Just after question time on 23 November 2022, the federal parliament debated a motion relating to the repatriation of four Australian women and 13 children who had been stuck in a Syrian detention camp since the fall of Islamic State three years prior.
One after another Labor MPs argued with passion, clarity and logic about why it was not just acceptable, but necessary and morally right, for the federal government to assist the return of its own citizens from the squalid and dangerous camps.
Take, for example, the contribution of Clare O’Neil, then the minister for home affairs.
“Is it in the nation’s interests for a large group of Australian children, who will in all likelihood one day return to Australia, to spend their formative years living in a squalid refugee camp where they have very little access to health, where they do not get to go to school and where they are subjected every day to radical ideologies that tell them to hate their own country, or are they safer growing up here with Australian values?” O’Neil asked parliament.
Fellow MP Lisa Chesters appealed for sympathy not just for the innocent children but also the women, many of whom she said were “coerced, were tricked” into travelling to Syria to join Islamic State.
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“These women deserve our support, compassion and understanding,” the member for Bendigo said. “These women deserve a moment for healing and a chance to rebuild their lives in a country that they are part of.”
Mike Freelander, a paediatrician whose daughter visited Al-Hawl camp in Syria with aid group Médecins Sans Frontières, said: “I cannot see those kids – any kids – be exposed to that, without trying to fix it”.
In his speech, Labor MP Luke Gosling said resettling the women and children was both “admirable” and “smart” – not least because the security agencies recommended it.
“When we talk about a cohort, it’s women and children. It’s Australian women and children, kicked down the road, which is a road to ruin,” Gosling said, describing the camps as “horrific” scenes of rape, assaults, sickness and death.
“Let’s just think about what we’re really doing here.”
The tone and content of those speeches are entirely unrecognisable to the harsh language the Albanese government is deploying today, as it attempts to convince the public it is doing everything it can to not help the latest group of women and children escape the camp and return to Australia.
Appearing on the Karl Stefanovic podcast on Tuesday, Albanese again declared his “contempt” for the adults who had travelled to Syria.
“I’ve said this before, but my mum had a saying, ‘if you make your bed, you lie in it’. And as far as I’m concerned, I have nothing but contempt for these people,” the prime minister said.
Tony Burke, who replaced O’Neil as home affairs minister in 2024, bluntly told the ABC’s Insiders program: “we don’t want them back”.
“We’re actively making sure we do nothing to help them, nothing to help them at all,” he said.
The dramatic shift in policy and rhetoric would be irreconcilable if it wasn’t so easily, and lamentably, explained by Australia’s ugly politics of immigration in 2026.
In the wake of the Bondi beach massacre, which was allegedly inspired by Islamic State, and the surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Labor is clearly hyper-sensitive to perceptions it is weak on Islamic extremism.
Such anxieties are influencing the government’s better judgment, obscuring its ability to recognise the merits of the very same arguments its own MPs laid out so clearly a little over three years ago.
For example, O’Neil argued that by managing the returns in a “controlled way” the government could ensure proper security checks, ongoing monitoring of the adults as well as reintegration and rehabilitation for the children.
“If we don’t do this, if we do as those opposite did – that is, stick our heads in the sand and pretend this problem is going to go away – then we are doing a disservice to the country,” she said.
O’Neil’s comment is a reminder that it is not just Labor whose position has shifted: it was under Scott Morrison’s prime ministership that eight orphaned children were repatriated from north-eastern Syria in 2019.
Reflecting on those speeches from November 2022 tells another story about what has become one of the defining characteristics of the Albanese government.
Guardian Australia has spoken to several Labor MPs who shared the views expressed that day and are uncomfortable with Albanese and Burke’s hardline rhetoric, but are unwilling to say so publicly out of a reluctance to rock the boat.
Chesters, Freelander, Gosling and Peter Khalil – who also made a speech that day – either declined to comment or did not respond to Guardian Australia’s requests.
With such a quiet and compliant caucus, Albanese and Burke are facing no internal pushback against the sort of rhetoric that would have been unthinkable a little over three years ago.
Including to their own MPs.
Dan Jervis-Bardy is Guardian Australia’s chief political correspondent
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
