It now seems certain that, without opposition from the ALP, the Migration Act (Strengthening the Character Test) Amendment Bill will pass. We wrote to Kristina Keneally, the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship stressing that the issues with the bill, which the ALP had twice rejected, remain. We called on the ALP, if it wins government in the forthcoming election, to set up an inquiry into all the ‘god powers’ in the Migration Act, and into the sections concerned with asylum seekers and visa cancellation, with an eye to substantially redrafting the act.

Many migrant workers come to Australia to undertake work in order to send money home to support their families. These people’s visa conditions tie them each to a single sponsoring employer, such that if they leave those employers they lose their visas and have to return home.

A recent ABC podcast dealt with an investigation into some most unsatisfactory consequences of this arrangement.

Now that the dust has settled on the Djokovic saga, it’s time to consider the appropriateness of the Immigration Minister’s remarkable powers in relation to visas and how they are exercised.

This isn’t the first time individual visa interventions by the Minister have made the headlines: recall Peter Dutton’s controversial intervention to grant visas to two foreign au pairs in 2015, or the 2004 Phillip Ruddock “cash for visas” scandal, each of which led to a Senate Inquiry.

As Liberty Victoria’s 2017 report “Playing God” pointed out,  ‘the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection is granted the most personal discretion of any Minister by an overwhelming margin. More legislative provisions confer ‘public interest’ or ‘national interest’ discretions on him than on any other Minister … He or she has a power over individual lives, relatively unchecked by courts, that is greater than that of any other Minister, including the Prime Minister.’

Remember the pseudonym EGZ17.

EGZ17 is the pseudonym of an ethnic Hazara Shia man, whom the Government, specifically Alex Hawke, wants to be able to send back to the Republic of Afghanistan. A decision that he could safely be returned to Kabul was made in 2017 by the Immigration Assessment Authority, before the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan. The Government set about to deport him. After that takeover, he appealed the decision on the grounds that the newly named Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was in effect a new country, and that the decision to deport EGZ17 was legally unreasonable. A judge of the Federal Court agreed.

NSWCCL has made a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Inquiry into the Ending Indefinite and Arbitrary Immigration Detention Bill 2021.

In our view, passing the Ending Indefinite and Arbitrary Immigration Detention Bill into law is morally and legally necessary. The Bill corrects the deviation from human rights and international norms in the course the government has taken in its treatment of refugees and unauthorised arrivals under the domestic legislative framework.

There are 1,513 people in immigration detention facilities, including 1,276 in immigration detention on the mainland and 237 people in immigration detention on Christmas Island. There are also 137 people effectively in detention on Nauru and another 145 people effectively in detention on Manus Island and PNG. The suffering of unauthorised entrants to this country under Australia’s system of indefinite mandatory detention is well documented. Indefinite detention is inhumane and cruel. Loss of liberty is one of the greatest punishments that humans bestow on each other. As a nation, we are guilty.

As the Djokovic saga ended, the media attention has moved on, but many asylum seekers and refugees remain in detention.

Some of these men have spent most of their teenage years detained by the Australian Government. NSWCCL continues to campaign for their release.

For one of their stories, view this video. 

The Federal Government is responsible.

CCL, and numerous organisations have been warning the Morrison Government of the threat COVID-19 poses to those in detention. These include the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases and the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control.

Most have been urging the government to close immigration detention centres and release the detainees into the community, because of the risk of COVID-19 infection getting in.  The worry was, and is, that the conditions inside are such that if any detainee, or any guard for that matter, contracted the virus, it would spread quickly throughout the centre.

NSWCCL made a submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs Inquiry into the Migration Amendment (Strengthening the Character Test) Bill 2021 [Provisions].

This is the third time that such a bill has been presented to Parliament. We made an extensive submission to the 2019 version of this bill, and those criticisms stand.

Australia has moved from deporting people who clearly are a danger and high risk, such as unrehabilitated murderers, to deporting people because a minister cannot be sure that they are not a danger to the community.

In fact, it we now accept deporting people to their likely death:

'counsel for the Minister suggested that much had changed since Ali and that the Minister was now more than prepared to proceed on the basis that Australia would breach its non-refoulement obligations and return the appellant to Iraq, even though it had been accepted that he was likely to be harmed or killed there'¹

Criticisms made by the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Law Council, The Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, the Scrutiny of Bills Committee and the Visa Cancellations Working Group also still apply.

We are disappointed that the Bill has been reintroduced without those criticisms being answered.