Anthony Albanese is resorting to Donald Trump-style tactics to deport non-citizens – as he celebrates the passage of a series of tough new laws.
Labor’s Migration Amendment bills passed late on Thursday night, with support from the Coalition as 30 bills were passed on the last sitting day of parliament for the year.
Under the new laws, close to 80,000 people without a valid visa stand to be deported while asylum seekers who resist deportation face going to jail.
The latest development is a major policy shift for the Prime Minister who hails from Labor’s left faction – long opposed to offshore detention.
Less than a decade ago, Mr Albanese expressed his opposition to denying boat people entry into .
But in a bid to cling to power, the PM – who represents an inner-city electorate – is dumping his previous principles for political purposes.
His government is talking up the prospect of forced deportations and reinstating ankle bracelets for stateless criminals.
Human rights groups are warning that stateless people deported to a third country face being killed or violently attacked, while an asylum seeker group has described it as a ‘Trump-like bill’.
Labor was left reeling from a High Court decision last year that saw sex offenders and murderers released into the community.
The former home affairs minister Clare O’Neil introduced legislation in March which Asylum Seeker Resource Centre lawyer Rachel Saravanamuthu said was a ‘Trump-like bill [that] has no place in our democracy’.
Labor is traditionally regarded as weak on border protection so, if that means resorting to mass deportations – the kind of policy that helped return Trump to the White House – then so be it.
As the next American president prepares to deport illegal arrivals from Mexico, is embarking on the deportations of those whose visas have been cancelled or expired.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke three weeks ago announced new legislation to have non-citizens deported to third countries, with these countries paid to take people didn’t want.
His announcement followed the High Court ruling in the case of a stateless asylum seeker from Eritrea – known as YBFZ – who came to at age 14 and was released from immigration detention in November 2023.
This was after the High Court had ruled in another case – NZYQ – that indefinite detention was unlawful and unconstitutional.
YBFZ was required to obey a 10pm to 6am curfew and wear an ankle bracelet.
But the High Court ruled the curfew and the ankle bracelet were unconstitutional – even though ordinary ns had to obey a curfew in Melbourne during Covid lockdowns.
To get around this, Mr Burke announced proposed laws to have them deported, rather than detained indefinitely, and also announced he would be using his power as a minister to reinstate ankle bracklets by regulation.
A regulation means a temporary order can be made that comes into force immediately without the government having to wait for parliament to vote on it to become permanent.
‘Regulations are now being finalised that will allow for an adjusted process for electronic monitoring devices and curfews to be used,’ Mr Burke said.
Labor’s plan to deport non-citizens or electronically monitor them could potentially affect 75,400 people who don’t hold a valid visa.
The Department of Home Affairs made that admission to a Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee hearing last week.
Labor now faces a campaign from the Greens in cosmopolitan, inner-city electorates. .
Josephine Langbien, an associate director of the Human Rights Law Centre, warned asylum seekers forcibly deported could be killed under Labor’s plan to deport non-citizens.
‘We don’t know which countries will be included; we don’t know how the countries will treat the people who are sent there,’ she told senators last week.
‘They could be detained arbitrarily, denied medical treatment, they could be violently attacked or killed or they could be sent back to their countries of origin.
‘This is not far fetched because all of these things have happened to people previously exhiled offshore.’
Ms Langbien warned of children being separated from their parents – echoing what happened on the Mexican border when Trump was last in power.
‘It would allow the government to separate people from their families, sending them to permanent exile in third countries against their will with no way to ever return to their lives in ,’ she said.
‘These people have been singled out for harsher treatment than the rest of the n community simply by virtue of their visa status.
‘It will affect thousands of people – any person who is subject to removal from could be sent to an unspecified third country.
‘That’s any person – adult or child, refugee or tourist without any consideration given to their connections to or indeed their connections to the country which they’ll be removed.
‘It will be the people who cannot be returned to their countries of origin who are most at risk – refugees, stateless people and people who have fled oppressive regimes.’
John Howard’s Coalition government sent asylum seekers to Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea from 2001.
But his Labor successor Kevin Rudd scrapped the Pacific solution only for boat arrivals to surge from three in 2007-08 to 117 by 2009-10.
The number of asylum seekers soared from 25 to 5,327, figures from a Parliament House research paper showed.
Julia Gillard, who replaced Rudd in a party room coup, tried introducing a people swap deal with Malaysia but the High Court struck that down in 2011.
Labor never recovered politically and Liberal leader Tony Abbott won the 2013 election in a landslide, appointing Scott Morrison as the immigration minister who stopped the boats.
Under Labor’s watch when it was last in government, 50,000 asylum seekers arrived on 800 boats between late 2007 and 2013.
More than a decade on, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is leading the government in the polls.
The former Queensland police detective was also previously a tough-talking home affairs minister.
Ahead of the last election in 2022, Mr Albanese suggested he was against offshore processing – but later clarified he was.
‘We’ll turn boats back. Turning boats back means that you don’t need offshore detention,’ he told reporters at Cessnock in the Labor-held seat of Hunter.
In 2015, he told the ABC’s Insiders program he didn’t personally support the idea of turning back asylum seek boats.
‘Different people took different positions and that was the issue of turn backs,’ he said.
‘For me, that was something that I couldn’t support but in the context of the policy, I said earlier on in the week that you could be tough on people smugglers without being weak on humanity.’
Like the Howard government Albanese so despised, he has ramped up legal immigration to record-high levels and resorted to sending problem asylum seekers offshore – talking tough and acting tough.