Anthony Albanese accused of reviving Abbott-era onshore detention for failed asylum seekers

The Albanese Labor Government has been accused of reviving the Abbott Government-era policy of using onshore detention centres to deter illegal immigrants, although it is likely to pursue failed asylum seekers who arrived by air rather than in boats.

An extra 100 compliance officers will be hired to hunt down illegal immigrants and detain them in prison-like complexes that have been left partially empty for a decade, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced on Thursday.

Official figures show the six centres still operating in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide held 1041 people at the end of July. Almost all the detainees are waiting to be deported to their home countries because they committed criminal offences, such as assault or rape, rather than overstayed their visas.

They will now be joined by foreigners who arrived on tourist and student visas, which they may have used as a springboard to seeking asylum for persecution in their home countries.

“People just try it on because you get stuck in the queue and you get work rights while the government gets around to processing your claim,” former Immigration Department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi told The Nightly.

The Opposition foreshadowed its immigration policy, which will be published in weeks, would seek the deportation of tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers.

Liberal leader Angus Taylor ridiculed as “nonsense” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke’s claim that Australia has not allowed mass immigration. The Opposition calculates Australia accepts 1100 foreigners a day, or one every 78 seconds.

“We have been clear that Australia needs a UK-style Safe Country List to root out illegitimate protection claims and unclog our appeals system,” Mr Taylor told The Nightly.

“We also need to find and remove the 77,000 unlawful non-citizens who have no legal right to remain in Australia.”

While Albanese ministers said the revival of onshore detention was designed to discourage students and tourists from staying too long in Australia, immigration experts believe the primary target is the 1000 people every month being refused asylum who refuse to leave.

“Anyone that overstays their visa, if you overstay a tourist visa, you overstay a student visa, you’ll be picked up, and you’ll spend a few nights in a detention centre,” Assistant Minister for Immigration Matt Thistlethwaite told News24.

“We think that once the word gets around, ‘hey, I overstayed my tourist visa a couple of weeks, I got picked up and I spent a couple of weeks in immigration detention. It is not a nice place, I’m going home’.”

Only 20 failed asylum seekers are deported every month, according to Mr Rizvi, and “very little” was done to find and remove the rest.

Asylum-seekers usually fly into Australia on educational or holiday visas and claim refugee status after their visas expire, allowing them to automatically shift to bridging visas. Assessing their applications can take years and, with 85 per cent of claims refused, is seen as a leading way to rort the immigration system.

Awaiting deportation

Among those who could be caught by the change are asylum-seekers from Britain, Ireland, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, who are almost always denied the visas, which come with generous welfare benefits.

After holding 8000 people in 2014, mostly people who arrived by boat, 14 facilities were largely emptied out under the Turnbull and Morrison Coalition governments.

Greens Senator David Shoebridge compared the approach to mass deportations carried out by the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, also known as ICE.

“If you don’t want to be accused of acting like Donald Trump or ICE, then stop acting like them,” he told The Nightly.

The government spared the 20,000-people-a-year refugee program from cuts, but that did not stop refugee advocates complaining about the increased use of mandatory detention.

Kon Karapanagiotidis, founder of the Asylum Seeker Resources Council, said on X he was “deeply troubled” about the return to the pre-2015 policy of onshore detention. He said he planned to take a delegation of refugees to Canberra when Parliament resumes to put pressure on the government.

Pacific solution

Despite the government’s promise to prioritise agriculture and fisheries for skilled-worker visas while reducing net overseas migration from around 300,000 people a year to 225,000 people, some of the strongest resistance to Thursday’s immigration measures came from the farming lobby.

The National Farmers’ Federation said farmers were furious the government had slowed the processing of Working Holiday Maker visas from a few days to three months.

The program is used to attract backpackers for short-term farm labour, including fruitpicking. A lottery to choose which backpackers will be allowed to stay would discourage young people from travelling to Australia, hitting labour and driving up food prices, the group said.

“We’ve already got farms that are six weeks away from the harvest,” NSW Farmers’ Federation president Rebecca Reardon told The Nightly. “With the slowdown we’re seeing in (visa) processing, those workers they had lined up to come to the harvest are not going to be available.”

Farmers suffering backpacker shortages could hire unskilled and semi-skilled labourers from the Pacific islands and Timor-Leste, Employment Minister Amanda Rishworth said, through a federal program known as PALM, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme.

“Backpackers in their second and third year will have to work in regional areas,” she told the ABC. “There is also a number of other places that people can get agricultural workers, and I’d point to the PALM scheme.”

The suggestion farmers hire short-term workers from the Pacific appeared to be at odds with the government’s intention to cut the large number of temporary migrants, also known as guest workers.

The PALM scheme requires employers to cover the travel and relocation costs of workers from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru or Timor-Leste. The workers, who can stay for nine months or four years, depending on the type of visa, repay their moving costs from their wages.

After a promising start, interest in the scheme has stalled. There were 32,365 workers using the visas last November, about 2000 fewer than a year earlier, according to Stephen Howes, a professor at the Australian National University.

The high cost of the visas make them impractical for farms with short harvests, including wheat and other grains, Ms Reardon said. Hiring workers through the scheme is slow, she said, whereas backpackers were easy to find and could arrive quickly.

Shadow home affairs minister Jonno Duniam said the Coalition planned publish its immigration policy before parliament returns on October 12.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson called Mr Burke the “minister for mass migration” because his plan would add one million people to the population over the next four years.