Opinion
At what point should politicians and bureaucrats be held to account for the blood on their hands? Surely, when their decisions lead directly to the death of innocents, something stronger than merely being allowed to resign and shift sideways is merited?
The Victorian Labor government, after all, introduced its Industrial Manslaughter rules, which mean that bosses who may not have even had hands-on responsibility are criminally liable for workplace deaths. If a CEO in an office in the CBD can be charged with manslaughter when a worker on a site in the outer suburbs gets crushed by machinery, why shouldn’t a minister or a judge be held similarly culpable when a criminal they set free murders again?
A ministerial direction issued by Immigration Minister Andrew Giles was central to prompting a tribunal to order the release of an immigration detainee and domestic violence perpetrator who then went on to allegedly murder a man on Mother’s Day.
Sudan-born Emmanuel Saki, 29, has been charged with murder over the stabbing death of 22-year-old Bosco Minyurano on May 12. The incident took place just weeks after he was freed from immigration detention after the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned a 2019 decision to strip him of his visa.
That decision was a direct result of a direction by Giles. “Direction 99” was enacted by Giles, ordering more lenient treatment of criminal non-citizens if they had lived in Australia from a young age.
It was put in place, as it happens, to placate the Albanese government’s Labour comrades across the ditch.
First Jacinda Ardern, then Chris Hipkins, regularly complained and stamped their feet when the former Coalition government deported NZ-born criminals back to their homeland. Giles duly enacted Direction 99 just weeks before Hipkins visited Australia in 2023.
Now, a man is dead.
Who is going to be held responsible?
After all, it’s not as if no one could have seen it coming.
That decision came despite a “trend of increasing seriousness” in Saki’s “clearly frequent” offending leading up to his detention. Saki, Mr Boyle noted, had committed over 40 offences as an adult and one as a 17-year-old between 2012 and 2018.
The worst of those included a series of violent acts committed against his partner and the mother of his youngest child in the ACT […] Saki’s conduct described his “indifference” to the potential consequences of his actions.
That offending came less than a year after Saki was convicted of reckless threat to kill and common assault over an unprovoked incident in which he approached two men, pulled a knife and told them he was going to kill them. He had also been convicted of using a motor vehicle to cause impact with another person.
The Australian
Even when his own Direction 99 was clearly going to free an obviously murderously violent recidivist, Giles could have intervened to stop it. Ministerial powers perfectly entitled him to intervene and overturn the AAT’s decision. Indeed, ministerial powers were used dozens of times during the Coalition government, to reverse similar decisions.
But Giles is cut from a different cloth.
His first public prominence, it must be recalled, was as an open-borders activist lawyer, fighting the Howard government’s refusal to allow illegal immigrants who had commandeered the MV Tampa to enter Australia.
Once again, he’s taken the side of foreign-born criminals over the safety of Australians. Only this time, a man is dead as a consequence of his virtue-signalling.
This government has blood on its hands. Will they ever be held responsible?