Membership to our community is not the government's call

On August 24, 1983, Stewart West, then minister for immigration and former Waterside Workers Federation president, rose in the House of Representatives to speak on a deportation law.

That law would limit the power to deport non-citizens so that it did not apply to people who had been in the country for more than ten years.

These people, West said, were Australian in all but the legal sense. As a country that relied on a large-scale migration program, Australia could not have it both ways by seeking to expel people who had made a home in the community. There had to be a line somewhere when it came to the power to exclude non-citizens.

If that line still exists somewhere today, it is imperceptible.

Last week, The Australian published a painstaking review of some forty visa cancellation cases decided by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. All involved people who had been in Australia for years - sometimes since childhood - and many of whom had partners or children in the community.

The circumstances of their lives were breathily dismissed as a sob story. The purpose was a concerted and frontal attack on Ministerial Direction 99 which, unremarkably, allows decision-makers to consider a person's connection to the community before permanently banishing them from it - as have all previous directions, dating back as far as 1997.

This article joins a cacophony of reporting over the past six months focused on people released from immigration detention following the High Court's landmark ruling in NZYQ, the majority of whom are stateless or refugees.

Such is the feverish pitch of media and political commentary that one might easily forget that around 60,000 people are released from jail each year after serving their sentence, without anything resembling the same public scrutiny and backlash - let alone the prospect of drone surveillance, as proposed by the Immigration Minister last week. And it would be easy to forget that nearly half of people released from prison end up back there again within two years of their release.

Populist talking points leave little room for uncomfortable facts. Leaving any form of custody and re-entering the community is hard. And from the moment they enter prison, visa holders are set up to fail. Because of their legal status, visa holders are denied access to programs that might set them up for life in the community - like rehabilitation, family-based or vocational courses. If subject to visa cancellation, people are shipped off to immigration detention at the end of their sentence, and denied access to parole or transitional programs that help support them back into the community.

Many of the people released from immigration detention following NZYQ had spent longer in detention than in prison. Gus Kuster - a Queensland man with family from the Torres Straight - spent five times as long in detention as he did in prison. The weight of that detention was far more profound than years in jail, because there was no sense of when it would end - if ever.

And at the end of it, rather than the structured support of parole or a transition plan, these 150 people were released after years of unlawful detention to a maelstrom of public scrutiny, demonisation and humiliating restrictions. Gus says that he feels like he is still in detention, and in a way, he is. RVJB, a refugee and father, says the hope he experienced on his release from detention is now shattered.

We all have people in our lives and communities who are not citizens - neighbours, friends, co-workers, teachers. A piece of paper cannot possibly determine people's worth and the standards of treatment that are acceptable for them. Membership of our community cannot be determined by governments rather than the lives that people have built. Another vision of our community, and the world that we live in, must be possible.