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Transcripts
May 7, 2026
TOM ELLIOT: Our next guest, Shadow Defence Minister, Senator James Paterson, good morning.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Good morning Tom.
TOM ELLIOT: Well, I mean the ISIS brides are coming back here, they are coming to Melbourne. Will some of them face charges here, do you think?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: We believe they will. The AFP commissioner has said that a number of them are under investigation, a number of them are likely to be charged, and ultimately it'll be a matter for the courts whether they're convicted or not. But even the ones who aren't charged might require surveillance by the AFP and ASIO. So very significant resources are going to have to go into observing this cohort.
TOM ELLIOT: Our government and the Syrian government are all denying giving these women and their children any assistance whatsoever, yet they've managed to get a bus out of Syria all the way into Turkey, they appear to have money, they've bought plane tickets, they're being given new Australian passports because they ripped up the old ones. Is the government lying about this?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Yes, you're right to be sceptical about this, Tom. To get an Australian passport overseas, particularly if you're living in a war zone, is not an easy thing to do. And if you have children born overseas, you actually first have to apply for citizenship by descent, which is facilitated by the Department of Home Affairs, and then a passport. And actually, the federal government has the power to say no. The Passport Act allows you to refuse or cancel a passport if they represent a security risk. Now, if these people are serious enough of a security risk to be investigated and charged when they come home, then they should have been a serious enough security risk to cancel their passports. So, under the Passport Act, they could have been denied passports? Absolutely, there's no question. In fact, the former Abbott government, when Islamic State first got off the ground, cancelled dozens and dozens of passports of people who first wanted to go and fight for ISIS and others who'd managed to get over there and were trying to return home. They cancelled those passports to make sure they couldn't get home. And frankly, the Albanese government and the Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, have to explain why they haven't done the same.
TOM ELLIOT: Is it, I mean, I'll look at it simplistically, the Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has a western suburb Sydney seat, I think roughly one in three of the people in the seat are Islamic. I mean, is that the reason he's doing this?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, it's interesting you should ask that because one of his most important political supporters is an Islamic community leader called Dr Jamal Rifi, and he has been campaigning to bring these people home. In fact, before the election, Dr Rifi sent out communications to the electorate saying the only chance of getting the ISIS brides and their children home was for Labor to be re-elected, and he encouraged people to vote Labor on that basis. Now, Tony Burke can try and distance himself from this, but one of his close political supporters is helping to bring them back into the country, and I think he's got to take responsibility.
TOM ELLIOT: But why do even Muslim Australians want people from Islamic State coming back here? I mean, that regime was a death cult. I mean, they burnt people alive, they pressed young women into sexual slavery. I mean, there was so much about it that was just absolutely horrendous. Why are they so keen to have them back here?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I don't know Tom, and I suspect actually lots of Muslims Australians don't want them here. I mean, these are radicals, these are extremists, these are people who made a choice, as you say, to go to one of the worst terrorist organisations in the world, an Islamist death cult that raped and tortured and murdered Yazidis and others. And as a country, we made a decision to provide refuge for those Yazidis, and Chaldeans, and Assyrians and other Middle Eastern Christians who are victims of Islamic State. Many of them live in Victoria, and right now they don't know whether these people are going to become their neighbours. And frankly, I think the Victorian government has questions to answer here. Did Anthony Albanese give Jacinta Allan a heads up? What did Jacinta Allan say? Did she say we don't want these people in our home state or did she say she'd take them?
TOM ELLIOT: What about the kids? I do feel a bit sorry for some of the kids. I mean, it wasn't their choice to be born and have fathers who are terrorists and all that sort of thing. I mean, should we feel sympathetic towards them?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Of course, there's more sympathy for children who had no choice in the matter, who were either taken over as minors or were born overseas as minors. And in the past, there have been repatriations of children separate from their parents. And that can be appropriate in the right circumstances. But no one has proposed doing that in this circumstance. They've happily taken both the parents and the children back. And I think that's a real risk to our national security.
TOM ELLIOT: So all right, so they're going to be, if they're arrested, they'll be arrested for things that they did in Islamic State. Do you think the mothers represent a threat still now to Australians once they're let back in?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Personally, I don't think we should take any comfort from their gender, and sometimes we call them ISIS brides like that's less serious. But they were members of ISIS. They went to join ISIS, they went to support ISIS, and we know that women were critical in ISIS operations, including presiding over some of the torture and subjugation of those ethnic minorities and religious minorities underneath their care. So, we shouldn't diminish the seriousness of what they've done just because of their gender.
TOM ELLIOT: Alright, well thank you for that. I want to ask you one more thing. This was outside a voting booth, a pre-poll voting booth in Farrer, part of the Farrer by-election a day or so ago.
[CLIP FROM FARRER PRE-POLL]
TOM ELLIOT: Alright now, James Paterson, you're the more sensible voice in that, and the other person I believe was handing out how to vote cards for One Nation. What happened?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, the One Nation volunteer took great exception to a poster on the booth. It was actually a National Party poster, which pointed out that David Farley is a former member of the Labor Party, that he was a donor to the Labor Party, and that he tried to be a candidate for the Labor Party, and he's now running as One Nation's candidate. And my view is voters have a right to know. They can make their own judgment about whether that's a problem or not and decide accordingly, but he was very unhappy that that was there. And he engaged me in a verbal exchange initially, which is fine. Happy to have a spirited debate on a polling booth. But it should never cross the line into physical altercation, which it did yesterday.
TOM ELLIOT: Did it actually get violent?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well he grabbed my jacket while also taking my phone from me. So, I mean, I'm ok, and I don't feel the need to press charges. I've had worse than junior footy, to be honest, but One Nation should take responsibility for their volunteers.
TOM ELLIOT: Okay, and how do you sense the Farrer by-election is going to go?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Look, I think One Nation certainly started the race as unbackable favourites, just given the circumstances of the by-election, it's a regional electorate. But their candidate has had a number of missteps, and I think he's struggling under the scrutiny. Not only has he had Labor associations, he has had Teal associations, and he's contradicted One Nation policy on migration and on foreign aid. So let's see what happens on Saturday night, but I suspect they've still got their noses in front.
TOM ELLIOT: He sounds a bit like my former school chaplain. I went to a Baptist school, and he was a Baptist then, and I bumped into him a few years ago. I said, oh, are you still in the Baptist church. He said, Oh, no, no. I gave the Catholics a go for a while, and now I'm Church of England.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Yes, so I think it is David Farley's fourth political party, One Nation, now. So he's shopped around, and in recent years, it wasn't that long ago, he was supporting a teal only about 12 months ago.
TOM ELLIOT: All right, look, thank you for your time. Senator James Patterson there, Shadow Defence Minister.
ENDS