Among the 30 bills elbowed through in the Parliamentary rush were 3 bills agreed by the Government and Opposition targeting refugees. Human rights lawyer Alison Battison says Australia is criminalising refugees.
In the last Parliamentary session of 2024, the Labor Party pushed through over 30 pieces of legislation, including three bills targeting refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and non-citizen Indigenous people. This rushed suite of legislation was not drafted in response to any pressing concern of national importance.
Instead, it’s overriding purpose was and is to secure votes, so Labor can claim they are even more strict on border control and community safety than the Coalition. The legislation, however, does not address these areas in any cohesive manner. Instead, it creates great uncertainty for thousands of people who are worried they will be ripped away from their families and homes, detained and removed to places they have never been and have no connection to.
Just weeks before this suite of legislation was passed, I had self-funded travel to the UN in Geneva for meetings with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD). The WGAD is a specialist body within the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly.
The WGAD personally invited me to address them and civil society on developments in Australia regarding the arbitrary detention of refugees, asylum seekers, stateless and non-citizen Indigenous people in Australia’s immigration prisons.
These are the very people the new suite of legislation targets. Being a legal expert in this area I have submitted scores of complaints to the WGAD over the years.
A bad record
Australia has a terrifying record of its treatment of these vulnerable people, in particular for the conditions of, and length of time refugees and others are subject to administrative detention. I have clients who were detained for over 10 years, with the longest being over 13 years.
This is administrative detention at the whim of the Government, the administrative equivalent of being detained at the “Governor’s pleasure.”
Despite a landmark judgment handed down in November 2023, which finally set down the Constitutionally permitted limits of administrative detention, I was at the UN to inform them that situation had not dramatically improved and was likely to deteriorate further.
The legislation has unfortunately proven my point
The passing of the suite of legislation (meant to address the fall out of the 2023 High Court decision) has unfortunately proven my point.
I told the UN and civil society that instead of pro-actively identifying detainees caught by the High Court judgment who should have been released immediately, the Government had left it up to lawyers such as myself to find and identify such people in the detention network and then threaten legal action for unlawful imprisonment.
Many unlawfully imprisoned
More than 12 months later, I am still identifying multiple people every month who are unlawfully imprisoned, including very vulnerable young and queer people.
Given their detention is a breach of our Constitution, this is a terrible indictment of the Australian Government’s commitment to our separation of powers. I had expected better of a Labor Government and had expected they would reduce the ease at which people could be administratively detained. I was wrong.
I told civil society (to audible gasps) that Australia’s immigration prisons are not centres in which a person can come and go – they are prisons with high levels of security and monitoring, with razor wire, internal movement restrictions and handcuffing if anyone needs to leave, including for medical or legal appointments.
Distressingly, the new suite of legislation includes measures to further limit the contact people have with the outside world, by allowing guards (who are presumedly not trained in forensic analysis) to confiscate, check and ban phones from people they believe are committing crimes.
There is no need for suspicion “beyond reasonable doubt”
I told the UN that when people are released, they are fitted with electronic monitoring ankle devices and are subject to nighttime curfews. If they breach their visa conditions, they are liable for 12 months minimum prison time.
These people, where they have criminal convictions, have already served their terms of imprisonment and are subject to the same monitoring as any other person in Australia. Their treatment is the very definition of criminalising immigration.
They are tagged like cattle for administrative, not criminal, purposes.
The same suite of legislation also makes it lawful for the Australian Government to pay other countries to take these people, and if the person doesn’t assist with their removal to a place they have never been, they are liable for another round of administrative detention.
This means that Australia, a wealthy Western country, has legislated to use taxpayer funds to pay poorer nations to take the people our Government deems too unworthy to be in our country – including mothers of young children with no criminal records.
Convict history repeating
Given Australia’s history as the place the British Empire sent its convicts, the people it didn’t want, this move is the height of hypocrisy.
Some of my ancestors are Luddites and were sent to Australia for their political crimes. They were unwanted and inconvenient in their homeland. History is repeating itself.
The legislation to send refugees to other nations is built on the “Pacific Solution”, in which Australia sent thousands for regional processing to Nauru and Manus Island, PNG. The irony of this is that remote processing in remote prisons has not stopped irregular migration – it does not address the push factors that cause people to leave their homes. It doesn’t work.
Useless legislation feeds private contractors
And there is no evidence that the new legislation will work either. Instead, Australia is merely feeding the billion-dollar industry of publicly funded private contracts – it is Australia’s own industrial prison complex.
I am fielding scores of calls from petrified people who worry they and their families will be pulled apart by the new legislation. People with Australian citizen partners and young children. People with no criminal record.
There appears to be no human right the Government won’t trample on in its race to prove its potentially vote winning cruelty has no bounds.
The WGAD is coming to Australia in 2025. The Government has already delayed its visit due to the forthcoming election. When they eventually arrive, I can’t imagine I will be providing the UN with an update that is anything but a rendition of the steps taken to win votes by victimising some of the most vulnerable in the Australian community.
Room at the Inn: yet Australia’s asylum seekers face another Christmas in lockdown
Alison Battisson is founder of Human Rights for All. Before establishing HR4A, Alison worked as a corporate lawyer for top tier firms in Australia, the UK and Indonesia. She has also worked with various volunteer organisations in Zimbabwe, Australia and the UK.