The ABF has revealed that it routinely conducts operations like the one it abandoned on Friday in Melbourne. This is despite the fact that the Migration Act provides no scope for officers to demand visa details from people who happen to cross their path.

Section 188 of the Migration Act essentially states that identity documents may be requested when an ‘officer knows or reasonably suspects’ a person is a non-citizen.

How would an officer know or suspect that a person is non-citizen, without a tip-off? Racial profiling makes for easy targets. Perhaps even spotting someone reading a foreign language book, may be good enough. Such are the wide-powers under s 188. To make things worse, s189 allows the officer to arrest that person if the officer suspects that person is an unlawful citizen.

In explaining the failed Operation Fortitude, an ABF statement pointed out that, “Joint operations of this type are common and were previously conducted by Departmental immigration officers.” Surprisingly, there hasn’t been much discussion in the media about what may well be illegal operations whereby innocent people are confronted by these officers to give up their identity documents, where there may be no need to do so.

Leanne Weber ARC Future Fellow in Internal Border Policing at Monash University in an article in The Conversation says that ABF officers acting on suspicion by way of tip-offs from the police, do so with ‘little scrutiny’. This lack of scrutiny, Dr Weber says has led to the deportation of several overseas born Australians, including Vivian Solon and Cornelia Rau.

The top brass of the ABF and even the minister in-charge have denied knowledge of the news release which announced the joint ABF and Victorian Police operation which among other things would have profiled people and stopped them on the streets of Melbourne to enquire about their visa status.

However The Guardian reports that, “The “very, very badly worded” Australian Border Force press release that appeared to threaten random visa checks on the streets of Melbourne was twice sent to the office of the immigration minister, Peter Dutton.”

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, described the saga as one of the government’s most “catastrophically silly” ideas on Saturday.  I don’t think there’s a single Victorian and indeed a single Australian whose jaw just didn’t hit the ground.”

The Greens called for the powers of border force officers to be clarified. “It needs to be cleaned up; they’re not an arm of the military and they’re not a police force,” Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told the ABC, adding: “It’s not clear at all what they think their role is, what indeed the powers are.”

The prime minister, Tony Abbott, said his department had no prior knowledge of the operation.

He said nothing untoward had happened except the agency had issued a poorly worded press release, describing it as a mistake and “over the top”.

Almost half of the number of people who can call themselves Australians are born overseas or have both parents born overseas. However, these new Australians, despite their immense contribution to their adopted home still face the uphill task of being accepted.

For most of Australia’s history since European settlement, migrants from Europe and specifically the United Kingdom have been the dominant arrival group. This trend continued well into the mid-late 1900s. In recent decades however Asia has become the main source region for migrants, particularly from Southern Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan) and Chinese Asia (China, Mongolia, Hong Kong and Taiwan) according to the DIBP report, “The Place of Migrants in Contemporary Australia”.

In terms of their contribution, the report says that migrants and their children contribute significantly to the Australian economy. Its data shows that the children of migrants achieve high level qualifications when compared to the general population. Many migrants have high employment and education rates and strong English language skills.

However, in terms of attitudes, the report state that surveys have found that although Australians are generally accepting and welcoming of other cultures, there are sectors of the population for which less tolerance exists and in which problems are evident.

Some say the biggest devaluation of the Chinese currency in 21 years which wiped billions from stock markets came as a surprise and could severely affect the AU$18.1 billion education industry in Australia.

Maryland University finance professor Albert Kyle told The Australian that the devaluation will result in a slowing down of the interest of Chinese businesses and investors in Australian goods and services. This could include Chinese demand for education in Australia, as well as demand for property in Sydney and Melbourne, according to the report in The Australian.

“I think it is going to affect my business and also a big business in Australia, which is educating Chinese students…So that is an export market that will probably shrink since the parents of the children have less discretionary money to afford these relatively expensive degrees and that is why the Australian currency will depreciate along with the Chinese currency,” he said.

However, other analysts disagree and say that the devaluation will have a limited long-term impact on Australia’s education sector.

HSBC chief economist Paul Bloxham told The Australian that the bank didn’t think the currency would fall much further and Australia’s higher education sector would continue to benefit from China’s rising middle class.

“That’s a medium-term structural trend — it doesn’t really get thrown off by what we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks or even the short-term cyclical weakness we’re seeing in China,” Mr Bloxham said.

Some farmers, particularly in Queensland, are under investigation after reports of allegations of sexual coercion of backpackers.

DIBP has told the ABC that ‘there are ongoing investigations of farms identified’ but refused to comment further on the matter or say if the government is considering changing visa laws to prevent such abuse.

Currently, backpackers who arrive on one-year Working Holiday visas are required by law to complete three months farm work in order to qualify for a second year in Australia. Second year Working Holiday Visas were given to 38,000 backpackers from 2014 to 2015. Farmers are tasked with “signing off” and confirming the backpackers have completed the work.

Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Kevin Cocks has detailed disturbing allegations of farmers using their position to sexually exploit female backpackers seeking visas.

Mr Cocks told the ABC “at least a dozen” cases had been reported of backpackers being asked to perform sexual favours in exchange for having their work signed off.