Immigration failures still coming

Andrew Giles may have gone as immigration minister but his legacy lingers, with a spotlight back on his poor decision-making and the hapless performance of the department he led. Border security has been a weak suit for the Albanese government throughout its first term and the problems remain far from solved. As we reported on Monday, the nation’s offshore asylum processing centre in Nauru now holds more than 100 asylum-seekers who reached Australia by boat – the biggest surge in detainee numbers on the Pacific island since the final months of the Gillard-Rudd government. The increase in official numbers of asylum-seekers on Nauru from zero in July 2023 to 101 on November 30, 2024 has prompted a tit-for-tat exchange been the federal government and the Coalition about who is to blame.

Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said Labor had failed to deliver adequate aerial surveillance hours, down 21 per cent, and maritime patrol days, down 16 per cent, which had allowed more boats to slip through. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has denied there were fewer border patrols and blamed contractual arrangements put in place by the Coalition when in government.

But figures provided by Australian Border Force to Senate estimates in November show annual aerial surveillance reduced incrementally between June 2020 and June 2024 from 16,005 hours to 12,579 hours. The number of days patrol boats actively were performing border patrols also reduced in that period, from 2485 days to 2086. Acting Australian Border Force commissioner Tim Fitzgerald told Senate estimates both aerial and sea surveillance had been on an upward trajectory since July 2024. The poor performance and continued political disharmony can only bolster the hopes of people-smugglers.

So can the outcome of recent court proceedings that paint a picture of incompetence at the highest levels of the immigration bureaucracy. A decision by Mr Giles to cancel the visa of a domestic violence offender who attacked his victim with a meat cleaver was overturned because the minister did not consider the best interest of the man’s children in Australia or his claim to be stateless. In a separate ruling, a Federal Court judge criticised the Immigration Department for “poor staff work” and “clerical errors” in its documentation supporting the cancellation of another man’s visa.

Mr Burke must remove his focus from what events in the Middle East mean for his western Sydney electorate and spend more time cleaning up the mess left by his predecessor. This includes fixing the shortcomings in his department before the government and the nation are swamped by a full-blown crisis.