Greg Sheridan makes self perfectly obscure

Greg Sheridan remarked on the ABC’s Q&A program last week:

Refugee status itself is tremendously subjective, especially when people don’t have documents. I’ve interviewed, over the years, hundreds of people who assess people for refugee status and they’ll say, “If you tell me to pass 90 per cent, I can pass 90 per cent. If you tell me to reject 90 per cent, I can reject 90 per cent.”

No-one apparently took Greg up on this curious statement. Not being myself an avid reader of Sheridan, my only resort has been google, which yielded the following quote of former Australian immigration minister Philip Ruddock from a Sheridan column last November:

If you look at these populations in Tehran, Damascus and Amman, when the UNHCR did the processing you had about 10 per cent accepted as refugees. By the time these people got through Australia’s processing the figure was about 90 per cent. It built an expectation that nobody knew how to prove whether or not you were a refugee.

Connect the dots if you can...