Labor has vowed to carry out a “proper and thorough” examination of new laws which would stripping dual nationals of their Australian citizenship if they are involved in terrorist offences as the government plans to introduce the legislation into parliament on Wednesday.
On Tuesday the Coalition party room agreed to implement all 27 recommendations from a bipartisan parliamentary committee looking at the new powers.
Labor gave in-principle support to the laws earlier in the year but the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, has denied that the party will simply wave the bill through parliament when it is introduced on Wednesday.
A detailed account of the legislation, which includes the recommendations, was only given to the opposition on Tuesday night, Shorten said.
“We’ve been given the information for the first time late yesterday, and we will do the right thing by the Australian people where we will thoroughly examine it,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
Labor “won’t unduly delay the debate”, Shorten said.
Despite taking on the amendments of the committee, the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, admitted that the government expects the legislation’s constitutionality to be challenged through the judicial system.
“In these circumstances you would expect that there would be a high court challenge in relation to some aspects of the bill or the legislation at some stage,” he told reporters on Wednesday.
“From the government’s perspective, there is always a risk with any legislation, with any piece of national security legislation. We minimise that risk in this bill, and we believe we’ve struck a reasonable balance by accepting all the recommendations from the committee.”
Shorten is looking at the fine print. “The government assures us of the constitutionality of what has been proposed,” he said. “We’ll have to look at the detail to see if that stacks up.”
The government wants the legislation passed before the end of the year. There are only two sitting weeks left of parliament.
“Debate will commence this week, and the government’s desire is that this bill be dealt with by both houses by the end of the next sitting week,” Dutton said.
He argued that senior members of Labor, including the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, had sat on the joint parliamentary committee on intelligence and security and had helped draft the recommendations.
“The reasonable expectation is that Labor will support the bill, given that we’ve adopted the recommendations from the committee,” Dutton told reporters on Wednesday. “This is a very important piece of legislation that deserves bipartisan support.”
Shorten is not ruling out passing the legislation by the end of the year. “If the government has kept its word and the 27 amendments reflect what was dealt with on a bipartisan basis of the parliamentary joint committee, then it will be entirely possible to achieve that timetable,” he said.
The Coalition party room on Tuesday agreed to nearly 30 amendments to the citizenship bill – 27 that were recommended by the joint committee and two additional ones.
The changes include adding a retrospective element to the legislation, which would apply as far back as 10 years for people who have been charged with serious offences and sentenced to more than 10 years in jail.
The Greens have concerns about the bill in general, and the retrospective element specifically. “Stripping someone’s citizenship for offences committed up to 10 years ago amounts to double punishment,” Senator Nick McKim said.
The recommendations also include a requirement that a person whose citizenship was revoked must have had “intent” to cause a terrorist attack.
Dutton said this element would allow the government to differentiate between crimes that are in the existing criminal code and terrorism-related crimes. He used the example of the Sydney Lindt cafe siege gunman, Man Haron Monis, whose crimes, he argued, had a political aspect to them, making them terrorism offences.
“The package is designed to be effective to capture those who seek to do harm to Australians, and at the same time minimise constitutional risk, the challenge in the high court,” the immigration minister said.
The legislation seeks to strip dual nationals of their citizenship if they are convicted of a terrorism-related offence or engage in terrorist activity, or if they go overseas to fight for a terrorist organisation such as Isis.
