An inquiry found the Home Affairs secretary used his position for personal advantage, gossiped disrespectfully about ministers, broke confidentiality and didn’t disclose a conflict of interest.
Both countries have accepted very few Rohingya refugees to date, but new research suggests most Australians and New Zealanders are willing to resettle more.
Anthony Albanese has switched Tanya Plibersek from education to environment and promoted Clare O'Neil into the plum home affairs ministry in a 23-member cabinet that contains a record 10 women.
Refugees have waited in limbo for almost two years for Australia’s borders to reopen. So, why hasn’t Australia done more to ramp up its resettlement program, like Canada and the US?
The personal powers of the immigration minister to grant or cancel visas are extremely broad and powerful. And this isn’t the first time they’ve courted controversy.
Turning Serbia’s national hero into Australia’s national villain has been harder than the government thought. It’s an own goal for the latest “operation sovereign borders” chapter.
Nauru is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Australia annually to house 109 asylum seekers. The real purpose, though, is to ‘stand ready to receive new arrivals’.
Detainees at Villawood Detention Centre during a protest in 2011.
Dean Lewins/AAP
The largest immigration detention centre is located in a COVID hot spot in western Sydney. We need to make vaccinations for detainees and staff an urgent priority.
For the first time, a woman has been appointed to the hawkishly masculine home affairs portfolio. Whether this will bring a change of approach on asylum seekers and other issues remains to be seen.
Detained refugees inside a compound at Darwin Airport where they have been held for a year while they wait for medical treatment.
Aaron Bunch/AAP
Those who have been released have little financial or social support, confining them to lives of precarity, dependency and impoverishment in our community.
Denying protection to asylum seekers is neither sustainable nor defensible as long-term policy. Here are ways to make the screening process at airports more just when the borders do reopen.
Some changes in the new security bill submitted to parliament last week are welcome, but others require careful scrutiny, especially when the rights of children are at stake.
There were 8,000 forced relocations in Australia’s immigration detention system in a nearly two-year span. New research shows how distressing and destabilising these movements are for refugees.
The government gutted the ranks of experienced decision-makers and made organisational changes that undermined the quality of its decisions.
AAP/James Gourley