Stripping Australian citizenship from convicted terrorists won't make the nation safer and is contrary to the criminal justice system, experts say.
The Australian government can apply to a court to revoke citizenship from dual nationals convicted of serious offences, such as terrorism.
However, legal experts have raised concerns about how the laws work, focusing on several powers described as overreach.
Legal groups and the Australian Human Rights Commission criticised the legislation for covering people aged under 18.
The focus needed to be on rehabilitation, the commission's president Rosalind Croucher said.
"A regime of exile for children is just not the way to go," she told a federal parliamentary inquiry on Monday.
Constitutional law expert George Williams also questioned whether the powers made the community safer.
Deporting terrorists could harm Australia in the long run as authorities wouldn't have oversight in countries with less rigorous legal or policing systems, he said.
Similar laws were branded symbolic, with governments wanting to look tough on terrorism.
"We shouldn't proceed on the basis that applying this to even serious crimes like terrorism will increase our national security," Professor Williams said.
Powers to revoke citizenship weren't needed when the government could cancel passports or use a temporary exclusion order, Associate Professor Rayner Thwaites said.
Questions were also raised about the law's broadness, with espionage and foreign interference provisions covering reckless offences.
This could cover journalists who have provided information to a foreign media outlet, Prof Williams said.
A minimum threshold of three years behind bars ought to be raised to six and concurrent sentences should not count twice, the committee heard.
The courts also needed to ensure a person was not left stateless, including in a de facto sense if they couldn't access a second country, lawyers argued.
This encompassed cases when the other nation didn't accept the individual's deportation or the person couldn't exercise their second citizenship, such as a Chinese Uighur.
"There are people with just no connection to places they are citizens of and some of these countries are very oppressive," the Law Council's Stephen Keim SC said, pointing to nations that bestowed citizenship several generations down the line.
Stripping a person's citizenship while they were being sentenced was "antithetical to our criminal justice system" which focused on rehabilitation, his colleague Richard Wilson SC said.
"Many people who have expressed and even acted upon the most repugnant belief had been rehabilitated," he said.
Several witnesses chastised the parliament for rushing through the laws without appropriate scrutiny that would have prevented some of the issues raised.
Home Affairs Department officials defended the powers.
"It's important to have that provision in law to act as a deterrent," Deputy Secretary Nathan Smyth said.
The department also factored in the safety of Australians and whether the stripping could likely lead to further or unintended consequences when providing advice to the minister, he said when asked about the risks of deporting terrorists.
Addressing concerns about someone becoming stateless, the court already needed to consider a person's ability to access the rights of their second citizenship, another official contended.
The inquiry is set to report in mid-March.
