The government is using drones to track people released from detention as Labor deals with the fallout of some serious criminals being given their visas back by an independent tribunal, the immigration minister has revealed.
Andrew Giles, the usually media-shy minister, did a blitz of interviews on Thursday, announcing he has now cancelled eight visas of non-citizens due to character concerns after they were restored by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT).
As Giles bats away questions about his future as a minister, the government has toughened its rhetoric after the revelation the AAT has given serious criminals their visas back in dozens of cases.
Labor has vowed to replace visa cancellation rules with an order that community safety is paramount and outweighs a non-citizen’s ties to Australia, prompting a warning from New Zealand not to resume the practice of deporting people with little or no connection to that country.
In his interviews Giles also revealed new details about the extent of compliance measures for the separate cohort of 153 people released as a result of the high court’s ruling on indefinite detention in November.
Giles has been under fire this week due to the revelation at Senates estimates that at least two murderers or attempted murderers in that cohort are not required to wear electronic ankle bracelets.
Giles told Sky News: “Well they are being monitored … There is a quarter of a billion dollars that we’ve invested in supporting our law enforcement agencies.”
“That’s enabled things like using drones to keep track of these people. We know where they are.”
Asked why the cohort aren’t all required to wear ankle bracelets, Giles replied: “Because the law doesn’t allow it. The law requires a consideration for each person’s circumstances … That’s why we put in place a Community Protection Board to provide advice to the delegates so that experts are forming a view on this.
“There is so much being done for this cohort: spot checks, random house checks, as well as the use of drones that I just touched on.”
The Albanese government announced the $255m to respond to the high court’s NZYQ decision in November, describing the funding as for “compliance” and “surveillance”.
In Senate estimates on Wednesday, Australian Border Force officials revealed that 76 of the 153 people released are subject to electronic monitoring and 68 are subject to curfews, which are generally from 10pm to 6am.
The Albanese government announced on Wednesday it would rewrite a controversial ministerial direction on visa cancellation, which had elevated the “strength, nature and duration of ties to Australia” to a primary consideration for visa cancellation.
In question time the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, maintained the pressure on the prime minister, by suggesting he was the “architect” of the direction because it was enacted after an agreement with New Zealand to reduce deportations.
Earlier, Giles said the new rules would be put in place “as soon as possible”. “We’ve got to get it right,” he told Sky News. “We’ve got to get it in place quickly. But it’s got to be effective.”
In a statement the New Zealand foreign minister, Winston Peters, said: “We understand Australia intends to make changes to its deportation policy.”
“We accept that Australia has the right to determine what level of offending by non-citizens is unacceptable.
“But we do not want to see deportation of people with little or no connection to New Zealand, whose formative experiences were nearly all in Australia.”
Peters noted the prime minister, Anthony Albanese’s commitment to take a “commonsense approach to deportation of people to New Zealand who had effectively spent their entire lives in Australia” and said the issue had been raised at a “political level”.
In question time Dutton accused Albanese of putting his “close and sycophantic relationship with [former New Zealand prime minister] Jacinda Ardern ahead of the safety of Australians”.
“What we do is we determine our own policy according with our own interests,” Albanese said.
The prime minister counterpunched by noting the home affairs department under the Coalition released “102 sex offenders, 64 of whom are child sex offenders. 40 domestic violence offenders, [and] four murderers” from immigration detention without ankle bracelet or curfew conditions.
