Recent reports show a big uptick in asylum seekers, with some 2,300 would-be refugees mostly entering under cover of a fake tourist or business visa. They apparently arrived in Australian airports in a single month (May 2024) and applied for temporary protection visas in the arrivals lounge, ‘the highest since Anthony Albanese took office two years ago’, according to the Daily Telegraph. This is more than double the average of around a thousand monthly ‘refugee’ arrivals under the Morrison government in 2022, just before the election of that year.

The majority came from stable, prosperous countries unwracked by current refugee-generating hot civil wars or armed conflicts, including China (more than 300 arrivals), Vietnam (182), Colombia (152), and India (148). Most were men aged 25 to 44 with the bulk opting for Sydney as their ‘safe haven’ from whatever non-existent civil strife these young men in their prime were allegedly fleeing.

The steady drumbeat of asylum-seeking arrivals by air puts the amphibious arrivals of illegal boat people, which usually hogs all the headlines, in the shade. Jet-setting refugees are less visible, less dramatic, and less amenable to showy political resolve involving the military.

How do the asylum-seekers handle their arrival once on Australian soil? They have a well-rehearsed script for reciting at the airport and are ready to engage in a lengthy bureaucratic dance with the migration and refugee division of Australia’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). Repeated appeals can stretch out the time spent in Australia by up to eight years.

Those intending refugees, rejected at airport screening, have obviously studied their Marx – of the Groucho variety. As that expert pricker of pretence put it, ‘The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.’ If you can’t act sincere, however, you can always get a Woke lawyer (a pro-bono‘ progressive’ one or a taxpayer-funded one from a legal aid organisation) to make your case for you. Whilst only 4 per cent of self-represented applicants succeed in having an initial unfavourable assessment overturned on appeal, 28 per cent of those who brought a lawyer to the appeals table strike immigration gold.

Those most likely to succeed with a lawyer were appellants from Libya (91 per cent of those initially rejected getting lucky on appeal), Afghanistan (76 per cent), Ethiopia (61 per cent), Iraq (53 per cent), and Iran (47 per cent).

That said, the AAT mostly finds that some 90 per cent-95 per cent of those seeking a temporary protection visa as a refugee have no valid asylum claim with fewer than 5 per cent of applications from Vietnam, and 9 per cent of Indian applicants, succeeding in establishing their refugee bona fides. Around 84 per cent of the refugees fall at the first hurdle, with rejection by the Department of Home Affairs. 87 per cent of those rejectees who went on to appeal to the AAT were subsequently turned away. Almost nine in ten refugees aren’t anything of the kind.

This large failure rate has clearly displeased the immigration romantics in the federal Labor government – and in academia. Some blame the high rejection rate on the previous Liberal government which had (in their opinion) stacked the immigration courts with political appointments. To much Woke acclaim, the Albanese government has decided to scrap the AAT, replacing it with a new body, the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).

I could be wrong but this sounds like a spill of all positions to weed out the undesirable judges appointed by the conservatives under cover of a structural reorganisation. This bureaucratic ‘nuclear option’ feels like it is intended to advance Labor’s come-all-ye immigration/refugee policy.

‘Stopping the boats’ was a good start to secure our borders, and the policy won wide political support (except from the Greens, of course), but what is needed now is to complete the job by stopping the planes. Alas, both Labor and Liberal are attempting to blame-shift by trading barbs about each other’s governmental regimes for being weak or incompetent or both on the ‘asylum seeker’ farce when in power and neither of the two parties show any real sign of being prepared to stop the planes.