The federal government has resorted to schoolyard pettiness by cutting funding to the Refugee Council of Australia, lawyer and refugee rights advocate Julian Burnside says.
Despite $140,000 per year in core funding being allocated to the RCA in this month's budget and the forward estimates, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has slashed it.
He said budgetary constraints were behind the move, and said that while funding for the council's humanitarian program would continue, funding for administrative and advocacy work would go.
"In a tough budget like this, frankly I form the view that taxpayers' funds were not going to be spent on those types of activities," he told Sky News.
Mr Burnside said the department cancelled the funding on the grounds that "we all have to share the pain".
"I have great difficulty thinking it's a cynical exercise in cutting out the people whose beliefs they do not share, and if that's so, it's the sort of pettiness that should be confined to the schoolyard and shouldn't be seen in federal politics," he told a legal conference in Darwin on Friday.
"That's probably a vain hope."
At a forum on asylum seekers detained on Manus Island on Friday night, he said Mr Morrison was a "cynical liar" for perpetrating the myth that asylum seekers break the law by coming to Australia to seek refuge.
"Scott Morrison is a cynical liar when he calls them illegal," he said.
"The government has, in a very calculated way, tried to convince the public that these people are dangerous criminals. It is a lie with a purpose: to bring down the character of this nation."
Mr Morrison denied that he had cut the RCA's funding to silence dissenting voices.
"I doubt that anyone could suggest that there has been any diminution in the level of public commentary from any group in relation to the government's border protection policies," he said.
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