The Morrison government is gearing up for a national security election, daring Labor to vote for a bill that would ease deportation of permanent visa holders for low-level offending and amping up its rhetoric on “appeasement” of China.
In caucus Labor reserved its position on the strengthening character test bill – which it previously helped defeat in the Senate – ahead of a lower house vote on Wednesday, which Scott Morrison claimed would prove whether Labor was “on the side of criminals”.
Anthony Albanese told caucus that “every government scare campaign has blown up in their face”.
Earlier, Morrison told 2GB Radio the government’s efforts to deport criminals were “being frustrated by soft decisions in the courts” as judges “haven’t given a higher sentence because they’ve, they fear that they’ll lose their visa”.
The prime minister was referring to the orthodox sentencing principle that judges may take into account penalties other than the one handed down by the court, such as visa cancellation and deportation.
Morrison said if people have committed crimes “they have breached every single obligation they have to the country that gave them a visa” and should not be able to use “loopholes” to stay.
The bill lowers the bar for automatic failure of the character test, making it more likely people convicted of low-grade offences will have their visas cancelled although the minister already has the power to do so.
On 10 February Labor’s immigration spokesperson, Kristina Keneally, wrote to her counterpart, Alex Hawke, noting Labor had supported mandatory cancellation of visas for those actually sentenced to 12 months or more for serious crimes and arguing the existing powers are fit-for-purpose.
Guardian Australia understands Keneally reiterated Labor’s concerns: that low-level offending should not be a trigger for deportation, retrospective application should be removed, and a ministerial direction should be issued to soften the impact on New Zealand citizens.
The government does not intend to negotiate on these points, meaning Labor’s final position will be decided by the party’s leadership group with Keneally and the assistant immigration shadow minister, Andrew Giles.
Morrison pointed to Russia’s military buildup on the border with Ukraine and declared it was “not a time for weakness”.
“I don’t flinch on these things,” he told radio 2SM. “In the mettle department, there’s plenty there.”
The head of Asio, Mike Burgess, declared that his intelligence agency was “not here to be politicised” and he would have conversations with ministers, parliamentarians or staff if he felt intelligence had been misused.
The comments came days after the defence minister, Peter Dutton, said he based Thursday’s inflammatory allegation that the Chinese government had picked Albanese “as their candidate” on “open source and other intelligence” he saw.
Burgess had said in a speech last week that Asio had foiled an alleged election interference plot, which involved an unnamed “puppeteer” hiring an employee who then allegedly searched for “candidates likely to run in the election who either supported the interests of the foreign government or who were assessed as vulnerable to inducements and cultivation”.
Burgess told the Senate committee he “deliberately chose not to identify the election, jurisdiction, party, the individuals that were targets, or the country attempting to conduct the interference”.
That, the Asio chief said, was because attempts at foreign interference were “not confined to one side of politics” and were being seen “at all levels of government, in all states and territories”.
A Labor senator, Kimberley Kitching, under the protection of parliamentary privilege, named Chinese-Australian property developer Chau Chak Wing, who has previously been a major donor to both major parties.
“I am reliably informed that the puppeteer mentioned in your case study in your annual threat assessment speech given last week is Chau Chak Wing,” Kitching told Burgess at the Senate hearing, asking him to confirm it.
Burgess replied that he would not comment on “speculation” about identities “and it’s unfair you ask me that question in public”.
Chau later issued a statement saying he was “shocked and disappointed at the baseless and reckless claim made by Senator Kimberley Kitching”. He said he had “never had any involvement or interest in interfering with the democratic election process in Australia”.
“It is always unfortunate when elected representatives use the shield of parliamentary privilege as a platform to vilify and attack Australian citizens without producing a shred of evidence,” Chau said.
Keneally, when asked earlier about Kitching’s decision to name Chau, said “a range of senators from a range of political parties” had asked questions of national security agencies “that I would not ask in a public forum”.
Keneally encouraged “all members of parliament to take heed of the Asio director general’s advice about the importance of keeping national security information and intelligence information confidential”.
The home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, told Tasmanian radio station LAFM: “Quite frankly, I thought it was appalling behaviour by Labor in Senate estimates yesterday where they started making claims under parliamentary privilege and putting questions to the director-general of security, trying to identify who the individual was.”
The former prime minister Kevin Rudd said on Tuesday the government was telling “rancid lies” about Labor’s approach to China and he could not “sit back, be silent and allow lies and this hypocrisy to remain uncontested”.
Rudd said the federal election campaign should be “conducted on the basis of the facts” rather than “the fiction and hypocrisy we’ve been served up by Field Marshal Dutton”.
The former Labor prime minister said Liberal party figures had previously made supportive comments about an extradition treaty with China, questioned Labor’s ban on Huawei’s involvement in the National Broadband Network, and criticised a speech Rudd as prime minister had made in Beijing raising human rights concerns.
“I don’t intend to stand idly by while Peter Dutton smears the party of which I’ve been parliamentary leader, prime minister, and could form the next government of Australia as being somehow soft on China,” Rudd said.
Comment has also been sought from Dutton and Kitching.
China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, brushed off Morrison’s complaint that Beijing had been “chillingly silent” on the Russian troop buildup near Ukraine’s border.
Wang said the Australian government should “abandon the cold war mentality and ideological bias and stop making belligerent rhetoric that will escalate the tensions”.
