Rose only fled Gaza after her pharmacy was bombed. Dutton says she shouldn’t have come

Peter Dutton’s call to reject all migrants from the war-torn Gaza Strip as potential threats has been condemned as divisive and discriminatory by Labor, the Greens and Muslim groups, as Anthony Albanese accused the opposition leader of undermining Australia’s national security agencies.

As new data revealed the government has approved only one in 10 Palestinian visa applications since May, Dutton on Wednesday decided to push beyond the Coalition’s previous demands for tougher scrutiny of Palestinian refugees, saying: “I don’t think people should be coming in from that war zone at all at the moment. It’s not prudent to do so and I think it puts our national security at risk.”

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during Question Time on Wednesday.Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald

His comments marked a new division between the major political parties over the treatment of refugees as Labor prepares new avenues to permanent residency for about 1300 Palestinians currently in Australia on temporary visas. Dutton was immediately condemned by Muslim groups for dog-whistling and making scapegoats of people fleeing the bloody war in Gaza.

Home Affairs data shows 2922 visas have been granted to Palestinians since October 7 while more than double – 7111 applications – have been rejected. In the same period, there have been 8746 visas granted to Israeli citizens while 235 were refused. But in the last three months, the approval rate for Palestinian visas has significantly stalled: 2497 applications were rejected and 236 approved since the end of May.

Rose Alhelou, 33, who arrived in Sydney from Gaza three months ago, said her family only chose to come to Australia after being displaced 11 times since the war began. After her pharmacy business was turned to rubble, the family walked six hours to the south of Gaza before waiting two weeks to cross into Egypt.

“Everyone here in Australia welcomed us, everyone here is caring. Most of the Gazans who came here are well-educated, most are engineers, doctors, pharmacists. We are here to start a new journey. We are not here for help and to look for aid,” she said.

Rose Alhelou and her sister inside her pharmacy in Gaza, and after the pharmacy was destroyed during the war.

The opposition used Wednesday’s question time to hammer the government over the checks in place before visas were issued to fleeing Gazans, while Albanese said Dutton was stoking division while undermining national security officials who were applying the same scrutiny of refugees from conflict zones as they did under the Coalition government.

“This bloke... is always looking for an opportunity to create division, which is what his off-the-cuff comments were about today, that didn’t go to their shadow cabinet,” Albanese said. “I have confidence in the work that our security agencies do. They work their guts out to keep us safe.”

Coalition MPs confirmed Dutton had made the call to halt all refugees from Gaza without consulting shadow cabinet or the party room, but there did not appear to be any significant internal opposition to his stance.

Burke, in his first comments on the visas since taking on the immigration portfolio, defended security checks made by national security agencies.

“There is a process which ASIO is involved with, which applies to every single visa ... whether you come from the United States or whether you come from the Gaza Strip. And that’s through what ASIO will routinely refer to as their watch list,” he said.

“It is updated every 24 hours with every name that ASIO puts forward that they are concerned about. Every single visa that has been issued by this government and by the previous government went through that check against ASIO’s information.”

As he came under fire from Coalition MPs, Greens’ immigration spokesman David Shoebridge pointed out Burke was already “10 times more likely to refuse protection than grant it to Palestinians”. “[Labor] are stopping family members and people escaping violence from seeking safety,” he said.

The Coalition has escalated its political attack over weak security checks for arrivals from Gaza since ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess’s assurances on the weekend that rhetorical support for Hamas – a listed terrorist group – would not necessarily preclude people from coming into the country.

“I just think that every Australian would be shocked to think that the government’s bringing in people from a war zone, and that ASIO’s not conducting checks and searches on these people,” Dutton said on Sky News on Wednesday morning.

“It is something the prime minister needs to answer because we are living in a heightened security-threat environment.”

Former prime minister Tony Abbott backed Dutton on Sky on Wednesday night, saying it is “simply impossible to do security checks on people in Gaza”.

“We are stuck with whoever chooses to apply and you’ve got to assume under current circumstances that all of them are going to be Hamas sympathisers,” Abbott said.

Australia-Israel and Jewish Affairs Council executive director Colin Rubinstein stopped short of endorsing Dutton’s call for a total ban on Gazan arrivals although he said he wanted “utmost vigilance and scrutiny” of any applications for signs of support for Hamas.

“We are very concerned at the potential for supporters of Hamas and other terrorist groups to enter the country under this scheme,” he said in a statement to this masthead.

Secretary of the Lebanese Muslim Association, Gamel Kheir, pointed to Dutton’s comments about Lebanese-Australian migrants in 2016 and said he feared Wednesday’s remarks would “kick off another round of political football”.

“We, being the Muslim community in its many colours, are cannon fodder for the Liberal Party whenever an election comes around … Where does he propose they go back to? The rubble that is Gaza?”

Australian National Imams Council spokesman Bilal Rauf called Dutton a hypocrite whose comments revealed underlying racism. “He said none of this about Australia taking people from Ukraine, which is also a war zone,” Rauf said.

Islamic Council of Victoria president Adel Salman said: “Disappointing is not the right word, it’s disgusting.”

The war began when terrorist group Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel’s subsequent assault on Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, according to the local health ministry.

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