ISIS brides: Australian citizens or not? By Peter Van Onselen.

Anthony Albanese has tried to draw a line under the ISIS brides debate in a way that will satisfy almost nobody.

In a radio interview this morning, the Prime Minister restated the government’s political message: it will not assist the ‘wives of foreign fighters’ and their children to leave the Kurdish run camps in northern Syria.

But he also made something else clear as well. He won’t do any more, legislatively or operationally, to stop them coming here, if they can find a way to do so on their own.

Albo says the ‘full force of the law’ has already been applied ‘to the extent that we can’ to stop them, and that anything stronger risks being ‘knocked over in the High Court’. …

Judgement:

Refuse to help, concede returning is still possible, then blame the Constitution. That’s Albo wiping his hands of responsibility. It’s pathetic. …

It sounds muscular, but in practice it is an admission that prevention has been abandoned. It’s not good enough.

This controversy — in a confused, implicit way — gets to the meaning of what it means to be an Australian citizen. Is citizenship a bit of paper, a set of beliefs, or bloodlines going back at least decades?

If the ISIS brides are truly Australian citizens, then Australia should try and help them, and welcome them back.

But they are traitors, having chosen to support a murderous radical Islamic ideology over Australia. They cancelled their citizenship by adopting contrary beliefs. Perhaps they need to go and live in an Islamic country — perhaps Turkey.

The ISIS brides are Australian on paper, and some of them are Australian on bloodlines, but fail badly on beliefs.

For the left, citizenship is just paper. That way they can import millions of immigrants, who can vote in Australian elections yet have very different beliefs to existing Australians. The fact that Albanese has to pretend that ISIS brides are not “proper” citizens no doubt reflects Labor’s polling on the issue.