SUBJECT | Andrew Giles failure to look at Mark Green's Visa Issue and Indonesia Ban | 7 December 2022
BEN FORDHAM: Dan Tehan is the shadow immigration minister, and he joins us on the line. Dan Tehan, good morning to you.
DAN TEHAN: Morning. Great to be with you again.
FORDHAM: So you're talking to the minister at the moment to try and twist his arm when it comes to the Green family.
TEHAN: That’s right, I actually spoke to him personally yesterday and wrote to him; I also spoke to Ben Green yesterday. And what I’m calling on the minister to do is actually just make a decision. What is happening is he’s just pushing this further and further down the track, and that just leaves great uncertainty for the Green family. Now he has the powers, through a ministerial intervention, to make a decision. Obviously, he's got to look at this decision. He's got to make sure that there's integrity in what he does. But what I can't understand is, while Dan Andrews was campaigning, he did six fundraisers for him, and he’s done other events. He's not doing his day job, and that should be sitting down at his desk and ending the uncertainty that this poor family is going through.
FORDHAM: If there's one thing we've learnt about these visa issues is that we can't just leave people hanging, right? If you leave people in limbo for months and years, then that just leads to uncertainty, and they can't kind of lock in their future here in Australia because they don't know whether they've got one.
TEHAN: That's absolutely right. And when I spoke to Ben Green yesterday, he said if he were forced to go back to Scotland, they would literally have to start again, his whole family, in terms of finding housing, employment and getting their lives back together. And at the moment, they also had to pack up here in Australia, so they are absolutely in limbo at the moment. And the one thing he wants for Christmas, more than anything else, is for the Minister to sit down at his desk - don’t go to Christmas parties, just do your day job, sit down at your desk - and make a decision. Get rid of the uncertainty that the Greens are facing at the moment.
FORDHAM: Andrew Giles has used these powers before because earlier this year, he granted permanent residency to the family from Biloela in Queensland.
TEHAN: He did. He did. And he moved quickly to do that. And I think what's puzzling the Greens is that he was able to do that so quickly; why can't he sit down at his desk and make a decision for them and end their uncertainty? It just seems to me that his priorities are all skew-whiff. He just doesn't seem to want to focus on the things that matter to this family, and that's a great shame for them. But I think the Minister; now it wouldn't be hard for him to sit down at his desk today for four or five hours, get the departmental briefings, go through it, and end the uncertainty. No one from the department or from the minister's office has even had the courtesy to speak to Ben Green and his family. So, it just does seem that they just want to ignore and cause uncertainty to this family, cause stress to this family, and especially, as everyone knows, in the lead-up to Christmas, you want to make sure that you're providing certainty for your family so that they know what their future is.
FORDHAM: We’re chatting with Dan Tehan, the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship. Dan Tehan, is it fair to draw a comparison between what's happening to the Green family in South Australia and what's happened with these ISIS brides who've been brought in from Syria?
TEHAN: Well, I think that the comparison is that Minister Giles was able to find the time to work through these issues. And while we might not agree with what he's done with the ISIS brides, at least he found the time to sit down at his desk and make the decision. What he won’t do is sit down and find the time to make the decisions when it comes to the Green family - and that's what absolutely bewilders me. And as I've said, six fundraisers for Dan Andrews to help get him re-elected; while he was at those fundraisers, he could have been at this desk sorting out this issue and giving the certainty that the Greens want. So his priorities seem to be everywhere else except for the Green family.
FORDHAM: Well, let's hope that Andrew Giles sits down and focuses on this case and does it straight away so that they have some certainty leading into Christmas. If I can ask you another one as the Shadow Minister for Immigration. You'd be keeping across what's happening in Indonesia at the moment and this new rule that's been brought in - a ban on extramarital intimate activities. So it means anyone sprung with someone they're not married to could be in some trouble. So there’d have to be a warning issued to Australian travellers heading to Bali, right?
TEHAN: Absolutely. I think the DFAT travel advice needs to be upgraded, and we need to make sure that everyone is aware of this new law because the last thing we would want to see is people caught doing something that, by Indonesian law, they shouldn't be doing, when what they're doing is perfectly legal, for instance, here in Australia. So travellers beware, and we need to make sure that travellers are fully advised of these new laws because otherwise, we could see some very unfortunate situations where we'll have to provide consular help to people who unwittingly or unknowingly have done the wrong thing when they didn't know they were doing it.
TEHAN: And spread the word. Dan Tehan, thanks for joining us.
