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.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS