“Advocates, who assist or encourage refugees and asylum seekers to seek judicial review of migration decisions, may be liable for the costs incurred under proposed changes to legislation.”

And so they should be. As an immigration lawyer, Dickie has an axe to grind. But the so-called ‘refugees’ and asylum seekers she refers to should not be hampering our judiciary with the aid of such lawyers. Refugees coming here under our orderly program are not affected. The people Dickie is talking about are illegal entrants or people who decide they would like stay after arriving on other forms of short-stay visa. Australia has no responsibility to them except to send them back from whence they came. Thanks to meddling lawyers, this does not happen quickly enough.

Isn't this whole business of litigation so symbolic of modern day society, where an essentially simple matter is expanded beyond recognition, (and funded of course by the taxpayer), mainly to benefit lawyers. Wouldn't it be better to follow our practice up to the nineteen-fifties, sit the applicant down, require them to undertake a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic or similar appropriate language, and, if they fail, deport them as illiterate?

Well said Leigh, as a past Court Advice Worker I challenge all the so called Migration Officers and Barristers to tell the Australian taxpayers just how much they have to pay in costs representing people who have no right to stay in our country after having been assesed many many times as non refugees, this does not apply to genuine refugess who are assessed via the legal system. Whilst they are at it maybe they could tell us how many cases are blocking up our courts and the delay in hearing criminal cases because of the backlog, then maybe how many people are being kept in custody awaiting trial because of the delays, then the cost of medical treatment etc.
A refugee who we regard as a friend tells us that one only has to be honest and tell the authorities who you are and where you come from and you have no trouble getting assessed quickly.

One could only wish this law to be made retrospect. Millions of dollars have been frittered away indecently by those who refuse to accept the Dept Migration's ruling.
It is well overdue.

The proposed Bill will certainly go a long way toward better hiding the Rau/Solon type departmental / whole of Government errors.

The collaborative interference and sabotage in the 'Hao Kiet' Refugees' processing as described by the Vietnamese Community in Australia (PDF 1766KB)recent submission to the Senate Committee Inquiry into the Migration Act would also go unchecked with such a new law.

Let them stay I say;

And Plerdsus has a point: this is an issue that could have been resolved via regulation and the reasoanble application of existing laws. Never before has so much legislation been enacted for so few; add this tripe to excising of various parts of Australia and you get one un holy mess all because a few odd bods want to come here.

Illegal immigration is in real terms a non event

We should be pleased that any one still wants to come here; those that do clearly dont read the papers.

I'm surpised we havent adopted a North Korean solution and try to prevent people leaving - becuase they are - in droves. I fully expcet a "good riddance" - in fact some poster have offered even me a one way ticket to the place of my choosing.

The evidence is clear: most alleged queue jumpers came from places with no bloody queu in the first place and most are genuine. And those not driven mad by this evil system of management will be a great asset to this country.

And why would any one accept at face value the assesment of the Dept of Immigration? I mean to say does any one really think that bunch of proven to be inept public servants have any credibilityy any more?

All I know is I will probably live long enough to see this sick worm in relation to immigration turn.

Thanks Marianne, I didn't know this Bill was being put forward. A completely sensible move and well overdue, another reason to vote for Howard.

Welllllll the dirty, filthy, sleazy black hand of VESTED interest finally becomes clearer by the second. All this 'high moral ground'ism of Marriane Lee and this author is actually, about MONEY..... u know.. the dollars and cents stuff, that they obtain from who knows how many sources for working on behalf of... not would be immigrants, but THEMSELVES.......

So, I think it would be a good idea to the THEM a loyalty test, and to have them tell everyone if they are receiving money from the relatives or ethnic groups of the would be 'assylum' seekers/economic oppoortunists, I think we need a good dose of 'vitriol' from Skid marx or Redneck to better describe this issue.

How dare they wax eloquent about 'the rights of ....etc' when in reality they are using this as a tool for personal gain !

I'm writing this from Singapore, and my customer took me to lunch where I asked him about social welfare here, its pretty much ZERO and if u don't have family or a pair of hands which can work you are in big trouble unless you qualify for a small government assistance, where you are examined VERY closely to see if are eligable. There was a SEVENTY SEVEN yr old man wiping tables, shuffling around doing a great job, its amazing what people will do when there are no government handouts.

I say send migration agents here for a stint.

This Bill will force the likes of Marion Le and Mr Burnside QC to pony up the money or find another cause.

Let's see if we can find a cause that might appreciate a helping hand: the mentally ill, homeless youth, children in hospital terminal wards, drug dependent youth...... . Oh, silly me, they're Australians in need of help. That will never do.

From the transcript of public hearings, senate inquiry into the Migration Act that's happening at the moment.

“Our experience in South Australia is that the majority of migration work being done by lawyers for asylum seekers is being done free, gratis and pro bono publico by a very large number of South Australian legal practitioners, including literally half the South Australian bar, who give their time for nothing to put forward to the courts, in a proper manner, cases which they believe are of merit. We are not aware, as a society, of any one of those persons spending their time free, gratis and for nothing putting forward cases which they think do not have merit.”

Many refugee lawyers work pro bono, or out of community legal centres for peanuts. The lawyers who've definitely made money out of this have been the ones employed by DIMIA at huge hourly rates.

Have a look at the inquiry submissions, http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/migration/submissions/sublist.htm

Thanks Shoshana. I was going to point out that Dickie's concern is for the removal of pro bono representation for asylum seekers.

For the benefit of those who suggest (disgracefully) that refugee advocates are in it for the money:

"Pro bono, is a phrase derived from Latin meaning "for the good". The complete phrase is pro bono publico, "for the public good". It is a term used to designate legal or other professional work undertaken voluntarily and without payment, as a public service." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono

What this Bill apparently proposes is that refugee advocates who are already working for no fee, may become personally liable for administrative and legal costs incurred in representing their clients i.e. the Minister wants to be able to penalise those who have the temerity to assist people to assert their rights under law.

That is hardly the "the dirty, filthy, sleazy black hand of VESTED interest", is it?

Rather, it is yet another attempt by this government to abrogate our human rights responsibilities. It is nothing less than shameful.

Mahatma, 'migration agents'..... working for peanuts ? I hardly think so.

Vested interest is not always 'monetary'... it can be in other forms. Pro Bono work..... will also have a 'payday' of some form or another.

The only disgrace here is that there are those who would assist economic opportunists to insult our migration laws by going around the system, and by passing THROUGH countries where they have 'assylum' specifically to get 'here' in preference to 'other' places.

Assylum is about 'safety' not 'better economic opportunities' ..that . There is nothing in the UN charter that I've read suggesting that 'better econimic opportunities' or, to 'hook up with extended family' in Australia' are grounds for preferential treatment under the migration act or the Charter which they so disgracefully flout.

I'm all for assylum, but under the terms of reference of the charter, not some well meaning but misguided sentimentalism which will undermine our own political and social stability which is what happens when we lose the power of control over who and when and why people come to live here.

The unrelenting efforts by certain '5th column' elements in our society to undermine our social system and migration laws is more of a disgrace.

If this legislation were to be truly fair, it should cut both ways – the government should be held by the courts to be liable to pay when found to be unduly challenging an applicant.

Perhaps the legislation could also include a damages element in favour of the immigrants detained, if the government was found to have had no good cause to delay or deny the application.

I would suggest that the bill referred to in the original piece is a rather extreme response to a rather extreme problem.

There has been for the last several years a sort of righteous hysteria evident in the debate surrounding onshore asylum claims. One element of this has been, at least to a layman, an insistence on the part of applicant persons’ representatives to pursue matters to the highest court possible as a matter of course.

Whether this is a real or simply a perceived trend, it is obvious that the proponents of the bill intend to address it. I see no particular problem with this. For far too long, desperate unauthorised arrivals have been kicked around the political footy field.

Aside from the costs to the courts and the state, and more importantly, there is the effect that legal challenges may have in prolonging the incarceration of immigration detainees. One cannot have it both ways: if detention is so horrible, how can the advocate of an asylum applicant allow their detention to continue through long, perhaps futile, legal challenges?

I agree with Marianne Dickie that the proposed new legislation is draconian and seems to be aimed at trying to reduce the sorts of embarrassment that the Government and the bureaucracy has faced in so many cases over recent years.

Having been involved in refugee issues - human rigts, resettlement, integration into communities for some 40 years as a voluntary worker in the community and having had a short stint working in refugee camps some 20 years ago I have been appalled by the deliberate politicisation of refugees for political gain over recent years.

I am also saddened to see the ill-informed prejudices of some of the posters to this forum, names who seem to have ill-informed and often illiterate and ignorant opinions on many forum subjects.

Please may we have a bit more tolerance and sensible debate on a very serious subject dealing with humnan lives

To respond to BotanyWhig’s comment that “One cannot have it both ways: if detention is so horrible, how can the advocate of an asylum applicant allow their detention to continue through long, perhaps futile, legal challenges?”

Some detainees are stateless, no country will accept them, so they are stuck in the system and the only option is to keep fighting through the courts.

For others, it’s a stark choice. If they return to country of origin they’ll likely be tortured and/or killed. That’s why they persevere with their asylum claims; some have been found to be refugees after more than 5 years in detention.

Also, there’ve been cases where the court has found in favour of the refugee but DIMIA/Commonwealth has appealed, during which time the person stays in detention. This is what happened in the case of a child locked up (with siblings and parents) for 5¼ years.

The 230 plus submissions to the senate inquiry into the Migration Act can be found at
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/migration/submissions/sublist.htm Have a look at numbers 51 and 151 for starters

Shoshana (on another forum discussion) and Sneekeepete have made the point that most asylum seekers here are genuine and that numbers of claims have not been large. This is true, but the inference cannot be drawn that this situation would continue in the future. In the first place, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants prefer to go to places where there is already a community of their fellow countrymen. (Timothy J. Hatton of the ANU has written on the correlation between asylum claims in Europe and the size of the existing asylum seeker community.) What this means is that arrivals can trickle in at a low level for a number of years and then take off when a critical mass is reached. Once the demand is there it will pay people smugglers to service a route. In the second place, there is no point in making a blatantly false claim when you are subject to mandatory detention.

Britain provides a good test case, as it is also surrounded by water and a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Arrivals were low in the the early 1970s, but in the 1997-2004 period there were 490,000 asylum claims. Actual numbers were much greater because asylum seekers and refugees are allowed to bring in spouses, fiances, children and in some cases parents and grandparents. Of the 1997-2002 asylum seekers 21% were granted asylum, including after appeal, 16% were given extraordinary leave to remain, some for humanitarian reasons, but most because it proved impossible to remove them. 13% were deported, and the other 50% nearly all stayed on illegally. Clogging up the Home Office and courts with endless appeals is an important delaying tactic, and the cost to the community is enormous. Britain spent 2 billion pounds on the asylum system in 2002 alone. These are Home Office figures reported by Migration Watch UK (www.migrationwatchuk.org).

One only has to look at the SWARMS of Africans who attacked the Spanish enclaves in North Africa, desperate to find 'assylum' ?
The simple fact is,

Accessability + Opportunity = swarms of people claiming assylum.

The suggestion that making it easier to enter Australia would NOT result in 'swarms' of people from other countries finding some 'fear of persecution' excuse to come here is ludicrous. It is not backed up by reality occurring in other places.

So, one is attracted to the conclusion that the efforts by all those who seek to make it easier to enter Australia by those who have bypassed the system is not based on compassion, but more of a political nature.

If the facts fly in the face of the claims by assylum advocacy groups (the author being a migration agent), then something is seriously wrong, with either the claims made by the advocates (and their motives) or perhaps we just are not seeing with our own eyes the things people will do when a country drops it's guard for a moment.
Perhaps we are all hallucinating ? or.. "Its a right wing conspiracy to make assylum seekers look bad" ?

"SWARMS of African refugees attacking Spanish enclaves"?

Yep Boaz - I think you might be hallucinating. I haven't noticed too many reports of such happenings in Oz of late, nor do I recall any mention of them in Dickie's article.

How about exercising a bit less xenophobia and a bit more (dare I say it) Christian compassion, eh?

What’s Christian compassion? Does Dave know the meaning of compassion without referring to his leather-bound texts in rice paper? As soon as you use the term “swarms” for asylum seekers, it immediately conjures up something unwanted and threatening. Dave, what are you so frightened of that your god won’t save you from?

For a starters ,stop labelling new comers to this country as "Asylum Seekers" until proven as such.
This would have to be the greatest confidence trick pulled on this nation ever.
Send such people to off shore detention centres until their claims are proven, genuine asylum seekers will be happy to be in a place of safety, the others will not.
Australian citizenship should be a privilege not part of the furniture and it should be revoked if necessary.

I agree with Ms Dickie that this bill will not only deprive the applicant of a basic right in a society ruled by law, but also deprive the courts of professional legal advice which can streamline and present facts in the correct manner.

Pro bono services are important to assist people who cannot afford professional legal advice, especially asylum seekers. With this bill, lawyers are not motivated to take on genuine cases, leaving these people who have fled injustice in their country to be treated with another form of injustice in Australia