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February 18, 2026
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON
SHADOW MINISTER FOR DEFENCE
SENATOR FOR VICTORIA
TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEW
2CC Canberra
Wednesday, 18 February 2026
Topics: Appointment as Shadow Minister for Defence, new shadow cabinet, Coalition’s immigration policy, Labor should stop ISIS brides returning to Australia, home ownership
E&OE…………………………………………………………………………………………
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: One person that was always going to be at the forefront of this team, but in a new role, is Senator James Paterson, who's now the Shadow Minister for Defence and joins us now. James, good morning.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Great to be with you, Stephen.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: You can never get these things 100% right, but I think overall the balance is pretty good.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I think so too, mate. I think we've got some star performers back in frontline roles, like Andrew Hastie and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who are just critical to the task we have ahead, particularly of earning back the support of some of our former supporters who've left us. We've got some super energetic people like Tim Wilson as the Shadow Treasurer, some new and emerging talent like Claire Chandler as the Shadow Finance Minister and some wise heads like Ted O'Brien in Foreign Affairs, Michaelia Cash in Attorney General, Jonno Duniam in Home Affairs. So I'm really pleased with the team but of course these are difficult decisions and not everybody gets what they want and there always are some disappointments but I'm really proud of the team Angus has put together.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: The vote in the party room 34 to 17 for the leadership means that he's going to have a lot more stability than Sussan Ley had for the previous nine months but the party is still somewhat divided but it seems to be a little bit more united than it ever has been.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I certainly think that Angus Taylor has a strong mandate from the partyroom to lead and his Deputy Jane Hume also has a really strong mandate and I think they're an exceptional team. and we've seen that just over the first few days of their leadership, some really terrific engagement with the community and the media, very quickly moving on a frontbench to get that in place and get people working. And you'll see over the coming days and weeks some really clear direction from the Coalition about where we want go in terms of policy and values and ideas.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: The values statement I thought was made at that first press conference was important. And he talked about Australian values. Angus Taylor was talking about it. He talked about Australia values. And some of the things that obviously have been lacking in the Coalition's, I guess, upfront utterances. But the biggest issue you had at the last election was a lack of detailed policy. How soon do you need to put more meat on the bones of those value statements?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Look, Angus has recognised that and that's why he's appointed Zoe McKenzie and Simon Kennedy, who are two of the brightest emerging talents in our partyroom, to really central policy development roles. They're going to head up the policy development committee that's going to make sure that all of our shadow ministers are working towards really robust policy that will earn the trust and support of the Australian people when it's released and can be released in a timely way. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going release our entire election manifesto two years out from the election, that'd be ludicrous. But we will be putting more meat on the bones over the coming months in the kind of key areas that we know are important to Australians and that are important to Angus. He's really clearly outlined that restoring Australian's standard of living that's been lost under this government and protecting our way of life which has been under greater threat than ever before are the most important priorities for him and the Coalition.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: People are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I talk about the Howard era and John Howard talked about them being headland statements which weren't complete policies but were fairly detailed, I guess, directions on where you were going to go with certain policies. Dare I say it, a bit like One Nation's policy platform, they're not really policies but they're more value statements but with a bit more detail.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: One of the most important parts of political leadership is setting out your vision for where you want to go and that can really only be done with deep thought and long speeches and op-eds and other expressions of values and Angus has been doing that actually as a Shadow Minister. He wrote a really important article and did a really important interview with Paul Kelly last year about the direction of the Coalition and the importance of resting on our traditional values of markets but also patriotism and I think you're going to see a lot more that from him going forward.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Something I've been saying for years now is that we need to focus more on getting Aussies into home ownership rather than making them permanent tenants of the government because ownership is more than just a roof over your head. He did signal that as a priority moving forward, but that's easier said than done.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: You're right. This is a difficult policy problem, but it's one that we must solve for our country's sake and also for the Liberal Party's sake. We're a party of homeownership. That was Menzies vision for our party but also for our country and the truth is we've drifted a long way from that. It has become for many young people an unattainable dream, something that they now have no hope for the future about.And just restoring that hope of the possibility of homeownership is the first step, and the second step is actually getting people into homes because it transforms their lives and it makes our communities stronger as well. So, Andrew Bragg's been given that continued responsibility in housing, but it's deliberately been paired with the environment portfolio, because at the federal level, one of the major obstacles to more houses is environmental regulation and red tape, particularly the EPBC Act. And we want Andrew to clear away those obstacles to homeownership and home construction.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: How radical do you have to be in that area because I mean I've identified that the biggest real the biggest impediment to home ownership is affordability and the only way you can really fix that is by effectively reducing home prices for everybody because you know the property market is what is. It's a, it's a unique beast. Do you need to look at things like doing an audit of Federal land and becoming a developer yourself, maybe looking at rent to buy schemes and things like that, going back to things that we did in the 50s and 60s that worked that we just seemed to have abandoned over the last 30 or 40 years?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Look, we're really open-minded. Whatever it takes to get young Australians into a home is what we'll do. And the truth is that a lot of the levers that exist here are at the state and local government level. But the federal government has a leadership role to play to put pressure on the states to open up land to improve their planning systems so that we get that increase in supply of houses so that it is more affordable for first-home buyers. And we can't just let them get away with making those promises, but not being held accountable for them. And so that's a core part of our plan, which we'll be talking about more in the coming months.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Your role in Defence, obviously as a key backer of Angus Taylor, you would have had a lot of say in what portfolio you wanted. Why Defence and what do you bring to this role?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I think the existential challenges facing Australia today are our national security challenges. They're challenges to our way of life. You've heard people like Sir Angus Houston and others say that we are living in the most dangerous strategic environment since the end of World War II, but right now we don't have the policy settings or the investment in defence which matches that strategic environment. We're still only spending about 2% of GDP a year, which is just baseline peacetime spending when people like Professor Peter Dean and also Sir Angus tell us that we need to be spending much more like 3% and much more quickly. So I'm going to hold the Labor Party and Richard Marles to account on that. Frankly, if I do a good job, then Richard Marles will find it easier to go to the Expenditure Review Committee and demand more spending for defence and I'll be very happy.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: I want to talk about something you previously held the Shadow Portfolio for Home Affairs. Jonno Duniam continues in that role and now picks up Immigration, which means right in the middle of this ISIS brides situation we're talking about here at the moment, both sides talking a tough game here, although the Prime Minister seems to be prevaricating a bit, but Angus Taylor has said we need to shut the door on these people. Legally, we can't.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, we heard some rhetoric from the Prime Minister that, as usual, there hasn't been any action to back it up. We do actually have powers available to us to keep these people offshore. One of those powers is called a temporary exclusion order. It allows you to keep someone out of our country for up to two years if they've been associated with a terrorist organisation. Now, by definition, if you're a so-called ISIS bride, you've actually gone and joined ISIS and you've gone to support a terrorist organisation. And these are people who may have committed other offences while they're over there. As a starting point, it was an offence to travel to the so-called Islamic State caliphate deep in Iraq and Syria over that period under the declared area provisions. So there are options available to the government if they choose to take them.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: Sure, but ultimately as Australian citizens, if indeed they are Australian citizens we have an obligation to repatriate them and even if you do exclude them for two years, doesn't that create an environment where they might be even further radicalised?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, I have to suggest that someone who left a peaceful, safe, secure, prosperous liberal democracy like Australia to join a death cult that persecuted, raped and tortured ethnic minorities and religions probably is pretty radicalised to begin with and extra time over there probably won't change their world view. You're right, ultimately you can't indefinitely keep someone offshore. But frankly, I think this government's gone out of their way to facilitate the return of these people. They haven't even tried to delay their return. I mean, it's been reported that one of the organisers of this freelance repatriation effort is Dr. Jamal Rifi, who is, of course, a respected community leader. And he also just happens to be a very close friend of Tony Burke, who campaigned for him to be re-elected at the last election. So I think Tony Burke needs to come clean about what he knew about these repatriations plans, when he knew about them, and what he did to stop them.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: But ultimately, aren't we better off, because we're also talking about children here who realistically have been caught in the middle of this. It's no fault of their own. Aren't we better off just automatically repatriating these people? If we deem that they need to be locked up or prosecuted, we do that. But surely we can manage this situation a lot better than Syria can?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, of course, I have much more sympathy for any children in these circumstances, particularly if they were born over there or they were taken over there as minors and had no say in the matter. But that doesn't mean that this cohort doesn't pose a risk to Australians and Australia. And the first and most important duty of the Australian Government is to protect Australians here at home. There have been repatriations of minors only in years previously. And as far as I'm aware, all the current cohorts have refused to allow the adults to be separated from the children for a repatriation operation. And so we do have to very carefully consider whether the adults pose an unacceptable risk to Australia. Some media reports have indicated that among this cohort are high-risk individuals. And other media reports suggest that they have not been interviewed by the Australian government for three years. So we really have to understand what the risks are that we're dealing with here.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: In broader terms, do we need to reassess our laws around citizenship, make it harder to get citizenship? And Angus Taylor talked about, you know, we want people to come to this country who share our values. Now he hasn't yet articulated exactly what those values are, but how do you determine somebody's values? It's easy enough to say, well, okay, you've committed this crime or you don't speak English or whatever, but anybody can lie and say, yeah, I'm all on board with your values. Let me in.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well actually Angus has articulated that. He said the three most important Australian values are a belief in democracy, respect for the rule of law and respect for our basic freedoms. Those are universal Australian values. They're not political values of one party or the other and they're the absolute bare minimum that we should expect from someone who wants to come to this country. Now you're right it is possible that people can lie as part of an application for a visa or citizenship and not really support our values. That's why we have intelligence agencies and we should be using all the tools available to assess whether these people are just saying they support our values or whether they've actually lived those values in their lives.
STEPHEN CENATIEMPO: James good to talk to you and congratulations on being reappointed to the Shadow Ministry.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thanks for having me Stephen.
ENDS