Category: Immigration

Ordinary Australians are tired of the casual cruelty of hard-line border control policies. The medical evacuation bill was introduced by Dr Kerryn Phelps to ensure that refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island can access the medical care they require. The bill was passed because our elected representatives, too, recognise that enough is enough. (more…)

The Auditor-General on 11 February 2019 found in its audit of citizenship application processing that these are not being processed in either a time efficient manner or a resource efficient manner. But this is a tiny portion of a wider malaise in the administration of a once world class immigration system the Government and the senior leadership of the Home Affairs Department has allowed be run down. The record numbers of largely non-genuine asylum seeker applications (see here and here) and the Government’s lack of action on these (the backlog of these at primary and review stages is now likely to be well in excess of 60,000 – Home Affairs will not reveal the actual backlog) is the end result of the wider malaise. (more…)

Our discussion on asylum seekers is ill-informed .It is a disgrace.  Our politicians and our media have failed us.  This was made obvious to me yesterday on Insiders.  Do Christopher Pyne and Phillip Corey think we are fools. They were both pushing the cruel partisan Coalition line on refugees and boats. Both see refugees not as people but as political  opportunities to be exploited.

With boat arrivals stopped, people smugglers have turned  to the air to bring asylum seekers to Australia in record numbers. .Peter Dutton and the media have turned a blind eye to this breakdown in our border protection. (more…)

In their November 2015 Foreign Affairs article and subsequent book “Refuge – Transforming a Broken Refugee System” (reviewed here), economist Paul Collier and refugee academic Alexander Betts put forward a radical re-think of the refugee support system on the grounds that it is not a good fit for today’s world.  (more…)

In the first Four Corners program of 2019 [1], Sophie McNeil reported on the major hurdles placed in the way of Saudi women getting to Australia to make a refugee claim.  McNeil interviewed not just Rahaf Mohammed, who was quickly resettled in Canada, but others who are now in Australia seeking asylum.  They told of other Saudi women who had been prevented from getting to Australia by either the Saudi Government or Australian Border Force officers. (more…)

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Scott Morrison has announced (see here) a commitment to ‘create’ 1.25 million jobs over the next five years, beating Tony Abbott’s commitment in 2013 to create 1 million jobs over five years. But to achieve 1.25 million jobs over five years, Morrison will need to maintain an even higher level of net migration than over the past five years. How should we reconcile this with Morrison’s earlier speech committing to reduce immigration, particularly to reduce congestion in the major cities (see here)? Well the two can’t be reconciled. One of them must, almost by definition, be untrue.
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Nick Cater writing in The Australian (see here if you can get past the Paywall) seems to think people trying to manipulate the visa system is news. Has he been as asleep to this while our intrepid government has allowed a world class visa system to deteriorate into chaos (see here)?  It is the chaos in our visa system that has enabled Dutton to set a new record in the number of mainly non-genuine asylum seeker applications (see here). But rather than ask the hard questions about how a government obsessed with border protection could have allowed this, Cater looks to blame anyone other than the government. (more…)

Major ICT transformation projects conducted ‘in partnership’ with a big IT company are high risk. Privatisation of core government functions such as visa processing are also high risk, especially when undertaken under the cloak of commercial-in-confidence type secrecy. Doing the two together multiplies the risk big time. But that is exactly what the Home Affairs department is doing.  (more…)

Major ICT transformation projects conducted ‘in partnership’ with a big IT company are high risk. Privatisation of core government functions such as visa processing are also high risk, especially when undertaken under the cloak of commercial-in-confidence type secrecy. Doing the two together multiplies the risk big time. But that is exactly what the Home Affairs department is doing. (more…)

The report on the 2017-18 migration program has now been publicly released, more than two and a half months after an exclusive to The Australian newspaper and a short time after the Home Affairs department appeared before Senate estimates. As reported in The Australian, the outcome was indeed 162,417, over 27,500 below the ceiling of 190,000 – by far the largest program shortfall in at least 50 years. (more…)

While Scott Morrison earlier this year publicly disagreed with Tony Abbott on immigration levels, he eventually gave way to Dutton’s ruse about ‘greater scrutiny’ leading to the migration program ‘ceiling’ not being delivered in 2017-18. Will he continue to compromise with Abbott and Dutton on immigration or has he drawn a line in the sand by appointing a moderate in David Coleman as the new immigration minister? (more…)

Why did 50,000 asylum seekers arriving by boat represent a crisis for our border sovereignty while the arrival of a similar number over the past two and a half years by plane is just ho hum? Peter Dutton in 2017-18 has set a new record for the number of asylum seeker applications received. His record surpasses that set in 2012-13 under the Rudd/Gillard government. This is the result of a crisis in our visa processing system (see here) which is likely to be creating a honeypot for people smugglers. The new record will likely be exceeded in 2018-19 as Home Affairs is reducing frontline staff and IT contractors (see here). Outsourcing visa processing will make the problem worse. Tackling the chaos in our visa processing system will cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly north of a billion dollars and take many years. Is the Government’s border protection mantra a diversion from its real border protection failings?   (more…)

On Monday night, late in the evening after Labor’s national conference had debated asylum seeker and refugee policy, I sat at a bar with a mix of refugee advocates, conference delegates like myself, people seeking asylum and refugees.  (more…)

On the last sitting day of Parliament, the Government took extraordinary measures to block a vote on a bill to ease the medical evacuation of asylum-seekers on Manus Island and Nauru. The Government’s terror of losing a vote on the floor of the House reveals a dangerous misunderstanding of the workings of our parliamentary democracy. (more…)

Poor David Coleman. Business and employer groups, particularly in regional Australia, have been pillorying him for the ham-fisted changes to employer-sponsored temporary and permanent migration implemented by his predecessor Peter Dutton. Contrary to the traditional approach of past Liberal Party Immigration Ministers, Dutton tightened these categories in a way that shocked business and employer groups. Coleman is now sensibly moving to unwind many of Dutton’s changes. But can he make the changes quickly enough to satisfy employers around regional Australia and will he get the balance right between streamlining visa pathways, protecting the opportunities of semi-skilled Australian workers, maintaining visa integrity and minimising exploitation of the overseas workers? (more…)

Thursday 6 December was the final sitting day of the Australian Parliament for 2018 and one of only 10 sitting days between now and next May when an election is expected. It was a day to get things moving. Yet far more was undone than done, and not just for the asylum seekers and refugees held in indefinite, punitive detention off-shore, or the 6000 Australian doctors and the Australian Medical Association speaking up for their care.  (more…)

In a highly contested event, one political con over the last decade stands out as the greatest bipartisan piece of deception in any enduring debate: the obfuscation employed in the public arguments over asylum seeker arrivals in Australia. (more…)

For all the government’s tough-on-asylum-seekers rhetoric, protection visa applications have blown out to record numbers on Peter Dutton’s watch. (more…)