The First Duty: How Labor Abandoned the Primary Obligation of Government
The most fundamental duty of any state is not what its politicians imagine it to be. It is not the management of GDP, the refinement of social policy, the polishing of diplomatic credentials, or the endless theatre of parliamentary procedure. It is something older, simpler and vastly more consequential: the protection of the people who live under its authority.
A government that cannot or will not protect its citizens from those who wish them harm has failed at the threshold of political legitimacy. Everything else it does; every program, every speech, every piece of legislation, is downstream of that obligation. When a state treats the protection of its people as merely one consideration among many, something fundamental has gone wrong.
This is not some eccentric partisan theory. Security is one of the oldest justifications for political authority, expressed with particular force by Thomas Hobbes. Citizens surrender freedoms and accept the authority of the state partly because the state promises something they cannot easily provide individually: collective protection against violence and disorder.
That is why the Senate's treatment of Pauline Hanson's Protecting Australians from Foreign Terrorist Fighters Bill 2026 deserves far more attention than it has received. The legislation proposed additional mechanisms intended to prevent or restrict the return of foreign terrorist fighters, strengthen passport controls and impose further legal barriers against people associated with overseas terrorist activity. Whatever objections might be made to its drafting or constitutional foundations, its central political purpose was unmistakable.
The bill did not proceed.
That does not literally mean that every senator who opposed the legislation wants ISIS fighters wandering through Australian airports. Parliamentary votes do not prove the private motives of those casting them. But neither should that qualification be allowed to obscure the practical question Australians are entitled to ask: if additional legal barriers against the return of foreign terrorist fighters were unacceptable, why were they unacceptable, and what protections does the government consider sufficient instead?
That question becomes considerably more troubling when placed beside what has emerged concerning Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke and discussions about Australians linked to Islamic State who remained in Syria.
Here the facts deserve to be stated carefully because they are disturbing enough without embellishment. Burke met representatives of Save the Children, which had advocated government assistance for Australian women and children held in Syrian camps following the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate. Departmental meeting notes subsequently obtained through freedom-of-information processes record Burke saying that "there may be a way to achieve the same outcome without government undertakings." That sentence should stop Australians in their tracks.
The notes also record Burke thanking the organisation in connection with its media silence. Then something still more extraordinary happened: Burke asked the departmental official recording the meeting to leave so that a "frank discussion" could take place.
Those are the documented facts. What was said after the official left is precisely what we do not know. It would therefore be wrong to state as fact that Burke ordered the official from the room specifically to prevent a paper trail. But Australians are not obliged to switch off their powers of inference merely because a ministerial door has closed.
A Home Affairs Minister discussing an intensely controversial national-security issue referred to achieving the "same outcome without government undertakings," thanked an advocacy organisation in connection with its media silence, and then asked the official documenting the meeting to leave before continuing with a "frank discussion." Readers can decide for themselves what they make of that sequence.
The government's defence is important and should also be recorded. Burke has maintained that Save the Children requested a government repatriation operation and that the government refused. The government says it did not repatriate or assist the six Australians who subsequently returned commercially after reaching Lebanon.
That distinction matters. So does another distinction routinely lost in political argument: the Australians connected with the Syrian camps have included women and children linked through family relationships to Islamic State fighters. It cannot simply be asserted that every woman or child concerned was personally an ISIS fighter or terrorist.
But acknowledging those qualifications does not make the national-security issue disappear. If anything, it identifies the question more accurately. What obligations does Australia have towards citizens who travelled into the Islamic State catastrophe, or children subsequently born into it, and what level of risk should Australians at home be required to accept when adults associated with that world seek to return?
Compassion for children is entirely legitimate. Concern about citizenship and statelessness is legitimate. Legal objections to particular counter-terrorism measures may also be legitimate. But the safety of Australians already here is legitimate too. Indeed, for an Australian government, it should be the starting point.
This is where the government's conduct deserves particularly close scrutiny. It is not necessary to claim that every opponent of Hanson's legislation supports terrorism. It is not necessary to call every woman in a Syrian camp a terrorist. It is not even necessary to prove that Burke deliberately attempted to conceal something.
The documented facts are uncomfortable enough. There was advocacy for repatriation. There was a ministerial meeting. There was discussion of achieving the "same outcome without government undertakings." There was reference to media silence. The official recording the meeting was then asked to leave before a "frank discussion."
Those facts demand explanation, not euphemism. The difference between saying that the government "refused" scrutiny and saying that it failed to provide it is also worth observing. Where the government did not make a submission or did not provide substantive material sought in parliamentary scrutiny, that should be described precisely. But precision does not absolve a government of the political responsibility to explain what it is doing. Quite the opposite. National security is exactly the area in which governments demand extraordinary trust from citizens.
For more than two decades Australians have accepted enormous expansions of state power in the name of protection from terrorism. They have accepted surveillance powers, restrictive counter-terrorism legislation, airport security, intelligence gathering and substantial incursions upon privacy.
The bargain has always been clear: these extraordinary powers are supposedly necessary because the threat is extraordinary. Governments cannot invoke that argument when seeking powers over ordinary Australians and then suddenly discover limitless nuance when confronted with Australians who entered the orbit of Islamic State.
There is a genuine humanitarian problem here, especially concerning children. There is also a genuine security problem. A competent government should be capable of acknowledging both without pretending that one cancels the other. What Australians should reject is the suggestion that asking hard questions about returning ISIS-linked adults is somehow illegitimate.
Islamic State was not an ambiguous political organisation whose intentions became apparent only in retrospect. It advertised its barbarism to the world. It filmed murders. It enslaved women. It conducted and inspired terrorist attacks. It deliberately transformed atrocity into propaganda and recruitment. Adults who knowingly travelled into that project cannot reasonably be treated as though they accidentally boarded the wrong flight.
Individual circumstances nevertheless matter. Some may have committed crimes; others may not have. Some may have been coerced. Children plainly occupy an entirely different moral category from adults who made conscious decisions to enter Islamic State territory.
These distinctions are precisely why individual assessment is necessary. But individual assessment must begin with the interests of Australians who did not join Islamic State, did not travel into its territory, did not marry its fighters and did not participate in its project. They have rights too. Their security should not become the forgotten variable in a debate dominated by the rights and circumstances of those seeking to return.
This is what makes the Senate episode politically important even if Hanson's particular legislation was imperfect. Opponents were entitled to object to the bill. But Australians are equally entitled to demand to know what those opponents propose instead.
Saying that a particular bill has constitutional problems is not a counter-terrorism policy. Voting legislation down does not remove the underlying problem. And ministerial discussions conducted partly outside the presence of the official recording them hardly increase public confidence. The philosophical issue therefore returns with considerable force.
The state possesses powers that no ordinary citizen possesses. It taxes, regulates, surveils, prosecutes, imprisons and, in extreme circumstances, uses lethal force. The traditional justification for granting it those powers is that political authority protects the community. When government becomes more concerned with managing politically difficult individuals than reassuring the population exposed to the consequences, the relationship begins to invert.
That does not prove conspiracy. It does not establish secret repatriation arrangements. It does not prove that every person involved presents a terrorist threat. It establishes something more modest but still serious: Australians have ample reason to demand answers. What exactly did Burke mean by achieving the "same outcome without government undertakings"? What was the significance of the discussion concerning media silence? Why was the departmental official asked to leave before the "frank discussion"? What was discussed after that official departed? What assessment has been made of adults returning from the Syrian camps? What surveillance, prosecution or risk-management arrangements apply when such people arrive? And if the government regarded Hanson's proposed protections as unnecessary, excessive or legally defective, precisely what alternative protections does it regard as adequate? Those are not extremist questions.
They are the questions a democratic population should ask of a government exercising enormous powers in its name. Labor may have answers. If so, it should provide them plainly. Until then, Australians are entitled to regard the combination of parliamentary resistance, opaque ministerial discussions and the extraordinary phrase "without government undertakings" with considerable suspicion. The government does not have to adopt One Nation's legislation to demonstrate that Australia's security comes first. But it does have to demonstrate it.
The burden is on the government because the first duty remains the first duty: before the state redesigns society, redistributes wealth, pursues international prestige or lectures its population about their obligations to others, it must protect the people whose obedience, taxes and trust sustain it. A government that forgets that elementary bargain has forgotten why government exists at all.
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