‘Grotesque abuses’: Secret review of migration system scathing of failures

A scathing secret report has found poor management of the nation’s already inadequate immigration and visa laws and a focus on stopping boat arrivals allowed organised crime syndicates involved in human trafficking and drug smuggling to flourish.

The document – whose promised public release has been stalled by the Albanese government – has identified serious failures in the Department of Home Affairs and exposed Australia’s fundamentally flawed visa system along with regulatory and enforcement gaps.

Failures in the visa and migration systems are allowing “abhorrent” crimes including sex trafficking.

Those failures allow human traffickers and drug smugglers to enter the country, as well as exploit some of the millions of temporary visa holders who arrive by plane each year.

The inquiry, conducted by former Victoria Police chief commissioner Christine Nixon, was ordered by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil after this masthead’s Trafficked series with 60 Minutes.

O’Neil promised last month to release the final report before the budget, but this never happened, despite repeated requests from this masthead. Sources with knowledge of the situation who are not authorised to speak publicly have briefed The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on its contents, including Nixon’s conclusion that it was “clear that gaps and weaknesses in Australia’s visa system” were enabling “criminal organisations and unscrupulous people” to “exploit people and make money”.

These “abhorrent crimes” had remained partially hidden by “seemingly higher law enforcement priorities such as illicit drugs, tobacco and unauthorised maritime arrivals”, Nixon wrote.

Rapid review: Former Victorian chief police commissioner Christine Nixon.

Despite the security-focused rhetoric when the Australian Border Force was brought into being in 2015, the Nixon report found it had “limited legislative powers to effectively investigate visa and migration fraud and the exploitation of temporary migrant workers”. It also found the department had allocated too few personnel to the task.

Nixon also took aim at corruption in Australia’s multibillion-dollar overseas education sector and called for Labor to commit to long-stalled money laundering reforms and expand the new laws to include migration and education agents.

The Nixon inquiry, along with another scathing recent review of the broader immigration system by former public servant Martin Parkinson, will place significant pressure on Labor to urgently respond to gaps in border security. It also raises serious questions about failings within the Department of Home Affairs and under the previous Coalition government, which oversaw the regime for a decade.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who was in charge of Home Affairs under the previous government, said: “Funding for our security agencies increased year-on-year when I was minister for home affairs. I was proud to have continued the work the Coalition did to keep our country safe and secure. Unfortunately, Minister O’Neil behaves like she is still in university politics. Senior people within the department are laughing behind her back due to her juvenile and petulant approach.”

In response to questions sent to O’Neil’s office seeking comment from the minister and the Department of Home Affairs, a spokesman said: “The government has received the Nixon report and is carefully considering its contents.”

In her last public statements on the reports, on April 18, O’Neil said Nixon’s and Parkinson’s reviews showed “aspects of our migration system that are broken in fundamental ways”. She confirmed it would require a legislative response.

In last week’s budget the government allocated $50 million over four years followed by $15.3 million a year to boost enforcement and compliance, and $76 million to tackle a blowout in delays dealing with visa applications.

Dutton made Labor’s projected migration increase of 1.5 million people over five years the centrepiece of his post-budget political attack on Labor.

Sexual exploitation

Poor oversight of the visa system had left women with little or no English being held in sexual servitude for weeks without being allowed to leave hotel or motel rooms, with clients lined up down the hallway, “usually of the victim’s same nationality”, Nixon’s report found.

Their services were promoted and co-ordinated in call centres with hundreds of phone lines, operating nationally, and “a controller who moves the women around so they are unaware of their location within Australia, aided by complicit hotel and motel managers”.

Victims of these scams were in debt bondage, owing “debts” that averaged between $40,000 and $50,000, and usually in Australia on tourist or student visas.

Their controllers, who themselves might be in Australia on temporary visas, “have been found to turn over millions of dollars annually operating businesses built on the exploitation of vulnerable temporary migrants”.

The report recommended that, as in Canada and New Zealand, temporary migrants should be barred from working in the sex industry, and if they were found to do so, they and their employer could be deported or otherwise sanctioned. An Australian who employs a temporary worker in the industry should be disqualified from directing a company and their name published on a register.

Prohibition would “send a strong and clear message that the Australian government has no tolerance for the exploitation of temporary migrants, and abuses of human rights that have no place in Australia”, the report found.

Also set up after the Trafficked investigation was a joint-agency operation codenamed Inglenook, which Nixon reported had raised more than 57 border alerts and found another 93 foreign nationals “of interest”. The extent of wrongdoing revealed by the investigation meant it should continue for three more years, she recommended.

Border Force discrepancies

When the Australian Border Force was set up in 2015, it brought together a variety of legislative powers across 35 pieces of legislation. Dutton, the then minister, said it was “a dedicated front-line agency targeting and disrupting the whole range of border threats from organised crime gangs to narcotic traffickers and people smugglers”.

However, Nixon found there were “significant discrepancies” in its operations. It had only 120 investigations staff “and difficult decisions are regularly made about the prioritisation of finite resources to protect the border against constantly evolving threats”.

There was no compliance or investigative capability within the department’s immigration group and while Border Force investigators can exercise search warrant, arrest and telecommunications intercept powers for offences under the Customs Act, they have no such powers under the Migration Act and must rely on other agencies.

“With diminishing investigation function and field compliance resources, investigative skills appear to have been degraded, and visa and migration fraud competes for priority with other high-priority activity,” the report said.

It recommended the government “reprioritise an immigration compliance function” – a recommendation that appears to have been reflected in the budget.

Wrongdoing by people on temporary visas was facilitated by extended delays in visa processing. This masthead last year reported on notorious people trafficker Binjun Xie, who stayed legally in Australia, with work rights, for eight years, moving from a student visa in 2014 to a partner visa in 2016 and then multiple bridging visas.

Nixon found that Xie, who is still being hunted by authorities, exploited entrenched delays in the country’s visa processing and migration appeals system and had “applied for a number of different visas, one after the other”.

Criminals could also extend their stay in Australia for years while undertaking illegal activities by applying for protection as refugees.

Such cases had clogged the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, with the number of cases before it growing from 8370 in 2017 to 37,025 last year. The time from lodgment to decision had blown out from 10 months to 26 months, and only a tiny minority won their cases.

“The significant majority of applicants are found not to engage [meet] Australia’s protection obligations,” the report found.

The report was also scathing of the blind spot in the legislation and scrutiny of education providers, saying professional facilitators were “exploiting the student visa program to facilitate work in the sex industry”, and that unregulated education agents played a key role in the rort.

A federal parliamentary committee inquiry was told recently that agents were also financially exploiting their clients and should be better regulated, amid a recent surge of fraudulent applications, particularly from South Asia.

Nixon’s report pointed out gaps in the tracking of money laundering and counter-terror financing laws, saying that only casinos, bullion dealers and solicitors had an obligation to report suspicious money movements, and only for cash transactions of more than $10,000.

Reforms currently under consideration to expand this to property agents, lawyers and tax professionals should go further and include migration agents, education agents and privately owned vocational education providers.

It also pointed out that the Home Affairs Department’s internal corruption prevention mechanisms were inadequate, particularly for staff getting unauthorised access to visa applications or cherry picking the ones they worked on.

The Trafficked series revealed how women on temporary visas were being shunted “like cattle” around the sex industry, some fearing for their lives.

It also showed how registered migration agents were rorting the system without penalty and more than a dozen education providers had been found to be corrupt and facilitating sex trafficking.

“Criminal organisations and unscrupulous people are always looking for ways to exploit people and make money. It is clear that gaps and weaknesses in Australia’s visa system are allowing this to happen,” the Nixon report said.

“I hope this report will lead to a strengthening of Australia’s visa system so that temporary migrants are protected from the grotesque abuses that have been described, and Australia is reaffirmed as a safe destination for those who wish to visit, study, work or live here.”

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