So children will be freed from detention? Forgive me for not applauding

Children will be released from immigration detention.

When human-rights organisations react with devastation to the above statement, you know something is very wrong.

You know that there’s a catch. In fact many catches.

You know that the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection now has rights seemingly unfettered by the courts or international law.

You know that there are no protections for the children written into the new laws.

You know that the next batch of children to arrive can be put just about anywhere the Minister so deems to be appropriate. A developing nation with no child protection legislation – based on past experience – would be a good guess.

You know that the 167 children on Nauru will be no better off.

You know that 28 children in the community on Nauru, living in fear of their lives, hiding in their homes, will be no better off.

You fear now for the lives of 107 children born in Australia. They will quite possibly be put on a plane – as soon as it is reasonably decent to do so – though the Minister’s definition of ‘decent’ evades you for this moment.

Yes the children on Christmas Island will be freed – possibly by Christmas – but what of the other children detained elsewhere in fortress Australia? Those 167 on Nauru will not be freed. Nor those who come after them.

The legislation promises nothing in the way of child protections.

The minister frees the children under the same laws he had yesterday. And the week before that, and the year before that. Nothing has changed in that regard.

The children will only be freed because he says they will be freed.

This means they can be redetained at any time.

If found to be refugees they can be redetained. (The department forced 8-month pregnant refugee women off a bus – allegedly turning off the air conditioning and overheating them out of the vehicle – and back into detention, after they had lived freely for months.)

You’ll forgive us for not jumping up and down with glee when the Minister says the children will be out by Christmas.

At what price this last minute dash to free the children, on the last sitting day of parliament – after the government has been in power for so long?

These children – detained on average 467 days – were all of a sudden a priority?

Forgive us for not applauding.

For these children may temporarily be free. But in the long term, child rights have been compromised, to the point where one man has the power to flick them to a developing nation with the courts silenced. And international law becomes a footnote in an Act already lacking a notion of child rights.

Postscript: Not 24 hours after he promised to release children a 6 month old baby is sent to Darwin on its way to Nauru to indefinite detention. Has this minister no shame? Nauru's mortality rate for children under five is 40 times that of Australia’s.

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