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Transcripts
October 9, 2025
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: We're joined by the Shadow Minister for the Public Service, Shadow Minister for Finance, Shadow Minister for Government Services, and I think he's picked up a few more now, Senator James Paterson. James, good morning.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Great to be with you.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: What are you the Minister for these days? Dennis Shanahan calling you the Ghostbuster - who you gonna to call?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well I've got three substantive portfolios that you mentioned, and yes I'm also acting as the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs on an interim basis, and yes, I do have my plate full, but mostly because of the failings of the Albanese Government, not the responsibilities my Leader has bestowed on me. Whether it's ISIS brides, or indeed the debt and deficit this government, the trajectory they've put us on, we have a lot of work to do.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I want to talk about the ISIS brides in a moment, but Senate Estimates this week has been absolutely extraordinary, and I want to touch on an exchange that Senator Claire Chandler had with Dr. Anna Cody, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner. Now, when the word sex is in your job description, shouldn't it be a requirement that you know the difference between the sexes? Because Dr. Cody says she doesn't understand what a biological man is.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON:I wasn't in the hearing at that point but I'm not surprised that my colleague Senator Chandler was so easily able to trip up the Commissioner, because this is a Commission which is infected with - and taken over by – ideology, and common sense has left that institution a long time ago. I think it's become thoroughly discredited, and this is yet another example of it. Claire was asking a straightforward question that has a straightforward answer, and I'm astonished that the Commissioner was not able to do so.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: An extraordinary answer. Let's talk about these so-called ISIS brides. We now... I mean, the Prime... You've accused the Prime Minister of misleading Parliament here. Your colleague, Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Michalia Cash, has accused the government of a political cover-up here. It's hard to describe it as anything else.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well that's right, because we've had to spend several days like pulling teeth in Senate Estimates hearings, over hours and hours and hours, just to get some basic facts, like who has returned to our country? When did they return to our country? How did they return to our country? But so many questions remain unanswered, even pretty basic ones like: where are they living? The government won't even tell us which state or territory they're in, whether they'll be charged with offences, and any assistance they got from the government beyond what they're now terming the “normal assistance” of granting citizenship by descent and providing passports.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Because, I mean, the government and the responses from Senator Wong in Estimates yesterday were pretty mealy-mouthed, and her argument seemed to be that because they weren't flown back on a chartered jet, the government didn't assist them, and that's a fairly narrow view of what government assistance is, I would have thought?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I would say Senator Wong and the government generally have been contemptuous of transparency, and contemptuous scrutiny on this issue, but in a rare moment of honesty an Assistant Minister, Matt Thistleswhite, said while they didn't repatriate the people, they did provide them with the "normal assistance" to come back to Australia, and that includes things like that documentation, without which you can't enter our country, but it also is assistance by omission. They could have applied for a temporary exclusion order to keep these people offshore, but they didn't. They could have applied for control orders since they've returned to this country to control their movements, but they haven't, and they should explain why.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Because, of course, normal assistance is right, you know, providing visas and passports. That is the normal assistance we'd given to anybody repatriating to Australia. But surely that still comes with checks and balances.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: And indeed the Prime Minister didn't say “we've only provided the normal assistance”. He said in the House "we've provided no assistance". He didn't caveat it. It wasn't carefully worded. It was not nuanced. He just said over and over again "no assistance". He also implied strongly that he knew nothing about this. But we now know the government knew as early as June, that the Minister for Home Affairs, Tony Burke, had two secret meetings with the Save the Children charity who were advocating for these people to return, but we don't know exactly what was said at those meetings.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: So what should the process be here? Because let's go back a step. Now, we're talking about the wives of Australia, well, Australian residents, at least. I don't know how many of them were citizens, who decided to go and fight with the terrorist organisation ISIS in the Middle East. Now, a decade later, after being... Now, you would think that these women that we're talking about here went voluntarily. Now, the children, I imagine, weren't born in Australia. What would the process normally be if these people wanted to be repatriated to Australia?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, we sometimes call them ISIS brides or ISIS wives, but I think we should actually just remember these people were just members of ISIS. They were Australians who were inspired by Islamic State and went over to join them and assist their cause, and this is one of the most barbarous terrorist organisations ever to have existed, who engaged in the most shocking and reprehensible persecution of Assyrian Christians and Yazidis and other minorities. So, my view is that the government should act in Australia's national interest and put the safety and security of Australian residents first, and use all the powers available to prevent the return of anyone who may pose a risk to Australia. That's why we created things like temporary exclusion orders. But what we also did is we passed laws like declared area provisions which made it automatically an offence to be in an area controlled by Islamic State unless you have a permissible reason to be there. So, they should be prosecuted under these laws, they should also be prosecuted under the laws for associating with a listed terrorist organisation and they should be off the streets and in custody to protect the Australian people.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: So as it stands at the moment, we think that there's two adult women who have been repatriated and four children. Do you think this scrutiny now puts a handbrake on further repatriations?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well this is the thing we don't know. There are apparently dozens more of people like this living in the camps in Syria who may also seek to return home and based on how the Albanese government has handled this one, I have no confidence they'll be able to handle that if those people also make their way there. In fact, they've started using really loose language like "self-managed return". This is not a superannuation fund, we're not talking about people's retirement savings. A "self-managed return" sounds to me like a completely uncontrolled, unmanaged return, like this government has no say in the process, when actually they've got a lot of say if they choose to use it.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Yeah well it sounds like they're booking a holiday in the Maldives. But on a broader level, as you say, these people were associated with a listed terrorist organisation. We've seen a massive rise in antisemitism over the last two years in Australia. We've now, and I've been saying this all along, that all these so-called pro-Palestinian groups are actually pro-Hamas, and the latest graffiti now proves that. How do you think this plays into the social cohesion disruptions that we're seeing at the moment?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well I'm really concerned about it and don't just take my word for it, listen to the voices of the Australian Assyrian Christian community, or the Australian Yazidi community, who have been outspoken about their distress, that their captors and their jailers and their torturers who they've fled, and who we have provided a home for, are now here among them again, and the government has done nothing to reassure these communities. They have not reached out, they have not met with them, they've not reassured them that they will be safe, and so they will be distressed and uncertain, but so will many other Australians, including Jewish Australians, particularly at a time when we're commemorating the two-year anniversary of the 7th of October, and people are insensitively using that as a day for protest and celebration.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: It is extraordinary. I want to touch on one other thing that was covered in estimates yesterday, and I'm not sure if you were in the hearing or not, but the ABC's come under fire for its coverage of a lot of these things. Now, we know that many media outlets have decided to gobble up the propaganda rather than actually dig a little bit deeper, but sadly our national broadcaster has been at the forefront of that.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Sadly, I'm not surprised that this has happened at the national broadcaster. Of course there are some good people at the ABC who do some good work, but too often on issues like this, they just go with the zeitgeist, they just go with the herd, they just go with conventional opinion, and on questions like Israel-Palestine, it is often unreasonable and unfair, and holds Israel to a standard they would never hold any other country to, and I think the ABC should really examine themselves and provide a genuinely unbiased factual presentation of the conflict, not one sided.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: What's on the agenda for today?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, I'll be in the Treasury Estimates today, asking questions about the government's plan to have 10 years of deficits and $1.2 trillion of debt. My colleagues will be pursuing defence matters today, and tomorrow we'll have the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where we'll have an opportunity to ask further questions about their involvement in the return of these ISIS Brides.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Extraordinary that when we saw a smaller deficit than was planned, the response from the Treasurer seemed to be, yeah, but we were going to spend more money than we did. Look, you know, you've got to laugh, otherwise you cry about this stuff. James, I know you're a busy man, I appreciate your time this morning.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thanks, Stephen.
ENDS