Could Vivian Alvarez receive $2 million damages for her wrongful deportation? According to this morning’s ABC Radio National Law Report former HREOC Commissioner and Federal Court Judge, Marcus Einfeld, believes she could, at a rate of $1,500 per day (net of GST?). This story in the SMH suggests it might not be so cut and dried.
At the risk of being accused of flippancy, they can deport me for that rate of pay. There’s the little known fact that when I first came here in 1964 I was travelling on my Mum’s passport as a British Subject, and now that the Queen is Queen of Australia, maybe that means I shouldn’t be here at all? If I forget to tell them about taking out nationality in the 70s, it just might work.
Now, I’m not denying that Ms Alvarez should be awarded some compensation, nor that the Department of Immigration should be penalised for its shoddy work (it’s a market economy afterall). Just that $2 million sounds like an excessively large sum for the damage she’s suffered, and one that’s likely to encourage people to consider fraud, or at least encourage lawyers to discover more claims than they otherwise would.
It does, however, raise the question of how we keep public servants and the departments they administer honest and competent. When a government department makes a mistake there should be a penalty, but frequently mistakes are recklessly made in the knowledge that there are none.
Perhaps the damages could be split between payment in compensation and punitive damages – afterall, while $2 million might be too much for Alvarez, is it enough to deter DIMIA? The punitive damages could perhaps be put into a charitable trust for, in this case, refugees, and partly funded by a reduction in the pay and bonus of the DG of DIMIA.