Every single one of these visa cases is uniquely associated with an individual considered to be a non-citizen and who must, under our universal visa system, obtain an approval to enter the country. Every visa comes with a set of conditions that holders must abide by while they are in the country. Many of those conditions relate to when, where, how often, how long and for whom they can work to prevent too many Australian jobs being taken by foreigners. It is little wonder in this churn of visitors and visas that things sometimes go awry. Visitors overstay their visa deliberately or accidentally. They sometimes work when they shouldn’t or work more than they’re allowed. They can get confused about the type of work they’re allowed to do or they intentionally plan to work on a visa which they know doesn’t allow work. The Australian visa system is generally calibrated to deal with things when they go awry. It has automated mechanisms to fix simple errors, banks of human decision-makers when a judgement needs to be made and uniformed Australian Border Force officers at the border and out in the field checking for compliance with the rules. Where there’s a suspected deliberate breach of the rules, the visa holder often finds themselves refused entry or removed from the country. Peter Dutton’s grants of visas to au pairs has come under scrutiny. Credit:AAP Loading

Inherent in this system are decisions. Decisions made by either a machine operating on algorithms or decisions made by humans. Decisions to grant a visa, decisions to cancel a visa or decisions on which sanction to impose in the event of a visa breach. As in nearly every system of governance in the world, those decisions can be appealed. In the Australian migration system, appellants are able to avail themselves of a hierarchy of appeal forums which ultimately - albeit rarely - culminate in the High Court of Australia. More typically appeals are within the purview of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. One quirk in Australia’s Migration Act is the amenity for someone who has been detained to ask the Minister for Immigration to intervene in the public interest and grant a visa to allow that person to enter or remain in the country. That power is described in the act as non-compellable and non-delegable, meaning no one can force the minister to intervene and only the minister personally can intervene. During recent scrutiny of Peter Dutton’s grants of visas to au pairs when he was immigration minister, legitimate questions have been asked about the invocation and exercise of this unique power he exercised. Both Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Dutton have responded publicly that the power is prudent and have strongly defended its existence and its use by ministers on both sides of politics. Noting the large number of ministerial interventions that take place every year, it would seem the power is warranted. Punters are unlikely to criticise the very large bulk of those interventions, particularly those granted on humanitarian grounds. After all, and despite the febrile immigration debate, we still believe in a fair go. That Australian value is a double-edged sword, however, and those very same punters have a short fuse when such power is misused through privilege. Children at the Nauru processing centre in 2013.

Compare a pair. A child in one of Australia’s offshore processing centres needs medical attention for an acute condition which is unable to be effectively treated in situ. Urgent entreaties are made to the department and minister by many people and a public campaign is launched concurrently with legal action to medically evacuate the child. Sometimes the bid is successful through a reluctant 11th hour back-down by the minister. In the other case, a prominent public figure receives an email from a relative whose "visitor" has been detained on arrival at the airport in possession of evidence which shows she was here to do more than just visit. Within hours and with no more effort than forwarding an email, a document is signed by the minister, as he is literally in the process of boarding a flight to the Middle East, which grants the visitor entry on humanitarian grounds. Australians don’t know and don’t care about the different legalities or the underlying policy rationale associated with either of these two cases. They simply care about fairness. Morrison and Dutton can talk all they like about pub tests and common-sense tests but they’re convincing very few that the application of the ministerial intervention power passes either, let alone the fairness test. Roman Quaedvlieg was commissioner of the Australian Border Force during Operation Sovereign Borders.