Australia's High Court has ruled against the federal government's use of curfews and ankle bracelets for immigration detainees, marking another significant legal defeat for the Albanese government on detention policy.
The ruling, reported by the ABC, comes just over a year after the landmark NZYQ case forced Canberra to release dozens of immigration detainees who couldn't be deported to their home countries. Now the court has determined that the monitoring conditions imposed on those released detainees are also unconstitutional.
Mate, this is a constitutional mess. The government tried to thread a legal needle—keeping people effectively detained without actually detaining them—and the High Court called them on it.
The case strikes at the heart of how Australia manages immigration detention. After NZYQ, the government scrambled to impose strict monitoring on released detainees, including electronic ankle bracelets and nighttime curfews. The High Court has now ruled these measures cross the line into punitive detention, which the Constitution reserves for the courts, not the executive.
For the Albanese government, this is the second major High Court defeat on the same policy area in just over a year. It exposes ongoing problems with how Australia handles so-called 'indefinite detainees'—people whom the government wants to deport but can't, often because their home countries won't take them back.
The ruling has immediate implications for managing high-risk individuals in the community. Without electronic monitoring or curfews, the government must find alternative ways to satisfy community safety concerns while respecting constitutional limits on executive power.
Social media users highlighted the broader pattern. One observer noted that Australia's detention regime keeps running into constitutional problems because it tries to punish people who haven't been convicted of crimes.
The government will likely need to return to Parliament with new legislation that passes constitutional muster. But with an election looming, this defeat puts Labor's border management credentials under renewed scrutiny—exactly the political territory they'd hoped to avoid.
