A cabinet minister has played down concerns new laws to deport immigration detainees being rushed through parliament could result in people being sent to countries where they face being murdered.
Legislation that passed the lower house on Tuesday would impose a mandatory minimum one year prison sentence for immigration detainees who don’t co-operate with attempts to deport them.
Penalties include up to five years behind bars and a $93,000 fine. The minister would also have the power to ban visa classes for countries that don’t accept deportees.
The laws will be debated in the Senate on Wednesday.
Independent MP Monique Ryan raised concerns the legislation could mean if the government makes a mistake when determining if someone is a refugee or not, they could be deported to a country where their lives were at risk.
“It’s appalling actually and this is a race to the bottom from the government,” she told Nine’s Today Show on Wednesday.
“The laws are draconian and they will harm people, they could potentially send people back to countries where they face persecution and even death.”
There were numerous opportunities for a person to apply for asylum, Labor frontbencher Chris Bowen said.
A person captured under the new laws would have had the opportunity to make their case to the Immigration Department, a relevant tribunal and the courts and found not to be a refugee in each instance, Mr Bowen said.
“We are talking about people who came to Australia, overstayed a visa or came under false pretences,” he told ABC News.
“The Australian government should have the right to send them home, otherwise our immigration system will continue to come under pressure from people who are not refugees.”
But fast tracking some of these applications meant they wouldn’t be fully considered, the Human Rights Law Centre argued.
The Sydney Catholic Archdiocese also hit out at the new laws.
Julie Macken from the archdiocese’s Justice and Peace Office argued a significant number of people in indefinite immigration detention had their claims refused “through the broken and defective fast-track assessment process”.
While it won’t apply to people found to be refugees, the concern stemmed from people who had strong claims but didn’t have a fair hearing or review, the council’s Refugee Council of Australia CEO Paul Power added.
The laws are in response to a High Court case involving an Iranian citizen known as ASF17 who has made a legal bid for freedom.
The man is seeking to have an earlier High Court ruling, that indefinite immigration detention was illegal for those who could not be returned to a third country, also cover detainees who refuse to co-operate with their deportation.
The government received the draft legislation on Friday after commissioning it to pre-empt the court’s April 17 ruling.
Wednesday is parliament’s last sitting day before the ruling.
The laws were drafted as quickly as possible to patch gaps in the immigration system, Home Affairs Department secretary Stephanie Foster said.
Despite supporting the laws in the lower house, opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan said it wasn’t a foregone conclusion it would pass the Senate on Wednesday.
“We are seeing a completely botched process by the government,” he told ABC radio.
He questioned the rush to pass the legislation, saying he had received no clear answer from the ministers.
People not co-operating was “undermining the integrity of our migration laws”, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles told parliament as he defended the laws.
They were in line with Australia’s human rights obligations, he said.
Labor has been under political fire from the opposition after the original High Court ruling resulted in some 150 detainees being released into the community, some of whom had committed sexual assault and murder.
The government has used ankle bracelets and curfews to monitor the cohort.
