Thousands of pandemic-era visas next headache for hapless Giles

In 2022 the Department of Immigration issued roughly 22,000 Covid visas which give the holder unlimited work rights, leading to what lawyers expect will be a tsunami of applications to stay in the country

Poor old Andrew Giles. A few weeks ago the Opposition would have been loving themselves sick if they’d managed to claim the Immigration Minister’s political scalp.

But after his horror fortnight, the Coalition MPs calling for his head are just going through the motions like a half-hearted LBW appeal on a ball clearly going down legside.

In private they’re not hiding the fact they reckon he’s their best-performing asset and it won’t be long before the question shifts from “should Giles go?” to “what’s the matter with Albo, why isn’t he moving him?”

The tipping point seems to have been the revelation only four days after boasting drones were being used to monitor the NZYQ detainees, that in reality he was a droneless man.

You can get away with many things in politics, stupidity, arrogance and corruption to name a few, but if people start laughing at you, you’re cooked.

Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, wondering what the next headache will be. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Among his colleagues there is sympathy for Giles’ predicament. When it comes to border protection, they complain, Labor gets held to a different standard to the Coalition.

No doubt there is something to this.

For the past week government spinners have been circulating tables showing that when it comes to letting convicted foreign criminals stay in Australia, despite what you might have imagined, the figures clearly show that percentage-wise Peter Dutton was a much softer touch when he was running Home Affairs than Giles and Clare O’Neil have been.

A family of refugees who had been granted temporary humanitarian visas after being held on Nauru as part of the Pacific Solution. Picture: AAP Image/Alan Porritt

In this they reminded me of the way their predecessors were always trying to get us to write that under the Morrison government Medicare bulk-billing rates had never been higher.

In both cases the facts are correct and both cases that won’t matter because they fly in the face of the public’s deeply-held beliefs about each side’s political weaknesses.

So just as in health, the last government was never able to live down trying to make people pay to see a doctor, on border protection Labor is still living with the consequences of Kevin Rudd’s decision to dismantle the Pacific Solution which caused 50,000 people to arrive here and the deaths of 1200.

Another reason the Coalition is less keen than you might expect to get rid of Giles right is they know that on border protection there’s another big problem down the pipe, one all of Labor’s making.

Remember the Covid pandemic?

You might have thought it ended sometime in 2022 but down there at the Department of Immigration and Border Protection it was still masks-on all through 2023.

Immigration lawyers say the Covid visas issue will dwarf problems with the Pacific Australia Labor Mobility scheme.

In 2022 the department issued roughly 22,000 Covid visas which give the holder unlimited work rights.

This followed on from 2021 when 26,000 Covid visas issues were issued and 2020 when they only issued 13,000.

Amazingly last year, by which time most of us were trying to forget Covid ever happened, officials managed to issue 136,000 of them!

Indeed it wasn’t until February this year that the Covid visa was closed to new applicants.

Already immigration lawyers are gearing up for what one described as “a tsunami” of work they’re expecting as these visas expire over the next year.

How many of them are going to end up applying for asylum?

No one really knows, it’s all going to come down to the integrity of the applicants and the agents and lawyers advising them. But the expectation is the trickle – 706 so far – will soon become a deluge.

If you want to get an idea of what’s coming, have a look at the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme which is meant to bring labourers temporarily to Australia, but which has led to a surge in asylum applications – about 320 a month last year – from such hot beds of political oppression as Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, East Timor, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The claimants’ chances of succeeding are nearly zero, so much that some of them can barely be bothered making a serious effort pushing their claims; in Vanuatu’s case two of its failed asylum seekers told the AAT they had a well-founded fear of volcanoes if they were made to go home.

The point is to get as many years as you can here on full rights before you’re eventually asked to leave.

At 27,000 the PALM visa holders are dwarfed by the Covid visa cohort which are going to clog the AAT’s successor for years, which is going to stretch out the time claimants have here, which is going to encourage people to try it on, which is going to further stretch out the wait time and on and on and on.

When you consider this you can understand why opposition front benchers are looking forward having Andrew Giles to kick around for a while yet.

– Andrew Bolt is on leave

Originally published as Thousands of pandemic-era visas next headache for hapless Giles