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Immigration case officers told to ‘say no more often’
While Prime Minister Tony Abbot’s much trumpeted ‘security statement’ has stressed on plans to impose tougher citizenship laws, it provided little by way of detail. The head of the immigration department, Michael Pezzullo however told a senate committee yesterday that his department is restructuring its visa decision making process to ‘empower our officers to say no more often, where circumstances warrant”.
What remains puzzling, in all this is the continued failure of policy-makers to flag that unregistered migration practice needs to at least be looked at in this paradigm shift in Australian migration policy.
Warning of a ‘new dark age’ the Prime Minister indicated that the increasing threat from home-grown extremists required major changes to both security and immigration policies. While much of his speech focussed on why the measures were needed, he did not provide specific details of what they would be, save as to the appointment of a national counterterrorism coordinator and a ban on vilification and hate speech.
The immigration department’s chief, Michael Pezzullo however did not mince his words when he told a senate committee yesterday that his department needs to re-examine how it makes visa grant decisions, to make sure that his officers are making the right decisions which balance the need to welcome legitimate travellers with a need to protect the Australian community.
“I would like to make it abundantly clear to the committee that we want to empower our staff to make better informed decisions on visa and citizenship applications.
“We will empower our officers to say no more often, where circumstances warrant and within the law, through better use of information, intelligence and data analytics, as well as ensuring that our staff have the training and support to make defensible, adverse decisions,” said Mr Pezzullo.
This together with the ‘no benefit of the doubt’ rhetoric of the Prime Minister, must mean that visa applicants are set to face greater scrutiny with greater risk profiling on the agenda for applicants from certain parts of the world.
The Migration Alliance categorically welcomes changes that will help protect the Australian community and weed out harmful elements from gaining residency or even entry into Australia. The proposed changes would mean that there will be an unprecedented level of scrutiny of applications with case officers clearly inclined to ‘say no more often’ when in doubt. The onus will purely be on applicants who must now have to lodge comprehensive applications that leave no room for doubt.
What we cannot still understand is why within all these concerns of the government, why none of the policy-makers have flagged unregistered migration practice as a matter that needs to be addressed in the new security framework. The Migration Alliance has written extensively on this issue on this forum, to the ministerial offices and to various committees with specific proposals on how to deal with the issue. Yet we see nothing being done to address a problem on the frontline.
Until that happens, do you think that as part of the security screening process, DIBP should at least start distinguishing for greater scrutiny self-lodged applications? Over and above professional obligations, RMAs clearly put their careers and reputation on the line with each application they help lodge. Surely that’s worth something to the screening process. Let us know your thoughts.
Comments
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015Better informed officers! Does he mean better trained officers, does he mean the regs need to much more clear and reader friendly such that even Immi officers can understand them?
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Hi Chris,
You have to remember that Migration Officers are assessed at being Skill Level 4 occupations in ANZSCO and as such are not even skilled enough to get into the country on their own merits!! -
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Maybe Officers should be required to undertake a course in Migration Law.
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
CORRECTION: The ASRI lists Migration Agents at Skill level 1
http://www.immi.gov.au/Work/Pages/asri/other-information-and-organisation-analysts.aspx
Given that you have to be an Australian Resident or a Citizen to become a Migration Agent I fail to see why you would require Migration unless you were seeking to Migrate as a Migration Agents responsible for other jurisdictions . I do note that Migration Agent is listed on the CSOL -
Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Hi Michael, that explains a LOT!!!!
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
Nice one Michael!!
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
In that case the review process should be extended to offshore applications.
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Wednesday, 25 February 2015
In one of my complaint to MARA of an unregistered practice in Perth , when discussion the complaint with the Professional Standards Officer it was alluded that it is the DIBP that deals with unregistered practice.
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Thursday, 26 February 2015
I have had an exhausted truce with the Department for the last couple of years, until two clients copped awful decisions in Delhi and Santiago last week. Too much discretion and no review rights, illiterate case officers, incoherent reasons, pattern decision making, failure to take into account evidence or explain how factors were weighted, failure to follow policy, institutional racism in the Indian case (and I do not say that lightly but only in the sense that an Englishman coming to Australia to visit his 2 citizen brothers and permanent resident parents would not have had his visa application dealt with so shoddily) and no broader policy rationale for the refusals.
On top of poor processing unregistered practice issue remains unaddressed.
The circus lumbers on with new priorities and pointless re-organisation while the old issues remain the same. Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted on border protection and this forthcoming reorganisation had been spent on better processing arrangements and proper regulation of our industry? Even the money spent on the rocket science consultants advising the government on the formation of the Australian Border Force fantasy would have fixed a lot of evils from where I and my clients sit.
In this industry agents are but placeholders on a ship if fools with our cabins in the lower decks beneath the waterline.
Immigration blog
agree!