The former attorney general Christian Porter rejected a plea for mercy from six Indonesians who said they were wrongly jailed as children using unreliable evidence, telling them they had no chance of success despite their lawyers pointing to a landmark ruling years earlier finding a miscarriage of justice in a similar case.
The six Indonesians, then aged between 13 and 17, were detained on a series of people smuggling boats in 2009 and were prosecuted by the commonwealth and jailed as adults in maximum security prisons in Western Australia.