When the Federal government named the city of Armidale in northern NSW a regional refugee settlement in 2017, it was envisaged that the newly arrived refugees would need a lot of support to settle and integrate into the community, but we did not imagine how giving this support would change us. (more…)
Scott Morrison says Australia’s economy will have to expand by 3.75% per annum for the next five years to recover from the corona virus recession. (more…)
The last time Australia was labelled a racist nation by a regional power was in the wake of the election of John Howard and the emergence of Pauline Hanson in 1996 and 1997. (more…)
Australia and Japan are demographic polar opposites.
The new Global Talent Independent (GTI) visa provides a direct permanent residence for ‘highly skilled professionals in high growth sectors’. According to the Department of Home Affairs, processing times range between two days and two months with many being decided within a week or two.
Kristina Keneally argues that when we come out of the current crisis we should aim for a lower level of temporary migration to make sure “Australians get a fair go and a first go at jobs.” Scott Morrison says cutting skilled temporary migration would hurt the economy. Who should we believe? (more…)
The practice of moving detainees around Australia’s immigration detention network is doubly unjustifiable on economic and humanitarian grounds. (more…)
Comcare has still not laid charges against Australian Border Force. (more…)
The Australian of 10 February 2019 reports the Morrison government is “considering” Mr Joko’s proposal for Australia to relax visa restrictions for Indonesian visitors in line with the “visa on arrival” arrangements for Australians visiting Indonesia. (more…)
In a front page exclusive on 28 January, Geoff Chambers and Joe Kelly of The Australian uncritically regurgitate the Government’s talking points on asylum seekers arriving by plane. Either they are just innocents with no idea how to do the job of a journalist or they see their role as purely to defend the Government. (more…)
The unemployment rate, and even the underemployment rate, have become an inadequate measure of the true health of our labour market. (more…)
Co-host of ABC Minefield, Scott Stevens astutely, impeccably summed up the generosity inherent in The Uluru Statement of the Heart. (more…)
Last year was a very challenging year for people seeking asylum and the many Australians who support them. (more…)
Manus and Nauru remain a focus in Australia for everyone concerned about the cruel treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and rightly so. (more…)
Since January 2018, the Australian Skills Quality Agency (ASQA) has cancelled the registration of around 450 private VET colleges. This is after years of such cancellations being relatively rare. A spokesperson for ASQA has said this reflects an improved “ability to better target regulatory activities on providers demonstrating the highest risks to VET in Australia”. But what does this mean for the merits of qualifications issued by these colleges? (more…)
On 16 November 2019, the Government’s much touted new regional migration visas took effect. One of these is a five year provisional visa that requires the migrant to be nominated by a state/territory government. To secure permanent residence, the provisional migrant must live and work in the relevant region and earn at least $53,900 per annum for a minimum of three financial years. If state/territory governments actively participate in this visa, they will be collaborating with the Commonwealth to set up many of these migrants for exploitation and failure. (more…)
The Kurdish-Iranian journalist left Manus Island after six years, but the bureaucratic hurdles still lie before him.
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Government has argued the surge in asylum applications from Chinese and Malaysian citizens is just part of normal growth in the caseload (see here). Nothing could be further from the truth. The surge is entirely the result of poor policy such as the staffing cap, Home Affairs rushing implementation of e:visas for Chinese nationals to save money and one that is slow to respond when things go wrong despite its rhetoric about being strong on border protection and immigration integrity. (more…)
As I read through the opinion articles in The Canberra Times and The Australian on Saturday 9 November, I grew increasingly exasperated at the total absence of any Asian voice. I then did an online search of opinion articles in the Fairfax media (The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald), plus The Daily Telegraph. As far as could be ascertained from their names and photos (with a built-in margin for errors), of the 49 opinion articles on that Saturday, only one was by a non-Caucasian. (more…)
I follow migration matters closely, so Tim Watt’s survey of the White Australia Policy and subsequent immigration policy was familiar territory. For those who don’t, there is much to recommend in the story he tells and his demonstration of the economic benefits of skilled migration. But his analysis has flaws. (more…)
The government’s traditional scare campaign having failed to work – because Medevac transfers have not re-started the ‘people smuggler’ boats – a very frustrated Home Affairs Minister Dutton is running a new ‘repeal Medevac’ line: he says the Medevac law is a con because no transferees are in hospital. But it’s his own Australian Border Force that is keeping them out of hospital. (more…)
The Australian women and children facing danger in Syria are not being brought home because it can’t be done or because they would be a threat to Australia but because of cheap domestic politics. As H.L. Mencken observed: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Our SAS could do the job and the expensive white elephant on Christmas Island could keep them and us safe while they are processed. (more…)
How will the Morrison government respond to the desperate plight of some 65 women and children detained in a camp in Syria? Relatives are pleading with our government to bring their family members safely home, but it appears immobilised by fear of a political reaction. How good is that? (more…)
In a speech at the Migration and Settlement awards (23 October 2019), Prime Minister Scott Morrison crowed about the number of regional migration visas issued in the first quarter of 2019-20. Now Immigration Minister Coleman has announced the target will be increased from 23,000 to 25,000 and that Perth and the Gold Coast will be counted as regional. What the Government hasn’t explained is the increased target is largely the result of changing its own counting rules. It has little to do with substance. (more…)
At Senate Estimates this week, Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo denied the record number of (largely non-genuine) asylum applications under his watch is a crisis. This is like the black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail insisting losing his arms and legs was just a flesh wound. But more seriously, Government allowing Pezzullo to get away with this denial suggests the size of the problem is going to get a lot worse. (more…)
Review of Kavita Puri, Partition Voices: Untold British Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 297 pp.
This is an important, interesting and elegantly written book. ‘It is no crime to be a refugee’, says one of the persons interviewed for the book. The story of refugees is the story of transience, fragility, rootlessness and impermanence. With refugees turned migrants, doubly so. For the children of refugee-turned migrants, their past ancestral land now often lies in ‘enemy’ territory. (more…)
Writing in The Conversation, Regina Jefferies and Daniel Ghezelbash argue the current surge in onshore asylum applications is not ‘unprecedented’ because tourists or students often lodge claims for asylum due to circumstances beyond their control. They give the example of the Chinese students after the Tiananmen Square massacre. But Jefferies and Ghezelbash fail to note the very stark differences between the two situations. (more…)
As a defence lawyer in criminal cases in New South Wales and Papua New Guinea I saw many prisons, including on Manus Island. Most had a harsh reality that one might expect in jails for convicted criminals. Yet I will never forget some of the cruelty inflicted on prisoners who had misbehaved in NSW jails. (more…)
Under Donald Trump, America is ceasing to be the last best hope. (more…)