Bob the Ten Pound Pom

Bob was born in the UK in 1965. He emigrated with his folks as a ‘ten-pound pom’ to Western Australia in 1970. Bob’s old man qualified for the scheme as a welder, perhaps because the Western Australian sons of the Squattocracy were fast at extracting wealth from the land but lacked muscle in building things. English Northerners can build anything. They literally built the modern industrial world.

As an adult, Bob presumed he was an Australian citizen. A reasonable presumption to make after living here for 45 years. This turned out to be incorrect. The ‘paperwork didn’t get done. No-one knew they had to do paperwork. His brother, sister and parents all migrated at the same time. They’re all Australian citizens. A week prior to Bob’s 30th birthday in 1994, a mysterious letter arrived from the government informing Bob that the legal basis for his right to remain in Australia was a Class BF Transitional (Permanent) visa. A permanent resident, not a citizen. At this stage in his life, Bob had four cannabis possession charges to his name (plus possess implements). He also had a pretty average driving / unpaid speeding fines record.

Fast forward 14 years.

Bob was charged with cannabis possession and supply in 2008. He was thus deemed to be of bad character by Scott Morrison, Michaelia Cash and Peter Dutton. This was on the basis of a history of criminal convictions partially driven by the medicinal need to possess and consume cannabis. It was also on the basis that Bob was a person who serving a prison sentence in excess of 12 months. In 2015 Bob was deported back to the UK after living in Australia for 45 years. He has a distant uncle and aunt he has never met in his country of birth. That’s his sole connection to Blighty.

Bob was one of the first people deported under draconian laws cooked up by Dutton in 2014, the dreaded Section 501 Regime or better known as Double Punishment for anyone Dutton/Cash/Scott don’t like.

Remember when the visa requirements were for Valkyrie-esque au-pairs for people Dutton knew? Spud waved those applications through. Not so for Bob.

In Bob’s case, it’s like we inadvertently sent a convict back to Blighty. A 1788-2014 switcheroo. This is a very weird case where under Dutton’s brainchild policy, we wound up regurgitating a convict 226 years after the First Fleet dumped its first load at Botany Bay. The human detritus of the descendants of both the Enclosure Movement and the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution. The supposed ‘criminal class’ of people who’s ancestors were dispossessed of rights in land, as tenuous as the Incidents of Feudal Tenure could ever be said to be firm ownership of land, of soil, of county and Country.

Bob’s parents are hearts-of-gold-salt-of-the-earth-Northerners. Durham precisely. Between Teeside and Tyneside, not Geordie and not ‘Boro. It’s Wearside, “on a river where they used to build the boats, by the harbour wall, the place you loved the most.”

Sunderland ’til they die. The Raich Carter mural by Frank Styles is not chosen at random.

This post goes out with Bob and fam consent and their request for ongoing anonymity until such time the issues raised here are properly resolved by administrative or other procedural means.

Bob uses cannabis to self-medicate for childhood trauma. He is ultimately a bloke that was acting by way of necessity to access the medicine that works for him. Problem being his run-in with the law occurred in 2008 when it wasn’t yet legal to use cannabis for medicinal purposes, like it has been since 2016, one year after deported him. Procedurally, Scott originally revoked Bob’s visa and by a chronological twist of awful fate, he drew Michaelia Cash as his last chance saloon on a second look at Personal Ministerial discretion. They booted him.

Bob’s parents played absolutely no role in causing any trauma. The gulag boarding schools where rebellious kids were sent are wholly responsible for what happened to Bob as a 13 year-old. Bob’s folks are the world’s most amazing, loving and caring parents. They are quite elderly and living in a Perth retirement village.

An excerpt from a letter Bob’s mum sent to the Department of Immigration for ultimate review. It is irrelevant as to who the relevant decision maker was at the time. We all lose track of the Liberal Party turnsies of the coveted role of deciding the socio-economic and cultural/counter-cultural make-up of the country:

“The children were very young when my husband and I immigrated in March 1970, our eldest son was 8 years old, Bob was just 4 years old and my daughter was only 2. We immigrated to Australia as ‘ten-pound poms’ when Australia was looking for workers. My husband was a welder at the time and he qualified as a Quality Controller. We were sponsored by the Rotary Club in England.”

Bob was a loose-unit-ADHD-kid before ADHD was listed in the DSM. On doctors orders, he was shipped off to a school where bright rebels go to be tortured until they’re so “effing crazy they can’t follow your rules.” That’s where the medical opinions of the 1970’s sent hyperactive and rebellious kids. Nowadays we’re starting to recognise those genetically marked out with useful, but unique and very niche skillsets as having some value beyond being sent to state-or-religious-institution-sponsored hell-holes of abuse and bastardry.

You try getting your kids in to get diagnosed and treated so that the same fate doesn’t befall them in 2023.

Bob, unsurprisingly, becomes a problem drinker in his teens. Booze shuts the head-noises up fast. It also made Bob do dumb things because that’s the sort of behaviour that people with ADHD engage in when they’re drunk. Risk-taking behaviour for a dopamine top-up. Bob has a few drink driving offences and plenty of speeding fines. He goes to prison a couple times for 3-6 months for not paying those fines. Cash and Scott, again were merciless in the reasons to cancel Bob’s visa in 2014.

Bob self-medicated with cannabis in his mid-20’s to deal with past trauma from abuse at the gulag school and as an aid in ceasing (or drastically cutting back) alcohol use. Bob stops problem drinking. Bob stops speeding. Bob stops racking up speeding fines. Bob stops going to prison. Funny that. He’s unlucky in love, marries young and has a daughter. Life was sweet for a while. The relationship sours when she runs off with a close mate. That’s the sort of thing that buries any man in grief and loss, let alone those with ADHD-loading. Bob falls off the wagon, a few more speeding fines follow. He needed to move interstate for a fresh start.

Give the former-ADHD-kid mindset a task that they’re good at and you have got the hardest workers on the planet. You got a warehouse that needs organising? Bob is your guy. He’s mellowed on the ADHD side as he’s aged. Most do but what his diagnoses are and what meds he takes is matter for for Bob and the relevant experts in their fields.

Interstate, he got his first job whilst sleeping in his car outside a building supply warehouse. They took him on as a cleaner. 12 years later he was managing the place. Getting jobs is easy, holding onto them is hard in the early days of workplace drug testing. So echoed the judge at Bob’s initial sentencing in 2010.

After failing workplace drug tests a couple times, he’s forced into physical work in a timber yard. Tough, back-breaking work.

Bob stays interstate for 16-ish years, all the while self-medicating with cannabis and mostly keeping to himself. Traumatised people often do that. There’s whole colonies of them in the Northern Rivers of NSW, people piecing themselves back together.

Eventually Bob finds himself out work and in a bind in 2008, unable to afford the 28 grams a month that he needed for nightmare-free sleep so he can function during the day. Bob is solely a midnight toker. There are patients in Australia right now prescribed 60 grams for the same conditions over same time period. Bob was no bonglord, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Bob finds himself in debt to his dealers. They essentially force Bob into working for them as “the patsy who meets you in person” to do the exchange for black market cannabis. In order pay off the debt and to pay for his own future supply. Bob became “a guy”. Bob was always acting under duress. Bob only did this for six weeks before police raided the stash location and found 1200-ish grams of dry cannabis flower and approx. $12K cash. 

Bob plead guilty to all charges at the first opportunity. As a result of the stress of the charges, he also fell off the wagon again whilst awaiting sentencing and picked up another booze related fine. He’s been off it since. If he gets a visa he won’t be operating any vehicle until he can prove himself safe and responsible to do so.

The court accepted that Bob had no financial gain from his offending. His sole gain was to access very modest amounts of cannabis to consume. Bob never gave up any names and took the full rap because the people who ran the operation were not nice people. That’s what Prohibition has done. It has handed the cannabis trade over to the types of people who would take advantage of a guy like Bob and would remorselessly have him bashed or killed in prison. There’s a whopping great wad of self-preservation to be had in conveying the vibe to the court that you won’t sing.

This is not hyperbole. At the 2018 Cannabis Business Summit Expo-Weed-Spiv-Fest-Thing in California, I sat in on a session where a civil rights lawyer spoke about a cultivator client going down for 5 years and not turning state. The room erupted into riotous spontaneous applause at the mere mention of such a story. It wasn’t glamourising criminality. It was an expression, from what Fox News would call a mostly woke and ethnic minority audience, that the conduct of cultivation cannabis for whatever reason ought never to have never been criminalised in the first place.

On our timeline in 2023 it doesn’t jive with the zeitgeisty vibe for a person like Bob, self medicating with cannabis to be criminalised for it and subsequently failing any kind of character test. Notwithstanding, that is what Peter Dutton, Michaelia Cash and Scott did to Bob.

Selling lots of medical weed in a short amount of time is now what boys from good private schools, nice suburbs and the right families do in 2023. And by Jove they are good at it.

Of course, by the strict letter of the law I must retrospectively advise Bob that he should not have broken the law. He admits that. Neither he, nor any Australian would ever have presumed that conduct such as his would ever warrant the double punishment he has received. Simply put, it is unjust and inequitable, but in the colony where ex-cops who read their speeches word-for-word decide who does and who does not deserve a second chance on the basis of character grounds, these are the sorts of outlier scenarios that emerge and require urgent remedying.

With regards to the events of 2008, Bob wishes he had found alternate means to manage his need to obtain the medicine that worked for him at the time. In hindsight, what he should have done was go and live in a cave for another 8 years until 2016 when we legalised cannabis for medicinal use (cue sarcasm).

How could Bob have known in 2008 that Dutton would later enact laws that deemed any person sentenced to 12 months or more in prison would automatically fail a character test by him on “character grounds” and that failing this test would see him deported after living here for 45 years? Even then, with Bob’s driving an extensive cannabis possession history he has the bogey man of “his past criminality” being a limb of the character test that in 2014, he could not pass. Conservative politicians were never going to exercise personal ministerial discretion in his favour. Bob’s one of them, someone who (on paper) can be stereotypically characterised as druggie or pothead.

Bob was sentenced in 2009 and appealed to a higher court in 2010 where Bob’s non-parole period was confirmed at four years.

Bob’s previous life as an un-medicated-teenage-to-twenties ADHD-whirlwind-of-chaos with a record of unpaid speeding fines was not helpful. That’s when courts, if they so choose, can apply the Drug War Tax and view a defendant as someone the courts really need to set and example of to deter them from activities from which they “feed their dependency on cannabis.”

Bob was sentenced so severely to create a deterrent for people to engage in serious drug enterprises. That is word-for-word elsewhere in this 2010 judgment. In view of the global revolution in the legalisation of medicinal and recreational cannabis over the last decade, this decision looks like something from before he war, the Crimean War that is.

These events of 2008 viewed through a 2023 lens of pending drug possession law reform and the overwhelming support of most Australians for the de-criminalisation and full legalisation of cannabis are enough to make anyone scream. What has happened to Bob should never have happened. But it did.

Should Bob ever to be granted a visa to return to Australia, there would be no shortage of doctors of good conscience who would want to help the guy out, provided he qualifies.

Bob has been retraining as a software coder. He’s not that far off being employable in that Mature-IT-MAN-stakes if any employer would take a chance on him. He’s working on a couple of coding projects that should be ready to be monetised this year. He does not wish to be burden on the state. He wants to earn his keep because that’s also pretty rockin’ dopamine fix for ADHD people. Otherwise known as the process of acquiring self-worth and purpose. Bob has no incentive to re-offend.

He’s what you’d call in plain English a very low risk of re-offending. He has never been of bad character. He merely failed the Peter Dutton Character Test intended to capture brown people, potheads, druggies and junkies (them). Bob was never a violent offender and has never been a violent person. His sole problem was being sentenced to in excess of 12 months in prison and then having new laws enacted to effectively punish him twice without the commission of a fresh crime. This is double-punishment and civilised societies don’t do it. Nonetheless, Bob was deported because that is precisely how Peter Dutton intended his section 501 brainchild to operate, as double punishment for them.

Bob served his time as a model prisoner in minimum security. He had approval to go into town and do the shopping for the canteen (escorted). He orientated new inmates and was chief conciliator between inmates and staff. He led peer support programs and was mentor to a few young, angry kids on his end of the spectrum.

“Staff report that he is a quiet individual that does not come to their attention. He complies with the unit’s routine and is respectful in his dealings with staff and is not considered to be a management problem.”

He was due for parole in 2014. At the age of 50 and after being in Australia for 45 years, Dutton’s Law kicked in and he was then deported in 2015. Bob’s parents spent a significant sum on lawyers who did in contesting the revocation of Bob’s permanent residency. What chance did they have when the troika of Dutton/Cash/Scott is like facing the Windies pace attack at the peak of Joel Garner ‘s speed whilst being dressed for water polo. What chance did they have?

Ultimately, the deportation ground that stuck was that Bob’s “rehabilitation was untested in the community.”

Bob has been living in the British community for 8 years. He has not been charged with any offences nor had a single run in with the local constabulary. He lives in boarding houses and hotels. He moves from low paying manual job to job. And shiiiiiit it’s cold and wet. Name any Midlands shithole, he’s lived in it. And survived. Ultimately that’s what he is. A survivor.

Bob often loses jobs because he has crushing breakdowns due to his underlying trauma and his ongoing isolation. Bob often loses jobs AND housing because people find out he was deported to the UK for drug crimes. Bob has a very thick Aussie accent because, despite the absence of formal paperwork, he’s Australian. At-least in that pre-Treaty sense that all non-First Nations occupants of Country are.

Bob now has two grandchildren. He misses them. They miss him.  They Zoom weekly. After he served his debt to society with the completion of his prison sentence in 2014, Bob had every intent on growing the bond with his family.  Back in 2015 all his daughter wanted was for Bob to walk her down the aisle.

This is the Phantom Zone that Bob has fallen into, like Terence Stamp in Superman II. Whilst technically not a current prisoner of cannabis prohibition, he is an exile from the homeland that shaped him, whose institutions traumatised him and created the overall circumstances for his coercion into criminality. If that’s not ‘Mad’ King George III secretly inventing time travel and slinging a practical joke into the future (over the colony he gave royal assent to) then nothing is. Cook and Phillip’s Royal Charters, the legal instruments triggering the magic teleportation of the common law onto NSW and Palawa, could be Horcruxes for all we know. They have this magic effect of causing lawyers to bow to inanimate objects when walking into empty courts.

Bob still owes the Australian government $6K for the costs of his deportation. Costs for the two guards who accompanied a handcuffed Bob back to the UK on a commercial flight where every normal passenger on board likely presumed him to be a dangerous sex offender or murderer. And you think you’ve had shit flights to Heathrow.

If a path to ministerial-personal discretion opens up in 2023 and a visa be issued by the current Minister, the family will find the money, yes, even in a costs of living crisis because that is what Northerners do.

Bob is essentially a victim of “some really bad stuff” (which we won’t go into publicly) when he was a kid who finds his PTSD and trauma symptoms became more tolerable with his use of a mix of THC and CBD. Once upon a time he would have been diagnosed with Cannabis Use Disorder. This is now in remission. Bob can take or leave the drug now. It’s nothing but a useful sleep aid from time to time.

The usual pharmaceutical cocktail of SSRIs, benzos, SNRIs merely slaps away at the problem and triggers the notorious barely bearable blur. Bob has worked himself into a good place with therapy and pretty much doesn’t need THC:CBD, but as and when he feels they will assist with sleep and a doctor says it is an option, he’d like it to be an option. As it stands now, both lawful medicinal and black market costs are too prohibitive in the UK so the blur will have to do. Bob can’t risk a conviction of any sort else doing the British Convict 180 Round Trip will become more complicated than it ought necessarily be. Likewise Bob understands with most warehousing or mining jobs (something Bob is keen to try), he needs to abstain from THC until such time as Australian workplace drug testing laws catch up with the new reality that most people can’t handle the barely bearable blur anymore.

Sadly, Bob is no Joey Johns or Damien Hardwick although he did take a few head-knocks in junior contact sports or from just being dumb with shopping trolleys at high speed (again, risk-taking). Not a week goes by without prominent media attention being given to medicinal cannabis newsy stuff. Ninefaxistan have done the universe a solid and published a story revealing that prescriptions for medicinal cannabis products (flower and oil, but hot daaang there’s a lot of flower) in Australia have now passed the one million patient mark for the first time. Cannabiz held off popping the champers on the basis that the numbers are bit more complex than that.

There are amazing doctors out there doing great harm minimisation work in the Australian medicinal cannabis space by weening problem users of THC onto lower dosages of this drug and introducing CBD and other cannabinoids into the mix. Every day these doctors get out of bed and save other people’s future career prospects by keeping them out of harms way re cops and courts. Whilst there are plenty of cowboy prescribers in the space, the good guys rarely get the thanks they deserve. They know who they are. They’re getting people off the stupidly-high THC concentrates and PGR-ridden black market flower and onto a more balanced cannabinoid intake. They are resetting their patients’ relationship with cannabis. That benefits everyone bar the illegal and legal dealers who earn more money from heavy consumers and lose money from infrequent users. Bob never prioritised food over cannabis and won’t prioritise it over holding down a job.

Bob’s story viewed through a 2023 lens gives rise to the following obvious statement of fact. 

“The Australian community now DO ordinarily expect people such as Bob to be granted a visa to reside in Australia. They would not expect someone like Bob, in 2023 to fail any sort of character test formulated by Peter Dutton in 2013. Especially when it comes to the supply of illicit cannabis for the purposes of obtaining regular supply of cannabis for personal-medicinal use.”

Bob looked on with hope earlier this year when the Australian Government granted a Visa to Dougie Desic, the man who escaped prison whilst serving out a sentence for cannabis cultivation then spent 29 years on the run. Bob served his time as a model prisoner. Bob’s overall period of criminality did not extend beyond one and half months. Full respect to Dougie. I agree. He is the sort of person Australians DO ordinarily feel deserves a visa. This is why sensible administrative action was taken to give him one. Hvala ti Darko and thank you to the Minister. I anticipate the relevant Ministers will be hearing from Bob’s mum soon. She’s not been well these last 18 months.

Bob never went on the lam. He paid his debt to society, our society. Let’s stop punishing him.

With jurisdictions around the world already exploring expungement options for those with prior cannabis possession convictions, you’d imagine that when Australia finally catches up, Bob will automatically no longer meet the criteria for someone with a “substantial criminal record” in accordance with section 501 of the Act. We argue that as of 2023, there is sufficient water under the bridge for the current minister to exercise her discretion and view that record as no longer being the spectre that it once was.

The 2022 election has drawn a line in the sand between the LNP’s Australia, the ex-convict colony where ex-coppers set the legislative parameters between who is and who is not of good enough character and who deserves a second chance. Bob’s past offending clearly does not warrant transportation for the term of his natural life t0 Luton. No-one deserves to be sentenced to Luton.

Bob also didn’t deserve the time spent in another state-sponsored gulag in Immigration Detention. Due to spinal wear and tear (forced into physical work at an older age), Bob endured extended periods of time being unable to do anything in detention other than lie flat. He was denied adequate medical care on numerous occasions. He was physically unable to walk the few hundred metres to the medical clinic to obtain treatment. When other detainees had to carry him there, the highest standard of care he received was basically “here’s some paracetamol now go away, you’re one of them.” Our entire Immigration Detention System runs on the coda of “you’re one of them“

Bob became hopeful when he saw the new Labor government directing officials to focus more on duration of residency in Australia contrasted with a potential deportee’s lack of connections to family in the country of their birth (where that country is Aotearoa-New Zealand). Bob and I both applaud that. We just want the general principle extended to his case and, ideally to all Section 501 Deportees, regardless of country of birth.

Bob’s mum, dad, siblings, daughter and grandkids won’t abandon Bob. Family is family and The North Remembers.

Bob is someone who’d actually really like an entitlement to vote in the upcoming referendum because he’s pretty big on reconciliation. Someone with Bob’s thick Australian accent has a very practical understanding of being removed from the lands and waters he comes from by an agent of the Crown. However, it may take a while between an SRC visa being granted, PR and eventual citizenship so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s stop deporting people who arrived here as kids and lived here for 45 years before becoming victim to a draconian Drug War vanity project. The project being to operate the levers of who can come into Australia and who can be kicked out of Australia based on grounds that mostly capture brown people and people who use drugs. Dutton is very much on the front foot right now with whipping up anti-migrant hysteria because that’s the only bullet that this retired officer has left in the chamber.

Strong letter following.

14 June 2023, Wallumettagal Country.