Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has promised a blank check to reintegrate women returning from the Islamic State. But frankly, my patience for bailing out Millennials who moved to an active war zone for the aesthetics is wearing thin.
I was enjoying a perfectly adequate macchiato in Double Bay yesterday morning when the news broke: yet another woman had been arrested at Sydney airport upon arriving back from Syria, with two more facing charges down in Melbourne. As if the morning traffic wasn't bad enough, I then had to listen to Finance Minister Katy Gallagher on Radio National, blithely announcing that the government will “spend what we need to” to manage this cohort of Syrian returnees.
I nearly choked on my almond croissant. Since when did the Australian taxpayer become the ultimate guarantor for every disastrous overseas lifestyle pivot?
Gallagher, in her infinite wisdom, noted that the government’s response was being managed “absolutely appropriately by the police and by our intelligence agencies.” She added that these parents had made a "terrible decision" to take their children into war zones. Well, yes, Katy. They did. But when my brother-in-law made a terrible decision to invest his inheritance in a doomed organic kombucha retreat in Byron Bay, the Australian Federal Police did not swoop in to restructure his commercial lease. He simply had to sell his Audi. That is how risk works.
To pack up your family and relocate to an active, collapsing totalitarian caliphate with absolutely zero exit strategy is, fundamentally, a failure of basic wealth management. It is an unhedged bet on a highly volatile, unregulated overseas market. And yet, when the local amenities inevitably fail to meet expectations, these expatriates simply hop on a flight back to Sydney and expect a full, taxpayer-funded bailout.
I was discussing this very phenomenon just last week with a senior official from Home Affairs at a charity gala for endangered equestrian pursuits. Between courses, he admitted to me that the logistical burden of extracting these citizens is astronomical. We are effectively providing a luxury, high-stakes concierge service for people who failed to do even the most rudimentary due diligence on their chosen destination. If you cannot be bothered to check the Smartraveller website before you leave, I do not see why my capital gains tax should fund your extraction.
We cannot continue to indulge a system where you skip the country to join a global terror syndicate, realize the local property market is a literal war zone, and expect a free chartered flight home to Melbourne.
The government, predictably, keeps hiding behind the children. Gallagher insists that these children are Australian citizens with an entitlement to be here, and that they will “need a lot of assistance to reintegrate into Australia.”
I do not doubt that they will need assistance. But I have to ask: who is paying for it? I currently pay upwards of forty-five thousand dollars a year for my son Julian’s tuition at a private North Shore academy, which includes a mandatory, heavily itemized pastoral care levy. Nobody is subsidizing Julian's integration into the rigorous academic environment of the rowing team. We pay out of pocket. To watch these returning families receive bespoke, state-funded psychological care simply because they chased an ideological pipe dream in the Levant is a slap in the face to every hard-working parent who properly vetted their child’s extracurriculars.
Furthermore, we must consider the sheer entitlement of this returnee cohort. They are arriving back in Australia at a time when the cost of living is out of control and the Sydney rental market is historically unforgiving. Do they expect to just waltz into a subsidized three-bedroom townhouse in the inner west? When my wife and I decided to spend a year abroad in a rustic village in Provence, we kept our property in Paddington fully tenanted just in case the French plumbing proved unbearable. We managed our own risk. We certainly didn't expect the state government to put us up upon our return.
It seems we are dealing with a generation of radicals who view international terrorism through the same lens as an "Eat, Pray, Love" gap year. They wander off to the Middle East to find themselves, realize that living under a besieged fundamentalist regime lacks the cosmopolitan charm they were promised, and immediately expect the intelligence agencies to organize their airport transfers.
Australia has always been a forgiving nation. We support the efforts of state governments and police to keep our borders secure. But there must be limits to our hospitality. If we set the precedent that the state will underwrite your quarter-life crisis just because you joined the Islamic State, what is next? Will we be bailing out everyone who buys a bad timeshare in Bali?
It is time we demanded some personal responsibility. I am perfectly happy to welcome these mothers back to the shores of Sydney, provided they face the consequences of their charges and, more importantly, pay absolute market rate for their own deradicalization. The Bank of the Australian Taxpayer is officially closed to poorly planned Syrian gap years.