Australian immigration law weblog

2012-01-11T14:06:00.001+11:00

Temporary residents not "integrating" -- maybe because they're temporary?

The Opposition spokesperson for immigration, Scott Morrison, thinks that people holding temporary work visas are not "integrating" with Australian society.

His colleague Teresa Gambaro suspects this may have something to do with their unfamiliarity with certain cosmetic products.

Both of them seem to be missing the point: temporary residents are temporary, they aren't supposed to integrate. We only want them for their labour skills, not their ability to get outside of a cold beer, or whatever "integrating" means. If we wanted them to become part of our society, make their lives here, take part in our democracy, send their kids to school to become skilled Australians, we should give them permanent visas.

That's how it used to work, anyway. I can't think why we changed it.

But looking at this more closely, skilled professional politicians don't just let loose with statements like this without knowing exactly what they hope to gain by them. This is dogwhistling at its best. The art of the double entendre is to hide one meaning behind another. Migrants are smelly. So it's okay not to like them? Oh, no, I didn't mean that! Sorry if anyone took my comments the wrong way.

I suspect Ms Gambaro knows exactly how her comments are likely to be taken.

2011-12-21T08:50:00.001+11:00

The Great Offshore Processing Con

(This entry was amended after reading Robert Manne's views in The Monthly)

Christmas may be the silly season for television programming, but Australia is experiencing a long silly, or rather plain stupid, season in the politics of asylum seeker processing.

Both major parties appear to support something called "offshore processing" as opposed to "onshore processing". However, neither will accept the other's plan for how to go about it, so they have snookered each other. This allows each to claim the high (pseudo-)moral ground and blame the other for everything from the spectre of rioting in the streets to the tragedy of people drowning in unseaworthy boats.

Besides the politicians, the media and practically everybody else takes one side or the other on the onshore-offshore debate, without questioning the basic assumption that there is a real alternative on offer. Onshore processing is clear enough, though whether people should be locked up for the duration is another question. But what is this offshore processing that both sides are proposing as the dyke that will protect our fair land from being flooded?

Labor's "Malaysian solution" certainly doesn't offer anything in the way of offshore processing, as opposed to offshore dumping. Sure, the idea is that we would take a tiny increase in our overall refugee intake in return, but that would not involve any more processing of claims than is already being undertaken by agencies such as the UNHCR.

The Coalition's "Nauru option" might technically involve processing asylum seekers in another country, but apart from the flag flying over the detention camps there would be no difference between Nauru and Christmas Island. The only place they can go from there is the Australian mainland. The Coalition's real plan is to return to the Howard era of towing boats back to Indonesia (which, interestingly, Labor says its plan would achieve in a "virtual" manner) and the moral dead-end of temporary protection visas (which if anything led to more people taking boats because family reunion was not allowed).

Political scientist Robert Manne suggests that an amended version of the Nauru plan would be "the least bad asylum seeker policy". He suggests an annual quota designed to result in a "two or three year wait" which, he says, "should act as a powerful deterrent".

Prof. Manne does not appear to appreciate that almost every single one of these people will be found to be genuinely fleeing life-and-death situations in their home countries. They have acted out of desperation to save themselves and their families, and have cut off all avenues of return. To make a two to three year stay in a detention camp such a powerful deterrent that they would prefer the indefinite squalor of life as an illegal immigrant in Indonesia would take some effort, though perhaps it would not be beyond the capabilities of the architects of places like the Baxter and Scherger concentration camps in Australia.

What both sides really want is to stop the boats, or perhaps from the Coalition's perspective to stop Labor stopping the boats while trying to convince the electorate that they would stop the boats if elected. The aim is not to solve the refugee problem, it's to solve our refugee problem. It's like convincing yourself that you can end poverty by locking up beggars.

Stopping the boats is not about stopping people drowning. A genuine intention to dissuade people from risking their lives on the high seas would involve real offshore processing, in the places where the asylum seekers get on the boats. After all, why send people to other countries for processing if they are already there?

A recent study from the Centre for Policy Development points out that the Scandinavian countries, with roughly the same total population as Australia, process six times as many asylum seekers as we do, and they are nowhere near any third-world transit countries.

Instead of real offshore processing, what we have is a confidence trick being played by both sides to cover up their cowardice and ineptitude in the face of the threat of losing votes by confronting the old visceral fear of white Australia: that other people will come on boats and take our land away, just as we did.

2011-12-09T15:18:00.000+11:00

Privacy, sword or shield?

A couple of unrelated incidents this week got me thinking, again, about privacy and our relations with the State. Over many years I have often suspected that the idea of privacy, when raised by anyone in authority, is more of a repressive idea than a civil right.

First, a refugee family in detention in Sydney -- and I say refugee rather than asylum seeker because apparently they have been found to have a well-founded fear of persecution but are still awaiting security clearance before being released. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the four-year old child of the family was attending a function at his pre-school under the watchful gaze of security officers protecting the community from the dangers posed by the toddler. When it came time for the photos, the officers stepped in and refused any snaps to be taken. Why? according to the SMH, they claimed they were protecting the family's privacy. Hang on a second, I thought, if a person is willing and happy to have their photo taken (or in the case of a small child, if the parents are), then surely they have waived their right to privacy. Or can privacy be thrust upon you? Apparently so, in this case at least.

In the second case, a woman attending an Occupy Movement protest in Melbourne probably wished her privacy had been so diligently defended by the organs of the State. As a protest against the confiscation of tents and sleeping bags, she had fashioned a dress into the shape of a tent. A group of male and female police officers surrounded her and forcibly removed the garment, at one point emplying a knife to do so, while the woman protested loudly and made it perfectly clear that she did not consent to what was happening. As the cops marched off with their booty, she was left huddled on the ground in her underwear.

It seems that privacy is something that can be thrust upon you, or torn and cut away from you, depending on the whim of the authorities. I'm not sure that is what it was supposed to be about.

2011-11-23T18:52:00.001+11:00

The Majestic Equality of the Law for asylum seekers

"The majestic equality of the law," observed the 19th Century novellist Anatole France, "makes it an offence for rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the street, or steal bread."

The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee has shown that the same majestic equality applies to foreigners attempting to enter Australia without a visa, and consequently to anyone who helps them.

The report is available here.

It is not actually a criminal offence to come to Australia without a visa to ask for asylum, any more than it is a criminal offence for someone to knock on your door asking for help of any kind. According to the Government and the Coalition combined, however, people who don't have visas have "no lawful right" to knock on our national door. This is nothing more than a simple statement of the fact, confirmed by High Court opinion, that international law is about relations between States, not about the rights of individuals.

Not having a right to do something, however, doesn't make it wrong. It just means you have to ask. That's why they are called asylum seekers.

Millions of people ask to be let into Australia every year. The overwhelming majority do so by applying for a visa: because they can. They don't get on leaky boats and risk drowning to try to get here: because they don't have to.

That's where Anatole France comes in. Rich people don't have to sleep under bridges, and people who can get visas usually aren't fleeing for their lives.

With bipartisan support (minus the Greens, or course), the Bill will get through. As I have previously commented, if it is only meant to confirm what everyone thought the law was for years, then calling it a Deterring People Smuggling Bill is a grossly optimistic.

2011-11-02T16:30:00.001+11:00

Do deaths at sea justify the Malaysia solution, or retrospective legislation?

Having previously attempted to replace its obligations under the Refugees Convention with a type of politician's carte blanche called the "national interest", Australia's minority Labor (yes, Labor) government has now thumbed its nose at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to which, like almost all other civilised countries, we are a signatory. Article 15 of the ICCPR has two parts:

No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time when the criminal offence was committed. If, subsequent to the commission of the offence, provision is made by law for the imposition of a lighter penalty, the offender shall benefit thereby.

Nothing in this article shall prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations.

On the evening of 1 November 2011 the House of Representatives passed a piece of legislation called the Deterring People Smuggling Bill 2011. (It has become fashionable to give legislation names that look like they were thought up by an advertising agency, but let that go). What this legislation does flies in the face of Article 15.

Since 1999, sections 233A to 233D of the Migration Act have imposed sentences of up to 20 years, with a mandatory minimum of 5 years (s 236B), for people involved in "people smuggling", defined as bringing to Australia someone who has "no lawful right" to come here. In a case currently before the Victorian Supreme Court, defence lawyers have argued that a genuine refugee seeking to invoke Australia's international and domestic legal obligations of protection cannot be said to have no lawful right to come here. Ordinarily the case would be determined by the Supreme Court by judicially interpreting the legislation, and would then in all probability have gone on to the High Court to make a final interpretation. If the defence case were to be upheld, it would mean that when the accused brought the refugees here they were not breaking the law at that time. The Bill passed yesterday, in under an hour with support from Labor and the Coalition, changes the definition of "no lawful right" to mean simply that the person didn't have a visa or was not exempt from having a visa, regardless of whether Australia may have protection obligations under the Convention and the person may have been come here to seek that protection. That would mean that what was not illegal (assuming the defence case is correct) when it was done, would be made illegal by the amendment.

It would be impossible to argue, nor did the government try to do so in presenting the Bill to Parliament, that bringing refugees to Australia would be "criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations". Article 15.1 of the ICCPR therefore expressly prohibits this retrospective criminalisation.

In its brief defence of the Bill in Parliament, the government made no mention of the ICCPR. Its justification was simply, "to clarify an existing understanding of the laws, and to ensure convictions for people smuggling offences already made as well as prosecutions underway are not invalidated." This is no justification at all. There can be no "existing understanding" of what legislation means if that understanding is ruled incorrect by a superior court. Since the US Supreme Court judgment in Marbury v Madison in 1803, a case long accepted as axiomatic in Australian jurisprudence, courts have had the final say on the meaning of the law. Any "existing understanding" to the contrary would be, quite simply, a wrong understanding.

Besides breaching Article 15, the Bill also in its specific reference to the Refugees Convention further distances Australia from that international instrument and raises the question again of whether this country should be taken to have effectively resiled from it.

Neither the government nor the opposition in supporting the Bill let go the chance of referring to the issue of deaths at sea of asylum seekers trying to reach Australia. The ultimate fall-back position of both sides is that travelling to Australia on unseaworthy boats is dangerous. Neither side, however, noticed the fatal flaw in their argument. The purpose of the law is to "deter" people smugglers by making their actions illegal. But, according to its supporters, it has been the "existing understanding" since 1999, presumably even amongst people smugglers, that these actions were illegal. Yet the 300 or so people convicted since then obviously were not deterred. It hasn't worked for over a decade, why should it work now? The fact is the law has only ever punished the impoverished and illiterate fisherman conned or coerced into crewing the boats by the real people smugglers who stay warm and dry in port.

But people do die at sea on those leaky boats. I would not accuse either side of disingenuousness in pointing this out. The fact that it is the most seemingly humanitarian argument they have to support their conflicting Malaysia / Nauru solutions doesn't mean they don't genuinely care about the tragic loss of life, and it would be fatuous to pretend that it is not a legitimate issue in the debate.

The problem is, in humanitarian terms we are offering nothing as an alternative to taking the risk of getting into one of those boats. It is as if a group of people were gathered on the balcony of a burning building, with people below warning them not to jump because it was too high. If one does jump, and survives, do we throw them back into the fire to deter the others?

Sending asylum seekers back to Malaysia or Indonesia, or forcing them to stay there, is denying them their internationally recognised legal right to seek asylum in a country that is a signatory to the Refugees Convention. We cannot deny them that right. If it is dangerous for them to avail themselves of it, then we must do all we can to reduce that danger by arranging for meaningful avenues to reaching safety legally. At the very least we must ensure they are fully aware of the danger, which the evidence seems to suggest some of them may not be. Instead, it appears our shadowy "disruption programs" do little more than force desperate people into the hands of the most unscrupulous of the smugglers, working with the most corrupt of local officials. Compelling evidence of this sort of collusion has been available since the infamous Siev-X sinking.

As a footnote, it is worth remembering that Australia is also a signatory to the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, which allows individuals who believe their rights have been breached to take a case to the United Nations Human Rights Commission for adjudication. Australia may yet have some explaining to do.

2011-10-27T22:09:00.000+11:00

Skilled migration - have we got it the wrong way around?

Reading this opinion piece in the Drum reminded me of an old heretical idea I have had for some time.

It is one of the articles of faith of immigration policy in Australia that what we need is more skilled migrants. That's why my idea might be considered a heresy.

To a classical economist, skilled labour is a commodity, produced at considerable expense and much sought after in the economy.

Imagine if Australian business could import steel for free. All you would have to do would be to go down to the docks and take delivery. That would be fantastic for industries like construction, automobile manufacture, etc. It would put the Australian steel industry out of business, of course, but the net economic benefit would probably be positive.

Free steel is a fantasy, but free skilled labour is not. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to train an engineer, accountant, IT professional, doctor, nurse, etc. But our immigration program delivers planeloads of fully trained (and fully paid for) professionals every day. The benefits to the Australian economy are obvious. Of course, like the steel industry in the earlier example, the production of skilled labour in Australia inevitably comes off the worse for the competition.

The trouble is, economists may be able to see skilled labour simply as a commodity, but the rest of us realise that, unlike steel, skills come with people attached. Not producing skilled labour in Australia translates in real terms into not training Australians. Why spend the money when you can get the product for free?

The OECD Education at a Glance report for 2011 shows that Australia spends well below the average of developed economies on education. We are simply importing it for free.

The old paradigm worked (and worked well, in my heretical view) on the basis that immigrants came in at the bottom of the socio-economic heap and pushed everyone else up. The new paradigm brings the migrants in at or near the top. What effect does that have on everyone below? It may be still too early to tell.

But the economy doesn't just need skilled workers. Engineers don't like to wash dishes, but someone has to. If bringing in the free engineers from overseas means we don't train them here, then I suppose our own kids can take the unskilled jobs. Sounds like a good way to create some social unrest, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of our close neighbours in Indonesia, the Philippines and the Pacific queue up for unskilled or semi-skilled work in other countries, some of it legal, some not. Even when it's legal, conditions are often just as bad as when it's illegal.

It's not hard to imagine that a poor woman in the Philippines with a family to support would rather work as a maid or housekeeper in Australia than in Saudi Arabia. But we couldn't allow that, could we? It would offend our egalitarian sensibilities, wouldn't it? Better to let them live in poverty at home or be sexually abused abroad. I'm sure they understand that we're doing it for their own good.

Right now, legions of foreigners work in Australia illegally. The fact that they are illegal means that they are open to exploitation. If they had visas to work as unskilled or semi-skilled labour in domestic, construction, hospitality and manufacturing jobs their rights could be protected. Their taxes could even help pay for training Aussie kids, including their own, to be the engineers of the future.

2011-10-25T15:30:00.000+11:00

Press dogs attack as government whistles

There are now two groups of foreigners in this country marked as permissible prey for the hounds of the gutter press. Marked by the government, that is.

Asylum seekers, of course, those existential threats to our fair nationhood whose supreme cunning has brought the judiciary into collusion with the Government/Opposition (strike out whichever side you prefer) to force the ever-so-good people of Australia to put them up in luxury hotels and pay them double what our own suffering pensioners must live on. See the Mediawatch exposé.

As I have often pointed out, if you lock up people who are bad or dangerous or both, then asylum seekers must be bad or dangerous or both because we lock them up. Why are they locked up? As a deterrent and, as the recent ABC 4 Corners report strongly emphasises, as a punishment. Deterrence against what? Punishment for what? For coming here, simple as that. Coming here by boat is bad and the people who do it are bad. Government and Opposition blame each other for letting these bad things happen. The hounds are unleashed by both sides.

Now it is the turn of the overseas students whose crime was to buy what we were selling. Education? No, visas. For the better part of a decade the commissioned agents of a new government-backed industry went from town to town all over the Punjab signing up families who wanted a better life for their children. Sorry? What? am I suggesting they were not being offered the chance of training as hairdressers or cooks to return home to ply their trade? Has anyone told the Department of Immigration? Apparently now the good Mr Knight has revealed this dastardly plot that our innocent public servants would never have thought was going on right under their noses. Let's now set the media hounds loose on them, too. The good old Tele will oblige, of course. They will even give us the names and photos of a couple of young kids who have been charged with no crime nor committed any.

If the Tele is right (I guess it's theoretically possible) then the Department has started a "crackdown". That suggests the government is going further than just blaming the victims for its own egregious policy failings; it is intent on punishing them also. Another threat to our aforementioned fair nationhood averted, I suppose. Those Indian kids look like real crims, don't they?

Perhaps while they're in Perth for CHOGM, Manmohan Singh could quietly point out to Julia Gillard that in a couple of decades, when the Chinese have completed the task of replacing coal with renewable energy sources, Australian kids are likely to be begging for jobs in Indian restaurants -- in India. I believe the Indian press can be pretty rabid.

2011-10-19T11:29:00.001+11:00

Another bureaucrat blames students for program failures

Kruno Kukoc is First Assistant Secretary, Migration and Policy Division, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Last Friday he gave a speech to the Australian International Education Conference in Adelaide.

No doubt Mr Kukoc is a first-rate public servant, but as such he is not speaking his own mind anyway. What he says is the official view. And the official view is simply this: none of this was our fault, it was all down to those sneaky students who had no interest in getting an education for its own sake. They just wanted permanent residence.

Sadly, I suppose, very few people in the real world want an education for its own sake. For most it is a means to an end. It is also not a rare thing for people to choose what to study on the basis of their future prospects. Choosing a course of study on the basis of the long-term advantages it might bring you is neither illegal, fraudulent nor even unreasonable.

For most of this century, Australia has actively sold education to overseas students as a path to permanent residence. Mr Kukoc observes that there was an explosion in the VET sector of colleges offering courses for occupations on the Migration Occupations in Demand List (MODL). Were those colleges acting outside the law? Absolutely not, in fact they had to go through a government approval procedure under the Education Services for Overseas Students Act. Was there something illegitimate about the MODL? No, it was set up and controlled by Mr Kukoc's own Department. How did these students go about getting permanent residence after their studies? They applied for visa classes created, by Mr Kukoc's own Department, exclusively for the purpose of allowing overseas students to apply for permanent residence.

The resulting mess had to be cleaned up, I agree. Too many of the VET colleges were visa factories with no real educational foundation whatsoever. The immigration program was being swamped by applicants with inadequate qualifications in areas not really wanted by the economy. So far, I agree with Mr Kukoc.

But where is the blame? Mr Kukoc criticises the MODL, but seems to imply the government he represents had nothing to do with it. He seems surprised that all those thousands of students really wanted to get permanent residence, but doesn't seem to remember that visa subclass 885 was designed, by his Department, exclusively for overseas students to apply for permanent residence within six months of finishing their studies in Australia.

Mr Kukoc probably doesn't get to see them. They come to my office every day. They are mostly around my daughter's age. They, or rather their parents, bought something the Australian government was selling, or at least knowingly allowing to be sold, and now they are being accused of not being "genuine temporary entrants". They never thought they were, they were never required to be, that wasn't the product that was advertised when they bought it. Their lives are in a mess now as they wait to see whether the product their parents really paid for will ever be delivered. Mr Kukoc has a nice job in Canberra.

Who's to blame, really?

2011-10-16T12:30:00.001+11:00

Distraction of boats allows racism to thrive

While our "leaders" in Canberra accuse each other of backing the people smugglers' business model or encouraging the loading of children onto dangerous boats, in Sydney's western suburbs, and presumably elsewhere in the country, it is all about "the enemy".

The article in the Sydney Morning Herald was headlined "fear and distrust". People interviewed in the Federal electorate of Lindsay, whose local Member actively campaigns against asylum seekers arriving by boat, were not apparently concerned about queue jumpers or dangerous sea voyages. Their comments were the stuff of pure xenophobia. The barber saw no difference between persecuted Hazaras from Afghanistan and the Japanese, North Koreans and Viet Cong whom we fought in wars last century. The service station manager, who thought there had been about 100,000 arrivals this year, was worried about the danger to her grandchildren. It did not seem to matter how they got here, just that they were here.

Xenophobia, racism, intolerance, whatever you want to call it, is endemic in human society. After all, that's what the Hazaras are fleeing back home. Meningococcal bacteria and genital warts are also endemic, but are rarely encouraged by politicians. When Vietnamese boat people started arriving in the 1970s there were virulent racist campaigns, but both sides of politics explicitly rejected them. Both the Liberals under Fraser and Labor under Hawke resisted the temptation to ride the wave of racism. They either condemned or ignored it, and went about the business of welcoming the new arrivals into the multicultural mix of Australia.

For the last two decades, rather than welcoming it has been official government policy to lock up asylum seekers arriving by boat. As I have said before, we usually lock up people who are bad or dangerous, or both. No wonder the service station manager in Penrith is worried for her grandchildren, then.

If government policy is to deter them if you can, and lock them up if you can't, then in the minds of many these people must be a threat. Permission is given for the fear and distrust of strangers to manifest itself as hatred and demonisation. That's how a Hazara becomes a samurai.

2011-10-04T14:36:00.000+11:00

Another SNAFU with the paper work

We all make mistakes. Far be it from me to cast the first stone. But when it comes to paper work, a volley of rocks has already been hurled at the Department of Immigration over the years. Just a couple of examples: incorrectly advising people whose visas had been cancelled of how long they had to appeal (the Srey case); automatic cancellation of student visas for breach of a "prescribed condition", but forgetting to prescribe a condition (the Hossain case).

On Friday, a couple of emails lobbed into my inbox which I didn't get to look at until Sunday. They contained links to a couple of new "legislative instruments" guaranteed to make your eyes glaze with their complexity. The explanatory note that was posted with them suggested that, since 1 July 2007, the skills assessments which are the basis of all General Skilled Migration applications may have been unlawfully made because the Department of Immigration failed, forgot, or somehow didn't manage to get the approval of another Minister as required by law. No details given, all very mysterious.

Today I got an email circulated by a colleague, Christopher Levingston, which sheds some further light on the mystery. According to Chris, the assessing authority that was not properly authorised was Trades Recognition Australia (TRA), which is responsible for assessing all trade occupations.

So what does this all mean? Visas wrongly granted? -- unlikely, since the legal requirement is that the Minister is "satisfied" the criteria have been met. Visas wrongly refused? -- that's a bit more complicated, depending on whether the non-existence of an authorised assessing authority means that all applications should have been approved, or none should have. Certainly, as Chris points out, there could be implications for people charged with criminal offences in relation to giving false documents to TRA.

Maybe the lesson to be learned is this: the politicisation of immigration over the past couple of decades has led to micro-management by politicians and politically-driven bureaucrats, with resulting increased complexity in the rules and regulations that is now reaching breaking point. Murphy's law triumphs again. Time to go back to the drawing board?

2011-09-28T22:46:00.000+10:00

Student visa program review -- still blaming the victims

Just over 10 years ago, in July 2001, amendments to the Migration Reguations allowed overseas students to stay in Australia and apply for permanent residence at the end of their studies. A new industry was born, offering courses designed exclusively for the study to PR pathway that had been opened up. Australian Immigration and Education regulators were on the back foot almost from day one, unable to keep up with the imaginative entrepreneurial skills of the free market "education providers". Just one example: when the rules for trade qualifications were changed to require students to complete 900 hours of work experience, training institutions teamed up with hairdressing salons and restaurants (often run by the same people) to exploit the free labour of students willing to work for nothing to get the necessary paperwork.

What became our third largest export industry, worth as much as $18 billion per year, ended up distorting the skilled migration program and clogging the immigration queue (the real one, not the imaginary queue of asylum seekers). Caught up in this were tens of thousands of young people from around the world, but predominantly from India and China, whose only crime had been to buy what the Australian government was selling, or knowingly allowing to be sold in its name. The response of the immigration bureaucrats was to blame the victims, claiming with barefaced dishonesty that no one had told prospective students they were supposed to be coming here for any purpose other than temporary study. I have commented on this previously.

Now a report commissioned by the government to prove that it was all somebody else's fault has done just that. The main feature of the Knight report's recommendations, which have been accepted en masse by the government, is a requirement that overseas students demonstrate that they are "genuine temporary entrants" (GTEs), with no intention of wanting to stay in Australia permanently after their studies. Not wanting to entirely massacre the geese laying those 18 billion golden eggs, however, students completing bachelor degrees or higher qualifications will be allowed to remain in Australia with work permission for two to four years. Any who pick up an employer or State sponsorship, or form a relationship with a local resident, may then qualify for permanent residence.

The promise has been replaced by an enticement, hopefully enough to keep the lucrative student market alive. Whatever long-term problems might arise (exploitation, incentive to commit fraud, family and social stress on young students, desperation -- see earlier comments) will be just that: long-term, beyond the next election, something that can be blamed on someone else at a later date.

I have previously noted that only one Australian journalist seems to have any understanding of, or care for, the victims of this decade of failed policy. Peter Mares' comments on the Knight report and his presentation to the TAFE Directors Australia 2011 National Conference in Sydney this month should remind everyone concerned with Australian immigration policy that asylum seekers are not the only issue.

2011-09-17T09:10:00.002+10:00

Shameful - Australia throws out Refugees Convention

Original post edited to take into account 19 September amendment

The proposed legislation for amending the Migration Act to make it possible for the Australian government to "virtually" push back asylum seeker boats is a shameful document. That shame falls on the politicians who have proposed it and the public servants who drafted it.

See the text of the Amendment bill published on 19 September.

The only criterion that the Minister need apply in deciding to send asylum seekers to a particular country is "the national interest". This has been amended from an earlier draft which referred to the "public" interest. In considering the national interest, the Minister "must have regard to" whether or not the country has given Australia certain assurances about not sending the person on to another country where their life or freedom would be threatened due to their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, and will make or permit to be made an assessment of whether the person is a refugee under the Convention. The Minister may also take into account other factors.

That's fine, then, isn't it? Well, the Bill goes on to say that the above assurances "need not be legally binding". Sort of like a promise with your fingers crossed behind your back, in effect.

There is also that slippery legal expression "must have regard to...". That doesn't mean the Minister can't still send someone to a country that has given no such assurances, or perhaps has given them in the past but not complied with them, so long as the Minister still thinks it is in the "national interest" to do so. Like the previous term "public interest", there is no clear legal definition of what that means.

Australia's obligations to refugees are contained in the Refugees Convention Article 33. There is no mention of the public or national interest in that article. The national interest of the receiving country is not a consideration in throwing back asylum seekers at the border. Using it as a criterion is therefore a direct repudiation of the Convention. Full stop.

Nor is there anything in Article 33 that says that Australia can outsource its protection obligations. The Bill contains a section headed "Reasons for Subdivision" which is one of those peculiar pieces of modern legal drafting that is supposed to make it clear what the intention of Parliament is. People smuggling, we are told, is a "major regional problem", as are its "undesirable consequences including the resulting loss of life at sea". No argument there. Then it goes on to explain that Parliament thinks that the Minister should have the power to decide which countries should be designated for the purpose of sending "offshore entry persons" to them, even if Australia has or may have protection obligations towards those persons under the Convention. So what are these OEPs? Elsewhere the Act defines them as, in effect, people trying to get to Australia to seek protection under the Convention but who get caught before they make it to the mainland and are taken to an "excised offshore place", which is a part of Australia where the usual rules about applying for visas don't apply to.... people taken there for the purpose of not allowing them to apply for a visa.

It is a masterpiece of circular logic. Section 36 of the Migration Act says that there must be a visa for people who are in need of protection under the Convention. Section 46A however says that offshore entry persons can't apply for a visa in Australia. So we have created this visa to comply with our obligations under the Convention, good little international citizens that we are, but the people most in need of it can't apply for it. Instead, we pack them off to some place that has, maybe, given us a non-binding "assurance" that they will take them off our hands. This is not what Article 33 requires us to do.

Article 33 is the heart of the Convention. If Australia no longer applies it, then Australia can no longer be considered a State Party to the Convention.

2011-09-12T17:26:00.000+10:00

It's a crazy idea, but....

I have been looking over a few cases involving onshore protection visa applications. It has been apparent to everyone involved for some time (including, not the least, the judicial authorities -- see my earlier post) that there is a significant amount of abuse of the system in this area. There has been some improvement in the last couple of years, due to an increase in the rate of processing applications through the system, but it is still the case that someone who knows the ropes, or is guided by someone else who knows them, can draw out a case for a year or more at very little cost to themselves, though considerable cost to the system: arrival on visitor visa, application for protection visa close to expiry date, appeal to Refugee Review Tribunal, appeal to Federal Magistrates Court, appeal to Federal Court, application for special leave to appeal to High Court (though by this stage it is beginning to get expensive). From the expiry of the initial visitor visa to the death of the last appeal, the applicant is free to come and go and has lawful permission to work.

Some of the costs are obvious in terms of expenditure by the administration and the Courts. The reduction in processing time in recent years has been helped by the requirement that the RRT decide cases within 90 days, but this has also come at a cost: since the RRT and MRT (Migration Review Tribunal) are administered jointly, the flow of resources into the RRT to meet the 90 day deadline has resulted in a blow out in the backlog of non-refugee cases in the MRT, with many taking 18 months or more to be heard. There is also a cost, in my opinion, to genuine onshore applicants whose credibility is inevitably measured against the background of a large number of fraudulent applications.

The solution seems fairly obvious. If the attraction is permission to work in Australia (earning the onshore protection visa the nickname of the "$30 work permit"), then why not remove it?

What if we treated all asylum seekers the same, regardless of how they got here? With or without a visa, they could be accommodated in open hostels, fed and clothed but not allowed to work. Their children could go to school, there would be no razor wire, they could come and go during the day but be required to check in at night. Failure to do so would amount to a deemed withdrawal of the protection visa application and would then be held against them when they were later caught and tried to re-open their case. People with valid visas could continue to get the benefit of them, but could not renew them on expiry.

Sound scary? Only because of our visceral, irrational, bed-wetting fear of being dispossessed by people arriving in boats without permission. Wherever did we get that phobia from?

2011-09-09T15:42:00.000+10:00

Metcalfe and the UK/French/Aussie riots -- a case of cui bono?

Did Immigration Department Head Andrew Metcalfe predict rivers of blood, or didn't he? He's not saying what he said. Whatever it was, he apparently said it twice: once on Wednesday morning to Canberra journalists, and again on Wednesday afternoon to Opposition leader Tony Abbott. With the exception of Abbott, the only people who have reported authoritatively on it seem to be people who weren't there, such as ABC journalist Jeremy Thompson or Crikey commentator Bernard Keane.

Personally I doubt very much that Mr Metcalfe would have said anything of the sort. Keane's second-hand scenario seems quite plausible: an answer to a question that was probably a bit clumsy and was misconstrued by the journos.

The point is, though, it doesn't matter now whether he said it or not. It has been taken up with as much gusto as the original "Rivers of Blood" speech by UK MP Enoch Powell in 1968. For the Daily Telegraph (a Powellesque rag if ever there was one), it became a prediction of rioting in the streets. The claim will inevitably come up again and again like the children overboard slander. And it's for that reason that the government should make a clear statement now that it does not believe that allowing asylum seekers to be processed onshore (which most of them are, anyway, since the majority come in by plane and no one notices them) will lead to rioting or UK-style looting (I thought that was caused by Senator Wong having a baby with her same-sex partner, according to the Tele?).

Otherwise, one would have to assume that the government is happy for these rumours to run wild. It doesn't want onshore processing either. That would be an example of dog-whistling surpassing even the best of the Howard era.

2011-09-05T20:52:00.001+10:00

Stopping the boats: a piece of legislative cake

In consideration of the public interest, I have decided the offer my professional legal advice to both the government and the opposition without imposing my usual exorbitant (though entirely justified) professional fee for the following advice.

As we all know, or at least as we all are told, the only real political /social / humanitarian issue facing our great country today is, "stopping the boats". On that basis the following drafting notes are put forward for the submission to Parliament of the Border Protection (Stopping the Boats) Bill 2011.

Firstly, to head off any potential High Court challenges, we need an unsinkable (sorry) interpretation provision. Try this:

"This Act is to be interpreted as if Australia had no international obligations whatsoever in respect of Human, Civil or Political Rights, the status or protection of Refugees, the rights of Children, or anything of the sort (ejusdem generis). To the extent that any provision of this Act may conflict with any obligations of Australia, whether explicit or implied, in respect of the above, those obligations are taken to have been rescinded, revoked, repudiated and expressly set aside. To avoid doubt, it is not the intention of Parliament that any international obligation to which Australia might otherwise be subject should be used to interpret this Act in such a way as to limit or reduce the clear and unequivocal intention of the legislation to stop the boats no matter what the cost (other than electoral cost to the government of the day)."

Having made that clear, the substantial provisions of the Bill are a piece of cake: "The military forces of the Commonwealth are hereby authorised and directed to take whatever action is necessary to prevent unauthorised entry into Australian territory of any boat or ship, including any floating, or partially floating, or potentially or imminently sinking, whether leaking or otherwise, maritime vehicle conveying, or intending or potentially or reasonably or unreasonably suspected of intending to convey to Australia (including an excised offshore place) any person, not being an Australian citizen or eligible New Zealand citizen, who may, in the opinion of an officer, wish or intend, or conceivably or reasonably or unreasonably possibly wish or intend, for whasoever reason whatsoever, including a reason that reasonable or even reasonably unreasonable people might think was arguable, to remain whether permanently or temporarily or for the minimum time necessary to protect human life or dignity, in Australia, including action that may involve sinking, or hastening the sinking, or sitting back to wait for the sinking, of such boat or ship etc., regardless of any loss of life or limb or suffering of any person whatsoever (other than an Australian citizen or eligble New Zealand citizen)."

Julia, Tony, waiting for your call.

2011-09-04T21:32:00.000+10:00

A simple twist of fate

Sitting in my office last week, across the desk from a young Indian couple, both sobbing. Good thing I've got that desk there. These kids (20-somethings, my daughter's age) made one big mistake: they bought what we were selling. It was our second biggest export industry for a while, though now we don't need them any more because the Chinese will buy anything we can dig up. But ten years ago it looked as though we really needed these guys. So we went out and sold them the dream. It's a dream families will go into debt for, children will promise their parents to live for, marriages will be made for, lives will be destroyed for. For these two, we didn't deliver.

Actually, it was just a stupid bureaucratic stuff up that Kafka could have written about. They were living in a rented apartment and the landlord kept the key to the letter box. An important letter from Immigration came, and went, because they didn't get it. Now their applications for visa extensions have been refused. Our stupid laws say there is nothing you can do about it. A 20 year old kid gives an address on a form and their life can be trashed because a letter doesn't get to them, even though they gave an email address also but Immigration chose not to use it. Joan Baez sang about a simple twist of fate. I'd hate to think my kid's future depended on a twist like that.

2011-09-01T08:59:00.000+10:00

End of the "Malaysian deal"; end of the madness also?

It's the morning after the High Court handed down its judgment in what will probably now be known as "the Malaysian swap case". Read it here:

Plaintiff M70/2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship; Plaintiff M106 of 2011 v Minister for Immigration and Citizenship [2011] HCA 32

Heads will be sore in Melbourne (where the lawyers are) and Canberra, though for very different reasons.

The High Court made the point that Australia has undertaken certain international obligations and that our laws must be interpreted in the light of those undertakings (not a new concept by any means). When applied to asylum seekers, that means that we must either properly assess their claims before sending them back (which is something I argued before in another post), or if they are to be sent somewhere else for processing the country concerned must have similar international legal obligations. As a matter of "jurisdictional fact" (that is, something that the Court can determine for itself), Malaysia has no such obligations.

Does this put Nauru back in play? That bankrupt little republic has now signed up for the Refugees Convention. Under the "Pacific Solution" devised by the Howard government, the actual processing of asylum claims there was under Australian control, so the High Court decision last year in the "Offshore Processing Case" might apply, meaning that applicants would have to be given natural justice and access to the Australian courts.

The situation now is that the Australian government can no longer have it both ways. It can explicity renounce its obligations under the Refugees Convention, or it can embrace them and end this whole farce of offshore processing and mandatory detention that has been such a stain on our national reputation for two decades.

Oh, and the Minister also has to live up to his obligations as guardian of unaccompanied minors, meaning he has to really consider whether it is in their best interests to send them somewhere else.

2011-08-17T08:39:00.002+10:00

There is a simple solution

19 years have passed since Australia "led" the world with mandatory detention of asylum seekers. There are now people on the electoral roll who have known no other way of dealing with the issue.

Some indication of the massive cost of this policy can be gleaned from the evidence given to the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Immigration Detention Network, reported on the front page of today's Sydney Morning Herald. Details of the Committee can be found on the Australian Parliament House website and the DIAC website.

The cost of the policy is measured in human lives and suffering, hundreds of millions of dollars, and irreparable damage to our country's reputation. And in return for this cost, the policy has been a total failure.

Secretary of the Department of Immigration Andrew Metcalfe stated in his address to the Committee yesterday that "these issues often defy simple solutions". Mr Metcalfe is wrong. One factual observation proves this: more asylum seekers arrive in Australia every year by plane than arrive by boat. They are allowed to live and work in the community while their applications are processed through the system. Statistically they are far less likely to be found to be genuine refugees than the boat arrivals, but nobody pays any attention to them. To get the facts, read this Briefing Paper from the Parliamentary Library.

In the type of free society which we Australians, for the most part rightly, believe we live in, people are only locked up if they are bad or dangerous. For 19 years governments from both sides have put out the message that asylum seekers arriving by boat are bad and dangerous, while those who come by plane are not.

The simple solution, Mr Metcalfe, is to recognise that the policy of mandatory detention is a failure, a costly, inhumane and miserable failure. Put an end to it now, treat all asylum seekers equally, and try to recover some national dignity.

2011-08-09T11:58:00.001+10:00

When is a queue not a queue? Englishmen, asylum seekers and students

A Frenchman once told me that when an Englishman is waiting alone at a bus stop he forms an orderly queue of one. In Australia, we probably line up less neatly than the English, but we have our own obsessions about queues and queueing.

Scarcely a day goes by without asylum seekers and refugees being on the front page, so it was interesting to hear someone talking on the ABC this morning about that other putative queue, the one that is populated by thousands of former overseas students in Australia waiting for the permanent visas that they have already qualified for. Peter Mares is one of the few Australian journalists who knows, or cares, about these people. He reminded us about them on Fran Kelly's breakfast program this morning.

In the opening scenes of the movie Casablanca the narrator tells us of the refugees from the Second World War who wait... and wait... and wait. Besides the students Peter Mares tells us of, there are of course the refugees from today's wars and injustices who are waiting all over the world. The government's plan is to send the latest arrivals to Malaysia so they can wait there, indefinitely it seems, and take in some others who have been waiting in that country, again for unknown periods of time. While waiting to be put on a plane from Christmas Island, the potential removees (is that a word?) have had their wait here extended, for which they are no doubt grateful, by their lawyers who have questioned yet another of the byzantine intricacies of our immigration laws in the High Court.

This particular intricacy is found in s 198A of the Migration Act, which was brought in by the Howard government to allow asylum seekers to be hauled off by the navy to Nauru, that obliging little deposit of bird dung in the Pacific that got its independence from Australia in 1968 and has probably regretted it ever since. In order to justify shrugging off our international obligations under the Refugees Convention, the Act allows the Minister to "declare" a place outside Australia to be an OK place to send asylum seekers to. Under the Malaysian deal, Minister Bowen has used the same section to declare Malaysia to be such a place. The argument before the Court is whether the Minister has to take into account any actual facts about the country in question before making that declaration and (here's the byzantine part), whether those facts are "jurisdictional", ie whether the Court can have a second look at them.

An injunction has been granted until 22 August when the Court will decide whether it can or not.

Oh yes, and then there is the question of the unaccompanied minors in the group. Another piece of legislation makes the Minister for Immigration their "guardian". The Court is being asked whether the Minister is being a good parent by sending them off to Malaysia on their own (presumably their real parents are either back home in Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran or in Indonesia).

All we can do now is wait...

2011-08-03T11:10:00.001+10:00

Two recent publications on immigration and population issues

In the past month I have come across two well-researched publications on immigration and population issues, each approaching the issues in very different ways. These are in addition to the report on illegal employment mentioned in an earlier post.

The first is a report from the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, entitled Immigration and the Resources Boom Mark II. The main author being Dr Bob Birrell, anyone familiar with this area will not be surprised that the report favours a reduction in immigration intake overall. While critical of the government's policy assumptions, it contains a few of its own that in my view predetermine some of its conclusions. One in particular that I disagree with is the assumption that the need to build and renew infrastructure to cope with population growth is bad or undesirable. I also think that the alleged preoccupation of Australian city dwellers with congestion and overcrowding is more of a political beat up than a reality.

The second is a report from the Productivity Commission entitled A 'Sustainable' Population? - Key Policy Issues. It contains the proceedings of a roundtable discussion on this subject held in Canberra in March 2011. As such it reflects a variety of different views on the issues. I'm glad to see the word "sustainable" put in quotes, since I think it is a largely meaningless tag that gets stuck onto just about any argument these days. I haven't yet had the time to get very far into the different papers and views collected in this volume, but I hope to have a few more observations over the next few weeks. Any comments from anyone who has read all or part of it are very welcome.

2011-08-01T17:19:00.001+10:00

Employer sanctions for employing illegal workers -- good idea, bad implementation

The following figures come from the recently published Report of the 2010 Review of the Migration Amendment (Employer Sanctions) Act 2007:

as many as 100,000 people working illegally in Australia;
100 instances of possible breach by employers of the laws relating to employing illegal workers;
at least 10 matters thoroughly investigated, involving "the deliberate and systematic use of these workers in significant numbers at identified workplaces", some involved in what appeared to be "serious organised rackets" and revealing "apparent abuse of the workers including sexual exploitation, unsafe work practices, underpayment, taxation and welfare fraud, and associated crime";
only one matter that "could properly be the subject of a prosecution taking into account the evidential requirements of sections 245AA to AK of the Migration Act 1958 and the Prosecution Policy of the Commonwealth";
no actual prosecutions so far, except for one person who pleaded guilty.

Governments of all stripes have been telling us for years that they would "crack down" on the employment of illegal workers. Exploitation, undercutting of wages and conditions, dangerous work practices, sexual abuse, all excellent justifications. While we lock away tens of thousands for the crime of getting on a leaky boat, and point the finger of blame at young foreign students whose only offence was to believe what the government told them, we still can only manage to convict one boss who was dumb enough to plead guilty.

The report concludes:

"The principal reason for the failure of the Employer Sanctions Act provisions is that the ‘best evidence’ of breach would almost always come from the workers themselves but their evidence is affected by their complicity or independent culpability under section 235 of the Migration Act 1958. They would normally be removed from Australia ‘as soon as reasonably practicable’ as required by section 198 of the Migration Act 1958. The cost and the administrative inconvenience of detaining them pending a trial would be prohibitive.

The provisions of the Migration Amendment (Employer Sanctions) Act 2007 are wholly ineffective as a deterrent against the small number of employers and labour suppliers who engage or refer non-citizens who do not have lawful permission to work or who work in breach of their visa conditions. The Employer Sanctions provisions are also ineffective as an educational tool for recalcitrant employers and labour suppliers. "

The report's recommendations include allocation of more resources to Immigration to deal with the problem. Maybe they could take them away from punishing asylum seekers and students and put them into what seems like a much more useful endeavour.

2011-07-30T21:12:00.001+10:00

Should migration agents have to sit for an English test?

Australia's system of regulating people who seek to make a living giving immigration advice is now nearly twenty years old. I have been active in the field since the start, and even for a few years before that.

In most professions, the requirement is that you undertake an intensive course of study over at least a couple of years, pass some fairly rigorous exams, then get a provisional licence to practice under the supervision of a more experienced professional for a year or two. After that, you are likely to have a pretty good idea of what you are doing.

For some reason, the time-honoured model was not adhered to for migration agents. For the first decade and a half, all that was needed was a clean criminal record and a pass in a multiple-choice exam. A fairly stringent, if somewhat quirky, Code of Conduct set the rules of behaviour for migration agents, but without a pre-registration training regime it was akin to giving you a driver's licence so long as you knew how to start a car, then cancelling it if you killed somebody.

Then it was decided to require new agents, though not the existing ones, to undertake a course at the level of a Graduate Certificate. While certainly an improvement, the duration and content remains inadequate, in my opinion, to properly train and prepare people to carry out the complex and demanding work of a professional migration agent. The continued absence of a provisional licencing system before an agent can be allowed to practice independently is also in my view a serious inadequacy.

Since January 2010 it has been a requirement that all new agents demonstrate a satisfactory level of English language ability, either by sitting a particular test or showing that they have completed studies in English at both matriculation and tertiary level. Interestingly, lawyers like myself are exempted. From January 2014 the Engish language test is to be extended to all practising agents, with the continued exemption of lawyers.

Many agents have expressed opposition to the requirement bordering on outrage. Accusations of racism have been made. These I think are nonsense, but I can certainly understand that people with long-established reputations feel threatened and upset.

I think the exemption for lawyers says quite a lot. The thinking seems to be that lawyers have gone through five years or more of full-time tertiary training so they necessarily must have good English language skills. I don't necessarily agree, but the comparison speaks for itself.

I teach and work with migration agents every day. I have the greatest respect for the professionalism and skill of many of them, and utter contempt for the incompetence and dishonesty of a few. As far as I can see, the question of English language ability is a fair way down the list of factors that distinguish the two.

Reasonable standards for accreditation as a migration agent would include English language ability alongside a far more rigorous level of training in the technical, ethical and practical aspects of the profession. Simply deciding to impose a test of this type is typical of the ad hoc and crisis-management approach that has dominated the bureaucratic approach to migration agent regulation for the past two decades.

The consumers of migration advice services deserve a more integrated and holistic management regime.

2011-07-16T22:37:00.001+10:00

Thoughts about the 2012 Selection Model

Now that I have had a chance to work through the details of the new points test, I have been thinking about how things are going to work a year from now.

It's called the Selection Model, or SkillSelect. I have previously mentioned its similarities with the notably unsuccessful Skills Matching Database of a few years back. There are also parallels with the New Zealand skilled migration system, which also requires an Expression of Interest, or EoI, followed by a possible invitation to apply for a visa.

A peculiarity of the 2012 proposal is that there is no way of knowing in advance what your chances are likely to be, with the result that potential applicants will need to try to maximise their chances when they lodge their EoI, potentially at great expense.

Each time the selection is run, DIAC will set a quota for each occupation and will choose the highest scoring candidates who nominated that occupation in their EoI.

In order to maximise their score, anyone preparing an EoI will need to pay for a skills assessment (fees from about $500 to over $1,000 depending on the occupation) and IELTS test ($330). If the applicant has a spouse with a skilled occupation, a further skills assessment and IELTS test would add an extra 5 points. Unrelated education qualifications cost $130 to be assessed by Vetassess. In some cases they might even try a NAATI test, at a cost of around $770.

Then the EOI itself will have a fee expected to be around $500 to $700.

All told, up-front expenses of $1,500 to $3,000 or more for an application that has no guarantee of success.

I wonder whether the result may not be that quality candidates, who may have several migration options (including staying put), might just not bother.

2011-07-12T18:18:00.001+10:00

Federal Court finally loses patience with secret advisers

The Honourable Geoffrey Flick is one of the most respected authorities and commentators on Australian administrative law, and has been a Judge of the Federal Court of Australia since 2007. Not the sort of person you would expect to lose his cool.

In a judgment handed down on 6 July this year he came about as close to that as a judicial officer of his standing ever could. The case, SZOZG v MIAC [2011] FCA 756, is reported at

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCA/2011/756.html

The case itself was a run-of-the-mill appeal from a decision of the Federal Magistrates Court which itself was an appeal from the Refugee Review Tribunal. But it was precisely the similarity of the case with countless others coming before the Courts that incensed his Honour. An applicant who barely spoke English had filed, somewhat out of time, an appeal from the lower Court using language that the appellant himself certainly did not understand and which, while essentially meaningless from a legal point of view was virtually identical to numerous other appeals and first instance applications making their way through the judicial system.

In an interesting example of judicial activism, his Honour managed to extract the identity of the "helper" who had drawn up the paper work and, after giving her a chance to state her position, had referred her to the Department of Immigration. What action they may take is not yet known.

The Court's frustration with the inaction of the authorities up to now in taking any concerted action against these anonymous, and generally incompetent, "helpers" is strongly expressed in the judgment. The waste of Court time and resources is obvious, as is the ultimate denial of real justice to the applicants. The underlying message is plain: the lack of a formal legal aid framework for immigration cases is counter-productive in the long term.

2011-07-03T18:55:00.000+10:00

The new points test and "credentialled community languages"

The new financial year has started and so has the new points test for General Skilled Migration to Australia. I have looked at the details of the new test on my website.

One of the peculiarities of the new test that deserves special comment is the 5 points awarded for a "credentialled community language". Under the old test, points were available for anyone who was competent in a designated foreign language, with competency demonstrated by having completed a Bachelors degree in any subject that was taught in that language, or alternatively having a professional level translating or interpreting accreditation from the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI).

The new category drops the university qualification entirely and replaces it with a paraprofessional NAATI accreditation. So what?

In the greater scheme of things, I suppose 5 points is not a large component of a test which has a pass mark of 65. For some people of course it could be make or break, and it will certainly be of greater significance from July next year when the new "SkillSelect" model will not have a fixed pass mark and applicants will need to try to maximise their points in any way they can.

As someone who has a long personal history in the translating and interpreting field over 30 years, with professional qualifications in four languages other than English, I feel the need to make a few comments all the same.

Do these people have any idea of what they are doing? Did anyone ask a professional linguist (that is, someone who has studied the science of language called linguistics, not someone who speaks several languages)?

Using a translating or interpreting test as a measure of a person's ability to communicate in a given language is a nonsense. The skill sets involved are totally different. Particularly when the level is reduced to what NAATI calls paraprofessional, formerly known as level 2, which is about the standard you can get from a good computer program, what is happening is that you are using a criterion from one discipline to measure competency in another.

But using the wrong test is only one of the problems with this new criterion. A test is a test, but not if you can't actually sit for it. NAATI conducts paraprofessional translating tests in only a few specific languages (like Swahili and Nuer), so for most people the only option is an interpreting test. No such tests are not available outside Australia, and according to my investigations with NAATI, nor do they have any intention of offering them overseas. It is not clear how long the waiting period for testing in Australia will be once the applications start hitting the desk at the NAATI head office.

The boys and girls at Belconnen (DIAC HQ) should make the trip to Deakin (NAATI HQ), via the School of Languages at the ANU, to get a bit of basic education in linguistics, and then have a second go at this one.

2011-06-25T10:44:00.002+10:00

July 2011 fee increases exceed CPI

Fee increases for most visa and other applications take effect from 1 July. Visa application charges (VACs) have been increased by around 15%, well above the inflation rate.

A particular concern is the fee for an application for review in the Migration Review Tribunal (MRT). The fee is increased from $1,400 to $1,540 (10%). The same applies to the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), where the fee is only charged if the application is unsuccessful. However, while the MRT fee was previously refunded in full if the appeal was successful, under the new rules successful applicants will only get back 50%.

The previous provision to allow for waiver of the fee in cases of financial hardship has also been changed, limiting the waiver to 50%.

Fees for the MRT are already substantially higher than in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), which charges $777 and refunds $677 on success. In cases of hardship, the fee is reduced to $100.

Most cases in the MRT take about 2 to 3 hours to be heard. Cases in the AAT, which include complex appeals concerning tax, customs, veteran's entitlements and other matters, often run for 1 to 2 weeks.

Since the MRT overturns 45% of decisions that are appealed to it, according to its annual report for 2009-10, there does not appear to be any basis for the government to seek to deter applications for being mostly frivolous or unfounded.

2011-06-10T13:48:00.001+10:00

Is the "Malaysian solution" illegal?
The internationally recognised legal status of a refugee is not something granted to a person by any particular country or authority. It is not like a licence, or a visa, or a title. According to the legal definition, a refugee is a person who has a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of nationality or residence because of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. The key word here is "is".

As a signatory to the Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees, Australia has well-established legal obligations towards any person who, according to the above definition, is a refugee. Australia recognises in its domestic legislation that it has these obligations, referring to them in the Migration Act as "protection obligations". They include the obligation not to send the refugee to a place where they would suffer persecution. This is not to be done "in any manner whatsoever" (Article 33). Sending a refugee to a country that is not a signatory, and of which they are not a citizen and where they have no right to remain, obviously constitutes a serious risk that they will either face persecution there or be sent on from there to face persecution elsewhere.

An asylum seeker is someone who claims to be a refugee. As with anything, some claims are genuine, some are not. But the individual asylum seeker does not become a refugee only after their claims have been accepted as genuine by the Australian government. They are refugees as soon as they have that well-founded fear of persecution.

So how does the Australian government know whether it has legal protection obligations in respect of any asylum seeker before it listens to the person's claims and makes an assessment? It doesn't. If it sends the person back without making that assessment, it risks sending back a genuine refugee and therefore being in breach of international law.

Official government figures show that around 90% of asylum seekers arriving by boat turn out to be genuine refugees: http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf

That means that, of the 800 asylum seekers sent back to Malaysia, which is not a signatory to the Convention, Australia is likely to breach its obligations under international law in 9 out of 10 cases.

2011-06-06T22:16:00.000+10:00

Get them off the boats -- put them on planes

Here are some interesting statistics. In 2009-10 some 5609 people arrived in Australia as "boat people" asylum seekers:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/boatarrivals.htm

In the same financial year, 5978 people who had not arrived on boats applied for asylum (protection visas) in Australia:

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/statistics/asylum/_files/asylum-stats-2010-11-section1.pdf

The figure for boat arrivals was a significant increase on the previous year's figure of 1033, while the non-boat number for 2008-09 was 5074.

Hardly anyone mentions the non-boat arrivals. They come in with visitor, student or other temporary visas and are allowed to live freely in the community, usually with permission to work, while their cases are considered. The boat arrivals are the hottest potato in Australian politics.

So here's an idea. Why not give the boat people visas and let them fly in? No more boats, no more detention centres, no more tragedies like SIEV 221 at Christmas Island (this is the real attraction, as far as I'm concerned), no more headlines, no more ranting and raving by shock jocks (ok, that might be a bit optimistic).

If the only difference between "illegal" and "legal" asylum seekers is having a visa, then why not create an Asylum Seeker visa? It would certainly achieve the government's stated objective of smashing the people smugglers' business model.

2011-06-01T14:47:00.000+10:00

Reply from DIAC about anti-discrimination protections

I have received a reply from Immigration to the enquiry that I mentioned in my last posting:

While what information and the form in which that information will be made available to employers is yet to be finalised, it is envisaged that only generic information would be visible to employers. In addition to this, clients submitting and expression of interest will be asked if they wish to make this generic information available to potential employer sponsors. It is also anticipated that the process will be an 'opt in' one for clients whereby employers will indicate in the database which clients they are interested in contacting. Clients will then be given the opportunity to contact the employer thus an employer will only be provided with contact details of a client by a client.

This is encouraging, since it shows that DIAC is aware of the possible anti-discrimination issues with the SkillSelect model. Now we must wait and see whether the employers are willing to participate.

2011-05-30T14:54:00.000+10:00

New points test, new selection model

We are now a month away from the start of the new points test for General Skilled Migration visas, and we have already been told that it will only be in place for a year before an entirely "new" system for selecting migrants to Australia comes into effect on 1 July 2012.

I put the word "new" in quotes because it isn't really a new idea at all, but more about that later.

The 2011 points test will apply to all applications lodged from that day on for visas in subclasses 175, 176, 475, 885, 886 and 487. Applications lodged before that date will continue to be processed under the existing points test.

I have included some more information about the 2011 test on my website. It appears to favour qualifications and experience over youth, which is probably a good thing. One thing that I think is a big mistake however is that family sponsorship has been completely done away with for the permanent visa subclasses. I have always believed that the migrant family was a major reason for the historic success of immigration in Australia, due to its contribution to the long-term settlement prospects of migrants.

From 1 July 2012, the new Skilled Migration Selection Model, or "SkillsSelect", takes over. Anyone who has been watching the development of Australian immigration programs over recent years will notice some striking similarities between the "new" SkillsSelect and the old Skills-Matching Database. That idea didn't work last time, though of course that doesn't necessarily mean that Mark II will also be a flop.

The plan is that you won't be able to apply for a skilled migration visa straight up. You will have to first lodge an "EoI" (Expression of Interest) and you will then go into a database. Depending on your preferences, your EoI will be available for scrutiny by the Department of Immigration, State and Territory governments and certain employers. If any of those find you interesting, you will then be invited to lodge a visa application. After two years, if you haven't been picked you will drop out of the database.

The basis on which the Department will select applicants will be the points test, presumably the same one that comes into effect this July, but there won't be simple pass mark. Immigration will decide what occupations it is looking for, and will choose the applicants that have nominated those occupations and have the highest overall scores. So instead of knowing what that the pass mark is, say, 65 points, when you put in your EoI, you won't know until the Department looks at what is available and decides who to take.

I attended an information session given by the Department last week to explain the new system. I wanted to ask a question about how the government intended to protect the integrity of its anti-discrimination legislation if it made information about gender, age, nationality, marital status etc. available to prospective employers. I wasn't able to get my question up at the session, so I sent it in an email to the Department. Specifically, I asked "if an employer wants to sponsor a particular applicant of, say, male Anglo-saxon background, will DIAC ask why the employer chose that candidate and not another one on the list with higher qualifications but a different profile?" So far I haven't received a reply.

That concern aside, I was interested to see that nobody really tried to explain how we got into the mess that, apparently, we are in now. You know, all those cooks and hairdressers (and accountants, or not, depending on who you are listening to) jostling each other on that huge queue, how did that happen? The old points test had available to it a mechanism which could have been used to avoid such a problem: at any time it wanted the government could have varied the points to be awarded for any given occupation. But this tool was never used. Cooks and hairdressers remained at 60 points, the top ranking. Interestingly, the 2011 test does not give points for occupations, so the tool that was never used has now been discarded.

Finally, at the same information session the person in charge of skilled migration processing announced that, over the course of 2011-12, he expected to clear all waiting priority 3 cases (ie independent and family-sponsored applicants with occupations on the current Skilled Occupations List -- see my website for details) and "some" priority 4 cases (independent and family-sponsored applicants with occupations on the old SOL).

As for the dreaded visa capping powers, the government apparently has no plans to use them again, but will not commit to not using them again.

2011-05-18T12:19:00.000+10:00

The only way to get the truth

Read this: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/18/3219866.htm

Make sure you read the "Editor's note" at the bottom of the report. The only time I ever hear public officials talking about "privacy" is when they are trying to keep the public from knowing what is going on.

2011-03-09T18:46:00.000+11:00

Who holds the stakes in the student visa program?

The government has commissioned a Discussion Paper entitled Strategic Review of the Student Visa Program, and called for submissions: http://www.immi.gov.au/students/student-submissions/

It contains a few gems, like: "Unsurprisingly discussions with regulators, providers and other stakeholders including students, suggest that not all education providers are the same". Hidden within that dreadful consultant-speak term "stakeholders" is the root of the problem, since amongst those holding a stake in this goldmine are precisely those education providers who only exist, could only exist, because of the fast-buck mentality on which the student visa program was built.

The paper discovers that "there now appears" to be a view that "some providers, and their agents, did manipulate the system primarily for migration outcomes rather than educational outcomes".

The term manipulate suggests that the system was somehow distorted, that those "migration outcomes" were not what was intended. This view appears again in what the paper calls "migration risk", defined as an absence of "willingness to study and return to their home country upon completion of study".

Apparently those wily providers, and their agents, somehow managed to sneak into the Governor-General's office and issue regulations under the Migration Act creating visa classes like 885 and 886, which were specifically, uniquely, entirely designed to create "migration outcomes" for overseas students.

The government, of course, bears no responsibility for all of this. In the end, the easiest group to blame are the students themselves, some of whom, the paper tells us, "came to Australia to undertake an education in order to gain permanent residence without any intention of undertaking employment related to their course of study".

Of course they did, that was the product they were sold, with the full blessing of the Australian government. No, it wasn't those corrupt agents who created the 885 and 886 visas, it was the Australian government. They allowed the fast-buck stakeholders to grow into the country's third largest export industry, fuelled by the savings and borrowings of aspirational families in India, China, Nepal, Vietnam.

The shame of this episode in Australian immigration history, and the damage it has done to the reputation of Australian education, will take a long time to fade. A bit of willingness to accept blame on the part of the government would help a bit, though.

2011-02-16T15:46:00.000+11:00

Rights depend on which side of the line you are on

I got a call from a colleague the other day who told me that a client of his arriving at Sydney airport had seen "about 200" returning overseas students being taken aside at the immigration desk for questioning about their visa status. My informant admitted it was probably an exaggeration, but from my own experience I can confirm that the practice of cancelling the visas of returning students before they are immigration cleared into the country is on the increase. In fact, I can quote verbatim from the transcript of an actual interview between a student and an immigration officer last November: "Immigration has started to interview people on arrival now OK. The people that are in your situation". And what situation was that? The student's college had cancelled his enrolment due to a fee dispute. They had done that in August, and notified Immigration on the computer system that DIAC shares with the Department of Education. Not being enrolled is of course a breach of student visa conditions, but despite the record being placed on the system in August no action was taken by Immigration at the time. The student went overseas in October and flew back several weeks later. On arrival he was taken aside in immigration clearance and, after a brief interview and ten minute opportunity to prepare a reply, his visa was cancelled.

Apparently the computer system is now capable of picking up visa numbers when people check in overseas and "flagging" anyone with a potential breach to the airport authorities who can then take them out of the arrivals line and cancel their visa on the spot.

Well, sure, he had breached a condition of the visa. But he had breached it in August, and Immigration had done nothing about it until his return from overseas in November. What difference does that make? Just this: when a student visa is cancelled in Australia the holder has the opportunity to apply for merits review in the Migration Review Tribunal, unless the cancellation occurs before the student gets across the line at the airport. If the visa is cancelled in immigration clearance, there is no appeal. Unless there is some legal irregularity which the student can get a Court to pick up on, they are on the next flight out.

According to the Tribunal's annual report for 2009-10, 41% of appeals against student visa cancellations were successful in that year. Taking away the right to appeal by cancelling the visa before the student gets across the clearance line, in effect, significantly disadvantages the student by comparison with someone whose visa is cancelled after clearance.

It is no surprise that the rate of successful appeals in these cases is so high. Anyone reading the published decisions would be appalled at the level of incompetency, negligence and plain dishonesty on the part of some education providers. Yet it seems that Immigration's main concern is to save time and expense by punishing the weakest element, the students who have been the victims of this appalling mess right from the start.

2011-01-05T13:12:00.000+11:00

Catching up

It's been a few months since my last post. I will make it my New Year's resolution to be more attentive to keeping up the blog during 2011.

As far as the media was concerned, the only immigration related issue worth mentioning in the second half of 2010 was "the boats". I will follow their lead in this first post for the new year.

Certainly the horrible events of the morning of 15 December at Christmas Island confirm the urgency of the need for a solution to this problem. The actual number of people who have died in Australian waters or en route to this country is unknown. The Christmas Island disaster showed that even the last few metres of this journey can be deadly. With the deaths of so many adults and children in mind, no one can seriously claim that the only issue is how we treat asylum seekers once they make it onto the beach.

For the politicians a good way to avoid having to come up with an answer is to divert attention onto the "people smugglers". No epithet is too lurid, no hyperbole too extreme, no mandatory sentence too draconian.

When pressed for a real solution, the Liberals fall back on deterrence. The Howard government stopped the boats, they say, by two measures: temporary protection visas (TPVs) and the "Pacific Solution". Sending all boat arrivals for processing in Nauru of course could never be as effective a second time around, both due to the fact that most asylum seekers sent there eventually made it to Australia or New Zealand and the impact of the High Court decision in December about processing ruses (see below). As for TPVs, besides the misery and injustice of not allowing recognised refugees to bring their families here or even visit them overseas in flagrant breach of Australia's obligations under international law, there is a strong case that the policy was a direct cause of the deaths of many of those family members who had no alternative but to risk their lives on the high seas: see http://sievx.com/articles/challenging/2006/20060206SueHoffman.html.

Deterrence will always work if the punishment is sufficiently graphic. Deliberately sinking any asylum seeker boat that entered Australian water and leaving its passengers to drown would pretty quickly end the flow, for example. The nefarious people smugglers on board could be summarily hanged drawn and quartered on the decks of the naval interceptors for good measure.

The deterrence approach is based on the assumption that the only problem is the boats. If you can stop them coming, the problem is solved. The asylum seekers themselves, if we can keep them away from our shores, then become someone else's problem.

Labor explicitly rejected both TPVs and Nauru in its campaign for the 2007 election, and is now stuck with those laudable policies like it or not. Gillard's brainstorm idea of a regional processing centre in East Timor has still not made it off the drawing board however.

In the end, the key to the succes of any regional processing centre, wherever located, will lie in the meaning of the word "processing". If the outcome of a genuine assessment based on international law is that an asylum seeker is a genuine refugee, what happens next? If the end result of the processing is not immediate resettlement in Australia for anyone recognised as a genuine refugee, the boats will remain the only option.

And any assessment would have to be genuine, or at least in accordance with the principles of natural justice, as the High Court has ruled in the case known as M61. The practice of denying boat arrivals the right to make a formal application for a visa, followed by a "non-compellable" Ministerial decision to grant a visa after an informal assessment and appeal, was held by the Court not to be a loophole that allowed for denial of natural justice in the assessment process. The fact that the Australian government was in charge of the procedure from start to finish, as it would be in any offshore processing arrangement, meant that the principles of Australian law were applicable.

Meanwhile, the asylum seekers who do make it here have to be "housed" (ie, locked up). Building new detention facilities almost seems to be propping up the construction sector single-handedly. Cries of "not in my backyard" are being heard all through the land. It is tempting to label these objections as racist, xenophobic, etc. But when you think about it, the reasoning behind them is not hard to follow. For nearly 20 years Australian governments from both sides have insisted that asylum seekers must be locked up. It has been done for so long now that a generation of Australians has grown up with it. Normally in a free country people are locked up in order to protect society from them, because they are dangerous. So asylum seekers must be dangerous, in which case we don't want them in our neighbourhood.

When mandatory detention was introduced in 1992, the responsible Minister Gerry Hand (ALP) gave the following explanation in the second reading speech: "I believe it is crucial that all persons who come to Australia without prior authorisation not be released into the community. Their release would undermine the Government's strategy for determining their refugee status or entry claims. Indeed, I believe it is vital to Australia that this be prevented as far as possible. The Government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed into the community."

Then as now, the majority of asylum seekers arrived in Australia with visas and were allowed to remain in the community while their claims were assessed, so the reasoning behind the first justification is hard to follow. As for sending that clear signal, after nearly two decades it must be admitted that it is not getting through. It must be time to rethink the whole idea.

2010-08-22T20:45:00.001+10:00

What was that all about?

The election is over. Labor has clearly lost. The Coalition has clearly not won. What does that say about the policy issues debated during the campaign?

Sorry, what policy issues? Immigration? Labor says: not so many, stop the boats, send them to East Timor. Liberal says: not so many, stop the boats, send them to Nauru.

Foreign policy? Tragically, on election day we heard of two more Australian soldiers killed in Aghanistan, plus two more injured (and a couple more the next day). So who won the foreign policy debate? Er, what debate? The only mention of anything going on outside Australia was, as above, East Timor vs Nauru.

Some might suggest there is an underlying connection between what is happening in Afghanistan and the flow of refugees. Too complicated for "real" Julia and "honest" Tony.

An old saying goes that, in a democracy, a country gets the government it deserves. What did we do to deserve this?

2010-08-12T21:52:00.000+10:00

Fewer people, more helicopters

I've been watching Dick Smith's diatribe against immigration on the ABC. Like the majestic equality of the law, which Anatole France identified as punishing rich and poor alike for sleeping under bridges, we have a majestic equality of freedom of speech in this country, allowing rich and poor alike to make their own one hour TV programs to put their views.

Mr Smith, who lives in a mansion and flies a private helicopter, is perfectly entitled to worry about the impact of humans on the planet. It bothers me too. But it also bothers me to hear reasoning such as the following (I think I am quoting correctly): "We are currently about 22 million sharing the wealth of this country. If we grow to 44 million, we will all be half as wealthy."

That means that in about 1963, when our population was around 11 million, we must have been twice as wealthy as we are now.

Issues like global warming, wealth distribution, water usage, education expenditure, soil degradation, urban sprawl, etc. are in fact far too important to be turned over to this sort of simplistic argument.

2010-08-01T11:42:00.000+10:00

Sustainability, the new weasel word

The economic historian Niall Ferguson has described Australia's current "population debate" as asinine.

Ferguson is far from being a radical. The fact that he was invited to talk in Australia by the Centre for Independent Studies, a conservative think-tank, confirms this.

Everyone politician in the country seems to think that the only word they need to use to describe their views on population, immigration, climate change and the environment is "sustainable". A word that is used to mean just about anything ends up being totally meaningless, and that is precisely what is happening here.

When it comes to population issues, what they are really saying is their program is to convince anti-immigration voters that they are against opening the floodgates, and at the same time convince business interests that they don't want to cut back on the supply of cheap skilled labour that immigration has been bringing in. In fact, they have no policy at all.

To tell the truth, I rather prefer them to have no policy. Like most things, they usually work out better when the politicians don't interfere.

2010-07-22T22:39:00.000+10:00

Telling it like it is

Watching the ABC program The Making of Modern Australia tonight I heard a woman of Vietnamese origin sum up her parents' experience with a powerful metaphor: "a whole generation laid down its body as a bridge for the next to pass over".

I don't think anything more needs to be said.

2010-07-14T12:41:00.000+10:00

East Timor or Nauru? What's the difference?

There are of course lots of differences between East Timor and Nauru. Geography, size, history, language, politics, economy, etc. Then there are two differences which, according to the Government and the Opposition, make all the difference (though for different reasons).

The first is that East Timor is a signatory to the International Convention Relation to the Status of Refugees, and Nauru is not (or not yet). This is what the Government says makes all the difference.

The second is that Nauru has an Australian-built detention centre which it is happy to fill, at a price, with asylum seekers delivered there by the Australian Navy, while East Timor does not and does not appear to want one, either. This is the difference that the Oppostion says is the one that matters.

Exactly what difference it would make if the country where the camp was located was a signatory to the Convention is not entirely clear. Arguably, an inmate of such a camp could call upon the host country to honour its obligations, which include Article 26: "Each Contracting State shall accord to refugees lawfully in its territory the right to choose their place of residence to move freely within its territory, subject to any regulations applicable to aliens generally in the same circumstances." But that would make it a disadvantage (from Australia's point of view at least) if the camp was in a signatory State, because the detainees could then petition the Court's of the country to release them. The signatory State would, in fact, find itself compelled by its own laws to accept the asylum seekers for resettlement. Hardly an attractive prospect for a poor country struggling to feed and house its own population.

The one big difference between and unwilling East Timor and a more-than-eager Nauru, as far as the Government is concerned at least, is that it is politically unacceptable for them to adopt the exact same policy they were so critical of in Oppostion.

It is not possible to understand whether either of these differences really makes a difference without looking first at what the issue is. Why would Australia want a processing centre for asylum seekers in either country?

To stop them coming here? To stop them being seen on the evening news coming here, more likely, since the Nauru experience showed that most of them ended up here anyway.

To stop them jumping the queue? Please explain just where that queue starts. In fact, even the Minister accepts that there is no queue.

To protect our borders? Against what?

There is however one legitimate argument for trying to stop people getting into overcrowded, unseaworthy boats with insufficient food, water and fuel and no navigational gear -- to stop them drowning on the way as many hundreds have already done.

Did Howard's use of the non-signatory Republic of Nauru stop the boats coming? Almost certainly it did. Sure there may have been some coincidental decrease in the push factors, but there can be no doubt that Howard's policy knocked the wheels off the boat trade out of Indonesia. Why wouldn't it? The prospect of indefinite detention on a pile of dry bird droppings was even less attractive than indefinite abandonment in the squalor of Indonesia's camps and doss houses from where the boats departed. The fact that a large majority of the Nauru detainees eventually made it to Australia may have somewhat spoiled the effect for the next time round, however.

If you think that stopping the boats means the asylum seeker problem is solved, then deterrence is the simple answer. Make it clear that they will either be towed out to sea or sent to a concentration camp somewhere, and before long they will stop coming.

If you think that there is a bit more to it than that, then what about providing genuine, fast, objective processing in Indonesia and then bringing those found to be genuine refugees straight here by plane?

It would probably keep them off the evening news, too.

2010-07-06T20:19:00.000+10:00

The population bugbear returns
Our new Prime Minister has chosen to make one of her first policy announcements on the subject of population, saying she is not in favour of a "Big Australia" and adding the word "sustainable" to the portfolio of the Minister for Population.

When the Australian Bureau of Statistics released a forward projection of around 36 million for the total Australian population in 2050, then Prime Minister Rudd made the (rationally) unremarkable but (politically) suicidal comment that he was in favour of a "Big Australia". Once deposed, the hapless ex-leader's naive remark was made into a "target" by those who deposed him, and having set up this straw man they proceeded to knock it down for political effect. Decrying "political correctness", Gillard has told us that there is nothing intolerant or racist about worrying about who is coming to this country and how, or how many for that matter.

But what is the issue? Should we really have any sort of target number for the country's total population 40 years from now? Could we if we wanted to?

Having a population policy that consists of a target number for a given date is nonsense. For one thing, a country's population isn't just a single number. Malawi has roughly the same total number of people as the Netherlands, for example. What does that tell us about either country? Not much. For these numbers to make sense you need to know things like age and geographic distribution of the population, the country's resources and access to technology, levels of income and education, wealth distribution, and many other things.

Most single-figure arguments are based on the idea that humans are indistinguishable from cattle. A cow can only behave in one way. It eats a certain amount of grass and produces a certain amount of greenhouse gas emissions. Humans are the opposite. There is a virtually inexhaustible number of ways we humans can interact with each other and the environment we live in.

Try thinking back 40 years. Could the McMahon government of 1970, which still considered Taipei to be the capital of China, have had any chance of predicting what the economy, technology and geopolitics of 2010 would be like? All of these things are relevant to population policy.

Of course government policy must have regard to the future, but 40 years is far too long to be a meaningful limit, and as mentioned above putting all the emphasis on a single figure is a gross over-simplification. A more reasonable approach to population policy would be to look at trends in the various factors that go into the makeup of the country's population profile to determine what impact those policies are likely to have on the sort of population we have over time, rather than worrying about an arbitrary number at an arbitrary date.

Hard to fit into a sound bite, though.

2010-07-06T20:13:00.000+10:00

Immigration and "sovereign risk"

The ongoing chatter about the Resources Super Profits Tax keeps referring to a term called "sovereign risk". Not being an economist, I had to look this up. Apparently it refers to a calculation made by foreign investors about the likelihood that the government of the country they are investing in will suddenly change the law in such a way that they will lose all or part of their investment. Obviously, a country deemed to have high sovereign risk is one where investors will be wary of putting their money.

For people thinking of investing their lives in Australia the sovereign risk factor has gone through the roof in the past weeks. Back in February the government decided to simply throw out all offshore skilled migration applications lodged before 1 September 2007. Then it changed the criteria for onshore applications so that students who had put all of their family's savings into a well-advertised and government-promoted plan to qualify for permanent residence through study were told they had never been promised any such thing and the best they could hope for was 18 months to try to find a job and an employer willing to sponsor them.

Now we have the Migration Amendment (Visa Capping) Bill 2010. This allows the government to throw out validly made applications based on any characteristic they choose - occupation, age, even nationality. Despite suggestions to the contrary by the Minister in an interview on the ABC, the Racial Discrimination Act does not prevent discriminatory laws based on a person's current nationality, only on their "national origin" -- see Macabenta v Minister for Immigration [1998] FCA 1643.

Applying for migration to Australia is becoming an increasingly risky business.

2010-06-13T17:57:00.001+10:00

Indian lawn bowlers refused entry by the the majestic equality of Australian immigration law

The Indian lawn bowls team has been refused entry to Australia based on an assessment that they did not have sufficient finances or "incentive to return to India". See article.

An Australian immigration official in New Delhi, apparently with a straight face, is reported to have said: "People from all countries have the same right and opportunity to enter our country".

The French writer Anatole France said it better: "The majestic equality of the law, which punishes rich and poor alike for sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets and stealing bread".

2010-05-21T17:17:00.000+10:00

On migrants and bean counters

The following is a direct quote from a Ministerial press release of 17 May 2010: "Australia's migration program cannot be determined by the courses studied by international students".

Think about that. According to the Minister, it was the choices of overseas students to study courses like cooking and hairdressing that was keeping those occupations on the Skilled Occupations List (SOL).

Once again, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the government chooses to blame to victims of this fiasco. First they pretend that they never encouraged anyone to think that there was a pathway from student visa to permanent residence (see earlier posting), now they say it was all the students' fault anyway for wanting to study those courses.

The Minister was of course announcing the belated arrival of the new SOL. As everyone expected, hairdressers and cooks are off the list. Curiously, though, that other much-maligned occupation -- accountants -- remains. And despite the Minister's oft-quoted lament that "Harvard-educated environmental scientists" wouldn't get in under the old program, they aren't on the new list either.

The new list will apply to all visa applications lodged on or after 1 July 2010, unless the applicant held or had applied for a subclass 485 visa on 8 February 2010, in which case the old SOL will continue in effect for onshore applications until 31 December 2012. The old SOL will also continue to apply to subclass 485 visa applications lodged up to 31 December 2012 if the applicant held a subclass 572, 573 or 574 visa on 8 February 2010. Subclass 485 visas are only valid for 18 months, so the holders will have no longer than that to find an employer to sponsor them to stay either temporarily or permanently.

The intention of the changes, we are told, is to "attract skilled migrants of the highest calibre and deliver people with real skills to meet real need in our economy". This is exactly what we have been told for the past 20 years. It is the metaphor of immigration as economic irrigation -- turn it on, turn it off, direct the flow where it is needed. The bean counters love it because they can measure it, or think they can. Come to think of it, weren't they the ones who kept saying cooks and hairdressers were in short supply?

For a country in which immigration is so fundamental to our national identity, you would think we could come up with a better justification than "real skills to meet real need in our economy". Are skills all the economy needs? and is the economy all that matters?

Reducing the immigrant to his or her "skills" (for which read "qualifications", since they are easier to measure) is the triumph of short-term accounting over long-term social development. It justifies any unfairness, such as cancelling 20,000 applications waiting in the queue, discriminating against tax-paying migrants who can't bring their parents to live with them here, and with the latest program changes, dumping thousands of overseas students whose only crime was to believe previous government promises into a dead-end visa category that will give them 18 months to desperately try to find a job in their "chosen" occupation or else be sent packing.

2010-03-02T21:46:00.000+11:00

Federal Court rules automatic cancellations of student visas invalid

On 2 March 2010 the Federal Court of Australia handed down two decisions that have created a potential nightmare for the Department of Immigration.

The background: since 2000 the Migration Act has contained a provision (section 137J) for the "automatic" cancellation of visas held by overseas students who were reported by their colleges for unsatisfactory attendance or performance and who failed to report as directed to the Department of Immigration within 28 days to explain themselves. By a technical amendment effective 1 July 2007, the circumstances leading to cancellation were to be prescribed in Regulations (a common method of giving the executive flexibility to determine the details of the law without having to go through the complicated procedures of amending an Act of Parliament).

But the drafters got it wrong. They left out a crucial reference to a particular section of the legislation which meant that the legal mechanism just didn't work. At first, nobody noticed. I didn't pick up on it for over a year, but when I first raised it with government lawyers in about September 2008, expecting a quick amendment to correct the error, they went into denial instead. For two and half years the official position of the government was that the error everyone else could see (once it was pointed out to them) just wasn't there. In December 2009 they finally corrected it, but they still kept saying the correction wasn't really necessary until Justice Buchanan of the Federal Court put the matter to rest in two cases handed down on 2 March 2010: Hossain v MIAC [2010] FCA 161 and Mo v MIAC [2010] FCA 162.

The result: all "automatic" student visa cancellations under s 137J based on notices to students dated between 1 July 2007 and 16 December 2009 simply didn't happen. I have no idea how many cases this covers, but every one of them is someone who was told their visa had been cancelled when, as a matter of law, it hadn't. Some would have left the country, others would have been overseas and couldn't get back. Some would have given up their studies. Some would have spent thousands of dollars on appeals.

Just a technicality, you might say. Just another example of the massive unpardonable bureaucratic bungling that has characterised the 15 billion dollar cash cow that the student visa industry has become.

2010-02-15T23:20:00.000+11:00

A few thoughts on parents

I lodged a Contributory Parent application for a client on 6 January. The Department receipted the fee on 19 January and sent out an acknowledgement letter on 27 January. Why rush? It's going to be well over a year before the application is processed.

For this the couple will pay in excess of $70,000 to the Australian government. If they can't afford that, they can do a Casablanca (wait.... and wait..... and wait).

But hey, they are old folks aren't they? Not much older than me, actually. The rationale is apparently that the money is intended to cover the enormous drain on the public purse of bringing in a couple of old codgers who will presumably go straight into high cost medical care.

It's certainly true that in the later part of our lives most of us will end up costing the taxpayer a lot of money. My parents worked and paid taxes all their lives and then required some expensive care before they died, but that was only a small return for what they had spent, wasn't it?

No it wasn't. That's bad economics. My parents taxes were fully expended on the government services of the day, including my education. Their health care was paid for by my taxes, and yours, and the taxes of millions of migrants working in today's economy.

So if those migrants are paying their taxes just like me, why can't their parents get the benefit of them like mine did? They paid for their children's education like my parents did, either through taxes or privately, and the Australian economy gets the benefit of that. Their children don't get a tax deduction because their parents aren't here.

Besides, $35,000 a head is only a fraction of what it costs to provide health and social security support for the elderly. As is so often the case in our spin-politics age, it's more for show than anything else.

It's just one more example of the mentality that sees migrants as commodities to be exploited for the quickest short-term gain.

2010-02-08T13:57:00.000+11:00

Latest unfair policy change will not go unnoticed

The Daily Telegraph said it all. The screeching headline "MIGRANTS KEPT OUT" appeared under a banner saying "Unskilled foreign workers told they're not wanted". Then the first paragraph: "Twenty thousand foreigners applying to move to Australia will have their applications ripped up to stop an army of cooks, hairdressers and accountants from swamping our immigration system."

Sensationalism and mixed metaphors aside, the Sydney tabloid captures the flavour of the latest policy change with terms like "kept out", "not wanted" and "ripped up". Whether or not the target is such an unlikely invasion force as the one described, intent on swamping the system (in which case wouldn't it be a navy rather than an army?), is a technical detail the paper no doubt thinks is too complex for its readers to grapple with.

The changes announced today cover a wide field, but the decision to "cap" (or, as the Tele puts it, rip up) all skilled migration applications lodged before 1 September 2007 seems to be the one getting all the media attention, and for good reason. It is grossly unfair and will reflect badly on Australia's reputation in the long run.

On 1 September 2007 the Department of Immigration introduced electronic lodgement for offshore skilled migration visa applications. Resources were thrown into the new system and paper-based applications lodged before that date were put to the end the queue. By the time they were coming up for consideration early last year, the first wave of "priority processing" was introduced, which threw them back further.

Who are these people? A few cooks and hairdressers no doubt, a few more accountants, quite a lot of IT professionals, specialist managers, a lot of teachers, in short the people the Australian government said it wanted. They looked up the rules, correctly calculated their points, paid their fees (including fees for skills assessments, medical and police clearances and in some cases legal or agents fees) and waited patiently. On the reasonable expectation that they would be migrating to Australia they may have made choices such as turning down job offers, not applying to migrate elsewhere, decisions about property and education, etc.

How would you feel? What would you think about the country that treated you like that? What would you think of that country's attitude towards foreigners? Would you feel inclined to buy Australian goods, come here on a holiday, do business with this country? Would you communicate your negative feelings to others?

Apparently our political leaders have learnt nothing from the handling of the attacks on Indian students. It would be interesting to know how many of the 20,000 applications being ripped up came from Indian citizens.

More on the rest of the changes in another post.

2010-01-24T12:27:00.001+11:00

Tony Abbott's Australia Day Speech

When I first read about Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's speech to an Australia Day dinner, my impression was he must have inherited John Howard's famous dog whistle. But before writing this blog entry, I thought it might be a good idea to read what he actually said.

News reports like one in the SMH quoting the Green Party spokesperson Senator Hanson-Young seemed to imply that Abbott had resurrected the worst of the Howard era "wedge politics" rhetoric by surreptitiously giving comfort and permission to racism and xenophobia. After reading the actual text, I do not agree.

Considering the temptations the occasion must have offered to an opposition leader with nothing to lose (his chances of winning this year's election are pretty dismal), I thought Abbott showed considerable restraint. The statement that "the inescapable minimum that we insist upon is obedience to the law" is hardly dog-whistling, and I think it is unfair to accuse Abbott of targetting specific ethnic groups by mentioning the off-beam comments of Sheikh Hilaly when seen in the context of what he said next: drawing a parallel with the anti-British views of Cardinal Mannix in the early 20th century, Abbott noted, "There has hardly been a time when there were not some reservations about the loyalty of particular ethnic or religious groups. A generation or two on, all of them have eventually become as Australian as everyone else."

Pointing out that "it's no reflection on boat people that they want to come to Australia", Abbott seemed to be cautioning the crypto-racists in the hardline border protection camp rather than giving them comfort. He very rightly observed that the most important reason for trying to discourage boat arrivals is the serious danger that is posed to the lives of the people attempting the crossing.

One thing that I'm sure upset the Greens was Abbott's rejection of the neo-Malthusian paranoia that dominates their anti-immigration policy. Forty years ago, a doubling of the Australian population would have appeared to these people to be unsustainable. Abbott claims that, while we are now twice as many, we are four times richer. I don't really trust that sort of bald statistics, but I certainly agree that more long-term damage is done by the politics of neglecting infrastructure development in order to discourage migration, as championed by the misanthropic NSW government of Bob Carr, than by planning for growth in a sustainable and environmentally intelligent way.

As an opposition leader whose best hope is that he will at least still have that job after the next election, Abbott is in the enviable position of being able to criticise without having to come up with any real solutions, and that would be my main criticism of his speech. While deploring the inhumanity of mandatory detention, he offers no alternative. At a time when the government of the country has no coherent policy on how to deal with this problem, it would have been refreshing to hear something different from somebody with nothing much to lose.

2010-01-13T13:35:00.000+11:00

More havoc wrought by the bean counters

If 2009 was the year when all the contradictions of the visa (sorry, education) export industry bubbled to the surface, 2010 looks like being the year of inept attempts to [make it look like the government has a plan to] do something to fix it.

Reading this article in the Australian, I noticed the following piece of bean-counter-speak from a DIAC spokesperson: "migration policy is responsive to economic conditions and labour market needs". The thinking is reactive, short-term, spin-driven. The resulting policy "responses" have been predictably chaotic and, as we are gradually coming to realise, damaging to the country's image internationally. Some examples can be found in a petition being launched one by one migration agency.

I don't want to enter into the debate on whether the brutal murder of Mr Garg and the other attacks on Indian students were motivated by racism or opportunism, though I don't see why the two would be mutually exclusive. I have suggested in the past, however, that there is more to the anger and frustration being shown by overseas students in their response to these events. We are constantly reminded of the $15 billion or so that the industry is worth to the Australian economy, to the point where if I were an overseas student I would be thinking that Australia only sees me as a cash cow, not a person. This is where the responses of the government to the attacks and the way they have implemented the recent policy changes come together.

In both cases, there is a distinct lack of empathy -- if not a blaming of the victims then at least an attitude that they have no right to expect anything better. The murder rate is higher in India, one commentator points out, and the Immigration Minister's attitude to the complaints of people disadvantaged by policy changes has been commented on previously in this blog. "Beggars can't be choosers", a former PM once said about asylum seekers. A similar philosophy underlies the disingenuous claims of the present government that they have never fostered expectations of a "pathway" from student visas to permanent residence. In the recently-stated view of the Senate Education, Employment Workplace Relations Committee, it is all the fault of "some education agents and advisers" that such a perception should exist at all. Before the same Committee, DIAC referred to its Visa Wizard website as a source of information for prospective visa applicants. Try it: tell it that you are interested in a student visa and your intention is to remain in Australia permanently, and you will get a whole list of ways to go about it.

When it comes to the reason for the anger over both the attacks and the policy changes, Senator Evans, Julia Gilliard and the government as a whole just don't get it.

2009-12-26T12:03:00.002+11:00

Remember Liu Xiaobo

Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo has been sentenced to 11 years in prison in China for the crime of expressing an opinion that the authorities did not like. He was one of the authors of a document called Charter 08, which dared to suggest that Chinese citizens should not be locked up for criticising their government.

Since weblogs are a form of free expression, I think all bloggers should express their support for Liu and their disgust with the Chinese government.

Australia will soon join China and a few other select nations such as Iran and Myanmar in censoring the internet. We are told it is all about child pornography, and other stuff that is "refused classification". Interestingly, our Prime Minister has publicly declared "people smugglers" to be the scum of the earth, presumably putting them in the same basket as pedophiles and terrorists, so perhaps it won't be long before any discussion of the free movement of people around the world will join the new index urlorum prohibitorum.

2009-12-13T17:36:00.000+11:00

You may qualify for a visa, but will you get it?
The papers this weekend are telling us that a new government proposal may "spark panic". The idea seems to be to alter "the relationship between the lodgement of an application and the legal obligation to grant a visa".

The legal obligation refers to s 65 of the Migration Act 1958, which obliges the Minister to grant a visa to a person if they satisfy all of the criteria for that visa. Of course, those criteria include some pretty discretionary "public interest" tests which give the Minister lots of scope for refusing a visa to anyone he or she doesn't really want to let in, but the idea now being kicked around seems to have something to do with changing the rules after a person has applied.

Actually, there is plenty of scope for that already. The current law allows the government to impose a numerical cap on certain visa classes and then declare void all outstanding applications once that cap is reached (s 39). The points test pass marks can also be hiked up or down at any time, and the new mark made applicable to any existing application (s 93). Even more generally, changes to the "time of decision criteria" for any visa subclass can operate retrospectively.

The media quickly understood that the likely target of any new changes would be the student visa industry. Not surprisingly, they sought comment from the Australian Council for Private Education and Training, which represents the education providers at the heart (for want of a better word) of that $16 billion dollar cash cow. And not surprisingly, their response was along the lines of "we'll all be rooned!".

There appear to be two different ideologies at work here. On one side, there are the national sovereignty supporters (remember "We will decide who comes to this country, blah blah blah"?). Migrants are foreigners, we owe them nothing, they should be grateful if we let them in, and whether they are or not nobody can claim a right to a visa. We control the tap, and we can turn it on or off as we please.

The other side of the argument starts from the proposition that immigration is a long-term society-building program that has worked astonishingly well in this country and, most recently, probably saved us from the worst effects of the Global Financial Crisis. Rather than being about foreigners, it is actually about Australians -- the Australians that the migrants become once they get here.

I have previously blamed the bean counters of the 90s for replacing long-term planning with short-term accounting. It looks like their offspring are carrying on the same tradition.

2009-12-08T08:25:00.000+11:00

When is a punishment not a punishment?
Is visa cancellation a punishment? Most people would think so. It can have pretty devastating effects. For one thing you can be arrested (sorry, "detained") and locked up in a jail (sorry, "detention centre"). Then you can be deported (sorry, "removed").

The official view is that all of this is "administrative", not "punitive". An interesting view from the other side can be found in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Royal Abbott.

2009-11-30T18:29:00.002+11:00

The student visa industry
We are told time and time again that international education is our third largest export industry. I saw recently that for NSW is it in fact the second largest.

Isn't that amazing? All those foreigners queueing up to pay money to study at our world-class institutions: doctors, lawyers, physicists, engineers, the odd musicologist perhaps, undergraduate degrees, masters degrees, a smattering of PhDs.

Not really. The occasional PhD there may be, but we all know what this "industry" is about. It's such a big export earner because it's about selling visas. In my practice, I see these poor kids every day. They started out doing a community welfare diploma (kids from the Punjab with a burning desire to study the lives of drunks and single mums in Cabramatta), then the assessing authority tightened up the requirements so they all suddenly switched to graphics pre-press - whatever that is.

I certainly don't blame them. They had no illusions about what Mum and Dad were paying all that money for. In fact I admire them. It must be pretty scary to leave home and go to a strange country where you have to deal with everything from opening a bank account to finding a place to live, getting a part-time job, enrolling in a course, complying with visa requirements, without any of the support mechanisms of home and family. They are also very much aware of the investment that the folks back home have made in them, and how disastrous it would be if they failed in their quest, which is to get permanent residence here.

Why not just sell them the visas and be done with it? They pay around $20,000 to $30,000 each in fees, so why not have them pay it into consolidated revenue instead of the pockets of the private businesses whose only reason for existing is to service the visa trade? It seems to me that most of them would make pretty good migrants, with or without a trade certificate in hairdressing.

Not likely, I suppose. On the other hand, we do charge a whopping big fee for parent visas, so there is a precedent. More about that another time.

2009-11-26T14:10:00.000+11:00

Immigration, population and climate

It's the big thing to be talking about now. The buzz words are "footprint" and "carrying capacity".

Both are based on wrong assumptions. My footprint has been a nine and a half since I was a teenager. It doesn't change. Carrying capacity also implies a fixed limit. Human society isn't like that.

There is only one way a cow can be a cow. It eats a certain amount of feed, blows out a certain amount of methane, tramples a certain amount of pasture, etc. What goes for cows goes for all other species, except us. Humans can be humans, and can interact with the rest of the planet, in an endless variety of ways.

Before the middle of the 19th Century, any city with more than a couple of hundred thousand people was a stinking, disease-ridden hole with raw sewage running down the streets and pouring into the nearest waterway. Unchecked pollution of the atmosphere continued a bit longer, leading to incidents like the Great London Smog of 1952.

But blaming everything on numbers is stupid. One person = x amount of environmental damage, so more people means more environmental damage, less means less. The overall success of the international effort to get rid of ODCs (Ozone Depleting Chemicals) shows that, just as humans are capable of doing vast damage to the planet, we are also capable (unlike any other species) of seeing what we are doing and doing something about it.

The various "ecologists against population increase" or "environmentalists against immigration" or such groups are actually a cop out. Funny thing, they usually come to the conclusion that we (that is, us rich white folks, apologies to any less exalted races who might be reading this) aren't really to blame. After all, we take our contraception and keep our birth rates below replacement level. Apparently the real culprits are all those other people out there, breeding like rabbits. Point out that we have much higher levels of resource consumption and carbon production per capita than the rest of the world, and the argument switches from population to immigration. Whatever you do, don't let any more of those people move from their countries to ours! They might start living like us! Heaven forbid.

Am I crazy, or is there something very wrong with this argument?

I heard it put very strongly by Prof. Tim Flannery and others during one of the IQ2 debates a couple of months ago. By the end, I was expecting Prof. Flannery to announce his imminent emigration to Bangladesh. He didn't, but that seemed to be the logic of his position. The debate took place in Sydney. I wonder what the audience response would have been if they had staged it in Karachi?

I suspect it may well turn out in the end that it won't be our decision anyway. If we carbon-munching Australians don't take responsibility for the impact of our lifestyles on the rest of the planet, the day may soon come when others decide that they will not stay poor, will not stay put, will not take their contraception, and instead will get into their boats and come over here whether we like it or not. I guess you could call it Pemelwuy's last laugh.

2009-11-25T17:03:00.000+11:00

Priority processing - not fair

One of the Rudd government's first responses to the 2008 credit crunch was to announce that it would "do something" about immigration. Governments always have to "do something". Imagine if they announced they were going to do nothing?

First, despite the rest of their policies being all about stimulus, they decided to cut the overall intake. Oh well, that was to be expected.

Next, maybe because the general tone of the new regime is micromanagement, they came up with a bright "new" idea (the quotation marks are because it isn't a new idea at all, just one that most people have forgotten we used to have). Thus we now have priority processing of GSM (General Skilled Migration) applications, based on the CSL (Critical Skills List).

The result is that people who do not have an occupation on the CSL will be waiting at least another 3 years for their applications to be processed, regardless of how long they have been wating already or how far advanced their case was when the change was announced on 23 September. Particularly hard hit are some applicants who lodged before 1 September 2007, when the online application system was introduced. Due to the decision to throw resources into the new system, some paper-based applications were just coming up for finalisation in September this year after more than 2 years waiting, and are now thrown back to the end of the queue.

In an interview with rhe ABC program The National Interest on 13 November, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Senator Chris Evans, was unmoved: "Quite frankly," he said, "if we decide [the immigration intake is] going to be 10,000 people next year, they might be waiting for 20 or 30 years". This ignores the main complaint, that people who met the requirements when they applied, and still do, are being forced to the back of the queue to make way for the so-called "priority" cases. See also the earlier interview with Mark Webster of MIA and Dr Zuleika Arashiro of ANU.

The underlying assumption is that immigration is like some sort of feeding tube going straight into the veins of the economy. By regulating the flow, and changing the mix of nutrients, the immigration technicians respond to the day-to-day needs of the nation. This is bolstered by a second assumption: that those same immigration technicians have developed an accurate set of tools for determining just which migrants are needed when, and how many, and what their impact on Australian society will be.

My view is that this is nonsense. Australia has had the most successful postwar immigration program of any country in the world. About 15 years ago, however, someone in Canberra decided that what wasn't broke neverthless needed to be fixed. One of the offshoots of this coup of the bean counters was the "migration industry", but that is another story.

We must never forget that migration is about people, and what has been done to thousands of real people waiting their turn and expecting to be treated fairly by Australia's immigration system is that they have been shabbily treated so that politicians can say they are "doing something".

2009-11-25T12:00:00.000+11:00

I am restarting this blog after a long time, because I think there is a need to reopen the immigration debate in Australia following the defeat of the Howard government and the "new world" we now live in with the GFC and the climate debate.

Comments are welcome, but will be moderated for legal/professional purposes.