Labor has announced an independent review of the management of regional processing procurement by the Department of Home Affairs after revelations it granted contracts to a company linked to the subject of a bribery investigation.
The home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, announced the inquiry citing “serious issues” with the governance of offshore processing contracts which she said “merit detailed and thorough examination”.
Not entitled to work rights, study rights or healthcare, the Paras have spent the last decade relying on support and funding from organisations including Rural Australians for Refugees, church groups, and individual members of the community.
Rural Australians for Refugees Ballarat convener Margaret O’Donnell said Para has been an upstanding member of the Ballarat community for many years, and his family has earned the respect and admiration of many. Para also founded the Union of Australian Refugees.
This report explores the ways in which refugee-led initiatives (RLIs) in Indonesia support and engage with their communities and other stakeholders, as well as the barriers that they face when conducting their work.
The research team would like to thank Act for Peace, the Asia Pacific Network of Refugees and the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW Sydney for their support throughout this project.
Dutton said he believed he had been “caught in the crossfire” between O’Neil and long-time department secretary Mike Pezzullo.
“The minister obviously is at loggerheads with the secretary,” he said.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have published serious allegations about millions of dollars of Australian government funding for Offshore Processing Centres finding their way through contractors to bank accounts controlled by South Pacific politicians. This comes on top of a history of criticism by the Auditor-General on how providers were selected and contracts managed by the Department of Home Affairs. The blocking of the Labor government’s “Malaysia Arrangement” by the Coalition and the Greens in 2011 was the strategic turning point that sent governments down the pathway to this sad destination.
The most politically sensational of the reports? That the Australian Federal Police told Dutton as home affairs minister in July 2018 that an Australian businessman was under investigation for bribery, and that Dutton’s department awarded the same man’s company a multi-million-dollar government contract a month later.
Scandal has stuck to Morrison, but offshore truths could hit home for Dutton, By Peter Hartcher,SMH
Two official inquiries, one by former police chief Christine Nixon and the other by former public servant Martin Parkinson, are equally scathing. Commissioned by Labor’s Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, they found criminals can eke out a 10-year crime spree on temporary visas alone. The number of people in visa limbo has been rising for years, and appeals are slowing processing times almost to a halt.
As for technology, Parkinson found at Australia’s borders it was, in some cases, 40 years old.
Nixon concluded that the laser focus over the past decade on stopping boat arrivals had taken attention from the department’s core business of helping legitimate migrants arrive and settle, and repelling or expelling the rest.
In an interview, Andrews said she had observed unease among senior public servants about attempts by Pezzullo to centralise power in his office, poor results in the visa processing system and a “massive” staff morale issue. If she had been returned as minister she would have made some “pretty significant” changes, Andrews said.
Asked if the dysfunction was Pezzullo’s responsibility, Andrews said: “It has to be, simply because he’s the secretary of the department.” Quizzed on whether Home Affairs could operate without him she said: “Well, no one’s indispensable.”
We don’t need to wait for tomorrow’s story to know that something has gone deeply wrong here. As with robodebt, obscene amounts of money have been wasted on a system designed to inflict harm, to punish desperate people for having the temerity to seek help. In this case, many appear to have enriched themselves off the back of it, lining their pockets with blood money. Australian politicians have long profited politically off this trail of human misery. But perhaps only a royal commission can get to the bottom of where the money has gone, and measure the true cost of the system we all enabled.
The money trail of human misery. By Rachel Withers, The Monthly
A new documentary about their journey, Freedom Is Beautiful, will screen this weekend in Melbourne. Directed by Angus McDonald, the film follows their flight from Iran, through the years in detention, to finally being able to make new lives in Australia – albeit still not fully free.
Jones says that after his arrival on Nauru on August 5, 2018, many of the children aged 11, 12 and 13 he was treating had been detained for five years. Their every moment – showers, meal times, movements – was timed and monitored by Australian contractors in ways they say were humiliating and debilitating. All were called by their boat number, not their name – a policy he denounces as dehumanising.
As the number of people in need of protection grows every year, it is imperative that unlawful and unsustainable efforts to push the problem elsewhere be reversed. Bringing Australia’s offshore processing policy to an end is an important first step.
But Australia must also look ahead to the challenges and opportunities that forced migration will create in the coming decade.
There is considerable goodwill right now, with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand all signalling a desire to improve their legal frameworks in this area. For instance, Thailand is developing a new “national screening mechanism” to identify refugees, while the Philippines recently revised its systems for determining refugee and statelessness status and has pending legislation on a number of issues.
In return for governments in Southeast Asia adopting reforms, Australia should significantly increase the number of people it resettles from these countries and create other “complementary pathways” to protection. We should also develop more strategic responses in acute crises, just as we did for people fleeing Ukraine last year.
The majority owner of the company that ran Manus Island’s immigration detention centre insists he was only trying to help his mother, who works in the Home Affairs Department, when he transferred more than $1.2 million to her in a series of payments.
The forerunner to the new National Anti-Corruption Commission has investigated the payments and is due to report its findings soon. Some payments were made while the $500 million asylum seeker contract was under way, and several were incorrectly invoiced as “consulting services” and charged via PayPal.
The Australian federal police says it briefed the then home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, on an investigation into alleged bribery one month before his department entered into a new contract with the target of that investigation.
The revelation has prompted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to demand an explanation from the opposition leader, although there is no suggestion Dutton was personally involved in the contract decision. The Greens called for a royal commission.
Iranian PhD students are facing waits of over 12 months for Australian visas despite being awarded scholarships.
The Department of Home Affairs has rejected suggestions applicants from certain countries face more scrutiny.
Hundreds of protesters gathered outside of State Library Victoria on July 22 to demand permanent visas for refugees.
Earlier this year the federal government created a new visa pathway, called Resolution of Status, for 20,000 people who held or applied for a Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) and Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEV) before February 2023.
About 4,000 of these have been granted since February and the Department of Home Affairs promises to process the remaining 16,500 applications within the next seven months.
Ms Dahal says receiving their Resolution of Status ends 11 years of torture and punishment.
But the real celebration will begin the day her family is reunited.
Financial data, internal emails and whistleblower testimony implicate Home Affairs’ lead contractors – Broadspectrum, Canstruct and Paladin – in suspected systemic misuse of taxpayer dollars in Nauru and Papua New Guinea…………..
………….Home Truths, an investigation series by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, can reveal that, on Nauru, a money trail that began in Home Affairs ended with multimillion-dollar payments to businesses controlled by powerful politicians and suspected kickbacks to the island’s political kingmaker, David Adeang…………
……..Queensland-based family company Canstruct, which was paid $1.82 billion over five years to run the Nauru centre after Broadspectrum pulled out, confirmed that one arrangement – to pay millions to a company linked to Nauru’s then president to deliver water – had the backing of Home Affairs.
Whereas once upon a time Australia was regarded as a country of goodwill, tolerance and decency, it is now reputed, worldwide, to be the country with the most inhumane treatment towards refugees.
Australia’s immoral asylum policies. By Roderick St George, P & I
In December 2021, Australia announced it had ended offshore processing in PNG but did not declare it had signed a secret agreement to pay PNG to provide welfare and support for the people still held there.
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