John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

To speak in reply to the Prime Minister's statement on Iraq is something that we, as a federal parliament, have to do. It is probably not something any of us came here thinking that we would have to deal with in the way that this has evolved. It is more than anything I have known in my lifetime to realise that Australia can have its own psychopaths or whatever term you want to give to people that leave our country to join ISIS. I do not think that they are even as good as terrorists. Terrorists are obviously lunatics; people who just want to get their own way. But they actually have an aim. I do not think these people have an aim. I think that people who leave Australia to go and be involved in the sort of bloodbath that ISIS is involved in are people who have no aim. They are simply escaping from life. They have no life. They have no responsibility. They have no cause. This as an excuse to go and kill.

That anyone could take their children with them to a place like this defies imagination. I do not believe that anyone in this place does not realise what an incredibly good country we have. Anyone who has travelled around the world at all is well aware that, when they come home, they are in as good or in the best country of anywhere in the world. The fact that we can have, as has been stated, at least 60 people who have gone to get involved in this murderous rage—and we know that a lot of them, and perhaps the majority of them, were actually born in our country—I find frightening. I find this worrying.

We have a responsibility to deal with this that none of us ever envisaged. Anybody going to where ISIS is and indulging in that kind of frightening lunacy is going there to do something for which they have no responsibility. They are escaping from life and do not have a cause. To think that they are going to get used to doing that sort of thing, the murder, the beheadings and everything they are involved in—we know they are and we know some of them are leaders in it—and then return home and just quietly become ordinary citizens defies common sense. Every one of us in this place has a job to back our leaders and to come up with a solution as to how we deal with it. Maybe that means we have to curtail some of our freedoms to deal specifically with them. We have to deal with this because we cannot have people like that returning to our country. I think all of us have felt a sense of safety, even if we have not thought about it, because of the fact that we are one of the biggest islands or the smallest continents in the world surrounded by water. Now we are certainly very much part of the world that we do not want to be. I have no doubt that everybody in this place will combine to come up with the best way to handle this.

As I said, I do not believe this is terrorism. I think these are a bunch of psychopaths who are escaping reality. To think that somebody who was born in our country could be doing this beggars belief. The fact that they obviously have people behind them, supporting them and sending them over there says it is a bigger issue than just dealing with a few psychopaths going overseas who obviously at some stage, unfortunately, will return, or at least some of them will. I believe that our nation has always faced its responsibilities. This time it is not just the responsibilities we have for the world at large; it is very much a responsibility that we have to ourselves and to our own people.

We have to come up with a way to deal with this. It does not change the fact that we have a responsibility to preserve the dignity and the ability of people to lead ordinary lives in the Middle East, in the Ukraine or elsewhere, but this time it is more than that. It is about looking after our own nation. I found it the most sobering thing I have encountered in public life to realise that people who were born in my country could escape from it to go to less fortunate areas of the world simply to indulge in a murdering frenzy. The thought that they might bring that back here says that we all have an incredible responsibility to our nation to make sure that they do not get that opportunity. It is not easy as a nation, with the freedoms that we have, the laws that we have and the Constitution that we have, to deal with this, but deal with it we must. I know that all 150 people in this parliament will join together to make it possible to do so, because we must.

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