Immigration Minister Andrew Giles has re-cancelled the visas of seven people and is examining at least another 23 cases where an administrative tribunal overturned cancellations based on a controversial ministerial direction.
But he couldn’t give a timeframe for when a new direction to guide the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and bureaucrats in his own department on visa cancellations would be ready.
The government has become embroiled in a fresh immigration scandal as details emerged of dozens of cases where the AAT had overturned visa cancellations for people convicted of horrendous crimes.
Home Affairs officials failed to tell Mr Giles the department had been losing these cases.
They were linked to the “direction 99” Mr Giles signed in January last year, which instructed decision-makers to “generally afford a higher level of tolerance” to criminal conduct by foreigners who had spent most of their lives in Australia.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Wednesday Mr Giles would be issuing a replacement direction.
The minister said on Thursday he had met several times this week with senior Home Affairs officials to make this happen as quickly as possible.
“We believe that these decisions need to be guided by two clear principles: the protection of the Australian community and by common sense,” he told ABC radio.
“That’s what we’re doing to set that out in terms of the new direction, to ensure that we will have a common sense approach applied, focusing on ensuring the protection of the community outweighs other considerations.
“We want to strengthen the role of victims and the impact on them and their family members in the consideration, because that’s something that we feel has been lacking, as well as of course, ensuring that the family violence considerations are consistent with the expectations of government and the wider Australian community.”
A January 2023 department briefing to the minister about direction 99 said it could not come into effect until six weeks after Mr Giles signed it “to ensure procedural fairness” for cases before the AAT.
The same briefing note, and an earlier one from August, anticipated about 2800 of the 5000 cases before the tribunal would be potentially affected by the change.
At Senate estimates on Thursday morning, the Government confirmed Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus – the nation’s first law officer – had no role in the drafting of the controversial direction 99.