A Lot Of People Are Outraged At Australia’s Immigration Minister

Image by Johann Ponniah

Australia’s Immigration Ministers rarely receive fan mail. Running the country’s most high profile and controversial department is a thoroughly unsexy gig, especially because it has become synonymous with getting rid of “boat people”. Being hated by the general voting public is just part of the job description. Unfortunately, Scott Morrison has recently started to prove himself especially good at being criticised.

In late 2013, most of the criticism levelled at Australia’s new and notoriously hardline Immigration Minister was predictably focused on asylum seekers, as well as those increasingly secretive non-briefings about foreign boat arrivals. Now, just four months into the new Abbott government, a dark horse is creating additional problems for Morrison and his department: visa processing.

Mainland visa processing is an undeniably boring topic, and it rarely makes its way into the major news headlines. It has none of the punch of asylum seekers, or the campaign support of vocal lobby groups, such as Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Despite this, the topic has snowballed in the last month, in part due to a lot of grassroots campaigning, citizen petitions, and the regurgitative nature of online media.

One major example of this involves a 23-year-old international student, Minh Duong. Minh arrived in Australia at 16-years-old on a student visa, which saw him graduate from a Melbourne high school and enrol in accounting at Swinburne University. He says his visa is valid until March. Australia’s immigration officials don’t agree, and this month forcibly deported Minh back home to Vietnam, and banned him from Australia for three years.

Being blacklisted by an entire nation wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for anybody, but Minh’s case is especially traumatic. In 2012, Minh was almost killed by a bunch of Melbourne neo-Nazis. This unprovoked attack saw him punched, kicked, stabbed, and a brick literally broken over his head. Minh faced eloquent slurs like, “you fucking gook”, and $25,000 worth of missing front teeth. Post-deportation, Minh is still waiting for dental surgery.

Minh’s story is compelling, but it mightn’t have been heard if it wasn’t quickly uploaded on the petition website Change.Org by Minh’s friend and piano teacher Adrian De Luca’s. Adrian’s argued that Australia has a responsibility to protect and foster Minh after what our (repugnant) citizens did to him in 2012. “I’m shocked and ashamed that our government could do this to him,” he writes of Minh’s deportation.”

Adrian’s memo to Scott Morrison quickly registered with Australians and has so far collected 85,000 signatures. It is subsequently generating a lot of sympathetic news headlines and a serious migraine for the Department of Immigration. Last week Morrison and his various mouthpieces maintained that Minh was being treated as an “unlawful non-citizen” and that the Minister has “no legal authority” to intervene in his case. Morrison also had a big stab at various media outlets (mostly the ABC) for “creating the impression” that he is refusing to do anything.

Minh isn’t the only person the Department has recently attempted to boot. The case of Ali Choudhry is a little more complex. This Pakistani man’s partnership visa application was rejected—he was given just seven days to leave the country—after Ali let a prior visa expire. Staying in the country without a valid visa is a cardinal sin of Australian immigration, and the reasons behind this are an admittedly confusing saga that includes two natural disasters.

The punch line: Ali has been in a gay relationship with an Australian dude for four years. When Ali asked for help with $15,000 in immigration lawyers’ fees on the crowd funding website, Pozible this detail sparked widespread outrage and allegations of governmental homophobia. As with the case of Minh, an online plea lead to sympathetic news headlines and a viral GetUp petition directed squarely at Morrison. The petition has 143,000 signatures to date.

Ali has since been given a temporary reprieve, but his case continues to raise questions about the Department’s recognition of same-sex relationships (already a touchy subject given the government’s open stance on this issue). As you’d expect there’s a lot of outrage about the decision to deport an openly gay man to a country where homosexuals face imprisonment. “Callous”, “irresponsible”, and “mean-spirited” are some G-rated insults recently directed at Morrison due to Ali’s case.

So, who is actually at fault? Despite the last month’s vocal community outrage, it is actually pretty unclear if the Department of Immigration is becoming the Grinch that stole visas. Changing entrenched internal procedures around visa processing is something that takes much longer than four months in power… even for the most overzealous of hardliners. This means it’s possible that the close timing of Ali and Minh’s cases is just one unhappy coincidence for the new government’s publicists.

It’s also worth noting that Australia has a record of questionable immigration decisions going back to the last seven Immigration Ministers and is particularly messy around the time of the Howard government’s Philip Ruddock and Amanda Vanstone—Australian voters really didn’t like them. Infamous examples during this period involve two mentally ill women, Vivan Solon and Cornelia Rau. The former was deported for four years in 2001 even though she was a citizen; the latter was detained for almost a year under suspicion of illegal immigration—despite being a permanent resident. These monumental cockups prompted a government inquiry.

Even the Rudd/Gillard government faced its share of visa bungles. In December, Australians became outraged over the dramatic story of Ayan, a 22-year-old Somali woman disfigured by a gunshot to the face as a child. When a team of Brisbane surgeons decided to bring Ayan to Australia for facial reconstruction last year her medical visa application was denied by Immigration on grounds she was a “non-genuine visitor” that may try to stay in Australia permanently.

Ayan’s visa decision was eventually overturned this month due to another huge e-petition, and some hammy but effective coverage on Channel 10. Interestingly, a lot of the public outrage over her case was directed at (you guessed it) Morrison and the current Department of Immigration—Ayan’s original visa was actually rejected during the Labor government’s term in early 2012. This post-script was left out of a lot of news reports, probably because journalists simply rehashed Ayan’s original Change.Org petition.

But let’s not whip out a tiny violin just yet.

This week another story surfaced in the media regarding the Department’s decision making processes. Wen Xiang ''Gary'' Mao’s story is similar to Minh’s, although thankfully without the neo-Nazi bashing. Last month the 16-year-old Chinese student was told he had until this week to leave the country, even though the last government’s Minister of Immigration Tony Burke had granted him a visa exemption. On Monday evening Morrison’s office admitted they’d made a departmental “error” and retracted their allegation that Gary was chilling out in Australia without a valid visa.

Clear cockups like Gary’s certainly show there are grounds to look into the Department’s processes. Amanda Atlee, a spokesperson for Amnesty International Australia, told VICE that there are heaps of question marks over the country’s evolving deportation policies, and the haste with which it makes decisions on visa denials. Unfortunately, these questions aren’t getting a lot of answers for the journalists and activists who ask them, and there’s a growing trend towards not dishing out information about visas or asylum seekers.

Atlee goes on to say there is an issue surrounding the “lack of information around deportations”, and notes there have been “subtle” procedural changes under the new Department, such as denying asylum seekers proper shoes until they "agree to leave to leave the country". Amnesty International is also finding it increasingly hard to get anything from the Department without freedom of information requests. Atlee says this is leading to a general feeling of “secrecy” around deportations, and concerns that the Department is moving towards a fast track visa-processing scheme based on a failed UK model.

Neither the Minister’s office or Department responded to questions.

Follow Emilia on Twitter: @EmiliaKate