Peta Credlin: Karen Andrews needs to emulate Peter Dutton’s firm stance

If the Tamil family case succeeds, it won’t be long before illegal arrivals start thinking that if you can get to Australia and have a child, you can stay.

The new Border Protection Minister Karen Andrews is being targeted by activists to reconsider Peter Dutton’s decision to deport a Tamil family back to Sri Lanka.

Nades Murugappan and his wife had arrived separately in Australia via people-smuggling boats, met and married here and later had two children.

The family had been living and working in Biloela in central western Queensland, and even though arriving illegally meant no chance of staying here, they still ran it through our generous legal processes with the immigration department, the Immigration Assessment Authority, the Refugee Review Tribunal, and the Federal Court all rejecting the individual claims of both parents to remain in Australia.

Border Protection Minister Karen Andrews. Picture: Matt Taylor

After the order was made to deport them, more legal action ensued, and while waiting this latest appeal out, Dutton placed them in detention on Christmas Island, pending deportation.

To get to this legal impasse, where they aren’t refugees but can’t be deported yet, has reportedly cost taxpayers $6 million so far in court costs.

I can understand why people in Sri Lanka might want a better life in Australia, even though there’s no danger to Tamils since the end of the civil war a decade back; indeed around 1500 people like this family have returned.

Yet activists, and church groups, opposed to the government’s policies that stopped the boats, have adopted this family as a test case.

They hope that if they work the legal system long enough to delay deportation, public sympathy (or a change of government) will allow them to stay; and importantly, if that happens, give the activists a precedent for every other illegal arrival who came during the disastrous Rudd-Gillard years.

Some will argue, “but their children were born here so that makes Australian”, but not so under our laws; children born in Australia to non-citizens have no legal right to stay and if anyone who gets here can stay, with enough sympathetic media coverage and lobbying, it won’t be long before the people smugglers start telling their potential customers that if you can get to Australia, have a child before your deportation order is made, or worse still, board a boat pregnant.  

It’s clear what the Murugappans’ backers want: to exploit the law to delay deportation for years, in the hope that a minister might relent, using ministerial discretion, and that coming here illegally by boat will be vindicated.

Over the past few years, we all came to know Dutton’s mettle. His successor is now being put to the test.

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