The fundamental question is not whether Australia wants these women back. Most Australians, understandably, do not. The question is what the law actually permits a government to do about it, and here the answer is far less satisfying than the political rhetoric suggests.
Eleven women who travelled to Syria to align themselves with the Islamic State are preparing to return to Australia from the Roj detention camp, and the pressure on the Albanese government to act decisively is mounting. Calls to cancel their passports have grown louder in recent days, offering voters a neat, simple solution to a deeply uncomfortable problem. Strip away the talking points and what remains is a legal constraint that neither major party seems eager to explain with any honesty.
Professor Donald Rothwell, one of Australia's most respected international law scholars, stated in a television interview on Sunrise that the passport cancellation option is largely a political fantasy rather than a legal reality. "There is no real basis for passports to be cancelled unless in the exceptional instance of where somebody has been convicted of a terrorism offence and that person is also a citizen of another country," he said. That is a high bar. None of the eleven women currently before public scrutiny appears to meet both criteria simultaneously.
The passports, it seems, have already been issued, and once issued, the legal grounds for cancellation narrow considerably. Professor Rothwell was clear that while some grounds exist to deny a passport to someone seeking to travel from Australia to commit a terrorist offence overseas, "this is quite a distinctive situation." Without identity documents, these individuals would have no capacity to move at all, whether returning to Australia or attempting to flee the camps in Syria entirely.
The primary legal instrument available to the Commonwealth is the exclusion order regime under the Counterterrorism (Temporary Exclusion Orders) Act. Yet only one of the eleven women is currently subject to such an order. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has previously acknowledged that the threshold required to issue one is deliberately demanding. The law, as written, was never designed to function as a blanket prohibition on return.
The counter-argument deserves serious consideration: the Coalition has proposed new legislation that would criminalise assistance to Australians with Islamic State connections who are seeking to return. It is not a frivolous proposal. But Professor Rothwell's assessment is sobering. Such laws would penalise those who help the women travel; they would not physically stop anyone from crossing the border. The distinction matters enormously, because legislation that sounds tough and legislation that actually works are not always the same thing.
What is perhaps most revealing is what the Coalition's package does not include. Professor Rothwell said he was "somewhat surprised" that the package contained no amendments to the Counterterrorism Temporary Exclusion Orders Act itself. "In principle, there's no reason why the provisions of the act could not be subject to amendment," he said. If hardening the exclusion order regime is legally achievable, its absence from either party's policy platform is a question voters deserve answered. This is not a left-right issue; it is a competence issue.
Adding urgency to the entire debate, conditions at the Roj camp are deteriorating rapidly. A separate camp in Syria was reportedly emptied last week. Professor Rothwell warned that the government may soon find itself forced to act not from deliberate strategy but from sheer circumstance, as the security situation on the ground collapses. He suggested relocating the families to a secure location where their futures could be determined through proper process might become a practical necessity before long.
Any legislative attempt to tighten exclusion order powers would almost certainly face a constitutional challenge, though the existing act has not yet been tested before the High Court of Australia. That uncertainty should prompt careful drafting rather than paralysis. Democratic governments routinely legislate in areas of constitutional ambiguity; what matters is the rigour of the legal architecture they construct.
The honest position here requires acknowledging genuine complexity. Australians are entitled to expect a government with a clear, legally defensible strategy rather than a collection of politically convenient announcements that do not survive contact with the law. Working creatively and rigorously within legal limits, whether through amending the exclusion orders framework, pursuing terrorism prosecutions through proper channels, or developing a broader bilateral approach with Syrian authorities, is precisely what we elect governments to do. The current state of managed ambiguity serves no one well, least of all the children caught up in circumstances entirely not of their making. History will judge this moment by whether Australia's institutions proved equal to the task, or merely loud about it.