Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has spoken about how Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) is doing a lot of work to identify fake documentation out of countries like India in an interview with Ray Hadley on Radio 2GB/4BC on Thursday.
The minister spoke on various issues related to One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s comments on vaccination, the case of fake Indian doctor, travel ban by United States and federal agencies.
When Ray Hadley raised the question about the Indian doctor who posed as a doctor for 11 years in Sydney before the fraud was discovered, and how he went undetected by the Immigration Department, Minister Peter Dutton spoke about how Australia was doing a lot of work around fraud and trying to identify fake documentation out of countries like India.
Here’s the full transcript of the conversation:
RAY HADLEY: Okay now, this fella, this Indian bloke, Shyam Acharya, who posed as a doctor; not just for a year, but since 2003. The finger was being pointed – well not at you, you can't be held accountable for what happened in 2003, even though you are now the Minister, but I guess the Department could be, the Department of Immigration – but it now turns out he was actually imported by New South Wales Health on a skilled migration programme and he even got a passport in the name of the doctor from the Indian Government.
So look, once he's got that passport in the name of the Indian doctor, all the other things flow. So the problem started in India not here. But what I don't quite understand; he must have been a very good actor or a very good doctor – even though he wasn't a doctor – to escape in all these various hospitals from 2003 to 2014 without detection.
PETER DUTTON: Well Ray obviously there's been a big failing of the system – whether it's at a federal or state level, it doesn't really matter – I mean the lesson needs to be learnt and as you say, he first came to Australia on a Tourist visa in 2002. He went out of the country and then came back on a couple of different visas. But, from that early stage he was employed by New South Wales Health in a lower position and then got his registration as I understand it, and you're right travelled on a fake passport.
Now, my view is that the Immigration Department back, you know 10, 15 years ago was a very different beast than what it is today. I mean I get accused all the time of being too tough on these processes and you know cancelling visas and the rest of it, but these are exactly the cases that we want to identify; stop these people before they get here and you know my Department today has a huge intelligence collection function. There's a lot of work that they do today that the Immigration Department wouldn't have done 15 years ago.
So we need to be realistic because if this guy had of been a national security threat, as opposed to a threat just to patients or the health system, which is bad enough, then the consequences can be diabolical – and we saw that Man Monis and other cases as well – so it's why we've got to step up the processes that we've got.
There's $100 million that we put in last year to look at biometrics collection. There's a lot of work that we are doing around fraud and trying to identify fake documentation out of countries like India and China for example.
So, I've asked my Department to get cracking and make sure that we can get to the bottom of what happened.
