September 4, 2024
TOM ELLIOTT: Our next guest is the shadow Home Affairs spokesperson, he is a Victorian Liberal Party Senator. James Paterson, good morning.
JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you.
ELLIOTT: I might be drawing a long bow here, but it seemed to me a few weeks ago that ASIO was all, well, we're not going to worry too much about your support of Hamas. You can still come here as a refugee. That appears to have changed now. Do you think it was because of the execution of the six Israeli hostages?
PATERSON: Well Tom, you're absolutely right about the unspeakable horror of this crime. I mean, let's be clear about this. Hamas is on par with ISIS and Al-Qaeda as a despicable terrorist organisation, and it's listed in its entirety as a terrorist organisation for very good reason in Australia. But to your question, I don't think the two things are linked. I don't think Mike Burgess ever meant to imply that it's not a bad thing to have Hamas supporters in our country. I don't think that's ever what he meant to say on Insiders. And I think it is really important that he's now made it crystal clear that any support for Hamas, any support for the 7th October terrorist attacks, any support for destroying the state of Israel means you are a security risk to Australia and you should not come to our country.
ELLIOTT: Okay but are you saying maybe he chose his words badly because he did say, oh well, if it's just rhetorical support, that's probably okay. And now he seems to be winding that back.
PATERSON: Look, I want to be cautious, not parsing the comments of the Director-General of Security publicly. I'm a politician, I don't want to get into position or comment on that explicitly, except to say David Speers is the toughest interview in the business. Many very experienced politicians have fallen afoul of David's questioning. I think the important thing is now, what's the Albanese governments view? Because we asked them in question time only a few weeks ago. Would it be a violation of the character test of the Migration Act, if you were a supporter of at listed terrorist organisation? And the Prime Minister couldn't give a straight answer that question. The Director-General of Security has now made clear that it not only would be a breach of the character provisions of the Migration Act, it is also a threat to Australia's security. But we now have 3000 tourist visas given to Gaza residents trying to come to Australia. How many of them support Hamas? How many of them support the destruction of Israel? How many of them support the 7th of October? We don't know, because the Albanese government didn't ask.
ELLIOTT: Do you think, and look, I'll just say it, I mean, we know with the Albanese government that there's an election coming up pretty soon, sometime in the next 6 or 7 months. You know, Labor definitely needs to hang on. The Prime Minister's popularity is down. There's a number of seats in Western Sydney which have a substantial number of Islamic voters or Muslim voters. Do you think that the government is trying to sort of walk both sides of the fence here and in order to not lose those seats?
PATERSON: I think that's the only possible conclusion we can draw, because on what planet would any previous Australian Prime Minister been unclear about whether or not it's okay to bring terrorist supporters into our country? I mean, I can't imagine any former Prime Minister whether I like them or dislike them, whether they were from my party or from the other party contemplating bringing in terrorist supporters to our country, not being clear about that. So really, that's the only logical conclusion that we can draw here. Anthony Albanese, and his Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, are putting their political interests ahead of the national interest.
ELLIOTT: Just going back to the 3000 visas which have been issued and some of them, a lot of them are tourist visas. I know not all the people who have been given the visas of actually come into Australia yet, but do you think that the appropriate security checks have been done?
PATERSON: No, I don't think they have been done. And we know that because on that Insiders interview Mike Burgess said that only a small number of them have been referred to his organisation for security assessment. We also know that no in person, face to face interviews took place. We also know that no biometric checks took place to confirm their identity. And these aren't just people fleeing a war zone. These are people fleeing a jurisdiction controlled for the last 20 years by a terrorist organisation. So we can't have any confidence that adequate security checks took place.
ELLIOTT: See, I know for a fact that back when we, admitted I think it was 12,000 Syrians over a decade ago, we actually sent, people from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Immigration over to Turkey and various other places to interview the people. I did have a caller on this program a week ago say, well, the Gazans who have got visas to Australia have been through Israeli security and Egyptian security, but I just don't know if that's true. Do you know about that?
PATERSON: Well, you do have to pass the Rafah gate, and you do need the permission of those two governments to pass it. But Australia should never outsource our security assessments to foreign governments. No security or intelligence agency is perfect. The Israelis are having a very active debate now about the failures of intelligence that led to the 7th of October. We should only rely on our own intelligence agency to do that assessment. And frankly, it's not only an intelligence assessment that needs to take place, it's a character test. The character test allows you to refuse people who come to our country at a much lower threshold than just being a security risk. Right now, the government is contemplating blocking the visa of Candace Owens, an American far right anti-Semite who wants to come to our country. Now she's not a supporter of a listed terrorist organisation, she's just an anti-Semite and they are going to block her visa. How do we know there's no anti-Semites among the 3000 tourist visas that the government handed out? We're in an unprecedented anti-Semitism crisis right now.
ELLIOTT: Yeah. Well, and you can imagine, for various reasons, most of them fairly obvious, that right now a lot of Gazans would have, not very nice feelings towards Israelis and therefore towards Jews. So if you're going to block Candace Owens, I mean, you would almost have to block almost every Gazan, wouldn't you?
PATERSON: And we don't even have to speculate about that Tom, because there is actually very good opinion polling research out of Gaza over many years from a range of international organisations and Palestinian organisations that show the lowest levels of support for Hamas at about 40%, some polls show it as high as 70%. Others show that support for the 7th of October attacks is overwhelming. So we have very good reason to believe that a significant proportion of these people have the views that Mike Burgess said should block them on security grounds.
ELLIOTT: All right. Thank you for your time, James Paterson there, Victorian Liberal Party Senator.
ENDS
