Additional comments from Coalition committee members

1.1Coalition members of the Committee support the listing of Ansar Allah (the Houthis) as a terrorist organisation under the Criminal Code, noting that the Opposition first wrote to the Government on 9 January 2024 calling on the government to consider listing the Houthis as a terrorist organisation in Australia.

1.2The listing of Ansar Allah follows previous decisions of the Australian Government to list Hizballah and Hamas as terrorist organisations. Hizballah has been proven to be an active supporter of Ansar Allah, including through military training, and Ansar Allah has been a vocal supporter of Hamas since its 7 October 2023 attack on Israel.[1]

1.3This brings attention to the current Government’s failure to take any action in listing the Iranian Guard Revolutionary Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist group. Australia’s inaction is at odds with our Five Eyes partners the United States, which listed the IRGC in 2019, and most recently Canada which announced its listing of the IRGC in June 2024. As the Canadian Government has pointed out, the IRGC supports the terrorist activities of Hamas and Hizballah,[2] and the IRGC is widely reported to be a principal financier and military trainer of the Houthis. Coalition members of the committee reiterate its offer of support from the Opposition to list the IRGC, including by legislative amendment to the Criminal Code if that is necessary.

1.4In relation to the listing of Ansar Allah, the Coalition is deeply alarmed at the significant delays for ministerial consideration of this terrorist listing.

1.5The Attorney-General Department’s submission reveals that on 31 January 2024, the Department of Home Affairs provided its submission to the then Minister for Home Affairs, Hon Clare O’Neil MP, seeking her approval of the statement of reasons to list Ansah Allah. It was not until 13 March – a full six weeks later – that the Minister for Home Affairs finally wrote to the Attorney-General, Hon Mark Drefyus KC MP, to provide the statement of reasons and endorse the proposed listing.

1.6The Attorney-General agreed to the listing on 19 March and wrote to the Prime Minister advising of his decision to list Ansar Allah and requested the Prime Minister to write to the First Ministers. On 18 April, the Prime Minister finally wrote to First Ministers advising of the Government’s decision to list Ansar Allah and sought their responses for any objections to the listing. This appears to be a new step in the terrorist listing process – the usual practice has been that the AFP Minister (the Attorney-General under Labor, or the Minister for Home Affairs under the Coalition) would write to the First Ministers on behalf of the Prime Minister. It is unclear to Coalition committee members why, on this occasion, the usual practice had changed and, as a result, added further delays to the already delayed listing of Ansah Allah. The Government should clarify this step in the process going forward for all future terrorist listings, and if the Prime Minister cannot be trusted to undertake this straightforward task in writing to the First Ministers without undue delay then it should be left to the responsible AFP Minister.

1.7It took at least 49 days for the decision-making process to list Ansar Allah to be bounced between the Minister for Home Affairs and the Attorney-General and it took another 28 days for the Prime Minister to write to First Ministers in relation to the decision to list. Overall, it took 126 days for the Houthis to be finally proscribed as a terrorist organisation after the initial recommendation of the Department of Home Affairs.

1.8By contrast, in the 2021 listing of Hizballah and The Base it took only one day for the then Minister for Home Affairs, Karen Andrews, to consider and approve the listing of those two organisations and wrote to First Ministers, on behalf of the Prime Minister, on the same day. Similarly, the 2021 re-listing of al-Shabaab, Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Palestinian Islamic Jihad it also only took six days for Minister Andrews to consider and approve the re-listings and wrote to First Ministers on the same day.

1.9The bureaucratic delays evident in this terrorist listing process is, very clearly, a symptom of the Albanese Government’s dismantling of the Home Affairs portfolio that started when it came into office with its machinery of government changes. This has resulted in the terrorist listing process being duplicated by two ministers, rather than being handled by just the one minister as was the case under the Coalition. This has clearly created friction and confusion in the Government as to which Minister is chiefly responsible for national security policy. That confusion will be further amplified by the Prime Minister’s decision to also relocate ASIO (in addition to the AFP and the ACIC) from Home Affairs to the Attorney-General’s portfolio, despite ostensibly leaving policy responsibility for national security with the Minister for Home Affairs.

1.10The Coalition is deeply concerned by the Government’s unnecessary and harmful unwinding of the national security architecture that has served our country extraordinarily well since the establishment of the Department of Home Affairs – especially given that the Government never told the Australian public prior to coming into office that it would seek to unwind the Home Affairs portfolio. The unwinding of the Home Affairs portfolio could not have come at a more unfortunate timing with ASIO’s decision on 5 August 2024 to raise the terrorism threat level to ‘probable’ for the first time in years.

1.11The listing of terrorist organisations is serious business: it is one of the principal tools in the counter-terrorism toolkit available to the Government to protect the Australian public from harm. It enables the Government to prosecute any person who finances, associates with, trains with or otherwise supports a listed terrorist organisation. It also enlivens the prohibited hate symbols legislation which makes it a criminal offence for any person to publicly display a symbol associated with a terrorist organisation, in certain circumstances.

1.12The Coalition Committee members are deeply troubled by the fact it took over 126 days to formally list the Houthis after it was first recommended by the Department, and this underlines the unnecessary duplication and confusion that has arisen as a result of the Government's machinery of government changes. The Government should immediately restore the Home Affairs portfolio to streamline the terrorist listing process and reverse the damage done to our national security architecture. But if the Government choses not to do so, then the Coalition will restore the Home Affairs portfolio to its proven and successful settings.

Mr Andrew Wallace MPSenator the Hon Simon Birmingham

Deputy Chair

Hon Andrew Hastie MPMs Zoe McKenzie MP

Senator James Paterson

Footnotes

[1]Committee report at paragraph 1.32 citing Attorney-General’s Department, Submission 1, p. [28] (Statement of Reasons p.4).

[2]Public Safety Canada, ‘Government of Canada lists the IRGC as a terrorist entity’, 19 June 2024, https://www.canada.ca/en/public-safety-canada/news/2024/06/government-of-canada-lists-the-irgc-as-a-terrorist-entity.html.