Border protection is bigger than wayward activists
The fast and loose tactics of activists were on display for all to see this week as a Sri Lankan family faced deportation. As was their complete disregard for upholding Australian law, writes Peta Credlin.
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If you arrive illegally to this country by boat, Australia will still test your claim for refugee status.
We will allow you to appeal the decision if it goes against you, over and over again, but when that’s exhausted, and our generous system still finds your claim doesn’t stack up, we expect you to leave because to do otherwise undermines our right to decide who comes to this country. And that’s the most fundamental principle of a nation’s sovereignty.
Of course, the activists will use any Ave, any person, indeed any child, to create a loophole that will be exploited as a new precedent, to tear down Australia’s border protection regime because for them, open borders globally are the end game.
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And this is what’s happening with the case of the Sri Lankan family, granted a last-minute legal injunction, as they were being deported from Australia on Thursday night.
Between them, the husband and wife have had their claims for refugee status rejected seven times — yet that hasn’t stopped activists using the family’s two-year daughter as their last throw of the immigration dice.
If the activists can win here, it means that any asylum seeker who can get to Australia just needs to arrive pregnant, or have a child here, to use the child as their ticket to remain should their own claim for refugee status fail; an offspring-insurance policy if you like.
With many of the 50,000 Rudd-era asylum seekers still in this country and using the courts to try and stay, many of them with children, the case of this Sri Lankan family has widespread implications.
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Here are the facts: the father paid people smugglers to come to Australia and arrived at Christmas Island in 2012; the mother also paid people smugglers and arrived at Cocos Island separately in 2013. As Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has pointed out in a statement released last December, this couple “met and married, and had two children … and did so in the full knowledge that they had no right to remain in Australia.”
It’s not as if they haven’t had due process either. The father’s application for protection under the UN Refugee Convention was rejected by the immigration department first, then by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, then by the Federal Magistrates Court, and then by the full Federal Court in November 2014. His argument went all the way to the High Court (the highest court in the land) and was rejected, yet again, in June 2015.
The mother’s refugee claim was rejected first by the Department of Immigration in 2016 and then by the Immigration Assessment Authority.
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From then, the family became unlawful non-citizens, and should therefore have departed Australia. When they refused to leave, they were taken into detention for removal. As Dutton’s statement said again, “after agreeing to voluntarily leave the country, the family withdrew from that agreement and Ms Nadarasa (the mother) then lodged further a legal appeal”. This failed too. But because this appeal only concerned the elder child’s right to stay in Australia — and because the younger child was not a party to that legal action, the activists are trying it on again. And this time is all rests on the claim that the youngest daughter should be allowed to remain in Australia, and if she does, so must the rest of her family.
There’s been a lot of misinformation in the media here about our laws of citizenship. Unlike countries such as the US, we do not have an automatic right to citizenship if you are born on Australian soil. Under our law, children born here to parents who are not Australians are not automatically considered citizens. This law exists because otherwise a child’s birth certificate becomes a parent’s citizenship stamp of approval for every would-be migrant who can get to this country.
Now, I understand why good people want this family to stay. Dad is working. Mum contributes too and this family has now been welcomed into the social fabric of Biloela, in central Queensland.
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But, no one should be able to come to Australia illegally on a boat, run the gauntlet of our legal system, and get knocked back again and again, yet still be allowed to stay. If we start bending the rules, we send a clear message to people smugglers and their customers that you can just wear down the legal system here long enough to have children in Australia and gain your ticket to stay.
There is nothing to stop this family returning to Sri Lanka and applying to come the right way. If they did, I would support them; because if they’re prepared to live and work in a regional town, they’re the sort of immigrants we want. There’s nothing to stop the father’s employer from sponsoring him either. But if the activists have a win here, we might as well hand back control of our borders to the people smugglers.