The Nadesalingams are back in Biloela, but Australia’s unjust immigration system endures

The Nadesalingams are home.

The right and just decision has been made, and a family is, finally, allowed to restart a life interrupted in the most cruel and punitive fashion.

But it should never have come to this.

Biloela residents rejoice to have their friends, neighbours and schoolmates home, but it should not have taken four oppressive, damaging years. It should not have needed a desperate campaign from their Queensland home town, it should not have required candlelight vigils and public demonstrations, online petitions and questions in parliament.

How many thousands more asylum seekers live today in Australia – on the fragile uncertainty of a bridging visa, or within the confinement of detention – who don’t have a town rallying behind them, parliamentarians advocating for them, or prominent public campaigns for their cause?

How many have, under the pressure or threat of detention, given up a claim for protection, and been unwillingly removed, potentially to harm?

There is a structural problem in the way Australia’s humanitarian program operates, a system that has forced the Nadesalingam family through a torturous, damaging four years – for no purpose at all.

Decisions are inconsistent and often flawed, the appeals system sclerotic, and the process bottlenecks around tribunal decisions, federal court appeals and ministerial intervention.

And, from the perspective of those trapped within that system, it is built around deterrence, around dissuasion, and punishment.

Life on a bridging visa is subject to a prohibitive code of conduct, people are fearful of speaking out about their situations, fearful it will be used against them.

Detention, or the threat of it, is used as a coercive measure to pressure people to abandon their claims for protection and return home.

In the case of Tamils who have fled Sri Lanka, human rights groups have argued for years that the “country information” on which decisions are made by Australian authorities is incomplete, outdated and fails to comprehend the reality of life in that country.

Human rights groups and UN special rapporteurs report regularly on the ongoing oppression of the Tamil minority. The Rajapaksa family who led Sri Lanka at the end of the country’s brutal civil war against Tamil separatists are back in charge.

And the country is now in chaos, on the brink of near collapse, with rioting, unrest and shortages of essentials such as food and medicine.

Sign up to receive the top stories from Guardian Australia every morning

This is not an argument that Australia should abandon any process to assess claims for protection, rather that the system can be more responsive to those seeking protection here, even if they fall outside the strict definition of the refugees convention, through other already-existing legislation such as complementary protection.

In other liberal democracies, such as New Zealand and Canada, decision-makers at the level of the bureaucracy have far greater discretionary powers to grant visas on humanitarian and compassionate grounds, on the basis of exceptional circumstances, or taking into account factors such as links to a community.

Australia, in decades past, entrusted decision-makers with such responsibility, but these have been removed in favour of concentrating power with the minister.

Nearly 15 years ago, the then immigration minister Chris Evans told Senate estimates “I have formed the view I have too much power”, citing the unchallengeable “God powers” that gave him sole discretion over people’s lives.

“I am uncomfortable with that, not just because of concern about playing God, but also because of the lack of transparency and accountability for those decisions and the lack in some cases of any appeal rights against those decisions.”

Those powers have not receded: the opposite has happened. Since then, successive immigration ministers have only expanded their powers over the lives of thousands of people living in Australia, and many of these are non-compellable, unchallengeable powers, exactly those reviled by Evans and which are anathema to good democratic practice. With a stroke of ministerial pen, lives are upended, futures recast, families torn apart.

Quick Guide How to get the latest news from Guardian Australia Show

Thank you for your feedback.

None of the trauma of the last four years endured by the Nadesalingam family was necessary. None of it made Australia any safer, any border any more secure.

When Australian Border Force (ABF) officers raided the family’s modest home on Rainbow Street, Biloela – at dawn on 5 March 2018 – it was on the basis of a visa that was one day expired: Priya had applied for a new one, the family was – in the jargon of the bureaucracy – “engaged” with the department, and still had their claim for protection process ongoing.

They had lives and jobs and schools and friends in their community. They were going nowhere.

There was no imperative to detain them, no need for those little Australian-born girls to go through the terror of having the life they knew ripped from underneath them.

But the pressure on the family was only intensified. An attempt to forcibly deport them was halted only by a last-minute court injunction when their plane was mid-air.

The move to Christmas Island was a deliberate effort to isolate them, ended only when inadequate medical care there forced the ABF to rush Tharnicaa to a Perth hospital with a suspected blood infection.

At every step, on every one of those 1,558 days, it was within the power of successive ministers to end the ordeal, and allow the family to resume their lives.

The Nadesalingams have returned home, but their future is not yet secure. They have been granted only bridging visas – essentially a holding visa – while their right to stay in Australia is substantively reassessed. The new immigration minister, Andrew Giles, has said he is looking at a long-term solution for the family.

“I am thinking about how we can finally resolve this, so the family can rebuild their lives in Biloela with the certainty they deserve.

“I am being briefed on the options available to best achieve this and will make my decision as soon as possible.”

The community of Biloela is to be lauded for its commitment to a family they rightly saw as one of their own; for their righteous defiance of the government; and for their perseverance in the face of unlikely odds.

But how many other asylum seekers endure similar treatment away from the public spotlight?

It shouldn’t come down to the good fortune of the support the Nadesalingam family have enjoyed, it shouldn’t take community vigils and online petitions for there to be a fair, transparent and reasonable process.