Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson has recently been extolling Peter Dutton’s record on immigration integrity and dealing with foreign criminals. So let’s just test those claims.

Labour trafficking abusing the asylum system

A key responsibility of any immigration minister is to prevent the system being exploited by labour traffickers. Attempts by labour traffickers to exploit Australia’s visa system have been made for decades. Australian immigration authorities have generally been quick to deal with these knowing that if allowed to grow, tackling the implications becomes increasingly more difficult.

That was why I was surprised when a massive labour trafficking scam abusing the asylum system started in 2015-16 and there was no response from Dutton. The scam started with labour traffickers bringing Malaysian nationals to Australia using the Electronic Travel Authority (ETA). They were mainly being used to work on farms as well as on construction sites, sex shops and back rooms in restaurants. This was a scam well known to long-standing immigration staff.

The lack of effective response from Dutton led to the scam quickly extending to Chinese nationals (see Chart 1). In 2017-18, Australia received 27,931 asylum applications, exceeding any previous financial year with around 67 percent of those applications from just........

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