December 1, 2023
Labor is under pressure to justify the release of 142 immigration detainees after a High Court ruling on one test case involving a convicted child sex offender, as the Coalition argues there was no need to let so many people out.
The federal government remains adamant it was required by law to release the cohort assessed from a broader group of 340 individuals deemed to be potentially impacted by the November 8 court ruling but the Opposition wants to see the legal advice behind the move.
The Coalition has also demanded an apology from Anthony Albanese after several senior Labor MPs, including Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil, accused Opposition Leader Peter Dutton of voting to "protect pedophiles".
Mr Dutton said one of his "life's passions" was to ensure women and children were kept safe. "I feel very genuinely and deeply about it," he said.
Labor's accusation stemmed from the Liberals' decision to vote against laws making it a criminal offence for any of the released immigration detainees convicted of child sex offences to go near schools or childcare. The Liberals argued they'd decided to wait for the full reasons behind the High Court decision that overturned a 20-year precedent ending the government's ability to indefinitely detain non-citizens it could not deport.
Those reasons have since prompted the Opposition to question if Labor prematurely released 142 of the detainees, including murderers, rapists and bikie gang members.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the court's reasons put "great weight" in the test case a stateless Rohingya man known as NZYQ having little chance of resettlement specifically due to the nature of his crime. Mr Paterson said it could be inferred that the decision only applied to other non-citizen child sex offenders as a cohort no other country was ever likely to agree to take.
"It is up to the Albanese government to tell Australians the basis upon which they then released in excess of 140 hardcore criminals who have no right to be in Australia," he said.
University of Sydney law expert Professor Anne Twomey said if the government was confident a detainee fell into the same category as NZYQ they were "obliged by the law" to release them.
Prof Twomey said in cases where there was "uncertainty" about the circumstances being similar to the test case, it would be "quite legitimate to wait for the judgment to have that certainty resolved".
However, she said continuing to unlawfully hold people in detention would have increased the amount of compensation the government could be required to pay.
Meanwhile, the Opposition has also called for new laws to allow governments to ask courts to strip convicted terrorists of their Australian citizenship to be strengthened to apply retrospectively.
Labor has proposed legislation paving the way for courts to strip citizenship from people convicted of terror, espionage and foreign interference offences in response to a different High Court ruling that struck down laws previously giving ministers that power. The Coalition supports the measures, but will refer the bill to an inquiry in the hopes a constitutionally sound way can be found to cancel the Australian citizenship of historic offenders.
