When Tony Abbott instituted his hugely successful boat turn-back policy, it was acknowledged by the Indonesian government as ‘taking the sugar off the table’. Indonesia is, of course, the jumping-off point for illegal immigrants and people smugglers bound for Australia. And they’re as sick of them as Australians are. By sending an unequivocal message that all boats intercepted would be sent straight back, the message soon got out. People smugglers might be criminal arseholes, but they’re not stupid. They can read an Australian newspaper as well as anyone else.
So, when Anthony Albanese, in one of his first acts as PM, rewarded a pair of former Tamil Tigers who’d deliberately overstayed in the country for years, despite losing every single legal appeal, everyone with half a brain knew what was going to happen. Every illegal immigrant got the message: just ignore the rulings and they’ll never budge you.
Huge numbers of migrants and asylum seekers are abusing the visa system through “unmeritorious applications” in attempts to stay in the country, experts say, amid a record number of appeals against Home Affairs’ visa denials.
When they say ‘huge numbers’, they’re not kidding.
Each month, about 1000 asylum seekers who are unsuccessful in their appeals at the Administrative Review Tribunal fail to leave the country, further analysis of its data shows, as former immigration official Abul Rizvi says “we don’t want to become like America on this”.
More than 82,000 people are currently contesting migration and protection visa refusals with the ART, the highest on record, with almost 18,500 cases added to the backlog in the last six months of 2024 […]
Former Immigration Department deputy secretary Mr Rizvi said the government needed to “significantly slow the (number of) unmeritorious applications” and deal with the growing numbers of unsuccessful asylum applicants”.
How are they getting away with this? A combination of fanatical, boat-chasing ‘refugee activists’ and a sclerotic review system clogged with years of Labor-appointed officials. Yet, even these open-borders zealots are forced to regularly admit that the so-called ‘refugees’ are really just a bunch of welfare-grifters gaming the system.
Like a particularly nasty tick, the greedy illegals are almost impossible to dislodge.
[Rizvi] said it could use a ‘first-out model’ in which the most recent unmeritorious applications are processed first, reducing the amount of time people spend on bridging visas with work rights in Australia. It would also need to target the migration agents submitting the unmeritorious applications, by investigating and prosecuting where needed.
The median time to finalise a protection visa case was 4.5 years between October and December last year, and close to one year for migration visas.
“Then there’s the question of what to with all the people in Australia refused asylum who don’t want to go home,” he said, which could be done by “ramping up deportations”.
“But all of that would cost a lot of money and no one wants to pay. Neither of the major parties want to pay,” he said.
Maybe the politicians don’t, but you can be sure millions of ordinary Australians would. Just as in America where, despite the screaming fits of the left, an overwhelming majority of Americans support Trump’s mass deportation policies. Brits, too, want to see mass deportations.
All that’s lacking is the political will to tell the ‘refugee’ lobby where to stick it.
Maybe there’s some hope, though.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the coalition had a plan to stop people from abusing the system, but could not yet reveal what that plan was.
“(There has been) a massive surge in migration appeals under Labor as people try to game the system to extend their stay in Australia,” he said.
“It hasn’t helped that the Albanese government brought in a record one million migrants in their first two years in office. Tony Burke has no plans to fix the migration appeals rort. Only a Dutton coalition government will stop people abusing the system to stay in Australia after their visas have expired.”
Why won’t Paterson reveal their plan yet? Most likely to make sure people smugglers and their helpers in Australia don’t get time to figure out a way around it.
Time to take the sugar off the table again.
