Reasonable suspicion

Citizenship stripping ... Heavy-handed officialdom ... Wooly notions of "reasonable suspicion" ... Procrustes shows how it has worked in practice ... The immigration official who was "very thorough with non-whites" 

H.M. EMBASSY
MOSCOW

Lord Pembroke
The Foreign Office
LONDON

6th April 1943

My Dear Reggie,In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with you a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.

We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when Spring is upon us, but few of us would care to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.

Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr,
H.M. Ambassador

Ambassador Archy Clerk Kerr (centre) sniggering at non-Anglo names

A hoary old chestnut, but none the worse for that, especially as we bask in the knowledge that Clerk Kerr, who had the misfortune to spend World War II cooped up with Stalin, was Australian born.

Where once this would have been greeted with schoolboy sniggers, now I will merely receive electronic denunciations for my sexism and adherence to archaic mirth at the expense of non-Anglo names.

Well, I'll up the ante to reveal my catholic tastes in this field, by noting the South African Supreme Court decision in Mustafa Aman Arse v Minister Of Home Affairs (March, 12 2010).

I think I've now covered the field, but before you all twitch over your keyboards preparing to troll old Procrustes, there is a point to this juvenilia. When you read Arse, as opposed to smirking over it, (can we assume that the "e" is pronounced as in "yes", or perhaps to rhyme with "yay") you discover a refugee case in which Mr Arse, an Ethopian, was detained without legal justification and, while courts below couldn't work it out, the Supreme Court was clear. 

In a judgment replete with references to habeas corpus and its Roman Dutch equivalent, the court resoundingly found for Mr Arse, and determined that he must go free.

This got Procrustes thinking, because under the Australian Migration Act, a non-citizen who produces any document related to entry into Australia that a delegate of the minister (all the Immigration Department airport staff are such delegates) "reasonably suspects" is bogus, forfeits their visa on the spot and as such becomes an unlawful non-citizen and must, under the Act, be detained. 

Goodness me, it was only last week that Prof Greg Craven, now vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, wrote in Lord Murdoch's national organ that we wouldn't allow a discretion to a minister to take away our houses, or our property or to detain us.

Note to Greg: the Migration Act is replete with discretions allowing bureaucrats (ministerial delegates) to lock people up.

The "reasonably suspects" riff attracts attention, as that is the standard that the Abbott government (give or take some members of cabinet) is proposing as the basis on which a minister of immigration might remove an Australian's citizenship.

Thank heavens that this major hurdle in the path of the bureaucratic juggernaut is so refined that there will never be error, which would, after all, result in detention and deportation for a visa holder, or, under the Terror code, removal of citizenship.

Shock horror, wait, a trawl through the electronic fog came up with a report by the Commonwealth ombudsman to the secretary of the Department of Immigration about a Zimbawean, named only as Mr B, who arrived at Perth airport in 1995, on a valid visa, for the purpose of staying with a pen-friend in Australia.

The pen-friend had been nominated in the visa application as the sponsor and live-in host, so that Mr B did not need to bring money for his living expenses. His apparent impecuniosity would tell against him dearly.

Immigration officials at Perth airport didn't like the cut of Mr B's jib one bit. Apparently he stared back at them when they looked hard at him. Uppity.

The report discreetly leaves out any mention of Mr B's race, but one of his complaints was that of discrimination.

All of those who were fulminating over my deliberately antique references above to Clerk Kerr and the South African Supreme Court, might care to contemplate that there is some part of our airfields that is forever White Australia. Somewhere that the standards of the twenty first-century have not reached.

In a lovely aside, when Mr B asked if the senior officer was racist, the juniors replied: No, "but he's very thorough when he meets non-whites".

Mr B's luggage was searched and his mail read to determine if he was planning a marriage in Australia, and then he was strip searched. One of the officials suggested that he needed a haircut (his style was Rastafarian, and we're not letting riff-raff like that in). 

Bad hair

Within 36 hours Mr B was back in Zimbabwe, because the team at Perth airport had a "reasonable suspicion" that Mr B was up to no good. Along the way, while Mr B had no phone access, none of the officials contacted the sponsor until very late in the day, after an airline employee rang to explain that Mr B had been detained and so was not flying to Melbourne. 

The sponsor, based in rural Victoria, had by then driven to Tullamarine with her daughter to wait for Mr B.  Earlier conversation with the sponsor might have resolved some of the issues gnawing at the officials, but now it was too late.

Both Mr B and the sponsor complained, and the 1997 report bears out the heavy handed conduct of the immigration officials involved in dealing with a non-citizen who had a valid passport and visa.

So much for the "reasonable suspicion" test. Its very wooliness attracts an energetic exercise, untramelled by any restraints. And this is the proposed test for removing citizenship.

I have a bad feeling about how many other, unpublicised detentions and removals there may have been based upon "reasonable suspicion" and later determined to be totally unfounded. 

In the meantime we are merely where David Marr and Marian Wilkinson left us with their analysis in Dark Victory of the 2001 election. They noted that for 200 years all that Australians have wanted from whomever was in charge was assurance that "the others", whoever they were, would be kept out. 

The Great Fear goes on. Protected by rude and officious (sorry, "very thorough with non-whites") airport staff, and a government determined to rid us of those deemed undesirable, we blunder on. 

It's only a couple of weeks since Margaret Throsby had John McCarthy AO on her midday show. McCarthy has been Australia's ambassador to Indonesia, India, Japan and the United States.

The most striking chord in his interview was his reference to Australia's perpetual international pose of fear.  When will we, the colossus of the South Seas, get over it and become light on our feet, like, oh dear, I hate to say it, New Zealand?