The major parties have been accused of “stitching up” a deal to transform Nauru into Australia’s “dumping ground and penal colony” as parliament passed laws stripping basic legal rights from a group of noncitizens set to be deported.
The home affairs legislation passed the Senate on Thursday, following a snap three-hour parliamentary hearing the night before.
The bill amends the Migration Act “to provide that the rules of natural justice do not apply” for noncitizens on a removal pathway and validates government visa decisions – made before the high court’s NZYQ ruling in November 2023 – that could subsequently have been deemed unlawful.
The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, struck a deal with Nauru last week to facilitate the removal of 354 members of the NZYQ cohort, a group of noncitizens living in the Australian community whose visas were cancelled on character grounds.
The changes aim to speed up the deportation process by removing the cohort’s right to natural justice – and therefore further legal challenges – once the government decides to send them to Nauru.
When introducing the bill, Burke argued procedural fairness was being abused by the cohort to “delay and frustrate their removal at cost to the commonwealth in circumstances where it is neither necessary nor appropriate for it to continue”.
A hearing on Wednesday night heard the deal was expected to cost Australia at least $2.5bn over three decades, with Nauru banking $408m in the first year and $70m each subsequent year.
The head of the home affairs department’s immigration unit, Clare Sharp, told the hearing the majority of the funds would be placed in the Pacific nation’s trust fund, which is jointly governed with Australia. The total amount was dependent on the number of people Nauru agreed to take.
“If there are six people on Nauru, the majority of that [yearly] payment goes into a trust and sits in the trust, and should the agreement be frustrated and it never grows and never delivers, the trust could be clawed back,” Sharp said.
With Coalition support, the bill was passed on Thursday afternoon, despite a strong rebuke from the crossbench.
The independent ACT senator David Pocock said the bill was rushed and appeared to be against Labor’s values. The Greens senator David Shoebridge criticised the arrangement with Nauru as a “toxic deportation deal”.
“We are meant to be treating our Pacific neighbours as friends. We’re meant to be treating them as equals. We’re meant to be treating them as partners,” Shoebridge said.
“But instead, the Albanese government is literally bribing … our Pacific neighbours to become Australia’s 21st century dumping ground and penal colony.”
Senators Mehreen Faruqi and Lidia Thorpe derided the major parties on a “race to the bottom”.
“You praise migrants for what they bring to this country. You eat our food, you enjoy our festivals, but then you stitch up dirty deals with the Coalition to demonise us, because that is what this bill does,” Faruqi said.
Sanmati Verma, legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, said the barely-scrutinised passage of the “anti-fairness bill” showed the government wanted “to carry out a mass deportation of migrants and refugees of the kind we have never seen, without having to give a second thought to the lifelong consequences”.
Verma argued the laws gave the government the power to exile people to Nauru without warning or a reasonable process.
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“Without having to ask even the most basic questions … whether a person will die in Nauru without proper care, be targeted for violence as other refugees have been, or be permanently separated from their family,” she said.
“Clearly, the Australian government does not want to know the answers to these questions.”
Verma said the government was contributing to the normalisation of racism and anti-migration sentiments across Australia.
“The Albanese government is setting a new low for how migrants and refugees are treated, but our rights should be the same, regardless of visa status.”
Jana Favero, the deputy chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the legislation stripped the most fundamental legal safeguard – the right to fairness – out of deportation decisions.
She said the law validated flawed government decisions already made, cut off appeals currently before the courts, and gave the government sweeping powers to deport people to Nauru without notice or legal recourse.
“The threat of deportation is now real for thousands of people: people who have Australian citizen family members, including children. This would cause permanent family separation.”
Favero said the Australian government should be ashamed of its “secret” deal with Nauru.
On Wednesday, the government refused to table its agreement with Nauru in parliament. Favero said it contained no cap on the number of people who could be deported and no transparency about how public money would be spent.
The Asylum Seekers Centre said the new legislation gave the government the power to deport people without proper warning or the chance to challenge a decision – even when the government had made a serious error.
“This legislation is a sweeping attack on the rights of tens of thousands of people, simply because of where they were born,” its chief executive, Elijah Buol, said.
