Australian Immigration Daily News

I have forgotten my password to my own blogger profile and I dare not ask my PA today for my password on her day off.  So here it is.  This is what I have come up with today.  An adaption from one doing the round for lawyers.  Liana Allan 

There is hope for the hopeless although the process of reconsidering his visa cancellation left Ricardo Bolvaran with ‘thoughts about suicide’.

Despite having lived in Australia for 41 of his 42 years, Mr Bolvaran, a recovering ice addict, was deported to Chile, the country of his birth late last year following his imprisonment in Brisbane's Wacol prison for drugs-related offences. Given that s501 of the Migration Act allows for automatic cancellation, if he had refused to leave, he would have been detained on Christmas Island while the DIBP reconsidered the cancellation decision.

However, within some 6 months of his deportation, the decision to cancel his visa was revoked yesterday by the DIBP paving the way for him to return to Australia.

Essentially any damage on travel documents that result in machine-reading failure or affect critical identity information can result in the document being impounded and that the traveller being detained or prevented from travel, according to the Standard Operating Procedure manual (SOP) of the Australian Border Force.

Under legislation, it is a serious offence to use or facilitate the use of a cancelled or otherwise invalid Australian travel document. The SOP which was released on an FOI request states that, suspicious, cancelled or invalid travel documents and travel documents where the holder has a financial debt to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) which are presented at the border should be impounded by a delegated officer.

While the SOP notes that immigration officers have an over-riding obligation to facilitate the entry and departure of Australian citizens in a timely manner, they are however required to impound travel documents which they determine are “not usable as evidence of identity and citizenship of its holder or to facilitate international travel.”

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Imagine that you have arrived at your office one fine autumn morning, and are happily drinking your coffee and reading the case law updates on the Migration Alliance blog when your phone rings and you get an urgent request for help, as follows:

“My partner visa has been cancelled by the Department!! Is there anything you can do to help me?”

And imagine further, that when you ask the potential client why the Department has cancelled his visa, he tells you the following:

We have very recently had a (lively!) debate on this blog about whether the Migration Act “tramples” on “common law” rights.

Coincidentally or not, there has just been a decision from the Federal Court which reinforces the concept that the requirement for “procedural fairness” is one of the basic cornerstones of the Act.

(As regular readers of this blog may recall, the failure to provide procedural fairness is one of the very few grounds upon which a decision by the Minister to cancel a visa on character grounds may be overturned).