High Court blows up Labor’s detention lies in one devastating paragraph

The depths of the government’s border confusion have been laid bare as the High Court’s releases its reasoning as to why it chose to release a sex offender from indefinite detention.

ANALYSIS

The depths of the Albanese government’s border confusion have been laid bare by the High Court’s reasoning, released Tuesday, as to why they chose to release a Rohingya sex offender from indefinite detention.

In a 7-nil judgment the High Court said, essentially, that if someone has done their time, they can’t be kept banged up in immigration detention if there is no chance they’ll ever get out.

It was this logic that saw the government free well over a hundred serious criminals from immigration detention, with at least one now on the run after refusing to wear an electronic ankle monitor.

The reasoning of the High Court is fairly straightforward and, as much as it might disturb some people, does not rely on any particularly weird or convoluted route to get from A to B.

The plaintiff – a child sex offender understood to have raped a 10-year-old-boy – had served his shockingly light five year sentence for that crime.

Because he cannot be sent back to Myanmar, and because there is no prospect of him being either deported or receiving a visa, keeping the man in detention amounts to an extrajudicial punishment, not a reasonable precaution while the wheels of bureaucracy turn.

That Clare O’Neil ever tried to suggest that the government thought the case might have gone their way simply doesn’t stack up, especially given the increasingly activist nature of the Court in recent years.

The Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese and Minister for Home Affairs, Clare O'Neil arrive for Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Worse, reading the judgment, it is clear that the reported attempts by the Albanese government to a Five Eyes nation to avoid the case going to the High Court came straight out of the Wile E. Coyote school of jurisprudence.

Not five paragraphs in, the justices write: “No country in the world has an established practice of offering resettlement to persons in Australia who have been convicted of sexual offences against children.”

At least one released detainee has refused to wear an ankle monitor. Picture: NCA NewsWire

The justices continue, adding: “The Department had never successfully removed from Australia any person convicted of a sexual offence against a child to a country other than a country which recognised the person as a citizen.”

So why did O’Neil’s office think they had a prospect of doing so this time?

And why did they think, even for a moment, that this might have gone their way – an error that led to an embarrassing train wreck for the government in parliament in an area where Labor has always been considered weak, i.e., border security?

Those who suggest that there is a lifeline for the government in that the ruling opens the door for the re-internment of individuals who have a prospect of being deported in the future should note that if there was a prospect of sending criminals back to countries where they had citizenship rights, these prerogatives would have already been exercised.