The National Character Cancellation Centre.
Rehabilitation camp for new leaders of the Labor Party?
Centre for revisionist studies in ‘Australian character’?
Unit for transforming terrible toddlers into nice human beings?
No. The NCCC is a new unit in the Immigration Department set up to “bring together cases where people’s character was in question”.
Not cases where people have broken immigration rules. Not cases where people transgress Australian laws in the present day. Cases where permanent residents have a past ’stain’ on their records — even if they have paid the legal penalty.
This government wants to make “character” an election issue and it wants to make “character” a test of whether people deserve to live here. The irony of a nation which was founded on the export of criminals now trying to deport petty criminals has already been pointed out. This government is trying to make the immigration system a branch of the judiciary - the no-appeal branch.
When I first read this story, I was incredulous. I wondered whether it was a joke. Surely there is no one in Canberra who could devise such an Orwellian title with a straight face?
I fear it’s only a short step from here across to the National Character Eradication Centre.
this government is insane
Yes, criminally insane.
Surely the National Character Cancellation Centre was named by a subversive type well versed in the arts of Orwellian News-Speak.
As such that person is clearly guilty of Thought Crime.
He or she is an objective traitor to the System and for reasons of security and loyalty must be dismissed forthwith.
How did such a person rise to a position of responsibility without the help of confederates?
Traitors are everywhere.
Hate Goldstein! Hate Goldstein! Hate! Hate! Hate!
Give it a decade or so, and someone in DIC will wake up to the fact that only someone who is criminally insane - and therefore of bad character - would want either to come to this country, or stay in it. Leaving them with a classic, Catch 22 situation.
Or, Howard and the Libs could get themselves comprehensively rolled at the next election. Personally, I’d prefer to see a slightly more selective rolling, with the crazies and the drop-kicks - even the ones in safe seats - having their majorities trimmed, while the genuinely liberal members of Federal parliament return with increased majorities.
The Character Test involves assessment of a person’s criminality:
Hey this could be good. We can all think of certain government members who would be candidates for deportation.
Facelift: thanks for the link and details.
“having regard to the person’s past and present general conduct, the person is found to be not of good character”
=
“we don’t like the way you mouth off about Dear Ratty, so you are not of Good Character”
“there is a significant risk that the person will …vilify a segment of the Australian community…”
Such as the Rattitarian Party?
These “criteria” are so subjective that they would be laughable if they were not evil. No-one espousing them should be considered fit for Public Office.
FaceLift,
I’ll see your Department of Immigration, Citizenship and all-round Australianness and raise you the relevant sections of the Migration Act, in particular, Section 501 where a “substantial criminal record” is defined entirely in terms of cumulative prison time and furthermore:
Interesting that the DIC fact sheet you chose for your link, omits any mention of that section, which implicitly assumes that court-ordered drug rehabilitation or psychiatric treatment is worthless.
Before you comment again, I suggest you acquaint yourself with the extensive background material that’s available on the subject of the “character test” by doing a quick Google Blog search for the names “Nystrom” and “Jovicic” or “MIgration-Act Section-501|s501″. I’ve written before on this topic, and researched it extensively - you’ve got some serious catching up to do. About 4 years’ worth.
I Hope someone points out that Ratty’s favourite Broadcaster , A Mr A. Jones of Sydney may be subject of this - I predict it will be dropped by the time the vocals start on Laura Branigan’s “Gloria”
Yes, those of us with more than a passing acquantance with DIAC, know that their so called ‘fact sheets’ rarely tell the full story.
Oh, so it’s not ‘new’ then, Gummo, as suz implies!
Hey, I made no comment either way, and was, in fact, just trying to bring a helpful note to this discussion. Apparently your response has added some quantified reason to the debate, but I don’t se why you have to be so aggravated about the information supplied! ‘Before you comment again…! Well if we had all the information available ‘before we commented’ we’d have no discussion would we?
I find the clause ‘having regard to the person’s past and present general conduct, the person is found to be not of good character’ rather ambiguous, and open to abuse, actually! Before you comment again… Cheer up, and have a nice day, grumpy one!
The National Character Cancellation Centre.
What a perfect title. I expect inventive bureaucrats are beavering away, right now, at new names for other centres.
I Heard What You Said Brian and it Wasn’t Nice Centre. IHWYSBWNC
I Will Give You Terrorism Son Centre. IWGYTSC
Union Boss Identification Centre UBIC
and so on……
…..while the rest of us are thinking Best Get the F Out of Here. BGFOH
Faclift,
While it’s true that “character testing” has been going on for years - under Ruddock, then Vanstone and now Andrews - the creation of the National Character Cancellation Centre is reported in the PM report that Suz has linked to as
Sounds like someone decided to pull all the mean-spirited little functionaries who were looking for potential deportees off their own bat, in the quest for a little additional job-satisfaction, into one centrally co-ordinated group. Good for morale, I suppose.
There’s nothing “ambiguous and open to abuse” about the wording of the Act - it’s plainly, and unambiguously abusive of the power of the Executive branch of the government - and if you’ve taken the time to check out my previous grumpy outpourings on the this subject, you’ll note that I’ve argued that before too.
Please excuse me if I mistook your helpfully intended attempt to bring some additional facts to this discussion for an attempt to obscure the issue by citing an incomplete and self-serving statement from the very Department that’s responsible for much of this entrenched abuse. Next time I’ll try to be show a little more patience, and a little more forebearance for your attempts to grapple with an issue that is evidently new to you, despite the fact that there have been several previous posts on the topic here at Larva Prod and not all of them from me.
Hard at work at his desk in the Ministry Of Truth, Winston read a Party Directive that decreed Detainees were to be dispatched in railway boxcars to Character Buildings.
Of course, and the whole world revolves around Lava Prod and grumpy postings!
I’m so glad you’re not on the Character Cancellation committee. I’d be gone already! For not knowing what the committee stands for as I apparently should! As would Fatih Tuncok’s lawyer, Michaela Byers, because, as reported on PM, ‘It was the first time the long-serving immigration lawyer had heard of the National Character Cancellation Centre.’
And, on the contrary, the clause quoted is ambiguous and open to abuse. Its ambiguity is what makes it debatable. You don’t even know how to be agreed with!
lol @ joe2
Maybe they should have called it the National Character Cancelling Margins.
“Substantial criminal records
A person is deemed to have a substantial criminal record if they have been:
sentenced to either death or life imprisonment…”
Oh, we DREAMED of being sentenced to death or life imprisonment! Why when I was a lad, me and my ninety-two brothers and sisters immigrated to Australia by floating through shark-infested lava, on the top of a soggy egg carton. And when we finally got here, our dad would try us, convict us, execute us, raise us from the dead, then sentence us to three more executions, life imprisonment, and transportation to the penal zargax-mining colonies on Mars, where we worked 54 hours a day (different axis of periodical rotation there, don’t ye know) without oxygen. Now THAT was having a substantial criminal record!
It’s not the ambiguity that bothers me. It’s the cruelty.
Deporting people because they are insane is just disgusting.
And I don’t believe any argument about the fact that they have to be arraigned on some charge.
I know a young man who descended into schizophrenia far from home in Melbourne, and ran a pitiful campaign of assault on chemists’ shops for drugs. A truly frightening experience for any of the staff he assaulted.
He was eventually removed home to Adelaide in shackles.
Both his parents come from overseas. It is entirely possible he is only a “permanent resident”. Are they going to deport him?
He is going to cost our community a great deal of money in care over his lifetime.
To actually assemble a bureaucratic apparatus so he can be removed, and to articulate a set of criteria to make it possible, and (no doubt) to create files and a questionairre and performance targets… you know what it makes me think of.
Can you imagine attending a party in Canberra on Saturday night? What do you do for a job, then? Oh, I deport insane people.
It is a sentence which should not be possible in the English language.
And you try and tell the young people of today, and they won’t believe you!!!
Let’s have parliament nominate a House Committee on Un-Australian Activities. They can decide who is worthy of living in this country… Certianly not people like Cornelia Rau or Vivian Solon or Robert Jovicic….
Cheers…
I have been distracted by a nasty little rebellion on Delma IV. Apparently they demanded food, the fools!
But having crushing it with maximum A-Team Dirty Dozen force, I turn my communications energy globe back on Tellus to see now you are getting ripe and juicy for absorption into Boskone.
The National Character Cancellation Centre? Yes! Now you are getting it! Carn the Allah Ackbar Show Us Your Weakest Link Pies! and other impromptu wage slave expressions of Tellurian joy!
But then I scan closely and realise it is just Potemkin Spielcock. Cancellation Centre so as *untranslateable* and weakly urine as your catch and release regime for marlinfish and trophy wives.
Undesireables must be terminated, not let back into the wild. Otherwise they will breed and complain. I know this from junior wormling times pacifiying Retiuclar B System. Happy days, oh happy days.
Cancellation should mean cancellation proper. Or at least final time of life in chrysolite mines. Not
minionsonions just consigning substandard units of production to economy class transportation to weaker colonies.Once again, you foolish weak Tellurians have revealed soft soft juicy pubic hair underbelly while disembarking with waving legs from your limos, boeings and mortages.
Boskone is now even more steadied for the steely ponce of doom.
“Boskone is now even more steadied for the steely ponce of doom.”
Zwilnik, I can only assume that you are the first, at least, on this planet to start channelling Kurt Vonnegut.
Congratulations!…… some sense is now restored to our world.
Yes, character tests for immigrants is a silly idea. Thank god, Paul Keating had the good sense to over-rule his Immigration Minister who refused to extend a foreigner’s visa, who was already over-staying illegally.
Keating was quite right to ignore this foreigner’s sermons that homosexuals deserve to be killed and that Jews start all wars through their sexual perversions.
Thank goodness, no authoritarian racist “character” test prevented this charming specimen to become a full citizen of Australia!
Que?
I suspect both of you joes seek to mock me. Rest assured of a lifetime in the Pain Amplifier when the Glorious Day of Liberation arrives.
As for the kurtvonnegut, his precious Tramalfadore would have ended up as Boskone’s main source of toilet plungers, if it ever existed. Which it doesn’t.
But you weak excitable Tellurians are always so ready to treat the creations of your Science Fictionalists as if they were were really real. Fools!
Nice try JG - now I suggest that you inform yourself on the actual content of the “character test” that our fine new “National Character Cancellation Centre” will be applying, either through Facelift’s link to the DIC “Fact Sheet” or the Austlii listing of section 501 of the Migration Act itself.
After all, you wouldn’t want to be taken for a blustering old blimp now, would you?
Gummo Trotsky
From my reading, the poor racially vilified victim of the right-wing Keating immigration minister would be a prime target of this racist, Islamophobic, fundamentalist neocon Character Test. At least Keating was able to make a difference for one powerless, oppressed and racially vilified member of our community. The man Keating saved clearly would not be entitled to a fair go under Howard and his stormtroopers, eh?