Dutton’s head-hunting mission

At the best of times, Minister for Immigration Andrew Giles can look like the proverbial rabbit caught in the spotlight. Mild-mannered, quietly spoken and very earnest, Giles was in the opposition’s crosshairs all week with increasingly strident demands that he be sacked.

Hampering Giles’s ability to return the heavy political fire coming his way is the fact he is no headkicker. He is aware it is never in Labor’s interests to inflame the fears and prejudices that inevitably engulf the immigration portfolio.

Giles is anxious to lower the temperature and regularly seeks the counsel of senior ministers. He is determined to ride out the onslaught, aware of the heavy expectations on him among his backbench colleagues readying to defend their seats.

No one has any illusions that the real scalp the Coalition is after is Anthony Albanese’s, and with it the demise of his government.

Labor in its return to office after almost a decade has not done the Liberals the favour of falling apart. There have been no ministerial resignations, forced or otherwise, to create or reinforce the perception the government is fracturing. Team Dutton has had to work very hard to manufacture a crisis that could force the issue.

Nothing fits the bill better than foreigners, who Dutton says are already responsible for traffic congestion and the housing crisis, among other things. It suits the narrative perfectly: criminal non-citizen residents are also now being given soft-touch treatment, putting community safety at grave risk.

We got a taste of that with the first question when parliament resumed this week. Dutton directed it to Giles, but its framing revealed the true target. The immigration minister had introduced a new direction 99 to his department last year, which made a person’s ties to their community relevant in decision-making. The Administrative Appeals Tribunal was obliged to consider this, along with four other priorities, in determining deportation of criminals.

Dutton cited a child rapist who was, he claimed, able to use direction 99 to have the AAT reverse his visa cancellation. This “watering down” of the law has made our country less safe, he said. “When will the Albanese government apologise for this catastrophic mistake and reverse direction 99?”

Opposition members cited other examples of criminals, some of whom they alleged to have committed repeated and heinous offences, who similarly had their visa cancellations overturned by the tribunal. Albanese was able to tell parliament the following day that under Dutton’s stewardship as minister, “hundreds were released” in similar circumstances. Indeed, that was before any High Court ruling on the illegality of indefinite detention.

Direction 99 was introduced after much soul-searching within the government. Ministers were concerned it could lead to reoffending – a risk the community takes every time bail is granted or a sentence has been served. This is the situation now, with 30 or more offenders in contention, all of whom have served their sentences.

Overriding those fears, however, was the commitment Albanese made soon after coming to government to New Zealand’s then prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

The Kiwis had complained long and hard that Canberra was sending hundreds of criminals “made in Australia” across the Tasman, even though many had lived here for much of their lives and now had tenuous connections, or none, with the land of their birth. Albanese rightly saw this tension as corrosive to one of the closest, if not the closest, of our international relationships.

Giles pointed out that the department applying direction 99 along with the other considerations had still revoked every one of the identified visas. Those other directions, according to the minister, have equal or more weight depending on the circumstances. They are, in addition to “strength, nature and duration of ties to Australia”, protection of the Australian community from criminal conduct; family violence; best interests of minor children; and expectations of the Australian community.

On Wednesday, Giles announced he had reviewed the directions on visas in light of the AAT “not showing common sense” in the application of its decisions. “First and foremost”, he told parliament, he would be “ensuring that the protection of the community outweighs other considerations”.

Giles is confident the new Administrative Review Tribunal that replaces the AAT – which was abolished this week by the parliament without the support of the Coalition – will perform much better. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said the Liberals had “fatally compromised the AAT” by appointing as many as 85 former Liberals without any criteria of competence for the job. They will all have to reapply for their jobs on the new tribunal under merit-based selection benchmarks.

The minister is now reviewing 30 other tribunal decisions his department, contrary to protocols, failed to bring to his attention. He told parliament he will use his discretionary powers to overrule the AAT, though this does not rule out appeals to the Federal Court.

In a sensational admission, the Department of Home Affairs secretary, Stephanie Foster, confirmed to Senate estimates on Tuesday night that Giles was not informed of the contentious cases that had gone to the tribunal. Foster admitted it was “extraordinary”, she regretted it and would now throw more resources at the issue.

The problem for the government is it creates the impression the department is a shambles and Giles has lost control. Seven News political editor Mark Riley raised questions about the minister’s ability to survive in the job, citing cabinet ministers “conceding” his days could be numbered.

Any minister, of course, is doomed if their performance is judged to be too great a negative for the government, a distraction getting in the way of its ability to set the agenda. Presentation and performance is, after all, half the job.

Midweek Albanese gave a curt “I do” when asked if he still had confidence in Giles as immigration minister. He had, however, come armed with examples of Dutton himself being overruled by the AAT in his visa cancellations, with the tribunal citing his ministerial directions allowing a “higher level of tolerance”.

The prime minister accused Dutton of “wallowing in hypocrisy” after the opposition’s vote to defend the “rorted” AAT.

While this brouhaha was dominating parliament, the monthly inflation indicator continued its slow climb of the past six months, with the latest reading coming in at 3.6 per cent. Inexplicably, the Liberals didn’t ask one question about it, even though it offered them ammunition on the cost of living and the government’s struggle to contain rising prices. They didn’t point to energy and rental rises to tie in with their anti-immigration rhetoric of last week.

Ahead of the release Treasurer Jim Chalmers had briefed the media that the monthly figures were “volatile and less reliable” than the quarterly measure because they didn’t compare the same goods and services month to month. He said the quarterly figures showed the downward direction, with inflation almost halving in two years, and he stood by his budget’s forecasts of inflation continuing to fall.

As always, it will be the view the Reserve Bank board takes of the data when it next meets that will count. Another interest rate rise would be more than enough to get the opposition back on to the main game of the economy. They would, however, have to come up with something more attractive than promising to slash government services by sacking public servants, or delivering cheaper nuclear-powered energy sometime in the next three decades.

The Greens brought the parliament’s attention back to the deteriorating human catastrophe in Gaza. Adam Bandt asked Albanese if he would “condemn the calls” from Dutton to consider cutting ties with the International Criminal Court if it issued warrants for the arrest of Israel’s war cabinet. Pointedly, he asked if Australia would abide by those warrants as they applied to the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Albanese ignored the specifics of the question in his answer, clearly not wishing to provoke what is a volatile situation among the Jewish and Muslim communities in Australia. He was one with the International Court of Justice, however, in its calls for Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive in Rafah”.

Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong told Senate estimates, “The death and destruction in Rafah is horrific, this human suffering is unacceptable. We reiterate to the government of Israel, this cannot continue. We must see an immediate humanitarian ceasefire so that civilians can be protected.”

Wong called for the release of all hostages held by Hamas and for the free flow of aid “at scale”.

Bandt said these words meant nothing without action. He attempted to have the parliament call for the immediate recognition of Palestine as a state – that motion failed by a vote of 80 to 5.

Bandt’s calls were supported by one of Albanese’s senators, however. Fatima Payman, the hijab-wearing Muslim daughter of Afghan refugees who fled the Taliban, cited heartbreaking videos coming out of Rafah. “We must demand an end to this genocide, stop all trade, divest and recognise a Palestinian state,” she said.

Payman has quietly withdrawn from a Senate foreign affairs committee but has never resiled from her “from the river to the sea” call – at direct odds with Albanese, the government and a majority of the parliament.

The prime minister and the young Western Australian senator have had an earnest conversation that neither will discuss. Payman’s personal welfare is a priority of her colleagues, and she says it is a privilege to serve as a Labor senator for her state.