Anthony Albanese has tried to draw a line under the ISIS brides debate in a way that will satisfy almost nobody.
In a radio interview this morning, the Prime Minister restated the government’s political message: it will not assist the ‘wives of foreign fighters’ and their children to leave the Kurdish run camps in northern Syria.
But he also made something else clear as well. He won’t do any more, legislatively or operationally, to stop them coming here, if they can find a way to do so on their own.
Albo says the ‘full force of the law’ has already been applied ‘to the extent that we can’ to stop them, and that anything stronger risks being ‘knocked over in the High Court’.
Risks? Isn’t that a risk worth taking to try and keep them out? Refusing to try because of a legal risk isn’t toughness, it’s legal fatalism dressed up as responsibility.
Refuse to help, concede returning is still possible, then blame the Constitution. That’s Albo wiping his hands of responsibility. It’s pathetic.
Saying we won’t help is not the same as saying they won’t come here. The first is posturing, the second is what most of the Australian public actually wants.
The fallback line Albo is using here is that anyone who returns will face the full force of the law.
Anthony Albanese has tried to draw a line under the ISIS brides debate in a way that will satisfy almost nobody, writes Peter van Onselen
It sounds muscular, but in practice it is an admission that prevention has been abandoned. It’s not good enough.
Prosecutions rely on admissible evidence from a war zone many years after the fact, often without witnesses or clean chains of custody.
What little the state knows sits inside intelligence holdings that can’t be aired in open court anyway. Even where charges are possible they don’t answer the core question, why did this become Australia’s problem?
Control orders and monitoring tools can be useful if they do get here, but they are no substitute for keeping them out in the first place. Temporary exclusion orders, designed to slow any return, are limited and contestable if used as a de facto permanent ban via rolling renewals.
If the current kit is inadequate, that is a reason to strengthen it, because the women involved don’t deserve our sympathy.
They made their choices, leaving a safe and wealthy democracy to live inside a terrorist state built on ideological violence. Wanting out now because the project collapsed isn’t contrition and it’s certainly not evidence that they are reformed.
What Albo can’t do is posture as tough while refusing to even attempt to draw up tougher laws. The real failure here isn’t that the legal terrain is difficult, it’s that the PM is using that difficulty as a pretext for not even trying.
He is governing as though the High Court has already struck down laws that have not even been drafted.
One of the so-called ISIS brides who is seeking to return to Australia from Syria
Of course any serious attempt to restrict their return will be challenged. Of course the High Court will scrutinise legislation drafted to stop them.
That’s not a reason to surrender, it’s the reason Parliament exists. Legislatures are meant to draw lines that courts then test. To reflect the will of the people.
If governments only legislated where there is no constitutional risk, they would legislate on almost nothing that matters.
So try, Albo. Get your best legal minds on the case. Delicately draft new laws in a way that just might tip-toe within the Constitutional limits.
Put them to Parliament, defend them publicly, and if they are challenged, fight for them in the courts, potentially redrafting the laws to succeed next time.
Losing in court after a genuine attempt is one thing. Refusing to attempt anything in the first place just because it might be hard is something else entirely.
It’s certainly not showing leadership on this important issue.
And guess what, even if the High Court uses the constitution to strike down any laws designed to prevent these terrorist sympathisers from getting here, the constitution can always be changed via a referendum.
While that’s unlikely, in the wake of what happened in Bondi – murder under the banner of ISIS – I’m willing to bet a majority of Australians in a majority of states would back any constitutional change that makes it possible for the state to cut ISIS sympathisers adrift. Whether they are citizens of this country or not.
