Former Detainee Facing Deportation in U-Turn on Visa

When Wilton Briggs was released from Sydney’s Villawood Detention Centre in July, he saw it as a chance to start over. The 29-year-old got a job raising money for charities on the street and was saving to rent a home for his partner Ashleigh Bowen and their baby Amelia. He also started writing a book about battling depression, which he hoped would help young people avoid the bleak life he fell into in New Zealand.

After coming to Australia with his family as a child, Mr Briggs returned to New Zealand alone when he was 17 and his family was torn about by dysfunction. He used a false passport to return to Australia, where his family remain, in 2007 after being threatened by a gang in New Zealand.

In the first week he met Ms Bowen, whose mother had recently committed suicide. By the time he was picked up by Immigration she was pregnant.

At the Migration Review Tribunal in July, it was the future of his 21-year-old partner and baby that the tribunal considered when it granted Mr Briggs a visa.

The tribunal acknowledged that Mr Briggs had a criminal history with New Zealand gangs. But it ruled the whole family would be at risk from the gang that had threatened Mr Briggs if it returned.

Ms Bowen’s parents were dead, and the tribunal acknowledged the couple’s dependency on each other. It also found Mr Briggs genuinely wanted to change and would not be rehabilitated if he returned.

“He wants his child to be safe and loved, and he does not want his child to be in New Zealand,” the judgement noted. “The Tribunal found (his) commitment to his relationship and daughter to be genuine and deep, which raises concerns about the potential for him to resume his former life out of anger if they are separated or worse.”

But the Immigration Department has bypassed that decision and is attempting to deport Mr Briggs under Section 501 of the Migration Act.

Under the former government’s hardline approach, a person who has been in jail for more than a year can be deported no matter what connections they have to Australia.

The Federal Government distanced itself this year from that position by granting a visa to Robert Jovicic, a Melbourne resident with 150 criminal convictions, who was deported to Serbia in 2004 despite having come to Australia at age two.

The Immigration Department says Mr Briggs, who has more than 30 convictions including robbery and theft, does not meet the character test to stay in Australia.

“We believe that the Australian taxpayer and the Australian community would expect nothing less of us” than to consider him for visa cancellation, a department spokesman said.

Mr Briggs is remorseful about his past but says his family gives him a reason to change. “All I want to do is get organised and give our daughter the future that I have to give her,” said Mr Briggs, who is living out of a motel in Sydney with his family.-The Age (Melbourne), October 11, 2008