May 11, 2024
A bid to give the immigration minister extraordinary new powers to deport people and ban others from coming to Australia hangs in the balance, with government and opposition locked in a stand-off.
Labor argues it needs the power to clear a backlog of people in immigration detention who are refusing to cooperate with their deportation.
The Coalition broadly supports what Labor is seeking but has threatened to block the government's legislation unless it agrees to amendments to insert guardrails around ministerial powers.
"They do not have a pathway to pass this bill without the Coalition because the Greens and some of the independent crossbenchers have indicated they will not be voting for this bill," Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson told the ABC.
"If the government wants this bill to pass then it has to come to the party and it must sit down and it must negotiate and it must agree to amendments otherwise it's not going anywhere."
The Coalition's 17 amendments seek to give the parliament greater oversight, limit its potential impact on families and allow ongoing legal cases to proceed before the minister can compel someone to cooperate with deportation.
"The ball really is in the government's court now," Senator Paterson said.
"Will they accept these genuine amendments and work with the Coalition to pass the bill or are they going to continue to insist there is some urgency that doesn't exist."
Labor argues it needs to act because the Coalition failed to make any efforts to deport people languishing in immigration detention.
Immigration Minister Andrew Giles has offered few public signs that the government is willing to accept Coalition changes.
"The amendments that they have proposed and put forward, frankly, are incoherent. Even on their own terms, they are self-contradictory," Mr Giles said.
"The opposition really needs to have a hard look at itself and say are they serious about border security or are they merely playing politics with national security and community safety."
The legislation could be considered as early as next week in the Senate.
Labor has faced criticism from some of its own after it sought to ram contentious immigration legislation through parliament last month.
The legislation would compel someone the government was trying to deport to cooperate with authorities, or risk a jail term of between one and five years.
It would also give the immigration minister sweeping powers to blacklist countries refusing to take back their citizens, allowing bureaucrats to refuse to process visas for all nationals from those countries.
The intended target of the powers is not detailed in the legislation but is a thinly veiled reference to countries such as Iran, which have long-standing practices of refusing to accept its citizens forcibly deported.
Labor's botched bid to rush the laws through parliament came as the High Court was considering the case of an Iranian man refusing to cooperate with authorities trying to deport him.
The court on Friday dismissed his case and found his indefinite detention was lawful because it would end if he cooperated with his deportation.
The judgement was a relief for a government still reeling from a different case, known as NZYQ, that found indefinite immigration detention was unlawful if there was no real prospect of deportation in the foreseeable future.
Senator Paterson said the High Court ruling had "blown out of the water" Labor's push to rush the new laws through the parliament.
Mr Giles said the extra powers were crucial in light of Friday's judgement.
"We need to be able to have the capacity to remove people who no longer have any right to remain in Australia and if they are not going to cooperate with that, to have the capacity to them in detention to keep the community safe," he said.
Mr Giles dubbed Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a "complete fraud, someone who's weakened our border protection and fundamentally undermined the integrity of our migration system".
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said Labor needed to drop its bill, which she said could risk people on bridging visas being deported.
"Here we have the Labor government ... trying to out-Dutton Dutton on immigration," she said.
"It's a race to the bottom from the two major parties and frankly it's obscene."
