Laws doing little to tackle visa rorts

“I thought Australia was hard to get into,” is how British former detective Kevin Forrest reacted when our reporter Nick McKenzie asked him about the presence of a convicted crime boss, Binjun Xie, in this country, unveiled as part of our investigative journalism series Trafficked.

Forrest can hardly be blamed for his assumption. During the years when Scott Morrison and then Peter Dutton served as immigration minister, and later during Dutton’s tenure at Home Affairs in charge of the Australian Border Force, the Coalition’s rhetoric on safeguarding borders became so strident that it echoed around the world. Who can forget Morrison’s boat-shaped trophy bearing the legend “I Stopped These”, or the election-day text message alerting voters to the interception of a Sri Lankan vessel and urging them to vote Liberal?

Yet it is clear from our investigation, and the experiences of federal and state police it uncovers, that there has not been that level of attention to the suffering and exploitation experienced by young Asian women brought to Australia as sex workers in a system of debt bondage facilitated by large-scale rorting of our visa system.

Our investigation shows corruption in the application process for student visas and family reunification visas, as well as asylum seeker visas. It shows how alleged fraudsters are bending the education system out of shape to accommodate fake students. This is far from a new problem – leaked departmental documents obtained by The Age in 2014 showed that such corruption, and a lack of enforcement capacity to deal with it, were a known cause for alarm then.

But in the intervening years, the problem has mushroomed, with tens of thousands of people working in this country in indentured conditions, their entry based on a lie. Law enforcement submissions have repeatedly warned our political representatives about this state of affairs. As Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the Immigration Department, told McKenzie, what we are seeing is “at minimum, an extraordinary level of negligence”.

While there is no evidence that migration agents and the “visa farms” they operate are knowingly assisting crime syndicates, it is clear that there must be an overhaul of federal government licensing for such agents and greater scrutiny both of their businesses and of the plethora of education providers capitalising on the student visa stream. Together, the practices of these industries have resulted in an ecosystem that criminals can exploit to traffic some of the most vulnerable people in our region.

In response to our reporters’ revelations, the Home Affairs Department has said that a comprehensive suite of laws and programs exist to defend the integrity of the visa system and prevent worker exploitation. Clearly they are either not fit for purpose or they are not being applied with anything like the consistency required. How else to explain that Binjun Xie, convicted and jailed in connection with an illegal sex ring in Britain a decade ago and deported to China upon release, can enter Australia on a student visa and set up a similar business here?

Calls for the appointment of an immigration commissioner to deal with visa rorts and for improvements to the laws governing slavery offences must be revisited.

The Age welcomes the announcement by Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles that there will be an investigation focusing on Xie and the migration agents used by his trafficking ring. But this can only be the beginning. Years ago, South Australian police fighting organised crime recommended the formation of a “multi-faceted taskforce” to combat this despicable crime. No such action was taken. It is time federal and state law enforcement, licensing authorities and regulatory bodies are brought together to tackle it. Then leaders who could say “We stopped these” would really have something to be proud of.

Michael Bachelard sends an exclusive newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive his Note from the Editor.

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