‘It’s now time for them to return’, says Alan Tudge

Nearly 200 asylum-seekers and refugees medically evacuated to Australia will remain in detention indefinitely.

‘We’ll keep them in the hotels in detention until they exercise one of those options. And that’s what we want them to do’: Acting Minister for Immigration Allan Tudge. Picture: AAP

Nearly 200 asylum-seekers and refugees medically evacuated to Australia will remain in detention indefinitely after the government vowed they would not be allowed to live in the community.

The unauthorised arrivals under the government’s Operation Sovereign Borders are in ­hotels in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point and Melbourne’s Preston, after being brought to Australia under Labor’s Medevac laws that were overturned in December.

Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said they could either elect to go home or back to Nauru or Papua New Guinea, but they would not be allowed to live in the community. “We’ll keep them in the hotels in detention until they exercise one of those options.

“And that’s what we want them to do,” Mr Tudge told the ABC’s Insiders program.

He said they would not be treated in the same way as about 1000 refugees and asylum-seekers living in the community who were medically transferred to Australia with ministerial approval prior to the Labor-backed laws.

“We’ve always been very clear that people don’t get the right to come permanently into Australia. We were always concerned about this Medevac legislation, that it was a back-door way of getting into the country,” Mr Tudge said.

“So the legislation was put forward by Labor and the Greens. Just under 200 people have come in. They’ve had their medical treatment and now it is, under the legislation, right for them to return home.”

Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally said the government, which had had people in indefinite detention for seven years, should explain its plans for the detainees, including whether they would be considered for community detention.

“Under the Medevac legislation, the Minister for Home Affairs had absolute power to refuse any person from entering the country,” she told The Australian.

Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship Kristina Keneally addressing media in Sydney in March. Picture: AAP

“If people in the hotels are a risk, why did he let them enter in the first place? If they are not a risk, why is he wasting taxpayers’ money putting them up in hotels when they can be accommodated at lower cost in the community?”

She said the refugee problem was one of “Peter Dutton’s own creation”, saying the government had left vulnerable people in indefinite detention while failing to negotiate other third country resettlement options beyond existing arrangements with the US.

“Labor has been calling on the Morrison government to resettle eligible refugees in third countries as a matter of priority for almost seven years and it’s time for Scott Morrison and Home Affairs Minister Dutton to take action.”

Mr Tudge said under the Labor-Greens Medevac law, ­refugees and asylum-seekers were required to return to offshore detention when their health improved. “That’s what the legislation itself says. On top of that, the individuals who came out signed a consent form that precisely that would occur.

“Now, we know today, 50 per cent of those people have actually had their health cared for. It’s been done and dusted.

“So it’s now time for them to ­return.”

More than 100 men are being held in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point Central Hotel and Apartments, and more than 60 men are detained in the Mantra Hotel, in Melbourne’s Preston.

Both are referred to by Home Affairs as an APOD’s or “alternative places of detention”.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, in a report last year, found hotels were “not appropriate places of detention, given their lack of dedicated facilities and restrictions on access to open space”.

In response, the Department of Home Affairs said hotels were used as “transit accommodation” for detainees “required to be in held detention for a short period”.