It has taken 16 months for officials to decide that Maha Almassri does not meet the character test for an Australian visa. At 5am last Thursday, Gaza Gran, as some media dubbed her, was detained at a Bankstown home and taken to the Villawood detention centre. Outraged Palestinian activists, friends and family grabbed their keffiyehs and Palestinian flags and staged a protest outside the electorate office of the Home Affairs Minister. The Australian reported a crowd of about 50 people chanted: “Tony Burke, you can’t hide, you’re supporting genocide.”
If the object of the demonstration was to harden public sentiment towards a tougher immigration policy, they should congratulate themselves on a job well done. Their disagreeable performance amplified Jillian Segal’s call for visa applicants to be screened for extremist views.
“Migration policies must guard against the importation of hate,” the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism wrote in a timely report last week. “Non-citizens involved in anti-Semitism should face visa cancellation and removal from Australia.”
Australians have been more than generous in welcoming refugees since the late 1940s, when Ben Chifley’s Labor government signed a resettlement agreement with the International Refugee Organisation. Yet in recent decades we’ve become too nervous to spell out the most important condition of entry, namely the intention to assimilate. We have also forgotten that the first requirement for an orderly and fair migration system is that screening should be conducted before departure. Offshore processing maintains sovereign control and lessens the influence of special pleading. It allows proper health, security and character checks, and avoids queue-jumping.
From the 1980s, however, growing numbers of asylum-seekers began arriving by air on tourist visas, then applying for refugee status onshore. The Keating government introduced mandatory detention in 1992 to deter unauthorised arrivals, but still allowed onshore refugee applications. John Howard’s reaction to the Tampa incident in 2001 was to introduce offshore processing in Nauru and PNG. The expansion of temporary protection visas under the Rudd and Gillard governments provided an incentive for asylum tourism from Malaysia, China, India, Pakistan, Vietnam and other countries.
Unfounded post-arrival claims from applicants who entered on tourist and student visas abounded, clogging the bureaucracy and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Bridging visas allow applicants to stay for years, with unprincipled immigration lawyers and agents smoothing the way.
The Albanese government’s decision to bypass offshore processing for sanctuary seekers from Gaza showed the extent to which onshore processing had become normalised. The government evoked the urgency of granting protection as the reason for the ad hoc granting of tourist visas. The validity of their applications would be assessed in Australia before the Gazans graduated to a bridging visa, a tax file number and a Medicare card.
Almassri reportedly received a bridging visa last June, four months after crossing the Gaza border and making her way to Australia, where she has family. Yet her ASIO assessment dragged on for more than a year before the assistant minister, Julian Hill, finally acted on the advice to cancel her visa on character grounds, citing the national interest. This back-to-front process leaves Almassri facing indefinite detention because the government concedes that Gazans cannot be repatriated any time soon. A string of legal appeals on compassionate grounds is likely, and not without emotional pull. Just because ASIO assesses you to be a security threat doesn’t mean you’re not a loving grandmother.
Whatever threat Almassri may or may not pose, this drawn-out debacle serves no one – least of all the taxpayer, who is left funding a shemozzle born of confused compassion and contempt for due process.
Labor governments have not always been as soft-headed when assessing the character of would-be migrants. Nor has it always been taken for granted that migrants will know what is expected from them should their applications be successful.
The Chifley government went to enormous lengths to ensure displaced persons admitted in the aftermath of World War II had the best possible start as they embarked on a new life. The first contingent of 843 Australian-bound refugees who arrived in Perth in November 1947 aboard the US Army transport ship General Heintzelman had been rigorously pre-screened to ensure they were skilled, free of Nazi ideals, and willing to live under army camp conditions.
Upon arrival, they were taken to a former army camp at Bonegilla, Victoria, where they were given lessons in English, civics, hygiene, sanitation and Australian weights and measures.
They were under contract to work on government-appointed projects for their first two years in Australia and subjected to what became known as the cane fields test: did they have physical fitness and resolve to survive as a canecutter? “The selection will be made not on humanitarian grounds, but on suitability,” the Hobart Mercury reported.
Chifley and his immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, are not easy subjects for the kind of revisionist treatment Albanese’s scriptwriters gave John Curtin recently. They probably wouldn’t want to dwell on the fate of the Alabama Kid, an African-American boxer who was deported under the White Australia policy on the General Heintzelman’s return voyage. Calwell told reporters: “There’s an important principle at stake.”
Nonetheless, the principle that migrants should be processed offshore and selected on their ability to adapt and thrive as law-abiding Australian citizens must be restored, sooner rather than later. Albanese’s late-flowering commitment to stamp out anti-Semitism is a good start, even if he has some catching up to do. Death-cult rhetoric, whatever its target, should be treated as an incitement to hatred. Strict sanctions must be enforced against those who pollute our public places by airing historical grievances.
All that should go without saying, regardless of the particular evil of anti-Semitism. Let’s stop mincing words. The right to permanent residency is an obligation to respect the Western values that underpin Australia’s extraordinary success. It requires acknowledgment that you are first and foremost an Australian or desire to become one.
An Australian passport is not like the Liberian ensign, an open registry that serves as a flag of convenience. It demands loyalty, not just paperwork.
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