amounts to a repudiation of citizenship. It was to deal with cases like this that the law was changed in 2015, to automatically strip dual citizens of their Australian citizenship if they were involved with a terrorist organisation. However, the High Court in 2022 found this to be an exercise by government of judicial rather than executive power and invalidated the provision.
And at no time since then has the Albanese government sought to rectify this law as it could, given countries like Britain refuse to allow any of these women to return.
But this isn’t the end of the legal story.
Just because it’s now very hard to strip people of citizenship doesn’t mean that the government is required to issue passports to people in camps in Syria.
In 2023, the federal court rejected an argument that the government was required to facilitate people’s return on the grounds that Australia was not responsible for individuals and camps over which it had no control.
So why did the Albanese government issue passports to this group of six people who had been living in an ISIS-controlled Syrian camp for at least a decade and who now wanted to return to Australia?
If these women have rejected radical Islamism, the government should have said so.
If it was confident that these individuals could be safely returned to Australia, it should have explained what precautions it was putting in place to protect the community.
And if there were no precautions being implemented, it should have explained why precautions were not needed.
Instead, we’ve been served up a wall of obfuscation and denial that proves that the Albanese government does not take national security seriously or is clueless about how that might be secured.
It’s bad enough that the Albanese government has issued 3000 tourist visas to people from a terrorist-controlled war zone in Gaza.
But to readmit the ISIS brides too, without any stated precautions, shows that this government doesn’t take seriously its most important job: Namely keeping the people of Australia safe.
THUMBS UP
Queensland government: Reversing the looming phase-out of coal until at least the 2040s to secure the state’s energy supply.
THUMBS DOWN
Pro-Palestine activists: By refusing to recognise a Palestinian state, the US President forced Hamas, Israel and the Arab countries to the table. How bizarre that those who’ve been marching for peace (so they tell us) can’t say thank you.
More Coverage
Workers protest on pay as our pollies rack up flights and meals
