Sarah Stephen
How fast the federal Coalition government can move when it wants to! On June 17, Prime Minister John Howard came to an agreement with the "Rebel 4" Liberal Party backbenchers on a compromise deal to reduce the harshness of mandatory detention of "illegal" asylum seekers, and within six days, legislation was drafted and passed through parliament to do this.
The legislation will allow families to be moved into "community detention", and will give the commonwealth ombudsman a role in overseeing those detained for over two years, with the power to call for their release (but not the power to release them).
The legislation will also commit the immigration department to processing asylum claims within three months, and the Refugee Review Tribunal to reviewing appeals within three months. The legislation did not deal with the issue of processing temporary protection visa-holders' claims for permanent protection.
Despite some passionate speeches in federal parliament, the ALP refused to support Greens Senator Bob Brown's amendments, which would have returned the bill to the original form proposed by Liberal MP Petro Georgiou.
Labor voted against a Greens amendment to close the detention centre on Nauru at the end of June, when the current memorandum of understanding expires. Labor also sided with the government to defeat another Greens' proposal — to extend the Australian migration zone to Nauru and other offshore detention centres, allowing detainees full access to the Australian judicial system.
While Labor proposed some of its own minor amendments in the Senate, these were rejected when the bill returned to the House of Representatives.
When the legislation came back to the Senate a second time, Labor backed down and let the legislation pass through unamended.
Peter Andren, independent MP for Calare in country NSW, told the parliament on June 21: "The prime minister suggests that, in hindsight, the changes he has put into these bills should have been introduced some time ago. Why weren't they? And, with the greatest respect to that endangered species, true liberals, why weren't the dissident backbenchers introducing private member's bills almost four years ago when these policies were tightened to the point of human rights abuses?"
A fair question. The answer points to the thing that has changed over the past four years — public opinion, which has been dramatically affected by a broadly supported mass movement against mandatory detention and the suffering it has caused. The dissident Liberal backbenchers acted only when the groundswell of public pressure presented itself as a real political threat.
Andren mocked Labor and its lack of opposition, describing the bill as "a response by a prime minister under enormous pressure from the four dissident members doing the job of an opposition that is locked into the mandatory detention process because it invented it, which has been rigid with fear of a backlash from the electorate — so rigid that the opposition to this obnoxious policy has gradually developed within the ranks of the government itself".
The government's best chance of reducing the political pressure it is under over mandatory detention of asylum seekers is to empty the detention centres without altering the policy itself. It's perhaps no coincidence that there has been a steady stream of refugees released from Baxter and Villawood detention centres on temporary protection visas in the past three months.
It's also no coincidence that immigration minister Amanda Vanstone announced on June 20 that long-term detainee Peter Qasim had suddenly begun to "cooperate", and that she had invited him to apply for a removal pending bridging visa.
The new legislation will increase the number of people living in the general community on bridging visas, among them families and long-term detainees such as Qasim. Bridging visas offer people even fewer rights and less certainty than temporary protection visas. The removal pending bridging visa, introduced in May, creates the potential for stateless asylum seekers to live in the general population in limbo forever.
From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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