Subjects: NZYQ visa issues, parliamentary spending

NATALIE BARR: It's been revealed the Federal Government issued invalid visas to nearly 150 former immigration detainees released after a High Court ruling.

Now the bungle means that 10 people who allegedly breached visa conditions since entering into the community will now be able to walk free. But both sides of politics appear culpable, with lawyers in the Home Affairs Department saying the Coalition made the mistake in the original legislation, while Labor duplicated the same mistake in their own tough new laws.

Joining us now for more, Home Affairs Minister, Clare O'Neil, and Shadow Finance Minister, Jane Hume. Good morning to both of you.

Clare, we'll start with you. How on Earth has this happened?

CLARE O'NEIL: Thanks, Nat. So on the weekend, lawyers in the Australian Government discovered a technical legal issue in an Australian law that had been passed by the Parliament in 2013. So this is an 11-year-old law, and the effect of that law is that visas issued under it, whether under our Government or previous governments, were effectively instantly invalid.

The consequence of that is that we have had to remake the visas of people who were issued as a consequence of the High Court's decision last year.

The important thing for your viewers is that community safety has been our absolute priority in everything that we have dealt with on this issue, so those tough visa conditions have been re-applied to people, whether it's ankle monitoring bracelets, whether it's curfews and the like, and we'll continue to focus on that as we move forward on this issue.

NATALIE BARR: Right. So are you saying you've fixed the loophole?

CLARE O'NEIL: We have fixed the loophole, Nat, and again, to your viewers, this was a problem in the original legislation that the Parliament passed in 2013. What we've done is Australian Government lawyers have identified a problem, we've moved very quickly to address it, and all of those visas have now been re-issued by the Australian Government with those tough conditions applied.

NATALIE BARR: Okay, Jane, let's cut back to the Abbott Government, eight to 10 years ago, your side made these laws. How did you do this?

JANE HUME: It sounds to me, Nat, if it can fixed through ministerial regulation so quickly, and there wasn't necessarily a problem with the original visa legislation. Quite frankly this wasn't a problem under our Government at all, because we didn't release criminal detainees into the community.

This sounds like a continuation of ministerial incompetence from Minister Giles. First of all, he didn't turn up to the briefings that were given by his own department on the potential for these criminal detainees to be released because of the High Court challenge. Then after the High Court case, over 149 detainees were released rather than just the one, because the Minister didn't wait for the findings of the High Court to be handed down.

Then those criminal detainees re-offended, and the Government asked for preventative detention orders to be made available. The Opposition made those preventative detention orders available. Not one has been issued.

This is a story of incompetence from go to whoa, and I can sense Clare's frustration here with her junior Minister, Andrew Giles. Quite frankly, the fact that Anthony Albanese has done nothing in response to this bungle - this bungle - demonstrates that this is a weak Labor Government, a weak government on border security and on community safety.

NATALIE BARR: Yeah. Look, people at home just want this sorted out, and it's really hard to work out which lawyers did which wrong thing. We just need you to sort it out and get the rules right.

Let's move on. It's been revealed Greens leader Adam Bandt's office forked out more than $200,000 of taxpayer money on printing in 2022. He also spent more than $20,000 on two charter flights in the same year.

Clare, he is not the only politician with expenses like this. Are these figures justifiable in a cost-of-living crisis? One of them was a flight, $15,000 for a charter flight between Canberra and Brisbane to his election campaign launch.

CLARE O'NEIL: Yep. Well, Nat, firstly can I just say I think this conversation's a really important one, and something our Government's really committed to is making sure that there's transparency in these numbers, so that your viewers at home can interrogate this and find those examples and talk about them. So I very much support the discussion.

With Adam's expenses, I think he needs to come forward and justify and explain all of those. I would just say that politicians, like me and Jane, have to travel virtually constantly. I'm here in Darwin in the middle of the wet season, as you can see with the rain behind me, and it is a really important part of our jobs. We represent the whole country.

But with reference to Adam's specific expenses, I think these are good questions to direct to him.

NATALIE BARR: Yeah. Jane, what do you think, because no one disputes that you guys travel and you work long hours, that's fine. But we don't want to be taking the mickey out of the cost, do we. The COMCAR rules, there are lots of examples of COMCARs waiting for hours and hours and hours, and then being cancelled and taxpayers forking out thousands of dollars.

Do we need to change the rules here, Jane?

JANE HUME: There's a really good reason why we make all of this information transparent, and that's because it's entirely justifiable for the taxpayer to ask questions about how their money is being spent.

Yes, there is a number of travel arrangements that we need to be flexible on, certainly, but it's up to the individual parliamentarians to justify exactly what it is that they're spending taxpayer money on, and why that is appropriate.

There are rules in which we need to operate. We know what those rules are. If those expenditures fall outside the rules, there is an audit opportunity, and I think that that's really important; the transparency and the opportunity to audit that is fundamental.

NATALIE BARR: Yes. Because as soon as we, as taxpayers find out more and more about what's allowed, maybe more and more, we're needing an audit. We might put that to our viewers this morning. Thank you very much, both of you, for joining us today.