January 30, 2025
**CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY**
Gerard – thank you for that warm introduction and for hosting me here at the Sydney Institute, Australia’s premier platform for debating ideas.
In politics it’s rare to recommend people read the work of your opponents.
But I want to make an exception.
Because a speech by the Albanese government’s first Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O’Neil, provides a remarkable - although probably unintended - insight into how Labor views national security.
Minister O’Neil’s speech to the National Press Club, in December 2022, has not aged well.
Even though she decried “playing politics”, Minister O’Neil mentioned Peter Dutton no less than four times and devoted much of the speech to critiquing his performance in the Home Affairs portfolio.
She accused him of being too focused on…wait for it…“boats and borders”, “terrorism and child exploitation”, “bikies, organised crime, illicit drugs” and, my personal favourite, “deportations.”
Dutton, apparently, had an “oddly-narrow view of Home Affairs” because these were his priorities.
The Minister concluded by promising that the Albanese government would be “taking a different approach” on national security.
I’m not sure if the Minister knew at the time just how right she was.
The Albanese government has indeed taken a very different approach to national security.
And Australians have paid the price.
From their immigration detainee debacle, to a new surge of boats, to deportation disasters and an antisemitism crisis – the Albanese government’s handling of national security has been a litany of failures from the very beginning.
They only have themselves to blame.
From their very first day in office, Labor set about demolishing the national security architecture that served us well and kept Australians safe.
Before the first Albanese ministry was even sworn in, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus led a smash and grab raid of the Home Affairs portfolio.
He removed the Australian Federal Police, the financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC and the Criminal Intelligence Commission into the Attorney-General’s portfolio.
The only operational national security agency which remained with Home Affairs was ASIO.
These machinery of government changes were never put to the Australian people.
Instead, the Prime Minister stood idly by while his Attorney-General ran roughshod over his Home Affairs Minister in a blatant power-grab.
Usually in public policy it takes months, or sometimes even years, before the consequences of bad decisions become measurable and obvious.
Sadly for Australia’s national security, it didn’t take long for problems to emerge in the cut-down Home Affairs portfolio.
Something as simple as the listing and re-listing of a terrorist organisation was a straightforward process under the former Coalition government.
But on Anthony Albanese’s watch it became convoluted and sluggish.
The new process required the Attorney-General’s and Home Affairs Departments to ping-pong advice and submissions between each other and their Ministers.
And the time taken for Ministerial consideration of a terrorism listing blew out.
For example, in October 2022, what should have been the very straightforward relisting of several branches of ISIS and Al-Qaeda took a combined total of 22 days of Ministerial consideration alone by Clare O’Neil and Mark Dreyfus.
A similar re-listing of five terrorist organisations in 2021 under the Coalition took just six.
New listings were even worse. From start to end the process to list the Houthis in 2024 took an astonishing 126 days, including an extraordinary six weeks of Ministerial consideration by Minister O’Neil.
By comparison, the Coalition listed the neo-Nazi terrorist group “The Base” for the first time following just eight days of Ministerial consideration.
Things got so bad that the then Chair of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, Peter Khalil, was forced to write to Clare O’Neil to ask whether she supported the re-listing in September 2023 of three terrorist organisations including Boko Haram.
In that re-listing process the Minister for Home Affairs had simply been left out altogether in an embarrassing stuff up.
These kinds of basic errors of process on one of the most fundamental counter-terrorism tools never happened under the previous Home Affairs construct.
Obviously, the Prime Minister thought he had not yet done enough damage to the Home Affairs portfolio.
Because in his July 2024 reshuffle in which he dumped Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles from the portfolio, Dreyfus struck again.
This time ASIO – our domestic security intelligence agency – was also ripped from the Home Affairs portfolio and sent to Attorney-Generals.
Tony Burke, sworn in to the new portfolio, is frankly Home Affairs Minister in name only.
Despite holding responsibility under the administrative arrangements for “national security policy and operations” he now has no operational law enforcement or intelligence agencies in his portfolio.
He is the weakest Home Affairs Minister in the history of the portfolio, and he has the Prime Minister to thank for it.
Perhaps that was why Tony Burke was missing in action from the announcement in August 2024 that the terrorism threat level was being raised on ASIO advice to “probable.”
It is utterly bizarre that the Minister nominally responsible for counter-terrorism was not in attendance for a major announcement about the terror threat in Australia.
In September last year – just weeks after the terrorism threat level was increased – The Saturday Paper exposed the Federal Government’s dysfunction on countering terrorism after states and territories threatened to go it alone because of Labor’s ineptitude.
This Prime Minister’s weakness and bad judgement has undermined our counter-terrorism architecture.
We now also have the curious situation where the Minister politically responsible for the operational outcomes on law enforcement and national security is also required to independently assess whether a warrant is granted to ASIO.
This causes an inherent and undesirable tension and conflict between operational outcomes and legal compliance.
The Prime Minister even kicked out key national security agencies including ASIO and ASIS off the National Security Committee of Cabinet.
And replaced them with the Minister for Climate Change, Chris Bowen.
I don’t know about you, but somehow I doubt Chris Bowen has better insights into our national security challenges than the heads of our intelligence agencies.
And I fear these administrative stuff-ups are just a small window into the dysfunction behind the scenes in the portfolio.
Perhaps in a more benign security environment we could afford such a confused national security architecture.
But we are not.
Australia is facing the most complex and serious strategic circumstances since the end of the Second World War.
The wars in Europe and the middle east have reminded us that geographically remote conflicts have global consequences, and Australia is not immune.
On 5 August 2024, the Director-General of ASIO returned Australia's National Terrorism Threat Level from 'Possible' to 'Probable'.
The Director-General stated that politically-motivated violence – which encompasses terrorism – had joined espionage and foreign interference as our principal security concerns.
The Director-General’s warning was a sobering reminder that we live in precarious times, but unfortunately it comes as no surprise.
Increasing social division and threats of violence in our communities have escalated dramatically since the 7th of October.
They have been fuelled in-part by the rising use of social media platforms as a primary source of news and information and the problems that accompany this.
We have seen teenagers charged with offences that police allege are motivated by terrorism, a shocking increase in antisemitism, and people proudly displaying the symbols of terrorist organisations on the streets of our cities.
A caravan found by the roadside packed with explosives in Dural, and disclosed yesterday, is just the latest and most disturbing incident in the escalating antisemitism crisis.
The Australian Signals Directorate has spoken of near constant cyberattacks on our government networks and critical infrastructure.
In his most recent annual threat assessment, Mr Burgess disclosed that “ASIO is aware of one nation state conducting multiple attempts to scan critical infrastructure in Australia and other countries, targeting water, transport and energy networks.”
Against this backdrop, we cannot afford for our national security architecture to be undermined by party politics and egos in the Cabinet room.
We need a government ruthlessly focused on Australia’s national interest.
Whether it’s this government’s weakness, distraction or sheer incompetence, the outcome is the same: Australia is less safe on Labor’s watch.
Take the government’s mishandling of the serious cyber threats facing Australia.
The Optus cyberattack exposed how ill-prepared the Albanese government was to protect Australians from cyber criminals – let alone sophisticated nation states.
Minister O’Neil took days before issuing any public statement, and spent critical early response time publicly feuding with the victim of the hack, instead of focusing on protecting users’ data.
The government swung wildly from publicly praising our critical infrastructure reforms as being the best in the world and trashing them as “not worth the ink printed on the paper”.
They made ambitious promises to make Australia the most cyber-secure nation in the world before later quietly scaling them back.
While the Cyber Security Strategy released by the Albanese Labor Government in 2023 commits only $192 million over four years, the Coalition’s 2020 Cyber Security Strategy was backed with $1.67 billion of investment.
It was followed by the largest ever investment in ASD’s history through project REDSPICE: $10 billion over 10 years to effectively double ASD’s size with 1,900 new personnel and the acquisition of new platforms, technologies and capabilities.
While the Coalition led the world by banning Huawei and other high-risk vendors with close connections to the Chinese Communist Party from providing 5G mobile technology in Australia, Labor had to be publicly embarrassed by the Opposition into removing thousands of high-risk devices from across the Commonwealth, including CCTV cameras and drones manufactured in foreign authoritarian countries.
And they were one of the last governments in the Western world to finally remove TikTok from government devices because of the serious espionage risk it poses to users.
Of course, these are not even the Albanese government’s worst or most obvious failings when it comes to national security.
Their slow and incompetent response to the High Court’s ruling in NZYQ is seared into the brains of many Australians as a prime example of why this government is not up to the task of protecting our country.
As soon as the High Court handed down its ruling on 8 November 2023 it was clear it would have major ramifications.
The very next day in a series of media interviews I called on the government to urgently introduce legislation to allow the highest risk offenders to be re-detained.
It took a full month before the government finally accepted these tough new laws were necessary.
But 13 months on these powers to protect the community have not been used. Not even once.
The consequences have been serious.
As we stand here today, at least 282 non-citizen offenders have now been released into the community by the Albanese government.
Among them are serious violent criminals:
Yet despite this, as of 31 December last year, only 64 are subject to electronic monitoring and 37 are subject to specified curfew.
At least 65 of them have been charged with new criminal offences since their release.
10 more were let off for breaching their curfews and other offences because the former Immigration Minister Andrew Giles stuffed up issuing their visas.
Perhaps he was too busy dreaming up his imaginary drone monitoring program, one of the more dumbfounding moments of this sorry saga.
If it wasn’t so serious it might be comical.
But Australians have paid a very real price for this government’s incompetence when it comes to community safety.
Dozens of Australians have become victims of violent crimes to people who never should have been free in the community to do this harm, including a Perth grandmother brutally bashed in a violent home invasion allegedly involving one of the released detainees.
If their incompetent response to the NZYQ ruling left a lot to be desired the direction 99 deportation disaster was on a whole other level.
Because this time it was an entirely self-inflicted wound.
As part of a foolish attempt to appease former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Anthony Albanese agreed to go soft on deporting violent non-citizen offenders.
The previous government’s refusal to water-down our strong policy of deporting violent non-citizens is just one of the areas Clare O’Neil attacked the Coalition over in her Press Club address because it apparently damaged our relationship with our Kiwi cousins.
So the Prime Minister instructed Andrew Giles to issue a new ministerial direction which required decision makers in the department and at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to give greater weight to their ties to the community before deciding to deport them.
The Department warned the government in black and white what the implications of this decision would be: 25% more violent non-citizens being allowed to stay in Australia who would normally be deported.
In the time this direction was live, we know of at least 163 offenders who were spared deportation by Labor.
Included among them were multiple child rapists, serious domestic violence perpetrators and drug traffickers.
To this day they continue to be arrested and apprehended in the community after being charged with new offences they never should have been in our country to commit.
And the only consequence for this shocking and unnecessary public policy blunder was Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles being moved sideways to portfolios where their incompetence is less obvious.
The return of Tony Burke to the Home Affairs and Immigration portfolios has been an auspicious one for people smugglers.
Last time he was responsible for protecting Australia’s borders in the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era, he held the portfolio for just 80 days.
Don’t hold that against him though – he packed a lot in those 80 days.
In fact, in that short time he presided over the arrival of 83 illegal boats carrying 6,634 people.
Children in detention peaked at 1,992 on his watch.
And while we are not yet back in those dark days, there are ominous signs people smugglers think they are back in business.
Since the last election 26 boats have attempted the journey to Australia.
Astonishingly, 7 have reached Australia - that we know of.
It’s no surprise these criminal syndicates are again testing our resolve.
One of Labor’s first acts in government was abolishing the use of temporary protection visas – a key part of our successful operation sovereign borders policies and a powerful deterrent to illegal maritime arrivals.
And Labor has failed to deliver the maritime and aerial surveillance required to intercept boats at sea.
On their watch, maritime patrol days are down 16%.
Aerial surveillance has crashed 21.4%.
It is no wonder boats are slipping through.
The regional processing centre on Nauru has started to fill back up after it was virtually emptied by the Coalition.
Just this week we learned that the government’s decision to allow 19,000 people who came here illegally by boat is having serious flow on consequences.
Labor has not only broken Kevin Rudd’s promise that if you come here by boat you will never be allowed to stay, they’re now letting those same people bring in more than 2,150 family members.
This sends a terrible message to desperate people that it is worth testing Australia’s resolve on border security.
And it gives people smugglers another product to sell.
If this is not addressed soon, we could find ourselves back in the border protection spiral under the last Labor government.
More boats. More illegal arrivals. More detention centres. And more deaths at sea.
Nothing less than the full restoration of Operation Sovereign Borders to its former strength is required.
Based on his past performance in the portfolio, I think we can safely say Tony Burke was not appointed for his expertise in stopping the boats.
So why was he?
I’m sorry to say but I think it is clear that base electoral politics was the driver of the Prime Minister’s decision.
Labor is under siege in the safe seats they have traditionally taken for granted in places like Western Sydney.
Dai Le proved at the last election that it can be done.
And in seats like Tony Burke’s there is a new movement determined to replicate her success.
The war in Gaza has galvanised them to be politically active and new movements like Muslim Votes Matters have been formed.
A formerly solid part of Labor’s base in these seats is threatening to walk away.
So what does the Prime Minister do?
He appoints one of his party’s most prominent pro-Palestinian voices to the key domestic national security portfolio.
Of course, Tony Burke swears he will always put the national interest first.
But we are entitled to question that claim given the decisions this government has made on national security.
It is very difficult to understand why they thought it was in the national interest to hand out 3,000 tourist visas to people fleeing a warzone controlled by a terrorist organisation in a haphazard process.
These numbers were wildly out of step with our closest allies and partners, like the United States, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, who handed out a fraction of the visas to people seeking to leave Gaza.
The process was so shambolic that we learned through documents released to the Senate that the department referred 2,601 visas to ASIO on a single day in March for security assessment.
That was long after most of the visas were issued and alarmingly after some had already entered Australia.
It later emerged that Tony Burke was personally meeting with Gaza tourist visa recipients to grant them humanitarian visas.
I am not aware of any modern precedent for this red-carpet service.
It is certainly not a service offered to the many other people who have issues with their visas and would like to stay in Australia.
And other than electoral politics, it is difficult to understand why a Home Affairs Minister would think this is a good idea.
Also difficult to understand is the shambolic process of handing out taxpayers’ money for social cohesion grants.
Through Senate estimates we discovered very little due diligence was conducted on the grant recipients.
That was evident because a few hours of searching the social media platforms of the lucky beneficiaries showed dozens of examples of racial hatred, praise for terrorism and even incitement to violence.
Only the Labor Party would think giving taxpayers’ money to hate preachers improves social cohesion.
Even more shockingly, months after this was brought to their attention, the government admitted it had not cancelled or sought to retract a single one of these grants.
The only explanation for this inexplicable decision is that this government puts its political interests ahead of the national interest.
It is more concerned about votes in our inner cities and Western Sydney than it is about social cohesion.
There is no contest for the government’s biggest failure on national security: antisemitism.
Because it is not just a failure of national security.
Or community safety.
Or social cohesion.
It is a moral failure.
Right from the start, the government has failed to recognise the seriousness of what we are confronting, let alone act on it.
Antisemitism is a scourge.
It can’t be tolerated. Or overlooked. Or ignored in the hope it will go away.
Because it festers and grows if it is not confronted.
Ever since 8 October 2023, when an extremist preacher addressed an impromptu rally in Western Sydney and said the actions of Hamas were a day of “elation” and “pride”, it was clear we had a very serious problem.
It only got worse on 9 October at the Sydney Opera House in shameful images that were beamed around the world.
And ever since that time the Jewish community and the Coalition have begged the Prime Minister to do more.
Like when Peter Dutton wrote to the Prime Minister on 14 November 2023 and suggested that a national cabinet be convened to address this crisis before it got out of control.
Anthony Albanese did not even have the decency to reply, and instead spent 14 months making excuses for why a national cabinet wasn’t necessary.
The day before he finally agreed to call one he even said: “What people want to see isn't more meetings, they want to see more action.”
Finally, after a childcare centre was firebombed, he relented.
But what was the “action” to come out of that meeting?
A new national database on antisemitism.
Set aside the fact that we already have databases on antisemitism, like the one maintained for years by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
How is a new database going to stop people who think there is nothing wrong with firebombing synagogues, cars, restaurants and even childcare centres?
Somehow, I doubt being a line on an excel spreadsheet is keeping them up at night.
The Prime Minister has failed to take up our suggestions for real consequences to deter these attacks, like mandatory minimum sentences for Commonwealth terrorism offences.
He declined to take up our offer to pass reformed incitement to violence provisions before Christmas, content to wait over a long summer of terror against the Jewish community before hopefully addressing it when the parliament returns in February.
He’s failed to ensure the law is enforced, most powerfully illustrated by the total impunity demonstrated by protestors waving the flags of listed terrorist organisations week-in-week out in our major cities, in open defiance of the law.
Again and again the Prime Minister sought to distance himself from these issues as something to be managed by law enforcement, as if this is somehow not his job.
It took the firebombing of Addas Israel Synagogue for him to finally convene a Federal Police Special Operation, and only after Peter Dutton and I called for one.
The four long days the Prime Minister waited before visiting, and the days of silence before Tony Burke made a public statement about the worst terrorist attack on the Jewish community in Australia, will never be forgotten.
The latest terrorism incident in Dural, only revealed this week ten days after it was referred to police, raises more troubling questions about the governments’ response.
When was the Prime Minister first briefed?
What actions did he take when he learned of it?
Was the National Security Committee of Cabinet convened?
Were state and territory leaders informed at national cabinet?
If you don’t know, you can’t act.
It would reveal a troubling breakdown in our national security architecture if the Prime Minister wasn’t promptly briefed like the NSW Premier.
Just as importantly, the Prime Minister has consistently failed to use the status of his office to clearly and unequivocally call out this un-Australian conduct.
For more than a year following escalating attacks on the Jewish community, Anthony Albanese and his senior ministers have seemed incapable of calling out antisemitism on its own.
Every rote denunciation of antisemitism had to be accompanied by a condemnation of Islamophobia and “all forms of racism” even when the attacks were overwhelmingly targeting the Jewish community.
By all means, call out the reprehensible attacks on Muslim Australians whenever they occur.
Every Australian deserves that.
But no community’s experience of racism has to be balanced against another’s like it is a competition of victimhood.
And a domestic terrorism crisis targeting one besieged community demands total moral clarity.
Not ambivalence. Not intransigence. Not weakness.
Worst of all, the Albanese government has not just been passive and feeble while antisemitism exploded on its watch.
It has actively licensed it through its own actions.
We know antisemites draw no distinction between the state of Israel and the Australian Jewish community.
They’ve made that clear when they target the former homes of Jewish community leaders and effortlessly intersperse anti-Israel and antisemitic graffiti on cars.
That means what our political leaders say about Israel matters.
When the Prime Minister baselessly implies Israel is guilty of deliberately murdering an Australian aid-worker, that fuels antisemitism.
When the Foreign Minister compares Israel, a friendly liberal democracy, to authoritarian states like Russia and China, that fuels antisemitism.
When the Australian government votes for one-sided anti-Israel motions at the United Nations that fail to condemn Hamas or call for the release of hostages, that fuels antisemitism.
When the Home Affairs, Education and Industry Ministers freelance with their own personal foreign policy and flirt with accusations of genocide, that fuels antisemitism.
And when the federal government shifts our foreign policy to reward Hamas and appease extremist protestors, that fuels antisemitism.
All of this has trashed an important bilateral relationship with a key intelligence partner, and left the Australian Jewish community feeling abandoned and betrayed in their hour of need.
It is little wonder Benjamin Netanyahu said of the attack on the Adass synagogue in Melbourne: “Unfortunately, it is impossible to separate this reprehensible act from the extreme anti-Israeli position of the Labor government in Australia…”
Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel also criticised the government in the wake of the recent antisemitic attacks in Sydney, saying “I note, however, that the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and other Australian ministers are refusing to accept any responsibility for the shocking recent surge in anti-Semitic terror in Australia. There is no doubt the rise in anti-Semitism in Australia has been caused in part by the Australian government’s ongoing campaign against Israel.”
It’s also little wonder that prominent ALP members like Dr Henry Pinskier and Bruce Hartnett have lost faith in the party.
To borrow a phrase, a Dutton Coalition government will be “taking a different approach” on national security, and the choice has never been clearer.
Instead of equivocation and weakness, we will bring total moral clarity to the evil of antisemitism.
Instead of buck-passing and handwringing, we will provide much needed federal leadership to our law enforcement and security agencies.
Instead of allowing high-risk offenders back into the Australian community, we will not hesitate to cancel visas and deport people of poor character.
Instead of the trademark chaos at the border we have come to expect from Labor, we will restore Operation Sovereign Borders in full to the tried and tested settings established by the Coalition.
And we will be unapologetically focused on protecting the community, even if some think that’s an “oddly narrow” view of the role of Home Affairs.
To do this we will need a Home Affairs portfolio that has all the tools it needs at its disposal.
We won’t be wasting time herding cats across multiple portfolios, or with complex inter-departmental committees.
I can confirm that under a Dutton Coalition Government, our key national security policy and operational agencies will be under one roof, working together seamlessly and reporting to one Minister.
ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Criminal Intelligence Commission and AUSTRAC will be returned to Home Affairs.
So will the key policy experts currently strewn across multiple Departments.
Home Affairs will again be the preeminent domestic national security portfolio.
And the high expectations we will have of them will be clear from day one.
Although I may have tormented them a bit in Senate estimates, I fundamentally believe in the Home Affairs portfolio and the dedicated and patriotic people who work there.
I know they get out of bed every morning because they want to keep their fellow Australians safe.
They are overwhelmingly professional and diligent Australians who have been let down by nonsensical machinery of government changes and leadership focused on all the wrong priorities – like airbrushing the Australian flag out of departmental headshots.
I know that with the right leadership they can do so much more for our country.
If we have the honour of forming government at the next election, the restoration of Home Affairs will be a key plank of our plan to get Australia back on track.
A Dutton Coalition government will provide the strong leadership required to keep Australians safe in a dangerous world.
ENDS
