The Nixon review of how Australia’s visa systems are exploited hasn’t come out of the blue. We’ve known for a long time that here was something alarmingly wrong with the way the Immigration Department, and then Home Affairs as it became, was managing our visa system — especially the onshore humanitarian visa processing system.
An auditor-general report in late 2015 concluded: “There are weaknesses in almost all aspects of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s arrangements for managing visa holders’ compliance with their visa conditions.” In 2019, Crikey exposed the extent of the rorting of onshore humanitarian visas for cheap labour by organised crime. Last year Nine newspapers’ Trafficked series further revealed sex trafficking, visa rorting and exploitation of temporary visa holders.
Throughout the Coalition’s time in office, it insisted it alone could secure our borders, that it had stopped the boats, that it was the only party capable of the toughness needed to ensure we controlled who entered Australia. First Scott Morrison, then Peter Dutton, proclaimed their leadership potential by being the tough cop on the immigration beat. From late 2014, when Mike Pezzullo was appointed Immigration secretary, there was a senior bureaucrat to match their rigour. But the rhetoric masked a comprehensive failure that allowed organised crime, sex traffickers and fake asylum seekers to exploit what turned out to be disturbingly porous borders.
The Nixon review is, unusually, everything that Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil says it is — a shocking indictment of the failure of Dutton, who has for years paraded as a tough guy on borders when he was presiding over a debacle.
But it’s not merely Dutton. Yesterday O’Neil declined to point the finger at Pezzullo as well, but as the portfolio leader for nearly nine years there is no way he can avoid blame. And the responsibility extends well beyond the Immigration/Home Affairs portfolio. The systemic undermining and partisan stacking of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) by the Coalition — also revealed by Crikey in 2019 — was a crucial enabler of organised crime and visa rorting.
The problems dissected in Nixon’s report were foundational in the Coalition’s supposedly tough stance on border protection. The Australian Border Force — a creation of Tony Abbott’s, portrayed at the time as a new, hard-hitting cop on the immigration and customs beat — turns out to, in Nixon’s words, have “limited legislative powers to effectively investigate visa and migration fraud, and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers. The formation of the ABF in 2015 brought together a variety of legislative powers (across 35 pieces of legislation), within which there are significant discrepancies.”
The Coalition also under-resourced investigating visa fraud: “With the integration of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service in 2015, the field compliance and immigration investigation function and associated staff were transferred from the department to frontline ABF operations. With diminishing investigative and field compliance resources, specialist migration investigations have reduced …”
As a result: “The ABF currently has an investigations capability of 120 across the full ABF jurisdiction, and difficult decisions are regularly made about the prioritisation of finite resources to protect the border … There is currently no compliance or investigative capability within the department’s immigration group.”
The under-resourcing, as is now well known, extended to visa processing, massive delays meaning applicants could game the system while in the country — especially the onshore protection visa, as Crikey detailed in 2019. The current onshore protection visa processing time, Nixon found, is more than two years; between 2017 and 2022, the average processing time was 668 days. Unsuccessful applicants — around 90% of applications are rejected — can then appeal to the AAT, adding years of delay: the length of time required for the finalisation of an AAT appeal has increased from 450 days in 2016 to 800 in 2022, during which time applicants can work in Australia.
This provides the context for the Coalition’s relentless stacking of the AAT with partisan hacks, Liberal and National mates and failed MPs. A 2019 review of the AAT commissioned by the Coalition and conducted by conservative former High Court judge Ian Callinan found that the Coalition’s merging of migration review into the AAT had been botched and that the government was appointing far too many people without legal qualifications, leading to long delays in migration cases that were being exploited.
The ability of tens of thousands of fake asylum seekers to game the visa system for years on end, providing an exploitable workforce for organised crime, was thus the product not merely of the failings of Dutton and Pezzullo, but of attorneys-general George Brandis and Christian Porter too.
Labor is now spending more than $50 million to dramatically accelerate Home Affairs’ processing of onshore protection visa applications, adding a further 10 AAT members to the 90-odd it has recently appointed, and will be expanding the Federal Circuit Court, in addition to creating a division of Home Affairs that will make permanent, or at least long-term, the taskforce that is investigating visa fraud.
All of these things could have been done by the Coalition, which understood fully how the visa system was being gamed and abused. Instead it relied on a misplaced reputation for being tough on border protection, while criminals, traffickers and illegal immigrants made a mockery of it.
No wonder Dutton is whining about Clare O’Neil being, as he puts it, ‘angry’ and ‘aggressive’; isn’t that his job? And to make it worse, she seems much better at it. Good for her. Let’s have more.
Well noted SSR. It is reminiscent of Trump’s refering to Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and others as a “nasty woman”. Borrowing from the Trump playbook has become Dutton’s default setting. The reason O’Neil’s blows have hit their target so well is because Dutton has no defence. If you’re in the chair for as long as Dutton was, the blame is yours. No other explanation is possible.
Clare O’Neil’s performance on 7.30 last night showed up how crappy Albanese is as a political communicater. She was across the detail, she knew her arguments, she spoke clearly and with authority, and she laid right in.
The two Clares – O’Neil and Jason are Labor’s standout political assets and both show up Albanese’s manifold shortcomings.
Yep DF, I had similar thoughts watching 7.30 last night, but somehow I can’t see Albo stepping aside for someone with more oratory skill and a little charisma (there seems to be a bit of inexplicable ego going on there. Hasn’t anyone told Albo a drover’s dog could have beaten Scummo in ’22? And that the DD would have scored a greater margin).
Agree with DF, However Tanya P has also the skills to play a senior role
Albanese is a manager. But as a good manager he knows where his teams strengths lay, and he allows them to utilise those strengths and shine.
He knows his own strengths and his own shortcomings and is not afraid of being overshadowed by his team.
Can you imagine any other recent PM allowing his team to overshadow him?
It shows maturity in his leadership style.
Totally agree, let her shine
Labor cleaning up the mess the Coalition left behind…as they always do.
Yep. Will they get any credit?
“Stop the boats” was the cry. I say and have said for years: “Stop the bloody planes”.
Exactly. The Coalition’s “border strategy” since Howard has been to demonise refugees and make the public get angry at those “queue jumpers”. Meanwhile, the raised migration intake of exploitable people under the fake guise of “skilled migration” was used to weaken the labour market to push down wages and boost house prices (increased demand). Everybody in the Coalition’s circles got really rich while genuine refugees that should settle here were being locked up and workers wages were thrown under the bus.
It started under Howard using imported Tanton ZPG nativist population ideology and GOP media tactics to recreate a proxy white Australia narratives and laws messaged and dog whistled to voters, especially older &/or regional aka ‘No’ vote……performative and nasty.
Stop the Submarines !
Them 2!
Deary me. Will the exposure of the lies, obfuscations, rorts and sheer incompetence of the cons EVER stop ?
How much more material is there to be exposed ? The mind boggles.
It’ll stop when they get back in. Then we’ll hear all about Labors crook deals.
Ergo we deduce that when in their immigration roles the harder Morrison & Dutton blustered at press conferences, the reverse was true ie: they were weak & incompetent. Meantime they fearlessly persecuted legitimate refugees such as the Murugappan family.
There are many good examples, but you have chosen failed asylum seekers, not legitimate refugees.
Dutton chose to be particularly vicious, cruel and unreasonable about the Murugappan family precisely because they are legitimate refugees, or if not at least perceived as exactly the sort of decent family that should get a break. Dutton must get far more credit from the white nationalists when he picks on such refugees than he ever would from merely deporting those who obviously do not qualify and lack community support. It’s Dutton’s readiness to go the extra mile and make a big show of it that gets the kudos. As somebody said in a different context, the cruelty is the point.
Every dung-heap has its rooster. For the moment it’s Dutton. The next one may be a hen.
There are thousands of decent families who don’t get to stay because they’re judged not to be legitimate refugees. Only those whose case gets picked up by the media might get to stay anyway.
did they have the credentials to look after his kids? Problem solved.
‘Weak and incompetent’ should be the Coalition’s motto. They have proved time and again how good they are at it. Maybe the problem is that they as a party believe in small government; they are apparently hellbent on showing how inadequate government is in managing everything from the economy to strong borders to the point that they simply cede power to whomever shows up with a plan or a loud enough voice.