How Biloela became a battleground for Australia's soul

Yet this central Queensland town has now become hard to ignore, after its residents rallied to prevent the deportation of a Tamil family that had lived there for years.

The case has brought Australia's debate over asylum seekers and immigration back into sharp focus, and united the most unlikely of allies.

If Priya, her husband Nadesalingam and their Australian-born children Kopika, 4, and Tharunicaa, 2, are deported to Sri Lanka later this month once an injunction preventing their removal expires, they will join 1500 Tamils who have been sent back "safely", Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton claims.

But unlike those families, Priya and Nades have had a community in their corner to fight for them.

While the uncertainty of their legal status hung over their heads, they built a life in the town of 5000 people, 120 kilometres inland from Gladstone.

It's coal-and-cattle country, beset by the drought and the mining downturn afflicting many towns around Australia right now.

Despite advertising year-round, there have never been enough willing locals to fill the jobs at the local abattoir.

Flights to the area were almost cancelled in 2016 due to low passenger numbers.

Put simply, the town needs people to survive. And for quite some time, migration has been the solution.

Nades was one of many asylum seekers who filled that need, but it was what the family put back into the town that made them special, friend Simone Cameron says.

She met Nades while teaching him and the other migrant workers English.

"They put down roots, they built relationships with people. As a result, the community didn't want to let them go," she says.

While many of the original migrant cohort moved on to other places - some forcibly taken back to their countries of origin - Priya and Nades stayed in Biloela.

Even when he wasn't able to legally work, Nades volunteered with the local St Vincent de Paul society.

Priya, a spiritual woman well-known to local church groups, used to take the girls to music groups.

She made curries for the doctors at the local hospital, to say thanks for the care she'd received after experiencing complications from the birth of her children.

READ MORE:

But the family was whisked away at dawn one morning in March 2018, after Priya and Nades' bridging visas expired.

They spent more than a year in a Melbourne detention centre, before being placed on a flight to Sri Lanka last Friday, after the High Court rejected their final bid to stay in May.

An eleventh-hour injunction interrupted their deportation, and the family got off in Darwin.

But in the early hours of Saturday morning, they were spirited away to the Christmas Island detention centre.

Through a smartphone, the country watched as the family was split up and loaded into two separate vans.

Australia heard the little girls scream as their mother was dragged onto a charter plane.

"My baby crying," Priya said, while being held back by staff.

The Federal Court delayed the family's deportation again on Friday, while it considered the refugee claim of the youngest child, who had not been born when Priya's application was assessed.

It will mean the bitter debate over their fate will continue to divide Australia for weeks.

While Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Australia's border security is "not about chasing Twitter [or] public sentiment", their cause has attracted support from unusual quarters.

Conservative broadcaster Alan Jones and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce have also thrown their weight behind the family.

"They've killed no one, they've bludged off no one, they've offended no one. And they're treated in this way in my country, your country," Jones thundered.

Joyce said while the case had put his Coalition colleague Mr Dutton in a "vexed position", it required ministerial intervention.

"I think it's a special case, no doubt about it Kochie," he told Sunrise.

"The kids ... were born in Australia, they're Australians as far as the community is concerned."

Labor dined out on the fact Mr Dutton had intervened more than 4000 times to grant someone a visa since taking on the portfolio - literally.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese flew to Biloela, where he Instagrammed himself eating a pie from Simmons' bakery after meeting with locals.

Albanese said the minister had no qualms stepping in when immigration officials tried to deport two au pairs, one of whom was to work for the politically connected family of AFL chief Gillon McLachlan. The other was to work for a former Queensland Police Service colleague of Dutton's.

"Peter Dutton's happy to do that for au pairs, when someone has his number," Albanese opined.

"He's not happy to do it when a regional community are saying that this family integrated into the community."

Labor's home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally even drew faith into the equation.

"The Prime Minister has explicitly said to the Australian people, 'This is part of who I am, this is what I believe' and so ... I'm calling upon him to reflect upon the parable of the Good Samaritan, which invited us as Christians to take care of the stranger in our land," Keneally appealed.

But the government has been swift to deploy its own statistics to counter the groundswell of sympathy.

Morrison reportedly ordered the release of new data about asylum seekers from Sri Lanka attempting to make it to Australian shores to drum home the message that the threat of "illegal arrivals" was still alive.

The head of Operation Sovereign Borders, Major General Craig Furini, also made his second visit to Sri Lanka in three months this week.

And while The Canberra Times was told the department had nothing further to add when we requested information, Home Affairs readily provided statistics to The Australian which showed another 5757 asylum seekers on bridging visas were pursuing legal challenges after they were found not to be owed protection under Australian law.

However the minister has used his discretion to grant visas to asylum seekers in similar situations to the Biloela family "many times", according to Refugee Legal's David Manne.

"There's been so many cases we've assisted with over the years with people in similar situations who've been able to stay. This case clearly justifies intervention on humanitarian grounds," Manne said.

Manne takes issue with the fact the power to stage such a life-changing intervention is vested in one person - the minister.

"My experience over two decades is that this power has been used by different ministers in a highly inconsistent, arbitrary way with little rhyme or reason as to why one minister would agree to allow someone to stay and one wouldn't," Manne said.

"It lacks any of the ordinary standards of transparency and accountability under our legal system."

In any case, Immigration Minister David Coleman is refusing to exercise it.

Morrison and Dutton have said the family is welcome to come back if deported through normal channels.

While it's not actually clear if that's the case - under migration law, deportations trigger an automatic bar and the family could be left with a huge bill from the Commonwealth for their detention - friends from Biloela are preparing for all eventualities.

The "Home to Bilo" GoFundMe campaign raised more than $75,000 in a little over a day.

But Simone Cameron is still hoping for a last-minute reprieve from the minister.

"It's not like one family will bring down the whole migration system," she says.

She also worries about what the case may mean for the future of towns like Biloela.

"If a model family like Priya and Nades can't return home, then people would have zero incentive to move there in the first place," Cameron said.

"I know having grown up there it's a lovely town from a social perspective, a tight-knit community, but it's not easy living in a place that isolated."