Under O’Neil, Biloela family would be deported

The Home Affairs Minister has turned hypocrisy into an art form with her constant brag about how Labor is keeping borders safe.

Priya and Nades Murugappan and their daughters Kopika and Tharnicaa pose for a photo after arriving at the Thangool Aerodrome near Biloela in June 2022. Picture: Getty Images

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil certainly is making hay while the sun shines, doing as many media appearances as possible to champion Labor’s new hardline position on illegal migration.

O’Neil is taking every opportunity to land political hits on Peter Dutton, attacking the hardline former home affairs minister from his right flank for a “lack of care, lack of attention and lack of basic interest in what is one of the most important things that the Australian government does”. The task of keeping our borders safe.

Putting to one side the-not-so humblebrag that her ministerial role must therefore also be “one of the most important things that the Australian government does”, turning border protection politics against the Coalition is an interesting manoeuvre.

This week’s announcement includes $160m of new spending to separate genuine refugees from illegal immigrants. Labor will hire more members of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, having downsized the number of members soon after winning government when it purged a host of Coalition appointments.

O’Neil wants to clamp down on what she labels abuses within the system. “The real victims of the abuse of this protection visa claims system are people who are genuine refugees,” she declared at her Wednesday press conference.

To prevent “false asylum claims” and to avoid “the backlog of tens of thousands of overstayed visas”, her reforms include a $50m announcement to bolster the compliance division assessing visas. “They (genuine refugees) are being forced to wait in a queue behind a bunch of people who don’t have a meritorious claim,” O’Neil thundered. She clearly has no tolerance for non-compliant claims and she’s taking strong action to address the issue head-on.

So what would the new hardline approach have meant for the Biloela family, who didn’t qualify as genuine refugees? Rightly or wrongly, the independent assessment process at the time determined the asylum-seeking family fell short of the official definition of genuine refugees. In other words, they didn’t qualify and therefore were slated for deportation. Their legal team spent years fighting to prevent their deportation in a bid to have the decision reversed – the approach now being condemned by O’Neil.

The Labor Party went to the election last year pledging to grant the family permanent visas anyway. One of the Albanese government’s first official acts of business was to release the family from immigration detention, allowing them to return to Biloela in central Queensland. It was a heartwarming moment, reflecting the values of the newly minted Prime Minister who was not prepared to let politicised Coalition attacks that Labor was “soft on boat arrivals” erode his compassion for a family contributing to their community despite noncompliance. A few short months later and the family was granted permanent visas by Immigration Minister Andrew Giles.

Under the hardline approach O’Neil is spruiking, however, that family would be deported. They didn’t qualify as genuine refugees and they overstayed their visas. Case closed. The deportation under the new model would have been swift, too, long before any public campaign could be mounted. The compassion used by Labor to justify the family staying just 18 months ago – their significant contribution to the regional community they settled in and its collective desire to have them back – is no excuse for exceptionalism under the policy settings O’Neil now champions as necessary to clean up the mess she claims the Coalition left behind.

Her desperation to land political blows on the Opposition Leader puts her moral framework at profound odds with that of the Prime Minister. Perhaps an example of the laws of unintended consequences in action. It also opens her up to the charge of hypocrisy. As former US congressman Tom Tancredo put it, “living on hypocrisy is not a healthy diet”. Or was this policy approved by the cabinet Anthony Albanese chairs? Presumably, in which case the question that has to be asked is: How do all the members in that room justify one rule for one family and a new, contradictory, hardline set of rules for everyone else? Perhaps the rigours of government have hardened all of their hearts.

Although O’Neil wasn’t the opposition home affairs spokesperson who drafted the election policy to grant the Biloela family visas in the first place, she was part of the shadow ministry that approved it. Back then O’Neil was passionate about moving from her shadow aged-care portfolio into the aged-care ministry to take up “a generational chance to reform the sector”. In the end a more senior seat at the cabinet table as Home Affairs Minister was too good to resist when the Prime Minister offered it up.

If Albanese has the courage of his long-stated convictions on refugee issues he’ll rein in his ambitious minister, who seemingly is using her portfolio to position herself as the next generation’s right-wing candidate for the leadership or deputy leadership.

No one is denying the portfolio’s challenges: misuse of the system and abuses some asylum-seekers face from unscrupulous operators. It does need to be cleaned up. But O’Neil’s reaction to the challenges and the way she is prosecuting the case for reform reeks of political opportunism and flies in the face of the compassion shown to the Biloela family.

I’m a long-term bleeding heart on the issue of asylum-seekers, including continuing to oppose offshore processing and the incarceration of those whose applications are being processed, and I am surprised someone with Albanese’s social justice instincts would allow O’Neil to turn immigration policies into dog-whistle politicking, playing the Coalition at its own game.

Watching it happen highlights that when it comes to seeking political advantage, both sides of the major party divide will ascribe to the “whatever it takes” playbook of former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson.

Meanwhile, where are all the journalistic critics of hardline Coalition politicking and policymaking on asylum-seeker issues now that Labor is going even further, with an added sprinkle of hypocrisy on top? Surely they don’t call out only one side of politics and not the other.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.