Arrest of third detainee underlines risk to public

The arrest of a third detainee released into the community after the High Court ruled indefinite detention is unlawful is an ongoing nightmare for the Albanese government. The issue is far graver than politics, however, going to the heart of public safety and national security. Emran Dad, 33, arrested in Dandenong in Melbourne’s southeast, has been charged with breaching his reporting obligations as a registered sex offender. Dad was charged with three counts of having contact with a juvenile and using social media such as Instagram and TikTok and a live chat facility in breach of his reporting obligations. He will be held in custody until his next Magistrate’s Court appearance on December 14. Dad once traded a packet of cigarettes as payment for sex with a 13-year-old girl, opposition legal affairs spokeswoman Michaelia Cash told the Senate on Tuesday. And the County Court of Victoria previously has heard that Dad took a young girl shopping on her 15th birthday and bought her any gift she wanted in exchange for sex and later told police he didn’t know the law prohibited him from having sex with girls aged under 16 because such laws did not exist in his homeland, Afghanistan. Such views reflect how far out of step some former detainees are with Australian thinking.

That will be cold comfort to most Australians, who do not know where the released detainees are living. Dad’s arrest follows that of two other former detainees who were also among 148 non-citizens released following the High Court’s decision in relation to NZYQ – a stateless Rohingya man who raped a 10-year old boy. The other two arrested are Aliyawar Yawari, 65, who faces two counts of indecently assaulting a woman in an Adelaide motel on Saturday night; and Mohammed Ali Nadari, who was arrested for drug possession in Merrylands in Sydney’s west on Saturday afternoon. He did not turn up in court and was found guilty in absentia by Parramatta Local Court on Monday and fined $300.

Labor’s preventive detention regime will pass the parliament on Thursday, the last sitting day of this year. The much-needed laws are a step in the right direction and should have been ready to go weeks ago, as soon as the High Court delivered its ruling. The government’s amendments to the bill passed the Senate on Tuesday with Coalition support. The Greens, as usual, were out of step with mainstream Australians, accusing the major parties, despite the third arrest, of being in a “race to bottom’’. The Coalition’s proposed amendments providing transparency about the criminal histories of the detainees released was rejected, unfortunately, by Labor and the Greens joining forces. That is information Australians are surely entitled to know. It is in Australians’ interests that the legislation allows stateless criminals and others who cannot be deported to be re-detained if a Supreme Court judge is satisfied there is “a high degree of probability that the person poses an unacceptable risk of committing a serious violent or sexual offence”. The laws will allow a judge to order ongoing detention for periods of up to three years, subject to annual reviews by the immigration minister.

Given the characters of some of those released, it will worry the public that constitutional law experts such as George Williams from the University of NSW are warning that the laws are likely to be challenged in the High Court. The government, to its credit, had “done their very best”, Professor Williams said, to make the legislation “constitutionally sound” and had based its laws on the former Coalition government’s High Risk Terrorist Offender regime, which already has been upheld by the High Court.

If required to revisit the matter in future, the court’s judges, in applying the law, surely need to take into account its potential impact on Australians far from the relatively secure leafy inner-urban suburbs where most judges and barristers reside.