Peta Credlin: We all feel for the Murugappans but you can’t run our border policy on sentiment

The Murugappan family is desperate to remain in Australia and I sympathise with them, but the government needs to hold firm on its border policy.

If you believe what they’re trying to tell you, it’s all very simple; it’s about cruelty versus compassion. Deport the so-called Biloela family or allow them to stay in Australia.

But it’s what you’re not being told, that matters.

As with everything, a little bit of history and a few facts, make a world of difference.

The ‘Biloela family’ are the Murugappans, with dad and mum travelling to Australia separately by illegal boat, paying people-smugglers in the Rudd-Gillard years like 50,000 others. Once here, they each sought refugee status and pending the determination of their claims, were put on bridging visas.

Not long after they started this process, they met, married and had two daughters. Largely because both Nades and Priya, it seems, had freely left and re-entered Sri Lanka before coming to Australia, their claims to be refugees (ie to have a “well-founded fear of persecution”) have repeatedly been rejected: by departmental officers, by review tribunals, and by the Federal Court, all the way to the High Court of Australia, which declined to grant them leave to appeal.

Nades Murugappan, wife Priya and children Kopika and Tharunicaa. Pic Supplied

At every point, the family has consistently been found not to be owed protection, and not to be refugees; so therefore, they must return to their homeland.

But doesn’t the fact that their daughters were born here give them the right to stay?

No, it doesn’t because under Australian law, the dependent children of non-citizens have no right to citizenship, despite being born here. And this law is perfectly reasonable, otherwise having a child would become every tourist and temporary residents’ ticket to citizenship.

Worse still, anyone willing to pay people smugglers would be incentivised to bring pregnant women with them on dangerous trips, or seek to get pregnant shortly upon arrival as they start to test their case to stay.

But despite losing every case, the Murugappans are still refusing the government’s offer to return to Sri Lanka. Instead of joining the six and a half thousand illegal arrivals that have now gone home, including over 1500 Tamils, they have chosen to remain in Australia and keep up the legal fight.

Peta Credlin

They are on Christmas Island, not because the Morrison government is hard-hearted, but because they are in detention pending this final legal bid; and because it looks like failing along with all the earlier legal attempts, the activists have ramped up the emotional campaign in the media hoping to use them as a test case to break Australia’s border protection resolve.

With dad previously working in a Biloela abattoir and mum volunteering at the local St Vincent de Paul, it would be hard to find an Australian who doesn’t sympathise with the Murugappans’ desire to stay in Australia. I know I do because who can blame anyone for wanting a better life in this country?

But you can’t run border protection policy on sentiment; it has to be run according to the law, and according to our international commitments on refugees. On both counts, the Murugappans have failed to meet the test and no amount of emotional campaigning can change that.

Indeed, if this family were allowed to stay after running a public battle against the government’s border protection policies, it wouldn’t be making an exception; it would be setting a precedent.

It would give the people smugglers the example they need of illegal arrivals, who came by boat and used the legal system and the media, to stare down the Australian government and defeat its policy in order to remain permanently in Australia. This case has become a test of wills: between our government and especially the new border protection minister Karen Andrews (who will need to show that she’s as tough and fair as Peter Dutton); and the refugee activists who are using the Murugappans as pawns in their attempt to break Australia’s effective stance against people smugglers.

Nadesalingam Murugappan, known as Nades, his wife Kokilapathmapriy Nadarasa, known as Priya, and their daughters Kopika, 5 and Tharunicaa, 3 leave the recreation centre on Christmas Island. Picture: Colin Murty/The Australian

It would be wrong for the government to send them to the United States or to New Zealand, as was reportedly being considered last week, because these destinations are only for those actually found to be refugees, not for would-be economic migrants.

It would be even worse for them to be invited to make an onshore claim to remain because every other person currently in Australia seeking to change their visa status is required to do so from offshore. Giving the Murugappans special treatment wouldn’t be making a “one-off exception” as many Labor MPs (and left-wing Liberals) are demanding but inviting thousands more to use the media to beat the system.

It’s wrong to paint this as compassion on the left versus cold-hearts and cruelty on the right because there’s nothing compassionate about incentivising deaths at sea and lining the pockets of people smuggling gangs preying on the hopes of vulnerable people with the pitch that “if you can get here, you can stay here”.

Lose control of your borders and the humanitarian immigrant places that should go to women and children from the world’s most crowded refugee camps mostly go, instead, to the angry young men from the Middle East and the subcontinent that can pay their way.

And there’s definitely nothing compassionate about expecting our navy to retrieve corpses at sea.

As every traveller who has been there knows, Sri Lanka is not a bad place. The civil war is long over. Its prosperity is growing, and it is happy to welcome back citizens lured by people smugglers in the hope they will help their own country rebuild. The Murugappans should go home. It is as simple as that.

And if the friends they have made in Biloela really want to continue to help, there’s nothing to stop them sponsoring an immigration application from Sri Lanka, so that they might come the right way, rather than reward coming the wrong way.

G7 OR D10, ScoMo HAS TO MAKE THIS TRIP

THE Prime Minister’s second overseas trip in more than 18 months is well worth making and well worth subsequently spending two weeks in quarantine.

To start, there’s the UK-Australia free trade deal that Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson are expected to sign this week. It should be as close as possible to the economic partnership agreement between Australia and New Zealand and certainly shouldn’t be derailed by the anxieties of British farmers mollycoddled, for too long, by the protectionism of the EU; nor by the British PM’s new-found climate evangelism, either.

The other really significant aspect of this trip is that Australia is sitting at the world’s top table. As current chair of the G7, Boris Johnson wants to refashion the old Euro-centric, economics-focused G7 into something that’s global and geopolitical.

He wants it to be the D10, the 10 major democracies, with Britain, the US, Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada, now joined by Australia, South Korea and India to stand against China’s regional bullying and unfair trade practices.

A key message out of this G7-come-D10, will be the need to minimise China’s presence in domestic supply chains so that the communist regime
can’t disrupt our production in
the same way that it’s already disrupting exports.

As a country that understands commerce and respects the rule of law, India could readily meet some of the supply chain challenges (as well as export opportunities) that losing China could bring. Kick-starting the stalled India-Australia FTA talks should be another priority, even for
a PM with a lot on his plate.

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