What’s their future?

Saturday, 7 September 2019 00:02 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Seeking asylum or send back to Sri Lanka? This has been the much-debated topic over the past week about the Sri Lankan parents and their two children – whether they should be allowed to stay or deport to Sri Lanka. It was front page news in the newspapers and lead news on TV and the debate continues.

“I will not chase Twitter public sentiment,” is how Prime Minister Scott Morrison reacted to widespread calls for the Government to allow the Tamil family facing deportation to remain in Australia.

The family is presently held on Christmas Island, about 2,000 kilometres from Perth, awaiting the outcome of the legal effort to stay.

Tamil couple Priya and Nadesalingam are fighting to return to the central Queensland town of Biloela, near Gladstone, with their Australian-born daughters Kopika (4) and Tharunika (2).

A rare alliance of conservative commentators, opposition parties and Coalition backbenchers is urging the Prime Minister to let the family of four stay, ‘The Age’ newspaper wrote.

But the Prime Minister has dismissed their pleas and said, “It’s about doing the right thing by the national interest. It’s not about chasing public sentiment.”

“I understand absolutely the motivation and the compassion that Australians have expressed in relation to this case. But I also know from bitter experience that if you make the wrong calls on these issues, then you invite tragedy and you invite chaos,” he added.

Prime Minister Morrison is encouraging the family to return to Sri Lanka, and then apply for fresh Australian visas.

The Federal Court in Melbourne has extended the latest injunction protecting the family’s youngest child Tharunika – and by extension her family – from being deported until 4 p.m. on Friday.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese travelled to Biloela, town in Queensland to join the family’s supporters. The family lived in the Queensland town until they were removed in a pre-dawn raid last year.

Albanese called on the Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to intervene, something he said the Minister had done thousands of times before.

“What it is, simply, is what Peter Dutton has done on more than 4,000 occasions as minister, on an average of three times every day he’s been a minister – using his ministerial discretion to say that it is in Australia’s national interest for this family to be restored into the community that they love and which clearly loves them,” he said.