The High Court documents released on Tuesday confirm this.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has sought to shift blame to everybody else.
But an important fact revealed in the High Court’s reasons for its ruling against indefinite detention exposes just how shambolic the government’s approach has been.
And the threat to keep parliament sitting until the government can fix the problem is nobody else’s fault but its own.
In paragraph 63 of the reasons for its ruling, it is revealed an agreed statement of facts between the government and the solicitors for the plaintiff – the child sex abuser known as NZYQ.
The concession given by the government on May 30 this year, was that the plaintiff could not be removed from Australia and there was no prospect of the plaintiff being removed in the foreseeable future.
This admission by Immigration Minister Andrew Giles made the High Court’s decision inevitable.
It effectively handed the issue of indefinite detention to the courts to decide on the basis that the government had conceded that the basis on which it is founded could not be fulfilled in this case.
The government clearly knew it had stuffed up.
In paragraph 66, it is further revealed that on August 29 O’Neill went on a mad rush to try and deport NZYQ by contacting Australia’s closest allies – Five Eyes partners of the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand.
Unsurprisingly, none of them were interested in taking a convicted sex offender. Why would they?
By then it was all too late. The question the government refuses to answer is whether O’Neill knew in the first place or was dispatched to try and clean up Giles’ mess.
The Opposition immigration spokesman Dan Tehan suggests that the admission that NZYQ could never be deported should never have been made in the first place by the government.
It made a rod for its own back.
There can be no doubt that this is a monumental stuff up at a senior Ministerial level.
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