Gus Kuster doesn't feel free, despite being released from indefinite detention

Gus Kuster was in immigration detention for five years. (ABC News: Michael Lloyd)

Gus Kuster was in his cell at Brisbane’s immigration detention centre three weeks ago, on November 7, when he was called into the guard’s office.

“I got told Saturday afternoon that they wanted to see me. And then they just told me I was going home,” says Mr Kuster.

“It hasn’t really been as good as I thought it would have been, because there’s so much going on about the release of us guys at the moment.”

Mr Kuster was one of the people released from immigration detention after the High Court ruled the government could no longer indefinitely detain people who couldn’t be deported.

One of 141 detainees released so far, Mr Kuster says he wants Australians to know: “We’re not all the same.”

A criminal past vetoes Australian citizenship rights

Gus Kuster was born in Papua New Guinea in 1978.

His mother Agnes was from Manus Island. His father, Australian. The family moved to Queensland when Gus was four years old.

“I believe I’m half Australian,” he said.

Mr Kuster began getting in trouble with the law from his early teens in Caboolture.

“I was always staying with friends and on the streets and stuff, and that led to the use of drugs when I was 13, and that led to more drugs and instability, and I made a lot of mistakes along the way,” he says.

Now 44 years old, Mr Kuster was convicted of serious criminal offences, including for drugs, dangerous driving, weapons possession, breaching domestic violence orders, and assault.

“The things that I’ve done, I admit to it. I’m not saying it’s not right – it’s right. I’ve made these mistakes and I’ve paid my dues for it, I done my time,” he says.

Mr Kuster’s final term of imprisonment came in December 2017 and was for 12 months — he’d breached a Domestic Violence Order in Queensland and his suspended sentence was enforced.

He’d twice before been warned by Border Force that his residency visa might be cancelled if he continued offending – something he says he didn’t understand.

“I do recall getting some of those bits of paper. But I also called my father and asked him about it and he said, ‘You’re Australian so that doesn’t apply to you.’ So we left it at that,” Mr Kuster says.

Deported

Within weeks of his return to prison in 2017, Mr Kuster’s visa was cancelled under section 501 of the Migration Act because of his substantial criminal record and full-time imprisonment.

When he was released from prison in 2018, he was transferred to immigration detention to await deportation to his birth-country, Papua New Guinea.

“I was speechless actually, I couldn’t believe it. But it was happening,” Mr Kuster says.

He feels he has deep roots in Australia. On his Australian father’s side, his grandfather fought at Gallipoli. On his mother’s side, his grandmother was a Torres Strait Islander, born on Thursday Island between the tip of Queensland and PNG.

“How many times can you say it? And when you’ve been asked by the government themselves, and no one listens — that’s just unbelievable, you know?” Mr Kuster says.

After more than a year in immigration detention, by August 2019 Mr Kuster agreed to be “voluntarily deported” to Papua New Guinea, seeing it as his only way out of incarceration.

But upon arrival in PNG, he wasn’t allowed off the plane — the country had no record of his birth.

Deemed stateless, he was returned to immigration detention in Australia where he stayed for the next four years.

A ruling on ‘non-citizens’

Human rights lawyer Alison Battisson has represented Mr Kuster throughout his detention, and said stateless people were among the fastest-growing cohort of people in immigration detention centres.

“They are people who have no country to go back to, no country to diplomatically protect them and yet Australian law was such that such people would have to be detained indefinitely,” Ms Battisson says.

That all changed on November 7 when the High Court made an unexpected ruling, effectively ending indefinite detention for people with no other country to go to.

In the immediate aftermath, Immigration Minister Andrew Giles told parliament three murderers and “several” sex offenders were among the cohort released into the public.

The High Court’s decision led the government to roll out monitoring measures for released detainees including ankle monitors and curfews.

Mr Kuster has now been fitted with an ankle bracelet. He says he doesn’t believe he is a risk to the community.

“If it was court ordered [that] would be understandable. But to just put it on me after spending so much time in there for no reason, I don’t think that’s right,” he says.

All but three of the 141 detainees are required to submit to electronic monitoring.

In a statement to the ABC, an Australian Border Force spokesperson said new laws allowing the released detainees to be more effectively monitored were “necessary and proportionate”.

Those laws are being challenged in the High Court by one of the former detainees.

‘I don’t feel free’

Ms Battisson says she’s eager for the public to understand that those released under the latest ruling had not been released early from the criminal justice system.

“I think one of the important things that the public should take away is that every person who has been released has already served their sentence,” she says.

For now, Mr Kuster is adjusting to life on the outside with the support of his family.

From the family home, his sister Lisa says she’s afraid for her brother’s future.

“It hurts me because my brother has done his time — it’s just unfair and I’m scared they are going to take him away again,” she says.

“And I don’t want that for Mum and Dad. It’s given them so much hope having him here.”

Mr Kuster is adamant he’s not the same person he was when he entered the criminal justice system.

“During that time I’ve done a lot of courses [to] rehabilitate myself. And I believe that I am a good person and I’ve moved forward,” he says.

“I just need people to give me a chance to be able to do that.

“I don’t feel free. I’ve got a lot of anxiety, and I don’t want to go out anywhere. So it feels like I’m still being locked up in the sense.”

Watch 7.30, Mondays to Thursdays 7.30pm on ABC iview and ABC TV