‘A state of disrepair’: Home affairs minister slams immigration system
The Age | 16 Nov 2022
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil has declared Australia’s migration system is broken and is being exploited by overseas criminals, and has flagged an independent inquiry to examine revelations of widespread visa rorting linked to sex trafficking, foreign worker exploitation and drug crime.
In her strongest comments yet about the failings in the system, O’Neil blamed her predecessor, Liberal Peter Dutton, and revealed she had received expert advice that “tens of thousands of people” might be unlawfully in Australia, including many who are exploited foreign workers.
“We’ve ended up with a system where there’s massive visa queues and where the people who actually legitimately want to use the system can’t properly use it. And yet criminals who want to bring people into the country as slaves are able to somehow do it,” O’Neil said.
“We’ve got to change the way that this system operates.”
O’Neil made the comments after she was privately briefed by Australian Federal Police commissioner Reece Kershaw and Border Force commissioner Michael Outram in response to a series of reports in this masthead about organised crime exploitation of the visa system.
O’Neil was responding to Trafficked, a project led by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, 60 Minutes and Stan’s Revealed documentary program which casts a light on visa rorting, sex trafficking and foreign worker exploitation in Australia. Among the reports was that of a human trafficking boss who entered Australia in 2014 and built a criminal underground sex empire despite having previously been jailed in the UK for similar offending.
“The migration system is in a state of disrepair,” said O’Neil said, blaming Dutton, now the opposition leader, for the problems.
The Trafficked “investigation has uncovered, repulsive criminal wrongdoing in our country”, she said. “There’s some systemic issues here about the way that our migration system has been run down … creating direct criminal conduct in our country and putting Australians in danger.”
The minister said it was vital to get “independent eyes on what’s happened here”. She wanted “answers to why various law enforcement bodies within the Australian government had information that was needed to prevent harm occurring in the Australian community, and that information didn’t get to the right people at the right time”.
O’Neil has already commissioned a review of how problems in the migration system – including huge backlogs in visa processing – are denying Australia access to desperately needed foreign skilled workers.
Trafficked has revealed how state and federal agencies have spent years issuing confidential warnings of migration rorting, involving syndicates gaming the visa system to bring criminals or exploited workers into Australia. This is facilitated by networks of corrupt federal government licensed migration agents, education colleges, fixers and people who rort the English language test.
Border security failures enabled human trafficking boss Binjun Xie to allegedly set up an underground sex network across Australia, and authorities have also uncovered repeated rorting of visa streams by Vietnamese cannabis crop producers and traffickers in Australia.
O’Neil said the revelations had highlighted “the failure of our visa system” as well as “dodgy educational institutions that are clearly set up as fronts to bring people into the country, some of whom go on to commit crimes”.
“And the question is, why was this problem let run for so long?”
“There are systemic problems ... It’s not about a bad apple here or there, but in fact this interaction between education providers, between visa systems that aren’t working properly and between migration agents, who are not properly regulated. There is a real problem here and that’s why I think this needs to be properly looked at and properly addressed.
“Criminals are coming into our country operating with impunity and no one’s doing anything about it.
“The expert evidence does suggest that during that nine years that the Coalition was in power, literally tens of thousands of people came into our country. They might be exploited farm workers, they might be women who are trapped in sexual slavery. The human consequences of these problems are enormous, and we’ve got to change the way that this system operates so we can have a properly run migration system.”
In a statement, Dutton said he had “zero tolerance when it comes to any attempt to exploit our visa system and vulnerable individuals”.
“As minister for immigration and border protection, I oversaw establishment of Taskforce Cadena … which specifically detects and disrupts criminal syndicates who seek to profit off vulnerable foreign workers,” he said.
He said he would support any further measures “to combat visa fraud within the Australian migration system”.
www.samigration.com
