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November 24, 2023
The Coalition is demanding that Labor uses the final parliamentary sitting week of the year to pass legislation allowing the government to redetain freed foreign criminals under a bolstered preventive detention regime.
With just five scheduled sitting days remaining for the House of Representatives, the opposition is preparing to hammer the government over its response to the High Court's ruling overturning indefinite detention.
The government is already facing a High Court challenge to its emergency powers that were rushed through parliament last week, which attached mandatory conditions such as strict curfews and ankle bracelets to the bridging visas held by 116 freed detainees, up from 111 on Wednesday.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil has flagged the government is considering preventive detention as a longer-term, durable solution to the High Court decision, sparking calls from her Coalition counterpart to be ready to legislate next week.
"The government must be ready to go when parliament returns next week with new legislation for preventative or continuing detention orders for, at the very least, the highest risk detainees now released into the community," opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said.
"They can't make the same mistake again of not being ready to legislate. And we can't wait for the High Court to eventually hand down its reasons sometime in the new year. The community deserves proper protection over summer from serious convicted offenders who are at risk of offending again." Senator Paterson said the high risk terrorist offender regime could easily be adapted to fit the cohort of released unlawful non-citizens "if the government has the will and has done the work".
Australian Lawyers Alliance spokesman Greg Barns SC said the emergency laws passed last week were an "egregious abuse of power not only by the government but also the opposition" and preventive detention was also "offensive to the rule of law".
"Preventative detention in this case is not based on a court making an assessment of risk and what's forgotten in this particular instance is that these are people who have served their (jail) sentence," he said.
"What you're doing is effectively saying 'If you're an Australian citizen and you commit a murder and you're paroled, you'll face less onerous conditions than if you're a person who doesn't have an Australian visa'. You're simply saying because you are a detainee without Australian citizenship, you should be treated differently and much more harshly." A Chinese refugee who arrived in Australia in 2001 on a student visa has lodged a High Court challenge against the government's tougher bridging visa conditions placed on freed detainees, arguing that the curfew and ankle bracelet were punitive and should be invalid.
Known as S151, the plaintiff had his employer-nominated visa cancelled in November 2017 under the so-called character test and was released from prison and taken into immigration detention in September 2022.
He was granted protection status this year, meaning he can't be removed to China. He was released from detention on November 11 following the High Court's NZYQ ruling, which found a stateless Rohingya man who raped a 10year-old boy was being held unlawfully in continued detention.
