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Deportation bill ‘desperate power grab’ in dying days of government: HRLC
The Morrison government’s third attempt to pass “flawed” legislation that would grant the immigration minister more power to cancel visas and deport people has been labelled a “desperate power grab” by human rights lawyers.
Naomi Neilson
Based on character or conduct alone, the immigration minister has sweeping powers to detain and deport people. Should the Migration Amendment (Strengthening the Character Test) Bill 2021 be passed, it would expose even more people to indefinite detention and deportation, the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC) argued.
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HRLC added that since 2014, when the Coalition government first expanded the visa cancellation powers, the number of people detained due to visa cancellations increased dramatically. HRLC senior lawyer Scott Cosgriff said that if passed, the new laws would lead to more people being detained, “including people who arrived in Australia as children and have lived almost all their lives here”.
“The bill would lower an already excessively low threshold for the minister to be able to rip a person away from their families, lock them up in a detention centre and deport them to a country that is not their home, even when that person has lived in Australia for decades,” Mr Cosgriff commented.
“If passed, it would allow the detention and deportation of long-term residents for conduct that did not otherwise lead to significant criminal penalty.”
Mr Cosgriff said that instead of “flogging this dead horse”, the Morrison government must focus on fixing immigration detention failures. This should start with releasing the refugees that it continues to “spitefully detain in makeshift detention centres”.
“Parliament must reject this desperate power grab in the dying days of this parliamentary term,” Mr Cosgriff said.
