As a refugee, when you seek asylum, you experience a complicated bureaucratic process that seems never-ending. This system is a labyrinth of violence where many refugees feel as though they have been sucked in or swallowed whole. Sometimes refugees may feel they have found an open door but soon they realise they have been brought back to the same room they were in years ago. The violence of this system has many faces and has swallowed years, decades, of their lives.
The Australian immigration system has established a vicious cycle of violence that looks to be further entrenched with the three rushed migration bills.
Thousands of refugees who had believed themselves to have finally found safety will be targeted by the new migration amendment (removal and other measures) bill. It expands the minister’s power and allows the government to put refugees back again in prison camps, deport them or banish them to a third country.
According to Guardian Australia, the most likely potential targets are about 4,452 people on bridging visas, 1,179 people in immigration or community detention, and 246 people released due to the high court’s ruling that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful. For those already in detention centres, this means no clear future and their indefinite imprisonment continues. For those who have been free for years, it means being trapped in detention and the threat of deportation or banishment to a third country. In other words, it means returning to the same place they were brutally held years ago – or worse.
Based on my experience as a refugee, we lost almost everything when we left our countries. We lost family, friends, jobs and the communities to which we belonged. A refugee is like a bird that has lost its nest, and it takes years to build a new one on a new tree.
Most refugees who will be targeted by this bill have already achieved this, even under difficult circumstances and while struggling with PTSD. But now they will again be forced to lose everything.
Yet this time the situation is worse: these refugees have already experienced the violence of the Australian immigration system and now the government seeks the power to put them back into that tragic situation indefinitely.
This bill is highly problematic in terms of its legal and political aspects. The high court ruled in November 2023 that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful and in November 2024 that forcing people released from immigration detention to wear ankle bracelets and live under curfews is unconstitutional. In response, the Albanese government has rushed to introduce this bill, which not only targets a few hundred people with criminal records but expands to target many thousands who have been living peacefully in Australia for years. The government has used a few specific cases to justify creating a brutal law.
We’ve seen how the media has adopted language used by politicians including the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, with headlines full of words like “criminals”, “safety”, “fear” and “community protection”. This language criminalises refugees, provides language for the government to hide behind and shapes public perceptions.
This bill expands the regime of banishment (offshore detention) and allows the government to make agreements with third countries including Nauru and others. It gives the Australian government broad powers to collect and share personal information about refugee’s previous interactions with the legal system, foreign governments or others, exposing refugees to deportation to countries where they may face harm or persecution.
We have significant experience with third countries, including Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and the history of human rights violations in those countries toward refugees has been recorded and criticised by countless humanitarian organisations. Sending people to a third country does not guarantee they won’t be deported to where they came from. Indeed, this bill is silent about whether they might be detained within such third countries.
Another huge concern is that the bill targets refugees who have Australian families. This means many families – including children – might be separated, with some family members detained, deported or sent to a third country.
Many families have already endured years of separation while in prison camps. Marriages have been destroyed due to the detention of one or both spouses, and we know children are the main victims of this brutal regime.
We can analyse this bill from multiple perspectives as it targets refugees in different situations but what is clear is that the Australian government is following the same pattern of using refugees as political tools close to elections.
As always, refugees – one of the most marginalised communities – are easy targets. Regardless of the many disagreements between Labor and the Coalition, when it comes to refugees, they always unite. I call it a “competition of cruelty”, where both parties vie to show the public that they are stricter. In this cruel race the winner is the Coalition, which has seized the opportunity to divide Australians further and once again dominate Labor.
I would like to repeat what I said to the Senate committee last week: You are making a policy that damages people who are already part of the community. What are you going to achieve with this brutal policy? Nothing. You are just making a tragedy worse.
• Behrouz Boochani is a writer and refugee who was held on Manus Island. He lives in Wellington, New Zealand
