Australia’s plan to detain visa overstayers has been defended by Labor as a return to earlier migration settings, rather than an imitation of Donald Trump’s immigration policies in the United States.
Immigration Minister Tony Burke said more of the roughly 77,000 unlawful non-citizens in Australia would be held in detention for several weeks under the proposed system. The government will encourage them, and others in the same position, to leave voluntarily.
Mr Burke said the changes would reverse a system introduced after 2015, when migration detention was largely focused on people who had committed crimes rather than those who had simply remained after their visas expired.
Speaking at the National Press Club in Canberra, he sought to distinguish the plan from raids and deportations carried out by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“This is not the sort of operation that some people have seen on TV happening in other countries,” Mr Burke said.
Concerns over children in detention
The minister did not say whether children would be detained or separated from family members. His office was contacted for further comment.
Gillian Triggs, the former head of the Australian Human Rights Commission, warned that returning to the pre-2015 approach risked recreating what she described as a “horrific pipeline” for children.
She said 1,100 children had been held in detention in 2014 without education, in some cases for more than a year and indefinitely. “Most of those children were severely mentally and physically ill … the damage that was done to children and families is well documented, and probably unique globally,” Dr Triggs said.
The commission’s report helped lead to a substantial reduction in the number of migrant children held in Australian detention.
Since then, a landmark High Court ruling in 2023 has outlawed indefinite detention where there is no reasonable prospect of a person being returned to their own country. It remains unclear how that ruling would apply to the proposed changes.
Detention capacity expected to increase
The plan includes the recruitment of 100 compliance officers and the release of 250 additional detention beds. A 100-bed quarantine facility near Melbourne Airport, used during the Covid-19 pandemic, could also be repurposed.
That would potentially almost double Australia’s migrant detention population, currently estimated at 1,100 by the Refugee Council of Australia.
Kon Karapanagiotidis, chief executive of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the proposal invited comparisons with US immigration crackdowns.
“No matter who is in power, rounding people up, locking people up in detention centres is brutal,” he said. “Why would you be building that sort of capacity if you weren’t also considering detaining whole families?”
Mr Burke described the proposed system as “modest”. Appearing on the ABC programme 7.30, he said overstayers would first be given a bridging visa before being detained and then removed.
“Overstayers at the moment have just had an attitude of ‘well, what are you going to do?’ … if you don’t have a visa in Australia, then you should leave,” he said.
