Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

It is correct to say that the assessment of the Department of Home Affairs on which the minister relied was that those 83 people in addition to the plaintiff were noncitizens and that there was no real prospect of removal from Australia becoming practicable in the reasonably foreseeable future. It may well be that, at some point further down the track, it will be possible for some of those people to be removed from Australia. What the court talked about was in the reasonably foreseeable future. Of course, should it become practicable, to use the wording of the High Court, to remove any of those people from Australia, then we would have the option of doing that, and that would occur.