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From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

DANIEL:

The treatment – or mistreatment – of refugees fleeing to Australia has been the wellspring of Australian politics for almost a quarter of a century.

This time, it's Peter Dutton with his call for Palestinians fleeing Gaza to be banned from coming to Australia. Language designed to make the government look soft when it comes to national security.

It comes at a time when ASIO has called for politicians to dial down the heated and divisive rhetoric consuming national conversations with fear it could spark violence within the community.

Today, former Deputy Secretary of the department of Immigration Abul Rizvi on the new low we’ve reached – and why Peter Dutton’s ban makes no sense.

It’s Tuesday, August 20.

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DANIEL:

Abul, thanks for joining us. You were a senior official at the Department of Immigration for decades and responsible for the migration program for ten years. Can you describe to me what level of support the Australian government has offered Palestinians fleeing Gaza, and how that compares to people fleeing past conflicts?

ABUL:

To date, the only thing the government has offered to people fleeing Gaza is the opportunity to apply for a visitor visa. We need to remember, absolutely anybody can apply for a visitor visa. And so those visitor visas are the minimal offering that a government can make. Or indeed, it's probably the most minimalist offering we have made to people fleeing war and conflict, at least in the last 30 years.

In the last 30 years, in every instance, we have offered some form of humanitarian pathway to people fleeing war and conflict.

So in the late 1990s, about 1998, there was the Balkan War, and there was significant bombing of places in Kosovo, And the whole world was saying, this is an appalling situation. Something must be done. Australia, under Prime Minister John Howard at the time, eventually offered seven to 8000 places for Kosovar refugees to come to Australia. Those people were taken directly out of refugee camps where they had just escaped. In terms of the documentation many of those people would have had, some would have had passports, many would not have had passports. Our ability to check or do the normal security checking in those circumstances was minimal. Nevertheless, it was recognised by the Howard Government that these people were facing severe peril and they had to be evacuated quickly. What we did was we arranged for flights out of that war zone back to Australia. We didn't offer them visitor visas. We said, we will let you get onto a plane. We will give you these special humanitarian visas. We will feed you and house you until that war subsides, which is what we did. In other words, we offer those people far, far more than anything that we have offered people fleeing Gaza today. I think that contrast between the views of Mr. Dutton, contrasting with what Mr. Howard did at the time, is just quite extraordinary.

Now, that's not the only time that happened. We did similar things when a year later, the Indonesian army was invading East Timor. And we were trying to protect the East Timorese. The coalition government did something similar when the Taliban returned to Afghanistan. It shows what Australia can do when it puts its mind to it.

DANIEL:

As you say, the government is offered visitor visas. And there's been a lot of criticism about the level of security screening that happens under these visas. So can you describe that screening process and how it compares to something like a permanent humanitarian visa?

ABUL:

Sure. So a visitor visa is only a visa that is going to allow someone to stay in Australia for three months. The person will initially be screened in terms of what is known as the genuine visit requirement. And I suspect the vast majority of people who are being refused are being refused because they do not fit the requirements of being able to demonstrate that they intend a genuine visit. If the person is possibly headed for an approval, they will be checked against what is known as the Movement Alert list. And if the individual is on the movement alert list, there will be a discussion with ASIO and the person is most likely to then be refused on security grounds. If there are other flags that come up that suggest there may be a security or a character issue. The case would be referred to ASIO, and ASIO would undertake their own background checks, including things like checking with partners in the Five Eyes, checking with relevant other governments where appropriate. Checking what kind of things they've been saying on social media. And ASIO will then make a decision.

I think it's important to understand here that if the person expresses support for some of the objectives of Hamas, ASIO director general has said that will not necessarily lead to a refusal, for example, one objective of Hamas is an independent Palestinian state. If a person expresses support for that objective of Hamas, clearly that would be just about everybody in Palestine. So that won't lead to a refusal. However, if the person expresses support for Hamas's violent objectives of, using violence to create a Palestinian state that may well lead to a refusal on security grounds.

DANIEL:

The government has called Peter Dutton out in the coalition's own use of visitor visas. Can you tell me how the coalition has used these visas in the past, and if there's any difference between how they're being used now?

ABUL:

I think a good example is the Ukraine crisis, where visitor visas were used for people initially fleeing Ukraine who were getting into places like Poland or Hungary and then applying for visitor visas to Australia. Australia was providing those individuals with visitor visas and then also providing them with a humanitarian pathway for extended stay in Australia. In that instance, there were no concerns raised about security checks. No security checks would have been taking place for people where red flags were raised and they would have gone through a very similar process. So in that instance, concerns were not raised. In this instance, concerns are being raised and it's not clear what the difference is.

DANIEL:

Could you take a swing at what the difference might be?

ABUL:

[Laughs] I think the politics of this is very different to the politics of people coming from Ukraine. The Australian government and the opposition were at one in terms of the Ukrainian, Russian, war, I think, on the issue of Gaza. There is a difference between the two major political parties, and I suspect that is driving the difference in approach.

DANIEL:

Coming up after the break - what is Peter Dutton’s own record on immigration?

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DANIEL:

Abul, so you've talked about the visa application process, both for visitors and for people coming into Australia on permanent humanitarian visas. What exactly is Peter Dutton proposing? What has he actually said? What's his solution here?

ABUL:

Well, when he was initially interviewed on this, he used the words “at all”.

Audio excerpt — Speaker 1:

“I do want to ask you about the security checks on Palestinians coming in from Gaza. Your thoughts on that this morning?”

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“Well, I just think every Australian would be shocked to think that the government is bringing in people from a war zone.”

ABUL:

In other words, they shouldn't be getting visas at all.

Audio excerpt — Peter Dutton:

“I don't think people should be coming in from that war zone at all at the moment. It's not prudent to do so, and I think it puts our national security at risk.”

ABUL:

The problem with that position is that what he is recommending is unlawful.

There is nothing in the current law which says people from Palestine should never be eligible for a visitor visa.

I think it wouldn't be an easy law to change. I think there would be serious issues that would arise. I suspect we'd be looking at High Court challenges and that sort of thing. But let's assume that's what Mr. Dutton wanted to do. He'd have to go through that legal process.

In the meantime, I get the impression that, after the initial interview, further consideration has been given to what should happen.

Audio excerpt — David Speers:

“David Littleproud, welcome to the program.”

Audio excerpt — David Littleproud:

“Yeah, thanks for having me.”

ABUL:

For example, Mr. Littleproud has said we should be looking at biometrics now.

Audio excerpt — David Littleproud:

“With biometric testing and doing it in third country. And Peter Dutton made that very clear, that that's a sensible way that's worked previously for Australia…”

ABUL:

Now biometrics are things like fingerprints, etc. taking fingerprints from these applicants, well firstly would be very difficult, but let's assume you could take fingerprints. That doesn't actually help you in deciding the visa, unless you can run the fingerprints and match them against the fingerprint database, presumably of people who are members of Hamas. Unless we've got such a database, taking fingerprints doesn't actually help at all.

The second suggestion has been face to face interviews. Now we need to remember ASIO doesn't conduct, generally, face to face interviews with visa applicants. Face to face interviews with visa applicants are conducted if they are conducted at all by the Visa Processing Officer from the Department of Home Affairs. They are not looking at security issues. They are looking at whether the person meets the criteria of a genuine visit. If there are flags regarding character or security, then that will be referred to ASIO. Face to face interviews don't actually help a lot in terms of assessing national security risks.

DANIEL:

Abul, Peter Dutton was immigration minister from 2014 to 2018…he would know full well how a lot of these political machinations you’ve talked about actually work. So how does his rhetoric match up to his record?

ABUL:

His rhetoric has been quite hardline. That's undoubtedly true. And he did make changes to the migration intake in terms of its size. The Permanent Migration Program. And after the 20,000 special allocation for people fleeing ISIS that was administered when he was Minister for immigration. He didn't announce that, that was announced by Malcolm Turnbull. He had to administer it. He would have gone through the checking processes that are currently being used by ASIO. So he would understand how those checking processes work. And he would note that there wasn't a blanket refusal there, but 20,000 people were visaed largely whilst he was immigration minister. At the same time, and I think many Australians would not be aware of this. Whilst he was Immigration Minister, there took place the largest labour trafficking scam in Australia's history abusing the asylum system.

DANIEL:

You want to tell us about that?

ABUL:

So what happened is that from about 2015 onwards, until Covid, we had a massive increase in people being brought into the country from initially from Malaysia on visitor visas and subsequently from China on visitor visas. Those people were being assisted by traffickers. Those traffickers were bringing those people in, helping them to apply for asylum, which gave them work rights for a period, then putting them to work on farms, in sex shops, on construction sites. And the trafficker would take a cut out of those people's wages in order to profit from that business. We need to remember labour trafficking of that sort is the second biggest criminal industry on the planet, behind drug trafficking. That took place when minister, Mr. Dutton was immigration minister. The bulk of the people who were trafficked into the country at that time are still here. On any objective measure. Mr. Dutton was the biggest failure in terms of border protection that we have had in our history.

DANIEL:

Given what we know about Dutton’s record and how he’s spoken about immigration for years, should it really be a surprise that we’re hearing about this now?

ABUL:

It does surprise me. It is unprecedented. I cannot recall a time in our history where any major party political leaders said, no, we will not accept anyone from this war zone. Yes, in the past, we have debated how we should respond, how quickly we should respond, what level of assistance we should provide, what financial assistance we should provide, what housing assistance we should provide. We've debated all of that. But no one, no major political leader has ever said no. Absolutely not one person should come in.

What Australia should have done is to create a humanitarian pathway, a humanitarian visa pathway for people who are escaping Palestine right now. Now, it could design that visa and set the criteria in such a way that you narrow down the people that you helped. For example, you could narrow it right down to people who have some sort of familial link to an Australian citizen. You could also narrow it down to people who, for example, are at extreme peril or extreme risk. For example, they could be people who have been orphaned but have a family relative in Australia, no family at all in Palestine because they've been killed, they’re young children. An obvious category for us to be assisting.That is the most sensible way of proceeding. It's the way we proceeded, always in the past. We've been successful at doing that in the past. Why we wouldn't be repeating that is really a function of politics, not a function of good policy.

DANIEL:

Finally Abul, what does the history of our policies towards refugees say about us as a nation?

ABUL:

We've run a refugee program since World War two. We were the first country to take Jewish displaced people out of World War two, when at a time when every other country in the world said, no, we're not going to take Jews. We're just not going to do it. We broke the logjam. It was Australia that… I'm sorry. Ever since then. We have consistently been at the forefront of developing good policy on how to help people fleeing conflicts. We are good at it. Why we're not doing that now is a really sad reflection on where our politics is at.

DANIEL:

What does that say about us?

ABUL:

We are changing. We are changing as a nation.

DANIEL:

Abul, thank you for your time.

ABUL:

You’re welcome.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today,

The Labor government has agreed to a Coalition demand to put the CFMEU into a minimum three-year administration.

During the administration, the union will be barred from making political donations.

The CFMEU was thrust into the spotlight in July over allegations of corruption and links to organised crime.

AND

Hamas has rejected the latest US proposal for a ceasefire and hostage deal with Israel

The group accused the Israeli prime minister of setting new proposals that ignored their long-standing conditions.

Earlier, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Israeli cabinet he would remain firm. The Hamas run Health Ministry reports the death toll in Gaza has surpassed 40,000.

If you enjoyed today’s show, we would appreciate you sharing it.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. We’ll be back tomorrow.

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