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Transcripts
October 9, 2025
GARY ADSHEAD: Let's go to James Paterson. Senator James Paterson, acting Home Affairs opposition spokesperson, who joins me on the line. Hi, Senator.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Good to be with you, Gary.
GARY ADSHEAD: Okay. Now, I'll start with this bit. It's that you asked Penny Wong, the Foreign Minister, in the Senate Estimates, to sort of put a description around when the government says they did not repatriate these women and children, what that meant. How did you go with that question?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, it was even more simple than that. The government said that they did not provide any "assistance" to these people. They didn't even say they didn't repatriate them, just simply that they didn't provide assistance. The Prime Minister said multiple times in the first week of September, when this story was first published in The Australian, that the government provided no assistance. So I tried to get the Minister to explain what the government considered assistance to be, how they defined assistance - which she refused to do - and whether or not, for example, granting citizenship by descent to children while overseas, granting them passports, and then effectively allowing them to enter the country with those documents, constituted assistance. And I didn't get very far.
GARY ADSHEAD: So the sort of words that are being used are the definition of repatriation and helping with repatriation or assistance. All right. What's the problem, though, that you have if these two women, who are Australian citizens, I am assuming, have returned here with four children?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: My problem is that they effectively repudiated their allegiance to Australia when they left our country to go and join one of the most deplorable death cults and terrorist organisations ever to have been in existence, that engaged in the most savage abuse of the rights of the people underneath them, including rape and torture and murder, and that people like that, yes, have a legal right to return to our country, but only under certain circumstances. For example, the government can apply for a temporary exclusion order to keep them offshore for up to two years so that we're ready to charge them with criminal offences when they return and they failed to do so.
GARY ADSHEAD: I note that Tony Burke said in Parliament yesterday, of course, he's the Home Affairs minister, he was talking about what the previous government had done, the Morrison government had done in terms of helping with people coming back to Australia. But he sort of went out of his way to say that, you know, the security authorities would have been well aware of these people. And so therefore we need not worry because they would have assessed them.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, I can tell you that the Australian Assyrian Christians, the Chaldean Christians, who are Middle Eastern Christians, and the Yazidis, who we settled in our country after the rise and fall of Islamic State, so that they would have a safe place to live. They don't feel reassured. They don't feel safe. They don't feel protected by this government. One of the reasons is probably because the government didn't reach out to these communities, and has had no contact with any of these communities. And another reason is probably that yesterday was the first time since this story broke that Tony Burke actually addressed this issue. He finally surfaced for air. He finally answered a question. Why didn't he do a press conference a week ago, two weeks ago, when they returned to outline the facts and explain to the Australian people how he was keeping them safe?
GARY ADSHEAD: So, by the fact that the government is saying, well, we didn't have any role in repatriating these people, are you saying that they're trying to pretend that they didn't even know that they were coming back?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, that was the implication when the Prime Minister was first asked about this, because he was asked about a report in The Australian by Liam Mendes, which said these people were seeking to return. And the Prime Minister simply initially said those reports are not accurate. The impression he left was that there was no one coming back, and he did not say that the government is aware of these people, were planning and preparing for them. We've got steps in place to protect the community. He just said those reports are not accurate. Now, we now know, of course, the government did know. They knew for months. They were briefed by agencies and by a charity group called Save the Children, which was advocating for the return of these people. And they didn't disclose this to the Australian community.
GARY ADSHEAD: All right. Now, we know that they did come out of Syria, but we don't know the circumstances of that. Certainly, the government is saying they had no role in putting them on planes or anything like that to come back to Australia. They're saying that that might have been done with the help of Save the Children. But the point I think we need to understand is that, you know, people can't just arrive in Australia without some level of government knowing about it.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Exactly right. And so the language that Tony Burke was using in the House of Representatives today was different to the language the Prime Minister has previously used. The Prime Minister has said we've provided them with no assistance. Tony Burke said today, we provided them with the support that they are entitled to as Australian citizens. So that's a very different framing and I think a very important distinction, because it acknowledges that without this citizenship by descent, without the passports, and critically, without applying for a temporary exclusion order, these people would not be able to come home. And so the government has effectively sanctioned their return to Australia by giving them that citizenship by descent, by giving them those passports, and failing to apply for a temporary exclusion order.
GARY ADSHEAD: And it goes without saying that, of course, if ASIO or ASIS were involved in doing some sort of evaluation, well, that's part of the process of them coming back into the country under some form of government sanction, isn't it?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: I've got total faith in our police and our security agencies; they are good at what they do, and I'm sure they're diligently applying themselves to this task. But I don't understand why these people have not yet been charged with any offences. It is an offence to associate with a terrorist organisation. If you went to join ISIS, you were associated with a terrorist organisation. It's also an offence to be in the area of Islamic State, which the government created as a declared area. That's an offence unless you have a permissible reason to be there, and going to marry an ISIS fighter is not a permissible reason. So that's two offences minimum these people have plausibly committed, plus potential other terrorism offences if they are involved directly in enacting terrorism. Why haven't they been charged?
GARY ADSHEAD: Do we know where they're living?
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Well, that's the other thing. Not only will the government not tell us which suburbs or which cities they're living in, they won't even tell us what state or territory they're living in. There have been media reports that they may be in New South Wales. There have been other media reports that they may be in Victoria. We don't know if they're in Western Australia. We've got no idea what state or territory they are in. And that is one of the reasons why those persecuted minorities from Syria, whom we resettled, feel particularly anxious about this. They don't know whether they're living among their captors, their jailers, their torturers.
GARY ADSHEAD: All right. James Paterson, thanks very much for going through it with us.
SENATOR JAMES PATERSON: Thanks for having me.
ENDS