Hastie warns government cannot afford to wait for NZYQ group to be deported, after alleged 'critical' assault

Shadow Home Affairs Minister Andrew Hastie warns the government cannot afford to wait for the outcome of a test case addressing the NZYQ cohort, after one former detainee allegedly critically injured another man in Melbourne.
A 43-year-old former detainee released after the 'NZYQ' High Court ruling was charged on Sunday over an alleged serious assault of a 62-year-old man, who was taken to hospital with critical injuries.
Mr Hastie says the Coalition supported the government to create powers that would allow people released from immigration detention to be re-detained, but the government is yet to make a single application.
"The reason why the parliament rushed through these preventative detention powers 18 months ago was to prevent exactly this sort of scenario, where an innocent person is [allegedly] harmed by a member of this cohort," he said.
"The question is: What is Tony Burke doing? Why didn't he exercise the preventative detention powers given to him by the parliament, and why is he being so passive in protecting the Australian community?"
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said in a statement yesterday separate powers that would see the NZYQ cohort deported were being tested in the High Court.
"The courts are setting the precedents right now on our laws," Mr Burke said in a statement.
"The government's principle is clear, if your visa is cancelled you should leave immediately."
The High Court heard a challenge yesterday by one of three former detainees who the government is seeking to deport to Nauru, in what is being seen as a test case for whether more of the group can be deported.
Another two appeals are before the federal court.
Even if the government succeeds against those challenges it would then have to negotiate the deportation of hundreds more people, many with serious criminal histories, to be accepted by another country.
Mr Hastie told the ABC the government could not afford to wait for that.
"We can't afford to wait, because we have just seen another innocent person [allegedly] brutally bashed by someone from the NZYQ cohort," he said.
"Tony Burke needs to explain to the Australian people why there hasn't been a single application made ... if they can't deport them they need to exercise the powers the parliament vested in the minister to prevent this from happening."
The alleged Footscray assault is the second known allegation of a serious attack by a released detainee, after a former detainee was charged over a home invasion and burglary where an couple in their 70s were assaulted.
In that case, the man had been released from their ankle monitoring conditions, a decision Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the time labelled a "mistake" by the Community Protection Board.
As at May 31, 85 of the 335 people on NZYQ-related bridging visas were subject to electronic monitoring and 46 were subject to a curfew, with the majority subject to no monitoring conditions.
The alleged assault has again brought the cohort of more than 300 released detainees who remain on bridging visas back into the spotlight.
The federal government has made several attempts to address safety concerns surrounding the 'NZYQ' cohort after a shock decision by the High Court in November 2023 to overturn a 20-year precedent that allowed the group to be indefinitely detained.
The court ruled that detention was unlawful because there was no prospect of the detainees being resettled, and that while many had committed serious offences, their time had been served and ongoing detention was an unlawful punishment.
Since then, the government has rushed multiple tranches of legislation through parliament gaining powers to impose strict conditions on the cohort and potentially re-detain them as a preventative measure — though the government has yet to file any applications to re-detain them.
And last year, the High Court again ruled legislation relating to the cohort was unlawful, throwing out the government's laws allowing it to impose ankle monitors and curfews to be imposed on the NZYQ group, resulting in a number of charges for breaching those laws being dropped.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke reintroduced rewritten monitoring rules the next day to reinstate curfews and ankle monitors, but those who were facing charges were not re-prosecuted.
Alongside that rewrite was a new tranche of legislation, this time allowing the government to cancel NZYQ-related visas and therefore immediately re-detain them if another country had accepted their deportation — as well as allowing the government to pay another country to receive the cohort.
Mr Burke in February announced Nauru had accepted three of the NZYQ cohort, in a test case of the new laws.
The Home Affairs minister warned detainees the government was focused on ensuring community safety.

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Second, our tax system is wildly inconsistent in how it treats different types of income. A couple with no assets, both on the minimum wage, could pay more tax than a couple with three homes, a share portfolio, and hundreds of thousands in annual income. In fact, without needing to bend reality too much, it's plausible that the second couple could pay no tax at all. As well as the obvious inequities, these inconsistencies are inefficient, encouraging people to park their money in certain places (especially super and property) over others. At the same time, there are many reasons to expect we will need to raise more tax over time, in part because as people live longer they will require more care. And while there is lively debate over whether some government spending can be cut, there is pressure to spend more in several areas, much of it with strong public support. So if we want to be less reliant on taxing wages, we would need to consider other ways to raise money. Increasing taxes on consumption (GST) or land are among the options that would be more efficient, though not necessarily more equitable. Finally, all of this creates an intergenerational problem, because in the coming years there will be more retirees for every person of working age, piling the tax burden onto the shoulders of the young, a problem which gets worse the longer we neglect it. To summarise: the wrong type of tax, designed badly, and not enough of it, to the detriment of working people and young people, and distorting the economy. And that's before even mentioning corporate tax, fuel tax or cigarette tax — all of which are the subject of their own lively debates. All of that is enough to be overwhelming. But a wealth of problems means a wealth of possible answers. All of the "big ticket" items that feature prominently in political debate — negative gearing, capital gains tax, super tax, raising the GST, ending bracket creep, taxing land — are efforts to address one or another of these agreed shortcomings of the tax system. While Chalmers insists he is happy for all of these to be on the table and is keen not to rule things out, his press club appearance — where journalists tried valiantly to tempt him to do just that — left the impression he wants to avoid ideas with too much baggage. If he chose negative gearing, he would be accused of reheating leftovers and presented with a highlight reel of all the times he or the PM has promised not to revisit it, with the Coalition likely opposed and the Greens likely taking credit. If he chose the GST, he would risk creating "sticker shock" and be the treasurer who delivers a temporary price rise on everything, an option unlikely to appeal so soon after a nasty bout of inflation, especially since the states would get to keep all the money. And if he chose to go further on super tax concessions, he would embolden the scare campaign already amassing against his current push to lift the tax on earnings, which visibly irritates him every time he is asked about it. None of these seems especially likely. But if the treasurer is searching for a defining reform, there are options on the shelf with more dust but fewer enemies. Perhaps the most popular among economists — and yet still fairly obscure to the general public — is a dual income tax. That tax, common in Scandinavia, treats wages and salaries ("active" or "labour" income) differently to investments and capital gains ("passive" or "savings" income). Australia currently treats some investment income the same way as wages but other types completely differently. A dual tax could close loopholes and treat investment more consistently on the one hand, and lower taxes on wage earners on the other hand, while still being revenue neutral or even raising money. It's an idea with a long lineage, discussed at length in the famous Henry tax review in the early days of the Rudd government. Ken Henry, the treasury secretary who gave that review its name and who helped Chalmers with a draft of his press club speech this week, has become something of a "godfather of tax reform", and his hefty report still carries authority. But there's little to show for that reputation — 15 years on, politicians have intoned their reverence for the Henry review while politely ignoring almost all its recommendations. The reason? Because there is no such thing as meaningful tax reform that does not create both winners and losers. And for some time now, governments skirting on the edges of electoral defeat have been nervous about losers, preferring instead to promise higher spending and lower taxes. The Morrison government made an artform of this "double carrot", carefully designing its tax cuts to ensure no taxpayer was ever made worse off by even a cent. For this it was rewarded, winning a 2019 election against a Labor opposition with a substantial and controversial tax reform agenda who told the losers that if they didn't like it, they could vote for someone else, which they did. That's the price tag of reform. But with its colossal majority, the Albanese government could decide it can afford it. Chalmers, at least, thinks so. Perhaps his most pointed comment this week was that he did not believe the media narrative that Labor was assured of a third term. Translation: time is of the essence.