If you need more evidence that the Coalition’s attack against Australian citizens who returned to Australia from Syria (a legal move, as Australians have the right to return to Australia, no matter why you left the country in the first place) is completely bereft of any sort of rational reasoning, here is Sussan Ley arguing on the Nine network that she has a problem with the government not trying to stop something they have no legal right to stop.

Ley is speaking about two women and four children who are being monitored by security agencies, and who were monitored as they managed to leave Syria and start making their own way back to Australia. Which they are legally entitled to do.

Well I can’t see any evidence, Karl, that the government has tried to do that and that’s what the problem is here. Accompanying that is a failure to reassure Australians of community safety. This is not some romance that went wrong. This is a group of individuals who willingly left this country, in itself breaking the law, to go and join ISIL, a death cult that has at its heart the destruction of our way of life and our society. If we cast our minds back to Islamic State at its height and the security threat that was talked about here in this country, do we really want these individuals just let back in and why can’t the government answer questions about how much it’s costing, whether they’re being monitored, whether they are being rearrested, what is going on, why all the cover up?