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.
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
EXTRADITION FEARS: The legislative changes come five years after a treaty was suspended in response to the territory’s crackdown on democracy advocates Exiled Hong Kong dissidents said they fear UK government plans to restart some extraditions with the territory could put them in greater danger, adding that Hong Kong authorities would use any pretext to pursue them. An amendment to UK extradition laws was passed on Tuesday. It came more than five years after the UK and several other countries suspended extradition treaties with Hong Kong in response to a government crackdown on the democracy movement and its imposition of a National Security Law. The British Home Office said that the suspension of the treaty made all extraditions with Hong Kong impossible “even if
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
RSS