What we are witnessing in immigration is beyond scandalous | David Penberthy
The jaw-dropping revelations of this week about the genuine scumbags granted citizenship confirms my long-held suspicion, writes David Penberthy.
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I am not sure what the people of Scotland did to attract the ire of the Immigration Department.
In the past 12 months I spent quite a bit of time covering the case of two families who came close to being sent back to Scotland in their entirety or having their family split apart with some members being sent back to Scotland.
Both cases involved people who were guilty of nothing other than working their backsides off since they moved here, paying their taxes, sending their kids to school to get an education, becoming fully integrated, proud, law-abiding members of the Australian community.
The case of the Green family was particularly absurd as electrician Mark Green had been encouraged to move to South Australia from Scotland on a work visa 10 years ago to fill gaps in the local job market.
The case of the Grigg family was equally absurd as it involved a computer glitch whereby Scottish-born mum Kirsty Grigg had her visa cancelled without her knowledge after the department’s IT system inadvertently processed her incomplete application form, with the subsequent rejection email being sent to her spam folder.
Kirsty works in a senior role in aged care at one of Adelaide’s leading providers and had flawless references from her employer pleading for her to stay.
Until the 11th hour the department’s response was: computer says no.
Both cases were only brought to the attention of the department through media coverage. These were and are good families.
If not for the news stories and the active involvement of politicians and employers to get their cases on the desk of federal Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, these people would have been on the first plane to Glasgow.
It is unnerving for these families to reflect how their cases might have played out otherwise. Having covered their cases so closely, all I will say is it’s a good thing The Proclaimers didn’t come out for the WOMAD festival earlier this year. They would probably now be in the Villawood Detention Centre.
The jaw-dropping revelations of this past week about the genuine scumbags who have been granted citizenship confirms a long-held suspicion on my part.
There is a cultural problem within the Immigration Department and among some people in Immigration law.
It stems from an apparent mush-headed, uncritical level of generosity towards those who have experienced any hardship, where the empathy is so unyielding that it renders people blind to obvious character flaws.
This is a country that rolled out the welcome mat for Man Haron Monis, accepting him from Iran as a refugee and bestowing upon him Australian citizenship.
We let him retain that gift of citizenship even while he was writing letters to the widows of ADF veterans telling them their late husbands were pigs and baby-killers who deserved to die. The authorities took the view that Mr Monis was a harmless nut as he wrote those letters and held his one-man protests outside the Sydney courts.
He only got a two-year good behaviour bond for his harassment campaign.
So much generosity, right up to the day he walked into the Lindt café.
When the case of Mark Green was being rejected by the Immigration Department, at the same time a decision had been made to let the so-called ISIS brides return to Australia from the Middle East, now that their husbands had finished their work beheading people and chucking homosexuals off rooftops.
When the case of Kirsty Grigg made the news, it came as a freed criminal non-citizen had allegedly reoffended by indecently assaulting a hotel worker in Adelaide’s north (which charges have now been dropped).
Law-abiding people come up against a wall of indifference and bureaucratic pedantry. Yet for that small horde of reprobates who have shown no commitment to Australia, or their new fellow citizens, we extend the hand of kindness to people who are demonstrably unkind.
I know people in the Labor Party who regard Andrew Giles as one of its most thoughtful and intelligent operators.
He is doing a great job hiding those qualities.
What we are witnessing in immigration is beyond scandalous. If the key job of government is to protect its citizens, the Albanese Government gets zero thanks to this appalling string of cases.
The most 2024 thing I have heard of late is that these saps even decided to bestow citizenship on an African migrant with a lengthy criminal record who now identifies as Aboriginal. It’s hard to imagine a bigger insult to the First Aussies than to let this blow-in use their heritage to cover his own sorry arse. Yet we swallow it out of a sense of politeness and kindness. Kindness, again, to the demonstrably unkind.
The most devastating moment in this disgraceful saga came not on some lofty political program like 730, but courtesy of Natalie Barr on Sunrise where she demolished Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil over her defence of Giles as Immigration Minister.
“Surely the buck stops with him. He’s the minister. He made the direction. He had to consider these people’s ties with Australia,’’ Barr said.
“So all these rapists, you want to know what they did?’’ she asked.
“One raped a 14-year-old stepdaughter while his wife gave birth. One raped the sister of the mother of his infant child. One raped a disabled 14-year-old and a 16-year-old. One raped a child between the age of 10 and 14 and one raped eight times, 48 counts of sexual assault on 25 women and a teen.
“The judge said he had no remorse. That’s what we’re dealing with and you’re still arguing support for the minister.”
Australians know the difference between good people and bad people. None of this is about race or religion.
Witness the outpouring of acclaim for the Bondi Junction security guard who has been promised citizenship after his heroics in the face of the knife attack.
It’s just a pity our same commonsense antennae aren’t shared by the department we fund through our taxes to keep the right people in and the wrong people out.
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