New laws will allow former immigration detainees to be re-detained if deemed to pose a high risk of committing serious violence or sexual crimes.
The legislation was passed in the lower house on Thursday night, after ministers met around 9.30pm, following a condolence motion for Labor MP Peta Murphy who died on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news with The National Briefing – keeping you in the loop with news as it hits:
Concluding at around 11pm, the government’s preventative detention legislation passed just in time for the end of sitting year.
The legislation comes after a 20-year precedent was overturned in November, disallowing the government to detain people indefinitely.
Under the new legislation, judges will have the power to cancel Australian citizenship of some serious offenders and preventively detain some non-citizens who were released following ther high court’s ruling on indefinite detention.
Punishable offences include terrorism, espionage, and foreign interference, however the Coalition wanted offences included murder of Australians overseas, inciting terrorism, and child-sex offences overseas.
The offences proposed by the Coalition were defeated in the Senate.
The rush to legislative preventative detention received backlash from the Greens, crossbench MPS and asylum seeker advocates.
Acting legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, Sanmati Verma said the government was “seeking to replace one impermissibly punitive regime – indefinite immigration detention – with another”.
“The government and opposition want us to believe that the only way to keep the community safe is to surveil or imprison every single one of this group of migrants and refugees for the rest of their lives,” she said.