The identity of the most persuasive person urging the Federal Government to bring ISIS fighters and brides back to Australia would come as a surprise to most people.

It isn’t a human rights advocate. Far from it.

It is actually someone who is routinely accused of denying the human rights of his own citizens.

That person is Donald Trump.

The US President has for many years been pressing countries such as Australia to repatriate their ISIS-aligned citizens from the Middle East.

He’s been doing it since the collapse of the Islamic State caliphate in his first term.

Trump believes it is safer for the world to have these radicals held in prison or under surveillance at home.

Otherwise, he argues, they would be re-radicalised in the dusty camps and dank jails of the Middle East to further threaten the West.

Publicly, successive Australian governments have refused to buckle to Trump’s pressure.

Practically, though, they have.

Anthony Albanese constantly reminds people that 45 ISIS fighters returned to Australia under the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments.

And about 40 ISIS brides and their children have returned since Labor took power in 2022.

Albanese said on Thursday that his Government “will do everything we can within the law” to prevent further ISIS fighters returning.

Now, Pauline Hanson is about to test that with a proposal she believes will keep foreign fighters out of the country for good.

Hanson’s Foreign Terrorist Fighters Bill cannot simply be dismissed as a superficial headline-grabber, as some in Government seem to want to do.

It is a proposal that deserves serious consideration.

One Nation enlisted the help of constitutional experts in crafting the proposal, which aims to circumvent legal and constitutional restrictions to keeping these fighters out of the country if they are Australian citizens.

First, the Bill would remove the appeal provisions that render the current exclusion orders ineffective.

Those provisions allow anyone subjected to an order to request a “return permit”, which the minister is automatically obliged to grant.

That is how Hodan Abby, the last remaining ISIS bride at Syria’s al-Roj camp, was able to gain permission to return after just two months of her supposedly two-year exclusion order.

Hanson’s Bill would also seek to get around earlier High Court rulings by transferring responsibility for the issuing of exclusion orders from the minister to the courts.

The High Court has twice overturned government actions on the basis that they offend the separation of powers by imposing punitive measures, which under the Constitution can only be ordered by the courts.

It is a reasonable assumption that the court would view permanent exclusion orders to be punitive.

So, Hanson’s Bill would set up a new system in which the minister would make an application for an exclusion order to the Federal Court, supported by advice from intelligence agencies.

The subject of the two-year order would have no right of re-entry while the application was being heard.

Further applications could be made to renew orders every two years if intelligence agencies believed the person still posed an unacceptable threat.

That would make some orders effectively permanent, keeping the fighters out of the country for good.

The subject would still have a passport but just couldn’t use it to get back into the country while the order was in place.

That’s important because removing a citizen’s passport renders them “stateless”, which would itself be unconstitutional and a breach of international law.

Hanson’s proposal would achieve the same effective outcome, but under a legal process with two-yearly judicial review and without the Parliament directly imposing punishment.

One Nation’s constitutional advice suggests those provisions give the laws a good chance of surviving an inevitable High Court challenge.

Whether it does or not is unknown.

But if Albanese’s Government is truly prepared to do everything it can within the law to prevent ISIS fighters returning, then it should at least allow Hanson’s Bill to be debated.

A majority of the Australian electorate would support the Bill’s intention.

But it also places Hanson in direct opposition to Donald Trump on a hot-button issue.

Though, in the current political climate, taking a stand against the US President wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the One Nation leader.

Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor