Jacinda Ardern famously thinks that Australia deporting Kiwi-born crims home to New Zealand is “corrosive”. Australians might think that bleeding-heart bureaucrats and lefty quangos letting foreign-born monsters continue to lurk among us is even worse.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal is the perfect embodiment of O’Sullivan’s Law: Any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. This is because, as analyses of academic departments, for example, have shown, left-wingers tend to be group-thinkers who like to surround themselves with people like them. Left-wing governments set up quangos like the AAT (a creation of the far-left Whitlam government) and stack them with leftist cronies. Those cronies then surround themselves with fellow leftists… and so it goes.
The AAT, as such leftist bureaucracies will, puts the interests of the worst kinds of criminals well ahead of the general community. The Morrison government, as conservative governments also will, has been spineless in taking them on. Dare we hope that that’s about to change?
Immigration rules are set to be tightened after a wife killer, gangsters, drug-runners and domestic violence perpetrators were given the green light to live in Australia this year.
Dozens of non-citizens and asylum-seekers ordered out of the country by Immigration Minister Alex Hawke have been given a second chance to stay in Australia by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal but the government intends to tighten the rules with an immigration review that could make it harder for the AAT to overturn deportation orders.
This is hardly new: an 1878 Melbourne Punch cartoon depicts “Some ‘really good’ people” taking pity on a hardened criminal – and only encouraging them to do worse.
Finding God, childhood trauma and the needs of Australian children are some of the reasons sympathetic AAT members overturned Home Affairs Department orders to cancel visas, deny citizenship or deport convicted criminals.
Mr Hawke on Wednesday said AAT members “must give weight to serious crimes committed by visa holders’’.
“In light of some concerning decisions, I issued a ministerial direction making it abundantly clear that having an Australian visa is a privilege and not a right, and that those who commit serious crimes should face the full force of the law,’’ he said.
It’s not just Kiwis, I should hasten to add: there’s more than a smattering of Afghans, Somalis, Sudanese and other refugees Australia has extended the welcome mat to, as well as Brits. But still, New Zealanders get a good look-in.
A New Zealand-born man will also be allowed to stay, despite attempts to deport him for assault and repeated contraventions of family violence orders in Melbourne.
What’s particularly interesting is what he has to say in his own defence:
In his witness statement, the man told the tribunal that he had been raised in a strict Maori household, and that a “common feature of typical Samoan/Maori households (is) violence against women and children carried out by the provider of the family’’. The AAT decision says that the man had been a “regular user of ice” and had completed a men’s behavior program, and a drug and alcohol program, “which he apparently thought were full of crap’’.
Well, he’s probably right about that last bit. But try to imagine, say, John Black, Olivia Pierson or Judith Collins stating that violence – against women and in general – is typical in Maori households. The NZ media would go into meltdown and Mighty Ape would hold a book-burning.
Meanwhile, the hand-wringers at the AAT are suckers for every sob-story imaginable.
A New Zealand citizen had his residency visa cancelled after he was jailed for drug and domestic violence offences, and assaulting a police officer[…]
But he convinced AAT senior member Kate Millar to reinstate his visa, after telling her that it would be “heartbreaking’’ for his three children.In her decision, Ms Millar wrote that the man’s stepfather had provided a reference that “ (he) has always respected him and his mother as parents and assisted with cleaning and finances for the housing they provided in their home to ‘all types of people from prostitutes, drug addicts to rapists’.
The Australian
Sounds like the ideal family home.
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