By a vote of 78 for and 62 against, the federal Coalition government's Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on August 10. Three Coalition MPs — Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan — crossed the floor to vote against the bill. Two Coalition MPs — Liberal Bruce Baird and the Nationals' John Forrest — abstained.
The bill has still to pass the Senate, where the government has a majority of only one vote. At the time of writing, four Coalition senators — Barnaby Joyce, Judith Troeth, Marise Payne and Russell Trood — had yet to announce which way they will vote.
The bill proposes to excise the entire Australian coastline from Australia's migration zone and force all unauthorised asylum seekers, including children, arriving by boat to be processed offshore, most probably in the remote Pacific island-state of Nauru, a former Australian colony. This would deny the asylum seekers access to the Australian legal system and to the protections of the international refugee convention.
The convention states that asylum seekers cannot be penalised on the grounds of "illegal entry or presence" and must not be removed to a country where they could face persecution. Nauru, unlike Australia, is not a party to the convention.
A June 22 Newspoll found that 74% of voters opposed the proposed changes.
According to the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) Graeme Innes, the migration bill would put Australia in breach of "a number of international human rights instruments to which Australia has responsibilities". He told ABC Radio National on June 20: "The commission's view is that the bill should not pass."
"I do hope that in the Senate others in the Coalition, who share that view, will ensure its defeat", federal ALP leader Kim Beazley told journalists on August 11. He described the bill as "appalling legislation", but not because it will result in gross violations of asylum seekers' fundamental human rights.
"I can understand why sensible members of the conservative parties would not wish to see our sovereignty derogated like this", Beazley said after the vote. In a verbal skirmish with Coalition MP Wilson Tuckey outside Parliament House on August 10, Beazley described the migration bill as "weak" and a "sop" to Indonesian government displeasure at the Australian government's granting of refugee status to a boatload of asylum seekers from West Papua earlier this year. In parliament, he denounced the bill as "bad foreign policy".
It is not surprising that "Bomber" Beazley regards the Howard government's bill as "weak". After all, he was a cabinet minister in the government that introduced the xenophobic policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers in the first place.
In its August 6 media release, HREOC noted that since 1997 the United Nations Human Rights Commission has ruled five times that "Australia's immigration detention regime breaches one of the most fundamental of all human rights obligations — the right to be protected from arbitrary imprisonment". The latest ruling was made only a week earlier.
Commenting on that ruling, Innes said: "Currently, Australia's immigration detention laws say that detention is always necessary when a person does not have a visa. The laws do not allow for a court, or any other review body, to assess whether some people should be detained and others should not. In other words, people in Australia without a visa have even fewer rights than a person who is charged with committing a crime. Accused criminals have a right to go to a bail court within 24 hours to argue their case. People without a visa have no hearing at all."