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?

After all, you wouldn’t want to be taken for a blustering old blimp now, would you?

Zwilnik, I can only assume that you are the first, at least, on this planet to start channelling Kurt Vonnegut.

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!

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!

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.

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 minions onions 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.

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.

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!

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!

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

a new unit in the Immigration Department … [which is] … pushing up the numbers of people being thrown out of the country.

The National Character Cancellation Centre was a little noticed by-product of the Department’s recent restructure.

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.

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

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!

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:

For the purposes of the character test, if a person has been convicted of an offence and the court orders the person to participate in:

(a) a residential drug rehabilitation scheme; or

(b) a residential program for the mentally ill;

the person is taken to have been sentenced to a term of imprisonment equal to the number of days the person is required to participate in the scheme or program.

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.