Social services minister backs investigation into claims over WA police after double murder
Amanda Rishworth was asked about the statement on ABC News Breakfast and said:
What Ms Bombara expressed was incredibly powerful, as you said. I think it requires an enormous bravery, particularly at a time when she would be grieving, to speak up and make these comments. And, you know, her urge for action is also very powerful. I think she has highlighted a number of areas where she didn’t get the response she needed from police, and so it is very right that the Western Australian police commissioner is investigating this, to look at where it went wrong.
Key events
Karen Middleton
Heading into a senate estimates committee room now, and Home Affairs secretary, Stephanie Foster, is back in the hot-seat in the Legal and Constitutional Affairs estimates committee this morning and they’ve gone straight to questions.
Shadow home affairs minister James Paterson inquires whether any answers have been produced overnight to the questions he lodged yesterday. But Foster says no, not yet.
Paterson is continuing with questions about immigration minister Andrew Giles’ direction 99, which is the direction that people challenging the cancellation of their visas can have their extent of their ties to Australia considered.
Paterson asks about the departmental protocol introduced early last year that the minister be notified of priority cases.
The departmental officer, Jacob McMahon, has clarified that it wasn’t a formal protocol but a proposal the department put to the minister.
It was our way of trying to manage the backlog,” he says.
Paterson presses him on whether the minister asked for the triaging process to be set up because he was being swamped.
McMahon says the department is always looking for ways to be more efficient.
I don’t want a hypothetical of what it could’ve been. What was it?” Paterson asks.
And, we’re off.
The vote will be held, but the government will not support the motion, and so it will fail.
Tim Watts goes through the official government position on recognition of the Palestinian state:
On the question of recognition, we have made clear that we will be guided by whether recognition will advance the cause for peace.
Like many countries, Australia has been frustrated by the lack of progress in this regard. Like Germany and the UK, staunch friends of Israel, Australia no longer sees recognition as only occurring at the end of the process, it could occur as part of a peace process.
And only once there’s progress on serious governance reforms and security concerns.
Hamas is a terrorist organisation. We see no role for them in this. A Palestinian state cannot be in a position to threaten Israel’s security. We want to see a reformed Palestinian governing authority that is committed to peace, that disavows violence and is ready to engage in a meaningful peace process.
We want to see a commitment to peace and how the Palestinian Authority leads its people The final status of core issues such as Jerusalem, and the borders of a future Palestinian state should be defined through direct negotiations.
The assistant minister for foreign affairs, Tim Watts is officially announcing that the government will not be supporting the motion to suspend standing orders.
The member for Melbourne knows pretty well that he is not moving the motion today to recognise Palestine is moving a procedural question about dealing with the parliaments agenda.
The member from Melbourne knows full well that procedural motions like this are always opposed. Why? Why he would be deliberately setting up a vote on Palestinian recognition to fail. It’s something that only he can answer.
The Greens party had an opportunity to select this motion for debate and an allocated time on Monday, but they chose not to. The reason only the Greens leader could explain.
The Prime Minister and Penny Wong has made clear statements in the last month about the government’s approach to Palestinian recognition. This is the same approach that The Greens are trying to exploit the war of votes.
Simplistic wedge motions in the house do nothing to advance the cause of peace.
Wedge politics only divides the community. We gain nothing from the Greens seeking to reproduce this conflict in our own community.
Adam Bandt is continuing his plea for the house to support his motion to suspend standing orders to debate his motion for the house to recognise Palestine.
What this motion is about is about recognition and recognition only. And this isn’t just a political question, it is a deeply moral question as well.
Because the people of Palestine have enjoyed displacement and suffering for far too long.
This motion is about saying the values that we hold dear, the right to live in freedom and exercise self determination, and to wake up every day thinking about how am I going to make my life better, rather than how am I going to avoid another bomb that is going to fall on me – those simple values about wanting to live in peace and security.
This is about saying those values should be enjoyed equally by everyone around the world. Those values of peace and security and self determination should be enjoyed equally by Palestinians and Israelis alike.
And this is about saying, as a matter of morality, we will not stand by as others rights to self determination and to live in peace and security and freedom destroyed.
Bandt says “hand wringing tweets” from the Labor government is no longer good enough.
His colleague Max Chandler-Mather is seconding the motion. Bob Katter can be herd interjecting once again.
The government will not support this, on the ground it does not (unless there is prior agreement) support motions to change up the business of the day.
Bandt moves for parliament to recognise Palestinian state
Greens leader Adam Bandt has taken the floor after the prayers and acknowledgements to move to suspend standing orders to debate his motion that the house recognise the state of Palestine.
“This is not just a symbolic move,” he says. “It is a critical step towards peace and towards ending the slaughter that we are seeing with the invasion of Gaza right now.
It is a concrete step towards peace and as the prime minister of Norway said last week, there cannot be peace in the Middle East if there is no recognition.
It is critical that we debate this now, just as other countries have interrupted what they were doing to recognise Palestine now because of the scale … and the genocide that we are witnessing is now topping 36,000 people, or 36,000 civilians, who have been slaughtered.
A health system has been destroyed. There are mass graves in hospitals. Aid has been blocked. Children are now dying because they did not have enough to eat or drink.
We are seeing right now a human engineered famine that is taking a toll on a civilian population that amounts to collective punishment of these people.
And it is time for countries including Australia to step in and do something and just as other countries have made it a priority to recognise the state of Palestine.
So should this government today, right now, by backing this motion now.
Bob Katter can be heard shouting something at Adam Bandt and is told to stop interjecting by speaker Milton Dick.
The bells have rung and the House of Representatives sitting is about to begin (the Senate isn’t sitting this fortnight, and instead is holding budget estimates hearings).
First up in government business – the “nature positive” legislation Tanya Plibersek has announced.
Cait Kelly
Australia Institute calls for fast fashion tax and garment levy hike
The government should implement a fast fashion tax and increase the proposed garment levy from 4c to 50c, the Australia Institute says.
Nina Gbor, the circular economy and waste program director at the Australia Institute, said new research showed Australia had surpassed the US as the world’s biggest consumer of textiles per capita.
Australians buy an average of 56 new clothing items a year, more than the US (53), UK (33 items) and China (30). According to the report, Australians are also buying the cheapest, spending on average $13, compared to $40 in the UK, $24 in the US and $30 in Japan.
Gbor:
Australians are the world’s biggest consumer of clothes, shoes and bags per capita. We’re addicted to stuff that is harming our health and the environment.
We need to drastically reduce waste at the source by penalising brands for mass-producing incredibly cheap and poor-quality clothing that is often worn just a handful of times or never sells and goes straight to the tip.
The Seamless scheme, run by the Australian Fashion Council (AFC), has proposed a levy of 4c on signatory retailers, with big brands such as Big W, Cotton On Group, The Iconic and David Jones already signing up. The AFC has said the money will go to sustainability projects, with the levy starting between 2024-25. It has federal government backing.
Gbor said it needed to be 50c for it to be meaningful change. She also called for a French-style tax on fast-fashion garments, and a ban on fast-fashion advertising.
The French government is set to bring in a new tax that will trace the eco-footprint of a garment and tax companies if it is rated poorly.
Gbor:
We’re walking around in plastic clothes made from petroleum. Many of these items end up in landfill or are dumped in countries in the global south, where they fill up their landfills, pollute beaches and oceans and contribute to more emissions.
Shein and Temu are expected to make more than $2 billion in sales this year combined. The federal government could redirect some of their profits to cut clothing waste and fund a domestic recycling and a circular textiles industry.
Greens push for Palestinian state recognition in parliament
The House of Representatives will sit from 9am and as we reported yesterday, the Greens will be moving a motion that “this House recognise the state of Palestine”.
As Daniel Hurst reported yesterday, Greens leader Adam Bandt wants Labor to make good on “an election promise to support Palestinian statehood”.
(Quick analysis: The party platform certainly called on Labor in government “to recognise Palestine as a state” and said this should be “an important priority” – but it did give cabinet ministers a level of flexibility because it did not set an actual deadline for that step to be taken.)
Bandt said the Labor government should go beyond “hand-wringing statements” and take meaningful steps:
Recognition alone won’t stop the invasion or end the occupation, but it will be a big step towards ensuring that Palestinians have the same rights as Israelis to live in peace and security with full rights under international law.
The government has already jumped ahead on this one, with a spokesperson saying Bandt is actually moving a procedural motion “about not dealing with the Parliament’s agenda”.
(That is standard – in order to move a motion in the parliament, you must first move a motion to suspend standing orders to change the house agenda (which is set by the government) so this is a bit of a technicality the government is arguing on here).
But procedural motions to switch up the agenda are always opposed by the government (unless agreed upon in advance), so the government will be saying no to the Greens motion. Although it says it is saying no to changing up the agenda, not the substantial motion the Greens have telegraphed.
A government spokesperson said:
The foreign minister Penny Wong has made clear statements in the last month about the government’s approach to Palestinian recognition.
OK, well that has been quite the morning!
The Senate estimates hearings are about to get under way and on today’s agenda is:
Environment and communications committee – where it is all about the environment department today (expect the nature repair market bill to feature in this, as well as the Environmental Protection Authority legislation Tanya Plibersek has announced this morning)
Finance and Public Administration committee – the prime minister and cabinet department is under the microscope here, and it will essentially be Penny Wong v Simon Birmingham in a committee room, rather than the Senate.
Legal and constitutional affairs committee – that will be a continuation of home affairs and immigration and direction 99 and the response to the high court decision which made indefinite detention illegal.
Rural and regional affairs and transport committee – planes, trains and automobiles.
Q: But are you not concerned that Palestinians are living in a war zone at the moment, that many of them are fleeing for their lives?
James Paterson:
Absolutely. There are no doubt genuine, innocent people in Gaza, who want to flee, and Australia has a role to play. But we have to do it carefully, by protecting our own national interests and our own national security.
The safety of the Australian people must come first. And we must do adequate checks. We know adequate checks weren’t done because, after many of these visas were granted, they were subsequently cancelled.
So why would you cancel a visa that you initially granted if all the adequate checks were done in the first place? It’s very clear this was a rushed process and as a result things were missed and visas had to be subsequently cancelled.
Australia’s security agencies are involved in background checks when these visas are approved and more is often known about Palestinians than people in similar situations (such as when Ukrainians applied in the wake of Russia’s invasion of their country) because of the occupation. Previously, when the visa cancellation issue was examined, it was for a range of reasons, including concerns they would not stay in Australia “temporarily”, not that security checks were not carried out.
The interview moves on:
Q: Senator Paterson, we also heard in a Senate estimates last night that a fifth of almost 10,000 Palestinians who have sought a temporary Australian visa since October 7 have had their applications rejected. So that’s just over 2,300 approved. At the same time, more than 3,300 visas have been approved for Israelis. Is there an imbalance here?
James Paterson:
I am concerned that 2,300 visas have been granted to Palestinian document holders in a very quick period of time after 7 October.
Let’s remember that this is a war zone controlled by a terrorist organisation and on average these visas were granted in 24 hours. In some instances, they were granted in as little as a few hours. I don’t know how you can do an adequate identity check, let alone a proper background check, on people like that.
We have a serious enough problem with antisemitism in this country, with social cohesion, before we go in bringing people with attitudes that are problematic.
I’m very concerned the department and the government has rushed this process unnecessarily.
On the departmental secretary Stephanie Foster taking responsibility for the department not raising the issue with minister Andrew Giles, James Paterson says:
It’s very hard to understand how this happened, and the department had no good answers about how this occurred. I’ll be re-prosecuting that issue with them today.
Frankly, the minister and the minister’s office should have noticed they were no longer being notified about these cases. It’s utterly routine to be notified about this. If all of a sudden you stopped being notified, wouldn’t you ask questions?
What happened to the referrals? What happened to the notifications? Something a minister for immigration does on a daily basis, if not weekly basis. When it didn’t happen, it appears Andrew Giles asked no questions at all.
James Paterson said a future Coalition government would scrap the direction entirely:
[Former NZ prime minister] Jacinda Ardern lobbied Anthony Albanese and he gave in. Instead of standing up for Australia, instead of protecting Australia, he gave in to Jacinda Ardern. My view is, if you are a guest in our country, if you are a non-citizen, regardless of how long you have been here, if you commit a serious, horrific crime, you have broken all the principles of your stay in this country and you should be deported – no ifs, no buts.
I don’t care if you came here when you were five. In some cases, these are people who came to Australia in their late teens, in their 20s, and even their 30s. So the idea these people should not be deported from our country I think is completely wrong. And a future Liberal government, if we’re elected at the next election, will begin deporting these dangerous criminals again.
The direction was brought in because of issues with deporting people who had been born in New Zealand but had spent almost their entire lives in Australia. At the time, Anthony Albanese said it was a “common sense” change, which meant that tribunals needed to consider someone’s ties to Australia (along with other things, including community protection). But the direction was meant to address the issue of New Zealand-born but Australia-raised people who had not applied for citizenship being deported to a country where they had no links (it was a diplomatic bugbear between Australia and New Zealand under the Coalition government).
Asked if the tribunals were to blame, given how they are interpreting the direction, James Paterson said:
If it was just one rogue tribunal member or one decision, maybe you could blame the AAT. But now we have dozens – in fact, more than 30 cases that the media has uncovered – of serious violent criminals who have been allowed to stay in our country.
And what those decisions have in common is they all point to this ministerial direction and the new primary consideration that Andrew Giles inserted into that direction, that considerable weight should be given to a person’s ties to Australia regardless of their level of offending if they have been here for a long time.
And so, really, the only person who can take responsibility for this is ultimately Andrew Giles, and if he refuses to do so, then the prime minister should do so. We think Andrew Giles should be sacked and we think Direction 99 should be immediately repealed and replaced with the previous direction to the department and the AAT, which required other factors to be weighted much more highly than someone’s ties to Australia.
