Andrew Giles’s time may well be up but Anthony Albanese must shoulder the blame

Anthony Albanese in question time on Wednesday. Picture: AAP

Anthony Albanese has been forced into a spectacular admission of failure. It doesn’t get much worse than this.

Ministerial Direction 99 was a disaster from the day of its ill-conceived inception.

It goes to the heart of the ideological revision of immigration policy under Labor and the poor decision-making by cabinet ministers.

The Prime Minister has effectively confirmed this by announcing in question time on Wednesday that he has ordered it be torn up. But this doesn’t absolve Labor from the deeper question over competence and policy making.

And it doesn’t absolve his Immigration Minister, Andrew Giles. Far from it. The pressure on Albanese to sack his minister is not diminished by the abolition of Direction 99.

Albanese’s latitude on this, however, is now constrained by one simple reality. While the consequences of Giles’ mismanagement of his brief may well warrant a ministerial scalp, Albanese himself has now been drawn into the orbit of this cascading disaster. The test for Albanese transcends factional loyalties and stability. The issue now involves the level of culpability for this decision in the first place, from the top down, and its reflection on the government broadly.

The revision of the character test in the section 501 visa cancellation program was at Albanese’s instigation.

Its intention was clear. Giles, to the degree he may have botched the drafting of it, was acting on a political directive from the PM.

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Albanese can’t escape the fact that the rewriting of the character test for 501 cancellations was a ­deliberate political decision by the Prime Minister on coming to ­office to appease New Zealand’s then leader Jacinda Ardern.

Standing beside Ardern in July 2022, Albanese said: “501 will continue to exist. We will continue to deport people when appropriate. But we will have some common sense applied here – and where you have a circumstance where someone has lived their entire life, effectively, in Australia with no connection whatsoever to New Zealand – then common sense should apply.”

Ardern got exactly what she wanted. But common sense was abandoned. For Albanese, it was yet another point of difference in the post-election demonisation of the Morrison government.

The consequences are now being laid to bare in horrific detail as cases of child rape, murder and assault are revealed.

While there may have been a case to act against Giles solely on the bungled response to the High Court decision to release detainees earmarked for deportation back into the community, to now sack him over Direction 99 would be an admission of Albanese’s own failings as leader as well.

This is the inescapable truth of the new political crisis engulfing Albanese and the Labor government more broadly.

The immigration detainee crisis was largely a one borne of incompetence. The Direction 99 disaster is a result of an intentional change to policy. It is not a conceptual debate. There have been real-world consequences from the government’s decisions.

There can be no question of the need for accountability. Shifting blame to the department head, to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal or even the Morrison government is unsustainable. It lacks integrity and undermines the government authority further. The threshold for acting has already been exceeded.

The latest revelation on the processes that led to this disaster now catapults the government into more dangerous territory.

Giles, we now know, was warned by his own officials that the new character test based on how long a non-citizen had been in Australia would trigger the potential for 2800 visa cancellations to be overturned.

The departmental submission makes several damning admissions, aside from the confirmation that consideration of ties to Australia be given priority. It admits the secretary of the department was not made aware of the submission, despite the Australian Government Solicitor being brought into the loop, and was made directly to the minister. It warned that those cases would be subject to longer stays in immigration detention because of the backlog of cases.

Labor also knew of the consequences of going down this path before Albanese made a decision to do so. The Home Affairs Department, in the same submission, warned that the AAT had already seen a spike in the number of cancellation cases being brought before it for a merit review during May and June of 2022.

That this correlates with the election of the Albanese government can be no coincidence.

Having been forced to act on tearing up the ill-conceived policy, Albanese has sought to cauterise further damage. This won’t stop the opposition from calling for the sacking of the architect. If anything, it adds weight to its claims of gross incompetence.