Campbell: Almost 30 years should have been time for Albo to get his head around immigration stuff
Despite being in the parliament for almost 30 years, PM Anthony Albanese seems to lack a basic idea of how immigration law works, writes James Campbell.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
As you would no doubt be aware the hot issue in Canberra last week was immigration, sparked by The Australian’s revelation that the AAT has been overturning the visa cancellations of some very nasty people indeed.
The debacle, which has seen foreigners convicted of child sex offences as well as other serious crimes of violence allowed to stay, has left Immigration Minister Andrew Giles looking like a complete goose, though the consensus seems to be he won’t lose his job.
Along the way it has also revealed that despite being in the parliament for almost 30 years Albo seems to lack a basic idea of how immigration law works.
Let me explain.
Last week’s trouble stemmed from something from Direction 99 that Giles issued early last year.
It’s basically a set of instructions for public servants given the job of deciding whether or not foreign criminals will be booted from Australia – as the law says they should – or effectively granted clemency and allowed to stay.
The reason it was issued was because Albo listened to the complaints of New Zealand’s then PM St Jacinda that we were sending “our” criminals home and promised that henceforth we would apply “common sense” in deciding who to return.
At the time I warned that effectively giving bureaucrats riding instructions to exercise the Dennis Denuto principle of “it’s the vibe of the thing” was “basically insane”.
Direction 99 was the bureaucracy’s attempt to codify “common sense” by creating a new “primary consideration” that decision makers were to take into account namely “the strength, nature and duration of ties to Australia.”
As we now know from a ministerial briefing released under Freedom of Information Giles agreed to this after his department told him it wasn’t expected to impact the outcome for serious and violent sexual offenders.
But the same briefing made it clear the public servants had reached this conclusion after a “desktop exercise” in which they tried to guess what the impact of Direction 99 would have been on 10 – that’s right 10! – old cases plucked at random.
But actually it was worse than that.
Because as the briefing made clear although the review found that the operation of Direction 99 would not have resulted in a different outcome for three of the worst cases tested – that is to say they would still have been punted – the bureaucrats admitted “none of these of three cases had family ties and only one had some employment history”.
In other words Giles’s officials were not bright enough to test whether a rule designed to change the outcomes for criminals with family ties to Australia would work as intended, by actually testing it on criminals with family ties to Australia.
But they were cunning enough to know that if things later went pear-shaped they would be able to say they had warned Giles.
One of the truisms of life in Canberra is the deeply baked-in belief among Commonwealth bureaucrats and politicians alike that they are superior beings to their incompetent state counterparts.
But whether it’s this fiasco, Robodoebt, Snowy 2.0, the subs fiasco or God-help-us the NDIS, the evidence is piling up that far from being the A-Team, the Feds would struggle to organise a piss-up in a brewery.
But back to Albo and what this week suggests about his grasp of detail.
On Friday, in an interview defending Giles, he told the ABC “What we have done is replace the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, that made many of these decisions to overturn decisions by the department or by Ministers under both governments.”
He later doubled-down, saying that being overturned by the AAT was no grounds for dismissal: “if Immigration Ministers, having a decision of either themselves or of their department, being overturned by an Administrative Appeals Tribunal, then there wouldn’t have been an Immigration Minister in office at any time for more than a fortnight.”
A good line, I think we can all agree. But there’s a problem with it.
In the cases under discussion, while the AAT can overturn decisions of the delegates of the Immigration Minister to cancel their visas, ie decisions of his department, it does not have the power to overturn decisions of the minister himself.
Only the Federal Court can do that, and as we saw with the Djokovic case, the circumstances in which courts can do so are extremely limited.
The listener was left with the impression the Prime Minister does not understand the difference.
Of course it might have been a slip of tongue or he might have been thinking of other cases – such as citizenship – where the AAT does have the power to review ministers’ decisions.
But it was hard not to suspect that in all his years in Canberra Albo hasn’t thought it worth his time to get his head around this stuff.
More Coverage
Life’s a beach for Albo: Savvy PM feathers his own nest
The optics, as they say in politics, aren’t great, particularly for a bloke seeking to renew his lease on the Lodge in the middle of a cost of living and housing crisis, writes James Morrow.
Cuddly Albo now a torn and tattered teddy bear
‘God smiles on new governments,’ a respected former ALP leader once mused. Two years later, that electoral god is no longer smiling on Anthony Albanese, writes Tim Blair.