August 20, 2024
CHRIS KENNY: Let's duck down to Canberra and catch up with Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson. James, thanks for joining us. This news that visas have been cancelled, visas issued to people from Gaza, cancelled. Some of them reinstated on review. Do we have any idea of the exact numbers or why they were cancelled?
JAMES PATERSON: Chris, no one in Canberra is any the wiser as to what the government is talking about when they're talking about the number of visas that they've cancelled. They've been putting out these numbers to try and make it look like the system's working and they're tough. They said there's 43 visas cancelled at the moment. They're refusing to say what that is about, but in February this year, a spokesman for Clare O'Neil implied that it was for security reasons. It may be for security reasons, but also 20 of those were overturned on appeal. So hopefully it wasn't for security reasons, if they were overturned on appeal and allowed to come to this country. I mean, the truth is that the government is obfuscating here. They don't want to be transparent about this because they've got a lot to hide. This is a government that has brought people in at record rates on tourist visas, far faster and in far greater numbers than any of our like minded partners or friends.
KENNY: Now, one of the bits of information that we need that the Coalition asked in Parliament today and we got no answers on, is whether any of these visas have been cancelled for people who are already in Australia, or were these visas cancelled for people who are waiting to come here from Gaza, this makes a huge difference, doesn't it?
PATERSON: It certainly does Chris and again, the government is not publicly being clear about that, although I understand they are briefing journalists furiously off the record, trying to imply that none of those that were cancelled were in Australia. But some of them were in transit to Australia and I understand, some of them might have been very close to getting on a plane to come to Australia, and with moments to spare, before they boarded their flights, some visas were cancelled. I mean, this has been a shambolic process from start to finish. It is not appropriate to give 3,000 tourist visas to people leaving a war zone controlled by a terrorist organisation in an average of 24 hours, and in some instances as quickly as one hour.
KENNY: Well, as I said in the introduction, Anthony Albanese tried to say as little as possible on this today, but I want to just show a clip of one of his responses in Parliament.
[CLIP] ANTHONY ALBANESE: In this case, we have rejected more than 7000 visa applications. Fewer than 1300 people are here. And I remind the Leader of the Opposition that the Rafah border crossing is controlled by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities. Let's be clear about what is happening here. Israel closed the Rafah border crossing in May. They're not letting people out.
KENNY: Now James Paterson, he's right there, isn't he? We're not getting people in from Gaza anymore because they can't get out of Gaza. But doesn't that mean there's an opportunity here, during that pause for the government to put in a decent third country processing scheme?
PATERSON: That's exactly right, Chris. As we've been saying this week, this is the opportunity for the government to get this right, to put in place an equivalent process to what the former government had when people were leaving Afghanistan and when people were fleeing Syria. We had people processed in third countries, for example, in northern Iraq, when it was controlled by Coalition forces. In the UAE, in Lebanon, in Turkey, in other places in the region where it was safe to put Australian government officials on the ground to conduct those in-person, face to face interviews, to do biometric tests. And it took us, in some instances, up to 12 months to satisfy ourselves that there was no security risk and Peter Dutton, as Home Affairs and Immigration Minister throughout this period was attacked for being too slow. But we took the time to get it right. And they've not done this when it comes to Gaza, and that's an extraordinary thing to do, given that we've got polling out of Gaza, which shows that up to 70% of Gaza residents are supportive of Hamas and their atrocities on the 7th of October. We don't want anyone with attitudes like that coming into our country at a time of record anti-Semitism and threatened social cohesion.
KENNY: Now Australia's got a proud history in doing its part internationally and in giving humanitarian access to refugees. But why, in this case, should Australia be leading the world both in terms of numbers and speed of processing?
PATERSON: That's right Chris. So what we've discovered today is that Australia has brought in more people more quickly than the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Italy, so many of our other like minded partners. And not just a little bit more. In many cases, ten times as many people we brought in in that period of time. It's bizarre to think that Australia is one of the countries bearing the heaviest load of Gaza evacuees since the 7th of October. In the developed world, there's only two countries that we could find that had brought in more in that period, Greece and Belgium. Why should Australia be leading the pack on that? The government has provided no explanation as to why they've chosen to do this. No explanation as to why this is in our national interest, and no explanation as to why it should be so rushed.
KENNY: Yeah, it's a worry. We need a lot more from the government. They need to be more upfront about this as well as revising those security checks. Thanks for joining us, James.
ENDS
