Labor wants Australia to pay countries to take former detainees

Australia will pay third-party countries to accept former immigration detainees who cannot be deported to their home nations under Labor’s response to the High Court ruling that has unshackled non-citizens with criminal records from electronic monitoring devices and freed them from curfews.

Immigration Minister Tony Burke’s new laws would also allow the federal government to re-detain people once they are accepted for resettlement in another country, escalating Labor’s efforts to deal with the political fallout from last year’s NZYQ case, which released 224 former immigration detainees into the community.

Tony Burke has introduced legislation that would allow Australia to pay third countries to accept former immigration detainees who cannot be deported.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Under laws introduced to parliament on Thursday, if a non-citizen is granted entry to a third-party country under an arrangement facilitated by the government, then their bridging visa will cease to exist. That person then “may be taken into immigration detention … and may be liable to be removed”, according to an explanation of the laws.

The removal powers will be debated in the year’s final fortnight of parliament later this month and loom as a fresh test for the government, after Labor’s previous attempt to introduce a deportation bill that threatened jail time was blocked by both the Coalition and Greens because of humanitarian concerns and hasty drafting.

Burke on Thursday stressed the government was prepared for Wednesday’s High Court ruling – in which a majority of justices found ankle bracelets and curfews were punitive and therefore unconstitutional – although he would not reveal in question time how many people were now living without the restrictive conditions that Labor rushed through in December last year.

Text messages seen by this masthead show some of the 150 former detainees in ankle bracelets and 130 people subject to 10pm-to-6am curfews – most of whom have serious criminal convictions – have been told those conditions on their bridging visas are no longer valid.

“The monitoring of your device has stopped and curfew does not apply to you. You will be contacted by the Australian Border Force to make arrangements to remove the device. Please do not attempt to take the device off yourself. Removal will be undertaken by an authorised office,” they were told.

Burke on Tuesday signed off on rules that will reinstate an electronic monitoring and curfew regime, but require a higher threshold. “Obviously people have to be tested against it, but the regulation takes immediate effect,” he said.

However, Burke said imposing ankle bracelets or detention was not the government’s top concern. “Our first priority is, we don’t want them in Australia at all, and that is why we introduced powers today in the legislation to improve the government’s capacity to remove people from this country in that situation.”

The Coalition asked for a parliamentary inquiry into the new laws so they could be scrutinised before parliament gets back, but said the Albanese government had failed to reapply curfews and electronic monitoring on Thursday.

“Every second counts when it comes to community safety, and the government cannot afford to sit on its hands while these offenders roam free,” a statement from frontbenchers James Paterson, Dan Tehan and Michaelia Cash said.

But Greens Senator David Shoebridge said the government’s new laws, which would bribe countries to take people against their will, built on Australia’s offshore detention regime and played into the politics of incoming US President Donald Trump by sowing fear about migrants.

“This bill does far more than respond to the recent High Court case. It also introduces sweeping new powers that will force people who have fled Iran or Russia to choose between indefinite detention or being forced offshore to some unknown country with no protections,” he said.

Labor’s previous deportation bill – which it insisted was urgent but then shelved – had threatened up to five years’ jail for non-citizens refusing to go back to their countries and banned entire nationalities from visiting Australia if their governments didn’t accept citizens being returned against their will.

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