Peter Dutton deserves a medal, not a senate inquiry
In occasionally overruling the bureaucrats, Peter Dutton has been getting on with it and doing the job that voters expect from him. Which is more than can be said for Labor, writes Peta Credlin.
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IF YOU want to talk about bullying in politics this week, the games being played against Peter Dutton are right up there.
Only because he’s a bloke, and a conservative, the attention is on the au pairs, the AFL chief and a whole lot of trivia when, in fact, this is an issue that highlights the superiority of Labor’s ‘dark arts’ and their hypocrisy. I mean what’s worse here — a minister who intervenes to allow an au pair to stay in Australia for a few months, or a shadow minister who requests ministerial intervention to give a hate preacher a visa?
It was only five years ago on Friday that the Coalition was elected to clean-up Labor’s record of border protection failure — 50,000 illegal arrivals and over 1200 deaths at sea. I know the human cost better than most as I was there when the Coalition stopped the boats and started to clean up Labor’s mess.
Since then, in the nearly four years that Dutton has been in charge, there has been just one illegal boat get through to Australia. In the three months that one of his chief accusers, Tony Burke, was immigration minister, there were some 3700 illegal arrivals on about 50 boats. This has got to make Burke one of the most incompetent ministers in Commonwealth history.
What’s more, Dutton has deported over 3000 convicted criminals who didn’t have Australian citizenship and sent them home. Rapists, violent criminals, paedophiles and more.
His tough stance represents a 1200 per cent increase in character-based visa cancellations from the Rudd-Gillard governments. Is it any wonder they’re after him?
Despite frequent abuse from activists and the compassion lobby, and the best efforts of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to overturn decisions, the Home Affairs minister has steadfastly kept our country safe and borders secure; for this he deserves a medal, not a senate inquiry.
The specifics of the case are worth restating. A young French woman was initially denied entry on suspicion that she might be working while on her tourist visa. After representations that she had become a friend of the family and was coming back to visit them and not to work, Dutton intervened to allow her to stay. After her visit, she returned home without incident. Despite the muckraking, there’s no suggestion Dutton gained any benefit from his decision, so what’s it all about other than a thinly veiled attack against a man who takes every opportunity to remind Australians of Labor’s border protection failures?
If you work in a member of parliament’s office, as I have, you know that much of your constituency work is making representations to ministers to have bureaucrats’ decisions reconsidered. What’s the point of having a minister if all the minister ever does is rubber stamp the decisions of bureaucrats? If that’s how Labor thinks it should work, then we might as well dispense with elections altogether and let the bureaucrats run the country if ministers can’t ever second guess what their officials do.
Thank God some ministers are strong enough, and brave enough, to do what they’re elected to do and direct the bureaucrats — rather than just take dictation from them!
In occasionally overruling the bureaucrats, Dutton has just been doing the job that voters expect from him. And it’s not just voters who expect him to take a second look at the decisions of bureaucrats. In his nearly four years as minister, other MPs have asked him to use his ministerial intervention powers no fewer than 9000 times. And get this: the same Labor Party that’s complaining about this particular intervention has asked him to intervene in nearly 300 immigration cases in just the past year. This includes 192 requests from Chris Bowen, 26 from Anthony Albanese and 22 from, you guessed it, Burke. The hypocrisy here is obvious. But it gets worse.
In July last year, Burke — the bloke who let 50 boats in during his three months as immigration minister — also lobbied hard for government officials to grant a visa to Mohammed al-Nabulsi, a Syrian national, whom Australian intelligence officials had red-flagged for his extreme and abhorrent views.
According to media reports this week that describe al-Nabulsi as an Islamic extremist and hate preacher, his views include the claim that women are the creatures of Satan, and that homosexuality warrants the death penalty. That’s the sort of man Labor was fighting to let in. And Dutton has stood firm on cases like al-Nabulsi, and border protection. Forget the au pair, this is what the fight’s really been about.