Labor’s refugee-bashing bill is terrible law. Minority government can’t come soon enough

Which candidates and parties have seen their popularity with electors increase, as the two major parties’ primary votes continue to decline?

And which members of Parliament lined up to vote against the Albanese government’s latest refugee-bashing bill yesterday, as it was rammed through with the Coalition’s support?

That’d be the independents (including the “teals”) and the Greens — in the lower house, almost the whole crossbench. You know, the ones who will probably hold the balance of power after the next election.

The Migration Amendment (Removal and Other Measures) Bill was given to the opposition at 7.30am, and the crossbenchers at 8.45am. No negotiations were entered into, no opportunity for debating amendments.

The bill is the latest manifestation of the government’s panic over the mythical hordes of “hardened criminals” who the Coalition insists have been roaming the countryside since the High Court brought indefinite detention to an end in the NZYQ case. Nobody in Parliament — Pauline Hanson aside — really believes in this threat; the issue is that the High Court torpedoed the bipartisan practice of torturing refugees and asylum seekers forever to placate Australians’ dread fear of boat people.

Since we can’t detain them indefinitely without criminal guilt anymore, the idea is to make them criminally guilty. The first post-NZYQ move was to impose draconian conditions on them in the hope or expectation they’d trip up, so they could then be imprisoned for these fresh “crimes”. That hasn’t worked.

So we now have Plan B, the invention of new criminal holes designed specifically for recalcitrant asylum seekers to fall into. The major plank of this is a regime under which the minister for immigration will have the power to order “removal pathway non-citizens” to actively cooperate in the process of their own deportation. If they don’t, that failure will be a crime, carrying a mandatory minimum one year prison sentence (and up to five years).

This new class of non-citizens are people who under the migration regime are deemed subject to removal as soon as reasonably practicable; that is, those who have been refused a visa. Almost all of these will be people whose asylum claims have failed. However, it also includes individuals on certain classes of bridging visa, who are in Australia lawfully as a result; some of them will have been found to be refugees.

What all these people have in common is that they are not, by virtue of the definition under which they’ve been collected, criminals. Entering Australia is not a crime, valid visa or not; nor is seeking but failing to obtain asylum.

The minister’s direction powers are broad, including requiring individuals to sign passport or visa applications and other documents to facilitate their being sent to another country and received there. The idea is that they can no longer refuse to participate in their own deportation; the effect is to criminalise passive resistance to an outcome they do not want.

The minister’s new powers will not extend to forcing children to do anything, but extraordinarily they will be able to order parents to do these things on behalf of their own kids. Pause here for a second, and try to imagine yourself in a foreign country where you’d managed to get your children for refuge. The government tells you to sign documents that will result in your child’s removal from that safety, and that, if you don’t, you’ll be going to jail. That’s where we’re at now, in our national relationship with humanitarianism.

Individuals will have a defence of “reasonable excuse” for non-compliance, to avoid committing the offence. However, genuine fear of persecution in the destination country is deemed by the bill to not be a reasonable excuse, and it’s hard to see what else could be.

Making it a crime to act consistently with the basic human desire to live freely, in a way that does not hurt anyone else, is a travesty. It is bad law, in flagrant disregard of our international human rights obligations.

The bill has a second new trick, adding dramatically to what was already an eye-popping list of personally discretionary “God powers” the Migration Act gives to the minister. They will now be able, on their own initiative and with no avenue for appeal or review, to designate any other country as a “removal concern country”, with the effect that any visa application from a person who is a national of that country will automatically fail. The only requirement is that the minister considers the designation to be in the national interest, which is as fluid as it sounds.

This one is partly about enhancing the government’s ability to use asylum seekers as human pincushions for political expediency, but its evil is broader than that. It gives a politician power to peremptorily shut out, altogether, entire populations from ever entering Australia (even on a tourist visa), let alone aspiring to settle here. The point is the message: fuck off, we’re full.

Not only does Australia tell the rest of the world do NOT give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Now we’re saying, and by the way, if you come from Country X, Y or Z, don’t even bother asking the question. You could be Albert Einstein crossed with Nelson Mandela, the answer’s still no.

This is shameful stuff. If the government didn’t think so too, it wouldn’t be subverting the parliamentary process to sneak this fresh inhumanity into law before anyone has time to even read it, let alone raise the alarm.

And, in late news, they’ve failed to even achieve that, the Coalition ambushing them in the Senate and pushing the bill off to an inquiry. The government deserves the embarrassment richly.

Bring on minority government; in my opinion, it can’t come soon enough.

Do you want to see a minority government? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.