Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, a lawyer [crikey!], has displayed his incompetence in all its glory the last weeks. In fact he has all along demonstrated what an appalling and poor Minister he is in his present portfolio - as also in his previous portfolio of Employment and Workplace Relations. Apart from being the narrow-minded, religiously-driven, one-eyed individual he appears to be, he certainly doesn't come within a bull's roar of being capable of holding office as a Minister of the Crown - as Mike Carlton backgrounds in his weekly piece in the SMH:
"To give him the benefit of the doubt, it might just be that soapy Kevin Andrews, the Immigration Minister, is as thick as two planks.
That would be the kindest explanation for the trail of chaos he leaves behind as he bumbles along through the dismal affair of Dr Mohamed Haneef and the vanishing visa.
Then again, it is also possible that he set out deliberately to distort the public case against the good doctor by cherry picking from the ham-fisted federal police investigation and, when that collapsed, by plucking rank fabrications from thin air.
Either way, at every stage he has been exposed as an incompetent.
His latest embarrassment, at the hands of Judge Jeffrey Spender of the Federal Court, was proof of the pudding. Andrews's decision to ban Haneef on the grounds of a link to a distant second cousin who might or might not have had something to do with the London and Glasgow bombings blew up in his face.
Spender demolished him by ruling that "the minister cancelled the visa by adopting a wrong criterion; he fell into jurisdictional error by applying the wrong test. That error infects the cancellation decision. It follows that the decision must be set aside."
This would be farce if it were not so serious. In legislating extraordinary powers to deal with terrorism, the Government scrapped a truckload of the ancient rights and liberties we have known at law. The promise in return was that these powers would be used with scrupulous care.
Clearly they have not been. Andrews and his advisers, if that's what they are, have blundered around like pigs in a minefield."
"To give him the benefit of the doubt, it might just be that soapy Kevin Andrews, the Immigration Minister, is as thick as two planks.
That would be the kindest explanation for the trail of chaos he leaves behind as he bumbles along through the dismal affair of Dr Mohamed Haneef and the vanishing visa.
Then again, it is also possible that he set out deliberately to distort the public case against the good doctor by cherry picking from the ham-fisted federal police investigation and, when that collapsed, by plucking rank fabrications from thin air.
Either way, at every stage he has been exposed as an incompetent.
His latest embarrassment, at the hands of Judge Jeffrey Spender of the Federal Court, was proof of the pudding. Andrews's decision to ban Haneef on the grounds of a link to a distant second cousin who might or might not have had something to do with the London and Glasgow bombings blew up in his face.
Spender demolished him by ruling that "the minister cancelled the visa by adopting a wrong criterion; he fell into jurisdictional error by applying the wrong test. That error infects the cancellation decision. It follows that the decision must be set aside."
This would be farce if it were not so serious. In legislating extraordinary powers to deal with terrorism, the Government scrapped a truckload of the ancient rights and liberties we have known at law. The promise in return was that these powers would be used with scrupulous care.
Clearly they have not been. Andrews and his advisers, if that's what they are, have blundered around like pigs in a minefield."
Comments