It is the second political controversy to strike Foster this year after she blindsided Giles and Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil by released a document to the Senate on February 12 detailing the number of murderers, rapists and violent offenders freed from immigration detention following November’s landmark High Court ruling outlawing indefinite immigration detention.
Giles has been under fire from the Coalition over a ministerial direction he issued in January last year that has been linked to several decisions by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal preventing foreign criminals with longstanding connections to Australia from being deported.
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Opposition Leader Peter Dutton asked Giles in parliamentary question time on Tuesday about the case of a New Zealand citizen who was allowed to stay in Australia despite raping his stepdaughter. Government lawyers had unsuccessfully argued for the man’s visa to be revoked.
Giles told parliament he had cancelled the man’s visa and it had remained cancelled by Home Affairs until the tribunal overruled his decision.
“Now, I believe it is a decision that should still be cancelled, and I advise the House also that I have prioritised a number of cases for urgent cancellation consideration,” Giles said.
This masthead revealed on Tuesday that almost one in five released detainees had been charged with fresh crimes since the court decision, which prompted questions about when the government would use as-yet-untested preventative detention laws to lock up those at high risk of offending again.
Compounding Labor’s immigration woes, Giles faced a barrage of questions in parliament over the tribunal’s interpretation of ministerial direction 99, which says significant weight must be given to a person’s ties to Australia.
The ministerial direction was issued on January 23, 2023 to assuage the New Zealand government’s concerns that its citizens were being deported in large numbers even when they had stronger ties to Australia than to New Zealand.
Last week, it emerged that the tribunal had in April released former immigration detainee Emmanuel Saki, who was charged with murder the following month. The tribunal reinstated Saki’s visa on March 27, partly due to direction 99.
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Questioning Foster over the bureaucratic failure, Paterson said, “someone has allegedly been murdered as a result of someone being released following a successful AAT appeal”.
Giles told question time he had since re-cancelled Saki’s visa, “and as the matter is before the courts, I will say nothing more”.
Giles has also issued a “please explain” to his department, and told parliament a number of cases before the tribunal were not raised with him.
“I’ve asked the department for an explanation,” he said. “My department is now looking at all these cases as a priority, and they are all under cancellation consideration.”
Home Affairs’ latest visa cancellation statistics show that, as of December 31, there was a significant reduction of visa cancellations on character grounds – particularly for New Zealanders – in the first six months of 2023-24.
From 2019-20, when the Coalition deported 939 people on character grounds, numbers have plummeted by roughly 75 per cent post-pandemic, to 244 so far in the 2023-24 financial year.
But a department spokesperson said the majority of cancellations were not subject to that ministerial direction.
