In heated debate last week about the high court’s ruling that indefinite immigration detention is unlawful, the immigration minister summoned a moral example from an unlikely quarter. Andrew Giles quoted warnings from the former attorney general George Brandis – a Liberal – that “to attack [the courts] is to attack the rule of law itself”.
Giles was responding to the absurd suggestion that he had misled parliament by stating that people other than the plaintiff, the stateless Rohingya man known as NZYQ, were required to be released as a result of the high court’s ruling. The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, and the shadow immigration minister, Dan Tehan, seized on the court’s reasons this week to claim that only NZYQ needed to be released.
