Policy shock: immigration to detain only risky refugees

Risky Business’s brain has a permanent search string for the word “risk”, much like when you buy a new car/shoes/haircut, you suddenly see the same one everywhere. So when Immigration Minister Chris Evans explained that his new policy for decisions on refugee status is based on “risk management”, the detector went off the scale. He said only those deemed a risk to the community would be locked up. But even then, how much of a risk they pose will be reviewed every three months. Goodness, the lights have been switched on.

The department will now have to answer the question: “Is there agood reason why this person has to be detained? Is there a risk to the community?”.

Grant Whitehorn, national president of the Risk Management Institution of Australasia, was impressed. He said the government is now “putting the onus on the Department of Immigration officials and officers to prove to us, to justify, to provide us with assurance, that this person should be in detention. A completely different mindset and policy to the former government.”

7.30 Report presenter Kerry O’Brien pointed out that it would be departmental officials ultimately making this risk assessment on decisions made by other department officials, and, in the case of offshore detainees, they would have no recourse to judicial review.

From the details released, it sounds like they’re not just using the term to sound trendy.

But let’s see how the department actually takes to the new approach and how the process is ultimately carried out in practice. As we’ve seen, policy is one thing, execution is something else.

Taking down the trolls

Internet forums and bulletin boards are funny places. On the one hand they can be anonymous spaces where members are free to explore aspects of their identity unfettered by worldly demographic characteristics. And on the other they're spaces where rogue members revel in that anonymity and behave as if there are no “real world”consequences to their actions.

One defamation lawsuit in the US is attempting to unravel the complex relationship between the anonymous avatars forum members live by and the law that is meant to otherwise govern them, including First Amendment freedom of speech protections. In the process the case is “unmasking the norms of online commenting,” Wired.com reported late last month.

The case goes back to 2005, when a female Yale University law student –identified in court documents as Jane Doe I – discovered a thread on AutoAdmit.com discussing her impending arrival at the Ivy League law school. “Stupid bitch to attend law school” was the charming thread topic on a site that claims to be “the most prestigious law school discussion board in the world”.

Posts therein included the full name of the woman, comments such as “I think I will sodomise her. Repeatedly”. A second woman, Jane Doe II, received similar treatment in January 2007. “Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped,” forum member AK-47 boldly stated in their attack on the female law students.

Attempts by the women to get the forum administrators to remove the offending threads failed but then it became front-page news for The Washington Post.

StanfordUniversity and Yale law professors helped the women file the federal lawsuit in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. And in January this year a federal court allowed the team to subpoena internet service providers and webmail vendors, allowing them to pin down the real world identities of AK-47 and a number of other forum trolls.

The Jane Does claim that the AutoAdmit.com posts appear in the first pages of search engine results for searches for their names, which they claim has had a negative effect on their professional and personal lives –including the loss of job offers. Of course, now the trolls are likely to be named and shamed by both their user names and whatever name their employers, teachers and mothers know them by. The case is yet to go to trial.

Quotes of the month

Qantas CEO, Geoff Dixon

“However, the facts are that oil prices staying at over $US140-plus a barrel has changed forever the way we do business.”

ANZ CEO, Mike Smith

“The rest of the western world is in severe financial crisis, in Australia we are trying to deal with the problem of success.”