Category: Immigration

In a recent speech to heads of international border agencies, Mike Pezzullo, head of Australia’s new Home Affairs Department, again highlighted the dark world view that, together with the policies of Peter Dutton, is paralyzing our world class immigration system.  (more…)

“The US president is indifferent to human rights.” That was the banner headline on the front page of France’s Le Monde newspaper last week, as if it were news. Donald Trump has amply demonstrated that indifference, and not only in the context of his fantasy wall along the Mexican border. But he is now being joined by the new Italian government and by the growing body of populist and right-wing agitators across Europe. (more…)

Peter Dutton is gambling with a long-standing pillar of Australia’s economic and budget success. By making the biggest cut to permanent skilled migration since the recession of the early 1990s, combined with a throttling of skilled temporary migration, Dutton will significantly reduce net migration and therefore our population growth rate. The 1.6% per annum population growth assumption in the recent Budget could be too high by between 12% and 25%. (more…)

In 2002 Australia, along with more than 80 other nations, acceded to the Rome statute by which the International Criminal Court was created.  The court is the first permanent court ever established with jurisdiction to try war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide regardless of the nationality of the perpetrators and regardless of the place where the offences occurred. (more…)

International disputes between contending powers frequently result in persecution of local ethnic minorities.  Look at how local German and Japanese communities were treated during the two World Wars, for instance, or how people of Middle Eastern background have been profiled since the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS.  As suspicions of China predominate in Canberra, and stand-offs occur, for instance in the South China Sea, the loyalties of Chinese Australians have been called into question.  This year marks the 200^th anniversary of the first Chinese immigrant to settle in Australia.  The Chinese community will celebrate that event, but the contributions of the growing Chinese community to the nation and to our developing relationships with Asia are under-appreciated. (more…)

The former Commissioner of the Australian Border Force (ABF), Roman Quaedvlieg, made a remarkable admission last week. It occurred in an exchange on Twitter with a former senior medical officer who had worked with refugees on Nauru. In a tweet, Quaedvlieg admitted that during his tenure the ABF had deliberately obstructed and thwarted the transfer of refugee detainees from Nauru to Australia for acute medical treatment.  (more…)

This is an edited extract of a talk delivered to the Integrity 20 Conference at Griffith University on October 25, 2016

If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed. (more…)

Australia has tentatively begun a debate about immigration – both the size of the annual intake and whether the country is choosing the right migrants. It’s a vital debate, but one that is open to misunderstanding, to producing more heat than light. With such a sensitive topic, the facts are critical. (more…)

In 2014, two Vietnamese high school students were suddenly taken from my local community and put into a detention facility. They’d received a letter from the Department of Immigration stating that their presence in the community ‘was no longer in the public interest’.  (more…)

While immigration – and a big Australia – is presented as the cause of infrastructure woe the real culprit is policy failure: deficient planning, bad structural arrangements and absence of road congestion pricing.   (more…)

Nils Melzer is the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment. Recently, he presented a damning report to the UN Human Rights Council on the subjection of refugees across the world to torture. Melzer’s fundamental contention was this. The primary cause for the massive abuse suffered by refugees globally is neither migration itself nor organized crime. Instead, it is the inexorable trend amongst States to base their official refugee policies on deterrence, detention and criminalization rather than on protection, human rights and non-discrimination. 

I am a measured person. Reason is my first strategy. But, nevertheless, I think it’s time for the nation to consider the probability that this country is responsible for torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment –  not only directly domestically but also indirectly internationally. A noticeable number of the 7 million torture victims worldwide is likely down to us.  (more…)

I come from a country town in central Queensland called Biloela. A town where you can leave work to pick up the kids from school and it takes five minutes because we have one traffic light.  A place where the “Buy Swap Sell” pages in the local newspaper are equal parts items for sale and posts asking: “Anyone know who owns this?” My favourite so far being a runaway bull on the golf course. And then Border Protection took our neighbours. 
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The Australia of today is vastly different to the Australia of my childhood with its widespread racism and sectarianism. It was socially suffocating. For those changes I am very grateful. There is a lot that we can be proud of.  No country has integrated newcomers as well as we have. But there have been failures and remedial action yet to be taken. We are yet to be reconciled to our indigenous brothers and sisters who watched the European boat arrivals in 1788. We are yet to take our share of responsibility for the displaced and persecuted people of the world.   (more…)

Peter Hughes and I posted two blogs in September 2015 (‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals’ Part 1 and Part 2) that pointed out first, that Tony Abbott kept the door open for tens of thousands of boat arrivals by opposing legislation that would have enabled implementation of the Malaysia Arrangement of September 2011. Secondly, we pointed out that Tony Abbott’s role in ‘stopping the boats’ was at the margins and vastly overrated.  (more…)

The Refugee Council of Australia’s call for more affordable and community based ways of settling refugees is only the latest attempt to bring both community good will to refugees and the implementation of a proven and superior alternative to government processes. (more…)

Why throw away money on preventing refugees when we should see the economic benefit they might bring ?   (more…)