A handy way to distinguish a government announcement inspired more by politics than its actual policy outcome is when the prime minister’s office briefs (some) newspapers about it before it has been considered by the cabinet.

On 21 May, the Australian reported that “second-generation Australians involved in terrorism face being stripped of their citizenship, along with dual nationals, as part of the Abbott government’s efforts to tighten national security laws”.



The Daily Telegraph has also reported this imminent development many times, and on Tuesday it informed its readers that the government would that day announce a new citizenship bill that included “controversial measures based on the UK model to also strip nationality from Australians who hold sole Australian citizenship, but only if they have legal access to citizenship of another country”.



Only problem was, the body charged with making government policy – the cabinet – had not approved the policy yet, and on Monday night – presumably after the paper had received its briefing – at least six cabinet ministers refused to support the idea that Australia would strip citizenship from second generation Australians.

According to a leak to the Sydney Morning Herald, verified by the Guardian, those who spoke against the idea were the defence minister, Kevin Andrews, the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, the attorney general, George Brandis, the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, the education minister, Christopher Pyne and the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

They were concerned about the substance of the idea, and also about the fact that they were being asked to sign off on it without seeing any formal written proposal either before or during the cabinet discussion and without having any time to consider advice.



Turnbull actually sought an assurance that the Daily Telegraph had not been briefed, and was assured it hadn’t – an assurance the next morning’s paper revealed to be untrue.



The issue of stripping citizenship rights from second generation Australians has now been included in a “discussion paper”.



It would seem the point of the idea is to provide the government with another means to make sure the 100 or so Australians fighting in Iraq or Syria (up to 50 of whom we are told are dual nationals) never make it back to Australia, with a lower evidentiary requirement than last year’s foreign fighters’ laws, which were in part designed to deal with the same problem.



But – despite the many headlines (we still haven’t seen any citizenship legislation and neither has the cabinet) we have no idea what evidence immigration minister Peter Dutton would need to see from intelligence briefings in order to revoke someone’s citizenship, nor any details of the promised judicial review.



Dutton also said that if another country got in and revoked their side of a dual citizenship first, Australia – given its obligations not to render anyone stateless – would have to take that person back. That raises a whole lot of questions about whether it wouldn’t be better to deal with people committing or planning acts of political violence by prosecuting them, rather than engaging in some kind of international race to make them another country’s problem. Not to mention the apparent contradiction of cancelling the citizenship of those already fighting overseas so they don’t come back at the same time as Australians are being urged to call the national security hotline with information about anyone planning to travel to the conflict zones so they can be prevented from leaving.



And before this stream of “citizenship crackdown” headlines we had the “crackdown on jihadis on welfare” headlines, which also turned out to be a bit previous.



In February, before Abbott delivered his national security statement, the Telegraph reported that “almost all of the wannabe terrorists who have snuck out of Australia to join jihadist armies in Iraq and Syria were on the dole or some form of welfare payment” and that “most had continued to collect payments from Australian taxpayers while training with Islamic State to become terrorists intent on wanting to kill Australians” and the prime minister said he was “appalled” that the majority of those Australians joining terrorist groups had benefited from the welfare system. The government vowed to cancel welfare payments under the counter-terrorism laws it had passed late last year.



No Australian jihadis overseas were on the dole, Senate committee told Read more

On 23 February, asked about reports that no foreign fighters had actually had their welfare payments cancelled, Abbott told parliament: “This is not correct. To the best of my knowledge and understanding, all of the foreign fighters who are currently overseas have had any welfare payments that they were receiving well and truly cancelled … the last thing we want to see is Australian taxpayers funding terrorism.”



But in an answer provided this week to questions that were asked in a Senate estimates hearing the day after the prime minister’s answer to parliament – 24 February – the Attorney General’s Department said that as of 24 February, “it was established that no individual was in receipt of any welfare benefit payments and it was therefore unnecessary to use the welfare cancellation on security grounds provisions”.



Last Sunday there was another wave of headlines, these ones about how students and teachers were going to get “Lessons in how to spot a jihadi”. Obviously family, friends and peers are the first ones likely to realise that a young person is becoming radicalised, but when the new “jihadi-spotting” plan got to the meeting of state education ministers on Friday, it turned out quite a bit was already being done in schools. The communique from their meeting said they had agreed that “senior officials will collate current initiatives that support youth at risk of radicalisation and identify gaps in prevention and intervention measures for schools.”



“Our senior officials will advise us about what exactly we should be doing, but I am not – I don’t think we should trivialise the issue by saying that we’re going to have a dobbing in of other students,” the education minister, Christopher Pyne, said in response to questions.



One might ask what is to be gained from so many headlines galloping so far ahead of actual decisions, or indeed, actual facts.



Does it help the police and intelligence agencies with their very important task of “keeping Australians safe” either by preventing acts of violence in this country, or preventing dangerous foreign fighters from returning, or the strategy for countering violent extremism aimed at stopping people here from becoming radicalised and dangerous?



Or is it playing to a very different audience – with the much more political aim of keeping security threats at the forefront of the national conversation and, perhaps, goading Labor into disagreement so that they can be portrayed as “weak on terror”?



The prime minister’s most powerful advisor is taking a keen interest in the policy and politics of the issue – his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, told a recent meeting of Coalition staff she was spending at least 40% of her time on the issue.



Another clue might lie in yet more information from the prime minister’s office to the Daily Telegraph, this time in an article entitled “The first cracks in Australia’s bipartisan approach to terrorism could doom Bill Shorten” which revealed that the prime minister received 900 emails in the week after the budget expressing anger at the possibility that “repentant Australian jihadis” might be allowed back into the country.



The article praised the prime minister’s “instinctive” response that “If you go abroad to join a terrorist group and you seek to come back to Australia, you will be arrested, you will be prosecuted and jailed” in comparison with Shorten’s reaction that “There are laws in place, I’m not going to play judge and jury.”



But of course, there are laws in place, and they do have evidentiary requirements. Which means the courts may not in every case implement the prime minister’s “instinct”. Which is presumably where the new policy-thought about citizenship-stripping comes in. And Shorten has been pretty careful to make sure there are no “cracks” in the bipartisanship on these issues, no matter what the government proposes.



There is, of course, an alternative to slap-dash policy in response constituent-email reaction, or policy by cabinet-pre-empting, headline-seeking press leak, and that is that old-fashioned idea of policy developed to address a real problem, thought through and discussed by cabinet, before public announcement.

