Visa reform: Turnbull Government considers law change to cancel visas of foreign-born criminals
MAJOR changes to the visa cancellation process are being considered by the Turnbull Government to stop hardened criminals using complicated legal appeals to avoid being deported.
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MAJOR changes to the visa cancellation process are being considered by the Turnbull Government to stop criminals using legal appeals to avoid being deported.
A parliamentary inquiry has been launched into the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in the wake of a string of Herald Sun reports exposing how foreigners were allowed to stay in Australia against the government’s wishes.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said the government was “not going to be taken for idiots”.
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Mr Dutton, who has been a vocal critic of the AAT, said on Thursday that those cases “say to me very strongly that we do need reform in this area of the law and I’m working on that at the moment”.
The Herald Sun revealed this week that a Muslim Iraqi father of seven who was a convicted violent criminal was allowed to stay in Australia by the AAT, even though he lied to avoid deportation by pretending he was a gay Christian.
Mr Dutton wants to crack down on criminals who “aren’t going to contribute to Australian society in a positive way”.
The migration committee inquiry, chaired by Victorian MP Jason Wood, will probe the visa cancellation process and how the AAT is allowed to review ministerial decisions on visas.
The recommendations could be used by Mr Dutton to shape legislative reforms.
Mr Wood said he was concerned that the current visa cancellation process “seems to be all in favour of the offender on a visa rather than the victim, who is in most cases an Australian citizen”.
“The concern I’m hearing in my electorate ... is how if a person fails the character test by being in jail for more than a year, and the minister has made a determination in support of this, then it ends up at the AAT,” he said.
“There we’ve seen the overturned decisions for rapists, murderers, home invaders and carjackers.
“The victims must come first, not the perpetrators on visas ... I don’t want to pre-empt the inquiry but it’s fair we look at this process and how it’s working.”
Opposition immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann said Labor supported cancelling the visas of non-citizens “on character or criminal grounds” but said the issue should be reviewed “on its merits” and “not be hijacked” by Mr Wood “for his own political purposes”.
Mr Wood, a former police officer, also questioned how much taxpayers’ money was being spent on visa appeals which bounced between the AAT and various courts.
