Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I don't have all of that information here, Senator Lambie, but what I do know is that the legislation is retrospective in the sense that it seeks to apply mandatory cancellation to people who had already had their visas cancelled under mandatory cancellation but this Pearson court decision basically said that their visas were no longer cancelled. So they are a group of people who, because they committed serious offences and had an aggregate sentence of more than 12 months, had mandatory cancellation of their visas. But for a relatively small group of people who had had their visas mandatorily cancelled because they had aggregate sentences of more than 12 months the court decision said, 'That's not allowed,' and therefore their visas have effectively been reissued. They are allowed to stay. They were people who were convicted of serious offences and had mandatory cancellation of their visas. The court said, 'Actually the way the law works is that those people shouldn't have had mandatory cancellation of their visas,' and therefore they got their visas back. What we are trying to do with this legislation is, if you like, step back in time and clarify that, in fact, for this group of people who had aggregate sentences of more than 12 months it was right that they had mandatory cancellation of their visas. That is, as I say, what's always been understood to be the case and the law. It was just that this court decision found something different.

In terms of the types of offences we are talking about you may have heard me say it's not minor offences; it's serious offences. When you think about it, we are talking about offences that lead to sentences of more than 12 months. It is just that in some cases there might have been a six-month conviction for one offence and a 10-year sentence for another offence and, because that's an aggregate sentence of more than 12 months, that wasn't enough for the court. So we are talking about sexual assault, kidnapping and serious assaults. As I say, it's not shoplifting or traffic offences. It's some of the most serious offences you can imagine.