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In 2023, then-home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo underlined the importance of state governments when speaking about the repatriation of women and children detained in Syria. He told a Senate committee: “If a state government chose to say, ‘We don’t want to proceed’, then I would have thought the Commonwealth would take that pretty seriously.
“We have to rely on them for schooling, trauma support, counselling, public health support and the like. So it’s done consensually.”
Non-Australian children at the al-Hawl camp in 2019 raise their index fingers to the sky in a sign for monotheism adopted by Islamic State followers.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Government-sponsored repatriations in 2019 and 2022 brought back four women and 21 children, including eight orphans. All were residents of Sydney.
The 2022 return led to a brief political backlash, particularly from a group of Sydney mayors. That prompted then-home affairs minister Clare O’Neil to say the government had a choice to bring people back to Australia “in a managed way”, or alternatively, “after a bunch of Australian children have grown up in a camp where they are subjected every day to radical ideologies”.
Since then, the Albanese government has ruled out any further managed repatriations. Advocates for the families say a number of Australian boys are at the age – between 13 and 15 – when the Kurdish authorities who run the camps will transfer them to adult men’s prisons.
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The irregular return of the six and the reluctance of Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to comment on it has infuriated the federal opposition.
Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson posed a series of questions on Monday, saying on ABC Radio National: “How did these people come home to Australia? Are any of them facing any counter-terrorism charges for their involvement with Islamic State? How will that be monitored? Where will they live? What involvement did the government have in bringing them home?
“None of these have been answered, and it’s simply not good enough for the minister of home affairs to refuse to answer about that.”
Describing the women and children as a “highly dangerous cohort of individuals”, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley and then-acting home affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash last week described the return as a “dereliction of duty” by the government.
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But Mat Tinkler, chief executive of Save The Children – which has been trying since the fall of Islamic State in 2019 to convince governments to bring the women and children home – said these were “innocent Australian children who have spent years in one of the worst places in the world to be a child, through no fault of their own”.
“All of the people who’ve come back are Australian citizens, and our strong national security, law enforcement and judicial systems are fully equipped to manage any risks.”
He called on the Australian government to return the rest of the cohort.
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