The Biloela factor: why a family’s plight should be front and centre of this election

In an election where the differences between parties appear incremental, the Murugappan family should be a bigger story. That’s because the status of this family, stolen from their Biloela home by Australian Border Force four years ago and sent to Christmas Island detention goes to the heart of how a wayward government operates.

Priya and Nades, two Tamil refugees who came to Australia separately from Sri Lanka a decade ago to seek asylum, now live with their two Australian-born daughters in Perth.

But it’s not their home. Their four-year-old, Tharnicaa, is stuck there, in a type of community detention, refused the bridging visa that appears to have been reluctantly given to her sister, Kopika, and parents. They can’t leave without her, obviously, meaning they can’t return to Biloela in central Queensland.

But even if they did, they would be watching the clock turn from this day to the next, wondering when they will be ordered on to a plane to leave the country they call home and the only place their daughters have ever known.

This family should be applauded. Like those who make up many of our rural communities, they love the Australian bush. It’s their happy place, and over years Biloela was where they worked, volunteered and paid taxes, and raised their daughters.

Labor’s Kristina Keneally, armed with dolls, visited the family in Perth this week. The home affairs and immigration spokeswoman, like her leader Anthony Albanese, has declared this family should be freed to return to Biloela immediately.

And the fact the government refuses to — despite using its discretion to do so in other cases — shows as much hypocrisy as it does a lack of empathy. But it also shows a belligerent stubbornness, an enormous waste of taxpayers’ funds, and a failure to read the rural communities whose votes it needs to stay in power.

The government’s position also strongly undermines the views of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who has publicly and continuously advocated for the family to be freed. Does he carry no weight?

This should not be only the decider in the central Queensland electorate of Flynn, the seat housing the town of Biloela and where the electoral contest is close. It should be at the heart of how we see government, and how government sees the people who make up local communities.

The issue hasn’t escaped teal independents, who are backing the family, along with several moderate Liberals and other independents. 

The government wants to deprive the issue of oxygen, and its defence of “it’s before the courts” is nonsense.

This is one policy where there is a very clear difference between the two major parties. The Coalition wants this hard-working family removed from Australia, and if it is returned to power that’s the likely scenario.

Labor says the family will be freed, almost immediately, to return to Biloela and the embrace of a community that misses them.

Where does your vote lie?