Former High Court and Royal Commission Judge Virginia Bell has a very interesting history

Really important to note that Anthony Albanese appointed the most progressive possible choice to lead the Bondi Royal Commission.

Former High Court judge Virginia Bell has a very interesting history when it comes to immigration/deportation cases. She was the deciding vote on a landmark case that ruled that the government can never deport a non-citizen who identifies as Aboriginal Australian (one of the blokes involved, Mr Brendan Thoms, is pictured here).

Virginia Bell was the deciding 4-3 vote in Love v Commonwealth which found that Aboriginal Australians have a unique metaphysical blood and soil connection to the Australian landmass that predates the Australian Constitution and British legal system, and as consequence, can never be subject to deportation orders, even if they are non-citizens who have committed violent criminal acts.

The case concerned two men, Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms, both born overseas and not Australian citizens, but each identifying as Aboriginal Australians. Love was born in Papua New Guinea and Thoms in New Zealand. Both had their visas cancelled after criminal convictions – Love’s record included assault occasioning bodily harm, unlawful wounding, and contraventions of domestic violence orders, while Thoms’s record included assaults on police.

On 26 August 2022, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced that the government had appointed Bell “to lead an inquiry into the appointment of former Prime Minister, the Hon Scott Morrison MP, to administer departments other than the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and related matters”.^[21] after Morrison had secretly appointed himself to five ministries without even his colleagues’ knowledge

The Commonwealth sought to deport them as “aliens” under the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). The men challenged this, arguing that although they were not citizens, Aboriginal Australians cannot be considered “aliens” under section 51(xix) of the Constitution. They relied on the idea that Aboriginal peoples have a unique and enduring connection to Australia that predates the Constitution and European sovereignty.

The High Court, by a narrow 4–3 majority, agreed. Virginia Bell was the deciding vote. Bell wrote: ”The position of Aboriginal Australians, however, is sui generis. Notwithstanding the amplitude of the power conferred by s 51(xix) it does not extend to treating an Aboriginal Australian as an alien because, despite the circumstance of birth in another country, an Aboriginal Australian cannot be said to belong to another place.”

Agree that Aboriginal Australians have a unique native connection to Australia, but progressives tend to believe that this invalidates or overrides the connection British/European Australians have to the country after ten generations of history and settlement. So it creates in effect a two tier legal system.

Bell’s ultra-progressive opinions on the matter of deportations mean that in my view it is unfortunately very unlikely she will interrogate the role immigration played in the Bondi Massacre, even though Sajid Akram was a non-citizen who came here on a student visa.