Australia's immigration chief was named as Canberra's next ambassador to Indonesia yesterday, just days before the official release of a scathing report examining his department's role in a series of blunders stemming from the government's tough asylum policies.
Prime Minister John Howard said Immigration Department secretary Bill Farmer had asked to leave to allow a new person to oversee reforms recommended in the report, written by former federal police chief Mick Palmer.
The government commissioned the Palmer report earlier this year to find out how a German-born Australian resident Cornelia Rau spent 10 months behind bars as an illegal immigrant when she should have been receiving treatment for a psychiatric condition. Since then, the government admitted Farmer's department has wrongfully detained another 33 people, including one citizen who was mistakenly deported to the Philippines.
"We do need to make changes and the current secretary of the Department of Immigration [Farmer] indicated to the government a little while ago that he felt that a new person at the head of that department was needed to drive that change," Howard told Channel Nine television.
Howard said Farmer would replace Australia's current ambassador in Jakarta David Richie, subject to the normal approval process.
The prime minister denied Farmer was being unjustly rewarded for a poor performance at immigration, saying he was well qualified for the Jakarta posting. The Palmer report is due to be officially released in Canberra this week but a draft report released by the Queensland state parliament was highly critical of Farmer's department.
It found Rau's treatment was "demonstrably inadequate", the department had failed to provide proper care to a mentally-ill woman who desperately needed help, and had breached its own guidelines on how long immigration detainees should be held in prisons.
"I don't accept the view that the immigration department has become a joke," Howard said."It has clearly made mistakes and I'll be having more to say about that when we comment on the Palmer report. But the Immigration Department does have a difficult job to do."
Australia's immigration policy until recently allowed for the mandatory and unlimited detention of illegal immigrants, including children, and had been widely criticized by rights groups here and abroad.
Packed crowds in India celebrating their cricket team’s victory ended in a deadly stampede on Wednesday, with 11 mainly young fans crushed to death, the local state’s chief minister said. Joyous cricket fans had come out to celebrate and welcome home their heroes, Royal Challengers Bengaluru, after they beat Punjab Kings in a roller-coaster Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket final on Tuesday night. However, the euphoria of the vast crowds in the southern tech city of Bengaluru ended in disaster, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra calling it “absolutely heartrending.” Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said most of the deceased are young, with 11 dead
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
RSS