Peter vs Paul: Au pairs vs Sheik Hilali ; ministerial intervention in immigration matters compared.
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by Ganesh Sahathevan
Sheik Hilali First, Paul Keating's history of intervention in immigration matters:
Keating defends letting sheik stay
By RICHARD KERBAJ
THEAUSTRALIAN
FORMER prime minister Paul Keating has defended for the first time his decision to give controversial Islamic imam Taj Din al-Hilali permanent residency, saying it was in response to lobbying by the cleric's supporters.
Sheik Hilali was given residency in 1990 following attempts by then Hawke Labor government immigration minister Chris Hurford to have the Egyptian-born cleric deported in 1986.
Mr Keating told The Weekend Australian he and then Labor backbencher Leo McLeay pushed for residency for Sheik Hilali following demands from his supporters. "Leo McLeay and I responded to parish interests and requests from a community that attended the Lakemba Mosque to try and keep their (cleric) in Australia," he said.
"The Liberals, having let him in eight years earlier, kept on extending his visa."
Mr Keating and Sheik Hilali were photographed together in 1994 during a visit by the then prime minister to Sydney's Lakemba Mosque to meet the nation's Muslim spiritual leader and his community.
Muslim community leader Omar Yassine had invited Mr Keating to deliver a speech to thousands of worshippers following Friday afternoon sermons.
"We had close links with Paul Keating then and ... he was from Bankstown, near Lakemba ... so we belong to his area," said Mr Yassine, secretary of the community-based El-Dunnieh Association in Sydney.
Mr Keating said he visited the Lakemba Mosque "every two to three years" while he was in office. "As the local member, I used to visit most of the denominational establishments (in the area)," he said.
Sheik Hilali was condemned last October when The Australian exposed a sermon in which he compared immodestly dressed women to "uncovered meat".
Mr Yassine said the close links with Mr Keating were first established when he was treasurer in the Hawke government in the late 1980s. But while allegiances were being forged between Mr Keating and Sheik Hilali, Mr Hurford wanted the Egyptian-born cleric deported.
The Weekend Australian revealed last October that Mr Hurford wanted the cleric, who had been living in Australia since arriving on a tourist visa in 1982, forced out of the country in 1986 after making inflammatory speeches that were dividing the Muslim community.
But thanks to Sheik Hilali's powerful Labor supporters, including Mr Keating and then backbencher Mr McLeay, the cleric was given permanent residency status in 1990.
Mr Yassine said he did not remember what was discussed at the meeting between Sheik Hilali and Mr Keating at the mosque.
But he said he remembers wrongly introducing Mr Keating.
"When I introduced him, I introduced him as president of Australia," he said. "And then I said, 'My apology, the Prime Minister of Australia'."
Keating stopped sheik's expulsion
By BRAD NORINGTON
THEAUSTRALIAN
THE apology from the sheik was profuse. He had verbally attacked women, endorsed suicide bombings in Lebanon and declared that Jews were plotting world domination.
"The two cheapest things in Australia are the flesh of a woman and the meat of a pig," he said.
Taj Din al-Hilali accepted his words were offensive. "I genuinely believe that I have changed for the better," he insisted.
Nothing, it seems, has changed in the last 20 years. The nation's most senior Muslim cleric was not responding to public damnation over his Ramadan sermon last month in which he blamed women for inciting rape and likened them to abandoned "meat".
Chris Hurford, immigration minister in the Hawke Labor government, tried in 1986 to have him deported after Hilali had overstayed a tourist visa in 1982 and settled in Sydney.
Hurford wanted the sheik sent home to Egypt because his reported utterances were dividing the Muslim community.
But Hilali had two powerful Labor supporters on his side - Paul Keating and Leo McLeay - who would ultimately help him win his quest for permanent residency.
Keating, then federal treasurer, and McLeay, an influential backbencher from his party's Right faction, made no bones about their belief that Hilali should stay and lobbied on his behalf.
They were under pressure from the growing local Muslim community in their neighbouring western Sydney seats of Blaxland and Grayndler.
The Lakemba mosque where Hilali was the spiritual leader was in McLeay's electorate.
"It was a local political issue for people who lived in the electorate," said one observer.
"They took the philosophical view that if people in this religious group wanted Hilali to be their spiritual leader, why should they say no?"
But Hurford and other players close to the action take a different view.
They believe that Hilali was ultimately granted permanent residency by the Labor government in 1990 - in a decision made by Keating himself as acting prime minister while Bob Hawke was away - because the decision could help Labor in federal and state politics.
Barrie Unsworth, who was NSW premier from 1986 to 1988, confirms he and Hilali knew each other but denies he stood to benefit if the sheik was given residency.
"I didn't actively do anything to keep him here," Unsworth toldThe Weekend Australian yesterday.
"I had been to the Lakemba mosque and taken my shoes off and gone in. I met Hilali, I had to deal with him, but I also went to a synagogue in the eastern suburbs and met the head of the Coptic (Egyptian Orthodox) Church at the airport."
Keating did actively try to help Hilali stay.
He led a delegation of Muslim community leaders to see Hurford in his Canberra office in 1986, attempting to persuade the minister to reverse his opposition to the Muslim cleric.
Hurford wouldn't budge and continued to fight Hilali's application for residency in the Federal Court. But he didn't last much longer as immigration minister.
Hawke moved Hurford out of immigration a year later and gave him the community services portfolio of retiring senator Don Grimes.
The move was sold to Hurford as a promotion, but Hurford is understood to believe it was linked to his support for a "good settlement policy" - a view that did not sit well with Labor's version of multiculturalism.
In Hurford's mind, Hilali was a classic case of someone who should be rejected because he refused to integrate into Australian society.
But Hurford's replacement as minister, the late Mick Young, was much more receptive.
Tony Harris, then deputy head of the Immigration Department, recalls that it was Keating who ultimately allowed Hilali to stay in a decision he made as acting prime minister when Hawke was away.
Harris says he and then Immigration head Bill McKinnon believed that Labor had good reasons for giving Hilali residency.
"We surmised that Hilali came from that part of Sydney which was important to several Labor electorates, state and federal, that included Keating's electorate," Harris said.
"It was important to Labor because the party was very close to the Lebanese community.
"The view was that the Lebanese community was influential in selecting Labor candidates and had a heavy presence in electorates in the south and west of Sydney."
Hurford may regard himself as a casualty of refusing residency to Hilali but so, it appears, was the head of his department.
According to McKinnon's son, The Weekend Australian's freedom of information editor Michael McKinnon, his father's position cost him his job.
McKinnon says his late father told him he left the department involuntarily and was offered the job of high commissioner in New Zealand.
"I know he vehemently opposed granting permanent residency to the sheik," said McKinnon.
"My father paid with his job for putting national interest before the political interests of the ALP."
Longtime Labor adviser Richard Farmer says he and then fellow Hawke staffer Bob Sorby were sent to Unsworth's office to help with the NSW Labor government's campaign for the state election in 1988 because of their success with federal Labor the previous year.
Unsworth had only recently switched from the upper house to the lower house, in the southern seat of Rockdale, at a by-election and was very concerned not to lose it.
According to Farmer, the premier wanted to keep Hilali onside and have him take up residency to appease local Muslims.
"I have absolutely no doubt, because there was a big Lebanese community in that electorate and Barrie Unsworth wanted to make sure he was re-elected," Farmer said.
Unsworth rejects Farmer's claim as nonsense, saying the Muslims in his electorate were Shi'ites and attended the Arncliffe mosque, whereas Hilali was a Sunni and the leader of the Lakemba mosque.
"If Farmer says I was looking after Hilali in Rockdale it's nonsense - he fails to understand the structure of Muslim society," said Unsworth.
Unsworth lost the 1988 election and says he gained little campaign help from Farmer, now a winemaker and writer in South Australia, and Sorby, now a NSW judge.
"They were a couple of gunslingers imposed upon me by (NSW general secretary) Stephen Loosely," he said.
"They were uncontrollable."
Other senior Labor sources from that time say that Labor politics was very much mixed up in Hilali's battle to get permanent residency.
"Officially our policy was to send Hilali back but there were stacking wars going on among the Lebanese Muslims and (Christian) Maronites," said one source, who declined to be named.
"It was going on in the seats of St George, Barton and the inner city."
Keating yesterday declined to return The Weekend Australian's call.
But he was pitched at the time against another powerful figure, Lebanese Christian community leader Eddie Obeid, who wanted Hilali out.
Obeid, who owned the El Telegraph newspaper and later became a state Labor MP and minister, lobbied the NSW regional manager of the immigration department to have Hilali deported.
His newspaper printing press in Marrickville was burned down just days after El Telegraph published a story based on a taped recording of an inflammatory sermon by Hilali in 1982, likening the flesh of women to pig meat.
Obeid yesterday declined to comment but a source close to him said: "It was war out there. Burning down that building was the first terrorist act in Australia".
Peter Dutton leaving a press conference in Canberra last week. The home affairs minister is under pressure to explain why he intervened in the au pair cases and a claim he may have misled parliament. Photograph: Sean Davey/AFP/Getty Images
Peter Dutton has been accused of misleading parliament over the au pair visa saga.
On 27 March, Greens MP Adam Bandt asked Dutton in question time to categorically rule out “any personal connection or any other relationship between you and the intended employer of either of the au pairs.”
Dutton responded: “The answer is yes.”
On Thursday, Guardian Australia revealed Dutton saved an Italian au pair from deportation, who was due to work for a former Queensland police colleague.
Dutton went on to say in his answer to parliament: “I haven’t received any personal benefit. I don’t know these people. They haven’t worked for me. They haven’t worked for my wife. I repeated all of that yesterday, and I repeat it again today.”
Dutton was a police officer from 1990 until 1999 before being elected to federal parliament in 2001. In 1997 Dutton and the family’s father completed a surveillance course together and were pictured in a group photograph.
Bandt believes Dutton has some explaining to do.
“On the face of it, Peter Dutton may have misled Parliament when answering my question,” Bandt told the Guardian Australia.
“Given reports suggesting he has a personal connection with the employer of an au pair, he urgently needs to explain himself. If he can’t, he has no business being a minister.”
Labor immigration spokesman Shayne Neumann said if Dutton knows the intended employer of one of these au pairs, Peter Dutton has clearly misled Parliament.
“This entire situation stinks and it’s time Peter Dutton comes clean immediately. If he doesn’t, Scott Morrison needs to step in and clean up his minister’s mess,” he told Guardian Australia.
On morning radio on Friday, Dutton insisted he had not been in contact with the policeman for decades and the case was considered on its merits.
“I wouldn’t have spoken to that individual for 20 years. I didn’t speak to him in relation to this matter. He raised it with my office,” Dutton told 2GB radio on Friday morning.
“I apply the law equally.”
He characterised his intervention as “a commonsense approach”.
Asked if somebody was leaking the details to harm him, Dutton said: “It’s a good question. I suspect all will be revealed at some stage.”
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, defended Dutton’s use of ministerial intervention during a press conference in Jakarta on his first official overseas visit.
“I made hundreds if not thousands of decisions as minister for immigration, it would not be unusual to do that,” he told reporters.
Morrison said Dutton had “assured” him the cases were considered on merit.
“They are difficult decisions, they are personal decisions, human decisions,” he said.
He described the huge pile of folders immigration ministers must consider.
“Every single one of those is a life, and every decision you make on that affects those lives and all the lives of people around them,” he said
“You don’t make those decisions in a rush ... you make them carefully and in a considered way.”
When asked this week if the Italian au pair was intending to work for his family, the policeman told Guardian Australia: “Not confirming, not denying. Just talk to Peter Dutton’s office. It’s well above my call as to what to say.
“If you want to talk to Matt Stock at Peter Dutton’s office, feel free.”
Guardian Australia understands Matt Stock is a former Brisbane detective sergeant, who now works for the Australian Border Force as an acting commander and has had a liaison role with Dutton’s office.
And finally, with regards departmental advice, a reminder of the type of person,the department approves of:
Bangkok: Singapore has questioned how a Singaporean-born Australian resident came to be collecting welfare benefits while allegedly engaging in terrorism-related activities in Melbourne.
Comments by the city state's Home and Law Affairs Minister, K. Shanmugam, also raise questions about why Australian authorities never moved against Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff while he was making posts on social media supporting Islamic State and other terrorism groups.
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Forty-four-year-old Zulfikar, who lived in Australia for 14 years, was detained under Singapore's Internal Security Act when he returned to Singapore this month.
Mr Shanmugam said Zulfikar was a "dangerous, pernicious influence" who wanted to brainwash Muslims in Singapore to reject the democratic state and instead to have an Islamic caliphate.
Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff, 44, had been living in Australia for 14 years, leaving Singapore after run-ins with Muslim leaders and the authorities.
Photo: YouTube
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He said Singaporean authorities could not act earlier against Zulfikar because he was in Australia.
"He apparently was on the dole there, so he was getting money from the Australian taxpayer while criticising the democratic, secular system which was feeding him," Mr Shanmugam told reporters.
The Australian Federal Police have not commented on the case.
A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs said Australian officials are seeking to provide assistance to Zulfikar. But the spokesperson said Singapore does not recognise dual nationality and he is being treated as a Singaporean citizen.
A photo Zulfikar Shariff posted on his Facebook page of himself with his children in front of a flag associated with the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
Photo: Supplied
"For privacy reasons, no further comment will be provided on this case," the spokesperson said.
Singapore's leaders have used Zulfikar's arrest to deliver a strong warning to Malay Muslims that they will not tolerate anyone agitating to divide Singaporeans or sow conflict through religious extremism.
Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff is accused of actively spreading radical ideology online and helping radicalise at least two other citizens.
Photo: Facebook
Mr Shanmugam said individuals who preach extremism and motivate others to commit violence were more dangerous than those who inflict physical harm and kill.
Yaacob Ibrahim, Singapore 's Communication and Information Minister, said the arrest of Zulfikar and two other Singaporeans he allegedly radicalised, are a stark reminder to Singaporeans that the risks to Singapore are real and reflect the open and porous nature of the internet.
"No country can also fully block the internet and prevent want comes in," he said. "What is more important is the resilience and cohesion of the nation and our people."
Singapore authorities allege that Zulfikar, who studied at La Trobe University after first settling in Australia in 2002, planned to hold training programs to persuade young Singaporeans to join his extremist agenda.
Singapore 's Ministry of Home Affairs said Zulfikar started becoming radicalised as early as 2001 after reading hardline material, supporting groups like al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah and advocating for Muslims to take up arms in Afghanistan after the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.
"One day soon, we will run out of excuses," he said in one Facebook post last year. "And join the jihad … may Allah grant us the courage and guidance to do what needs to be done."
Zulfikar has been issued with a two-year detention order.
Two Singaporeans he allegedly helped radicalise have been issued with restriction orders than ban them from moving house, changing jobs or travelling abroad without permission from the Internal Security Department.
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has made repeated comments over the last year warning that south-east Asia is at the frontline of terrorism and the recruitment of terrorists. He has urged that regional nations step up their sharing of intelligence and cut funding channels to Islamic State and other terror organisations.
In May, Singaporean authorities said they had discovered a terror cell that could have directed an attack on the city state. Eight Bangladeshi men were detained under the Internal Security Act.
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