Thursday, 30 May 2024

Community safety

Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:10): (944) I sense it is report card season really. It has a certain air to it at this time of year, and what better place to give a report card on the federal minister for immigration than in the chamber here in Victoria. Of course this has to be relevant to the state parliament, and it is relevant to the Minister for Police. In my local publication, the Maroondah Leader, my attention was drawn to a Facebook post:

PREDATOR ALERT. Victorian sex fiends aren’t just sickos lurking in the dark.

They go on to make very visual expressions about the people we need to be worried about. I would like to know from the police minister of this state what information he has had from his federal colleagues in respect to the federal immigration minister’s absolute cock-ups of the entire system. That is sadly what they are.

It must be said that the federal minister has recently taken the knife to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This has some sort of irony to it, if not poetry – perhaps more poetry in a really Machiavellian sense. Let us never forget that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal as it currently stands is the love child of none other than Duncan Kerr. Duncan Kerr was the inaugural president –

A member interjected.

Nick McGOWAN: That is right, a former Labor member of federal Parliament –

Enver Erdogan interjected.

Nick McGOWAN: Well, he may be a great guy according to those opposite. However, Mr Kerr gave birth to this thing called the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, his love child as it were, to solve all problems. All administrative appeals would go there. This current government, the Albanese government, do not share that view in quite the same way. In fact they have now set up an alternate tribunal called the Administrative Review Tribunal – so it is the federal Administrative Review Tribunal with the unfortunate acronym of FART. It was a brain fart as it turns out from the minister, and the minister is now ruing the day he renamed the tribunal and set up its love child. It has gone from Mr Kerr’s love child to the FART. What a dreadful state of affairs that is.

To add further complication to that, he gave direction 99. Direction 99, all jokes aside, is a serious, serious error. I have got it here and I could wax lyrical about it, but I will not. In short, and having been somebody who was eight years on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal applying the law, basically what this minister did was to lower the threshold. What this minister did was to actually give priority to the considerations of the very person who had offended here in this country and put that above all other considerations. It has real implications for the state of Victoria and, fart jokes aside, what this federal minister has done should worry every Victorian. He is not fit to hold that position. The Prime Minister should do what he ought to do and remove him during the winter break. He should have done that already. We all know that. I would ask that the police minister come back to this chamber and advise us what advice he has received from his federal colleagues in that respect.

The PRESIDENT: I am not too sure, Mr McGowan, if you have got around unparliamentary language or not. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. It was quite clever.