Australian immigration head replaced after bungles

SYDNEY - The head of Australia's Immigration Department has quit after a series of bungles which included the wrongful detention and deportation of two mentally ill women, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday.

An investigation by former Australian police commissioner Mick Palmer into 201 cases of possible wrongful detention and deportation has focused attention on Australia's policy against illegal immigrants.

Australia is a nation built on migrants but has one of the strictest policies against illegal immigration in the world, policies which in part have helped Howard's conservative government to four straight election wins.

"There have been mistakes made, and I'll have more to say about this, and plainly people who are Australian citizens should never be treated as if they weren't," Howard said.

"Nonetheless we do need to make changes," he told Australian television.

Howard said he had accepted the resignation of Immigration Department secretary Bill Farmer, who would become Australia's next ambassador to Indonesia, and appointed former immigration official Andrew Metcalfe as his replacement.

Howard had resisted calls to replace Farmer and Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone but scathing excerpts of a report by Palmer, which has been handed to the government and is due to be released next week, highlighted a catalogue of failures.

Among those were the wrongful detention of mentally ill German-born Australian woman Cornelia Rau in jail and then in a remote outback detention centre for illegal immigrants, treatment which Palmer said exacerbated her illness.

Lawyers for mentally ill Australian woman Vivian Alvarez have said that she had a partially severed spinal cord and had to sign her deportation papers with a thumb print when she was wrongly sent back to the Philippines four years ago.

Farmer apologised in May for failings by his department in some of the cases being investigated by Palmer.

Australia's strict policy against illegal immigration includes detaining illegal arrivals, illegal workers and people who overstay visas, often for years while their cases are heard.

The policy has been harshly criticised by human rights groups but Howard last month softened detention laws to head off a revolt within his government, allowing children and families to be freed from custody while refugee claims are heard.

An Amnesty International report has found that nine out of 10 unauthorised arrivals who sought asylum between July 2002 and June 2003 turned out to be genuine refugees.

 

- REUTERS