Grattan, who among her many talents holds an institutional memory that makes every politician quake, gave a lesson in the intersection between media and politics by focussing on the lack of political reaction to two pieces of news.
One, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s interview on Sky News last Sunday, where he admitted that no one from the NZYQ cohort of immigration detainees, released by a High Court decision, had reached the threshold of laws designed to enable the government to re-detain them.
For that we need a bit of context – for years Australia had detained asylum seekers, refugees and migrants who had their visas either cancelled or refused, but couldn’t be deported because they were stateless, would face death or serious harm in their birth countries, or their countries refused to co-operate with Australia’s deportation.
Most of the people caught up in this had either committed a crime or been charged with a crime. Some have no convictions.
But unlike when an Australian-born citizen commits a crime, is given a custodial sentence and then released back into the community at the end of their sentence to resume life, Australia wanted these people out.
When they ran into a deportation boundary, the workaround was to lock them up in immigration detention.
Unlike a sentence handed down by a court, there is no end date to this sort of detention. It was called “indefinite” and successive governments just sort of swept it under the rug without trying to find a humanitarian solution.
