Peta Credlin: Importing potential terrorists is never clever

Are terrorist-supporting, atrocity-approving people really those we should be permitting into the country when anti-Semitism has never been more rife, asks Peta Credlin.

With some Islamist preachers routinely spewing out anti-Semitic bile in mosques around the country and with large protests most weekends calling for the destruction of Israel “from the river to the sea”, how smart is it to be bringing in more than 2000 people from Gaza about whom we know almost nothing?

Yet that’s precisely what the Albanese Government has done, issuing more than 2000 visas for people from war-torn Gaza to enter Australia. Remarkably, this has been done without any serious vetting because it’s all happened on the basis of online applications backed up by nothing other than the applicants’ self-provided information plus locally produced documents.

According to evidence from officials in a Senate hearing, many of these visas have been issued within 24 hours of the application being lodged. One was apparently approved within an hour. Without any consular staff inside a war zone, the information on which these visas have been issued is almost completely unverifiable.

In other words, all these 2000-plus Palestinians have been given permission to enter Australia, based on their own assertions plus documents provided by the terrorist-run Gaza authorities, or by the scarcely less suspect Palestinian authorities in the West Bank. And we do know, from the best available survey work, that about half the residents of Gaza support Hamas – and that about 75 per cent approved the October 7 terrorist atrocity in Israel.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles is, at the very least, in the wrong portfolio. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Under the circumstances, there is no way of distinguishing the small minority of Gaza residents who loathe Hamas and all its works from the majority who go along with them, however reluctantly.

Are terrorist-supporting, atrocity-approving people really those we should be permitting into Australia at a time when disgusting and un-Australian anti-Semitism has never been more rife?

It’s fair enough to feel for the suffering of the civilian population of Gaza as the Israeli army continues its relentless campaign to eliminate Hamas. A campaign, it needs to be said, that’s entirely necessary after the October 7 murder of innocent women, children and even babies, with Hamas fighters revelling in the slaughter by posting exultant videos of it. If civilian casualties are high, that’s the inevitable consequence of a having a terrorist government that deliberately hides its weapons, installations and fighters among innocent people.

The understandable urge to reduce human suffering doesn’t justify abandoning judgment in doing so.

And it is important to remind people that once here on these visitor visas, these Palestinians can readily apply for refugee status and stay in Australia for years while they do it, quite possibly using taxpayer-funded lawyers to do it. So while the PM will pretend these visas are just to get people out of a war zone in the short term, Canberra types know it’s an open back door to stay longer.

Every day, the Albanese Government looks weaker on border security. First, there was the sudden and unnecessary release from immigration detention of 149 foreign criminals, including seven murderers and 37 sex offenders. Then there was the arrival, undetected, on the Australian mainland of at least two immigrant boats in the past four months, at a time of reduced air and sea surveillance. And now there’s this news that we risk rubberstamping terrorist sympathisers to enter here.

Far right activists give a Nazi salute. Anti-Semitism has never been more rife. Picture: NCA NewsWire/David Crosling

Let’s not forget that, as a senior frontbencher, Anthony Albanese vigorously opposed the Labor Party’s reluctant move, when Bill Shorten was leader, to support boat turn-backs. The now-PM said that he couldn’t support turn-backs because he couldn’t ask others to do what he could not bear to do himself.

And our current Immigration Minister Andrew Giles previously acted as a lawyer for people on the Tampa seeking permanent residency of Australia, meaning at the very least, he’s in the wrong portfolio (but he should be sacked for sheer incompetence, not just reshuffled if the PM had any ticker).

It’s telling that instead of ending visa processing for applicants from Gaza until they could be properly vetted, the Government instead chose to attack the opposition and to claim that it was just following past practice. This was entirely in character for a Government that has trouble telling the truth but the facts don’t bend to spin. The 12,000 Islamic State victims, specifically from persecuted minorities, that the Abbott government had brought here from Syria in 2015 were all first vetted by Australian officials present in refugee camps. The 5000 visas the Morrison government issued to people fleeing the Taliban were to people known to us from working with Australian soldiers and officials in Afghanistan.

A country where hundreds of protesters chanted: “Gas the Jews” – which everyone heard except the police responsible for prosecuting hate crimes – isn’t just losing its decency but is in danger of losing its judgment too. Or at least the Government is.

DOCTOR-ASSISTED SUICIDE MAY PROVE SLIPPERY SLOPE

The trouble with changing the law to permit doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill people is that it soon becomes a slippery slope for anyone tired of life to be facilitated to end it. Euthanasia starts as a good way to ease the pain of patients in their death agonies and is then steadily extended to anyone with a terminal illness, a debilitating condition, or even chronic depression.

In Canada, in 2022, for instance, over 4 per cent of all deaths were from assisted suicide – with a growth rate of 32 per cent from the previous year – and now include disease and disability as well as a terminal illness. A terminal illness is also not required in Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Italy, Colombia, and Germany. In the Netherlands and Belgium, euthanasia is open to children.

So-called voluntary assisted dying is now legal (or in the process of becoming legal) everywhere in Australia. The final jurisdiction to allow it is the Northern Territory and the NT government’s public survey – that’s supposed to gauge public opinion for the drafting of the legislation, but that invariably is designed to get a tick for whatever the government has in mind – is asking Territorians whether they think people with mental illness should be allowed to access doctor-assisted suicide.

Last week, senior psychiatrists such as former Australian of the Year Pat McGorry warned that there was no such thing as a “terminal mental illness” and that every mental illness could be treated and alleviated. The worry, if doctor-assisted suicide becomes normalised, is that what’s permitted could become what’s expected and that the old and the frail, or young and depressed, could face pressure to “no longer be a burden”. While good palliative care is the best way to relieve patients’ pain, doctor-assisted suicide could easily turn into a way to relieve the financial pain on families and on governments.

Just have a look at the paltry funding levels for palliative care – we never want to be a society where governments push euthanasia to save money.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm

Originally published as Peta Credlin: Importing potential terrorists is never clever