Australian Greens: The right kind of outlaw

The absolutely shameful treatment of Iranian refugee Ned Kelly, a victim of Australia’s seemingly bipartisan punitive refugee policy

By Senator Jordon Steele-John

After taking office in May, one of the Albanese Government’s first orders of business was to grant the long-suffering Murugappan family permanent visas.

Years after the Morrison Government ripped the persecuted Tamil family of four from their Biloela home and shunted them between offshore and community detention facilities, it’s such a welcome relief to see that the new government has true compassion for refugees.

Except – surprise – it doesn’t.

Because while we (rightfully) revel in the joy of the Murugappans’ happy ending, hundreds of refugees continue to languish quietly in detention without trial or charge. I’d like to share with you the story of just one of them.

Such is life?

At the beginning of this year, I was contacted by a number of constituents expressing grave concerns for Ned Kelly (name changed by deed poll), an Iranian refugee being held at Perth Immigration Detention Centre.

For almost the entire decade since he arrived in Australia, Ned has been locked up in detention. He has quite literally spent longer in onshore detention than just about anyone else. And while his metallurgy engineering qualification falsely flagged him as a bomb-making expert, Ned has committed no crime. He is not a bad guy; he has not done anything illegal.

Like every other asylum seeker, Ned is simply searching for a safer, better life because the one available in his country of birth is untenable. He made what was probably one of the most difficult decisions of his life: to permanently leave his home and everything he knows and loves – something I actually can’t fully comprehend myself. In short, he is seeking asylum. It’s right there in the name.

At the time I was first made aware of his case, Ned was in the midst of a hunger strike and only drinking water with his medication, which he said he was going to stop doing. Beyond the gross injustice of keeping him arbitrarily locked up for so long, it was obviously becoming a very urgent medical situation – particularly because he has been diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and made multiple suicide attempts.

An outlier among outlaws

Ned is subject to a protection finding, which means he cannot be deported to Iran. He can’t be sent anywhere else, because there is no third country available to resettle him.

And yet, when the Morrison Government released a number of refugees from detention ahead of the election – characterised by at least one advocate as a cynical ploy to garner favour with independents – Ned was left behind.

It is not some complex web of sensitive diplomacy or convoluted legislation that is keeping Ned in arbitrary detention – it is the home affairs department itself.

Ned was initially granted a refugee visa, which the Coalition government revoked in 2014. When a court then ruled he should be released from detention, former home affairs minister Karen Andrews personally intervened to ensure he stayed locked up.

I wrote a letter to former minister Andrews at the start of the year, imploring her to release Ned. I told her it was inappropriate and antithetical to Australia’s common values to allow him to continue in this perpetual state of hopelessness, and that Ned’s ongoing detainment breaches Australia’s commitment to the United Nations Refugee Convention.

My plea to Minister Andrews went unanswered. Though she received my letter in the context of Ned’s hunger strike, her office literally did not respond.

Since the change in government I have engaged with the new home affairs minister Clare O’Neill and urged her to oversee Ned’s release from immigration detention. At time of writing, I haven’t received a response.

A crisis of bipartisan proportions

If there could possibly be one good thing to say about the Liberals’ position on asylum seekers, it’s that we largely know what we’re getting. Since 2013, the jewel in the crown of their migration policy has been Operation Sovereign Borders, their military-led program of ‘stopping the boats’ and holding people in offshore detention.

Make no mistake: it is depraved. On a macro level, their policy shirks Australia of our humanitarian and legal obligations. Individually, it actively and heartlessly destroys lives. The Liberals’ position is so inhumane that it is actually John Howard’s handling of the Tampa affair in 2001 that sparked my interest in politics to begin with. But there is no confusion about their values – the ‘I stopped these’ trophy on Scott Morrison’s desk tells us all we need to know.

The Labor party has repeatedly demonstrated that it shares these views. But in their eagerness to maintain their mask of a party of the left – slipping though it may be – they are less forthcoming. Consider the following two statements:

“Labor believes in a compassionate approach to asylum seekers which enables refugees to progress their claims safely and securely.”

“Labor completely supports Operation Sovereign Borders – offshore processing, regional resettlement and boat turnbacks where safe to do so.”

These two remarks – the first from the ALP website, the second made ahead of the election by then shadow home affairs minister Kristina Keneally – are demonstrably incompatible. They cannot logically coexist within the same policy. And they betray the total disconnect between what the Labor party thinks it is and what it actually is.

The result is that the Albanese Government is now giving with one hand and taking away with the other. And Ned’s case, sadly, is emblematic of just how arbitrary and conditional the new government’s humanity truly is.

I absolutely agree with Labor’s first statement above: we need a compassionate approach to asylum seekers. We need to abolish offshore detention; to increase our humanitarian intake; to abolish temporary protection visas; to reintroduce permanent protection visas.

Ultimately, we need to abide by our humanitarian and legal obligations to accept refugees and treat them with the humanity we all deserve. That’s what the Greens have always fought for, and it’s a big reason why I found my home in this party and not one of the two majors.

Because as my colleague Senator Nick McKim has astutely said about this issue – on which he has so passionately advocated for years – they are simply the same shit in a different coloured toilet.

Header photo: Melbourne refugee and asylum seeker rights rally 27 July 2013. _{Takver, Australia CC}