As if on cue, just after my Real Good Oil column mooting industrial manslaughter-type laws for judges, bureaucrats and politicians, yet another story of astonishing judicial misadventure has broken. It was bad enough when the High Court summarily ordered the immediate release of hundreds of foreign-born criminals – including contract killers, rapists and paedophiles – from immigration detention. Worse still, the court further ruled that close supervision of the released criminals, such as ankle bracelets, also violated their “human rights”.
Now, lower courts are getting in on the act of virtue-signalling at the expense of the innocent.
Labor’s bid to neutralise the crisis over its bungling of foreign criminals being released from detention faces collapse, after the Federal Court ruled against an order from dumped former minister Andrew Giles and freed a man who attacked his wife with a meat cleaver.
In the latest blow to the Albanese government’s immigration detention regime, the Federal Court has ruled in favour of a Bhutan-born domestic violence offender who argued that Mr Giles’s decision to personally intervene to strip him of his visa was unreasonable.
Then make the Federal Court judges put the violent scumbag up in their own houses. No special protection.
See how they like living with the consequences of their judicial activism.
After all, plenty of other Australians have had to, in the worst possible ways, as dozens of the freed criminals went straight back to their raping and beating ways. The judges responsible for unleashing the mayhem, though, remain safe, secure, and wholly untouched by the results of their decisions.
It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong – Thomas Sowell.
The only price anyone involved in this dire saga has ‘paid’ has been a cabinet reshuffle.
Amid political pressure, Mr Giles moved to cancel dozens of visas of foreign criminals who had been allowed to remain in Australia. The minister’s scramble came after the Australian revealed last May that offenders, including rapists and armed robbers, had used his flawed Direction 99 to avoid deportation.
Violent scum like this:
PLQF, who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, PTSD and alcohol-use disorder, was originally stripped of his protection visa after he was convicted of a string of offences against his wife, including breaching a domestic violence order, assault and property damage after he attacked her with a meat cleaver and damaged her vehicle. In one incident he threatened to kill his wife, who sought refuge with some neighbours, one of whom he struck five or six times with the cleaver […]
The Bhutanese man, who belongs to the persecuted Lhotshampa minority and was identified only as PLQF, challenged the lawfulness of the minister’s exercise of power after his visa was cancelled in June, resulting in him being returned to immigration detention.
The man, who spent much of his childhood in a refugee camp in Nepal, was released into the community in August on a bridging visa after his lawyers told Mr Burke that PLQF must be released under a landmark 2023 High Court ruling that indefinite detention was unlawful.
Federal Court judge Nye Perram ruled last month that Mr Giles had made multiple “jurisdictional errors” by reversing an Administrative Appeals Tribunal decision that PLQF could remain in Australia, because he had failed to consider the impact of the cancellation on his children and his status as a stateless person.
I imagine “the impact of the cancellation on his children” would be infinitely less than the impact of seeing their mother hacked into with a meat cleaver.
And I could care less about his “status as a stateless person”. Actions, meet consequences.
Speaking of which, why not just dump PLQF on Justice Perram’s doorstep? Methinks m’lud would change his mind PDQ.
Nothing sharpens the mind so much, after all, as having to bear personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s decisions.
