Category: Immigration

  • Stephen Duckett. Blood money: pathology cuts can reduce spending without compromising health

    The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) set the cat among the pathology pigeons late last year. One of the government’s flagged changes, estimated to save around A$100 million a year, was to abolish the bulk-billing incentive Labor introduced in 2009.

    The industry mobilised, threatening to charge consumers significant out-of-pocket co-payments for pathology tests for blood, tissue and other bodily fluids. The threatened increases were well in excess of the A$1.40 to A$3.40 cut to the bulk-billing incentive, which companies received for not charging patients out-of-pocket charges.

    A campaign was organised, focusing on the increased cost of pap smears. It included apetition supported by more than 200,000 people.

    Health Minister Sussan Ley escalated her rhetoric, pointing out that Medicare was notdesigned to be a guaranteed bankable revenue for corporations, nor a taxpayer-funded payment to cross-subsidise pathology companies for other costs of doing business.

    The minister noted:

    … complaints from stock exchange-listed pathology companies about this MYEFO decision have revolved around impacts on ‘shareholders’ – not patients – exposing what is really motivating these criticisms.

    The MYEFO-induced furore about bulk billing provides context for a wider “root and branch” review of pathology payments. As the Grattan Institute’s report, Blood Money, published today, shows, there is money to be saved in pathology. This can be done in ways that don’t affect patient access to needed tests.

    Industry profit

    The Blood Money report addresses several questions. First, why is bulk billing on the agenda for pathology tests at all? All out-of-hospital pathology tests should be bulk-billed.

    There should be no “incentive” for pathology corporations to bulk-bill. Rather, bulk-billing should be a requirement to participate in this market.

    The place of co-payments in health care is highly contested. Those who argue for co-payments say they help to reduce demand, particularly for frivolous use of health care.

    But consumers almost never initiate pathology services. Professionals order tests to assist them to make a diagnosis or to track a patient’s condition. In those circumstances, there is no theoretical argument to use financial disincentives for consumers, in the form of co-payments, to limit demand.

    Industry consolidation and technological advances have completely reshaped the pathology industry over recent decades. But the way governments pay for pathology services hasn’t kept up.

    Fee-for-service was originally a way for individual consumers to pay their medical practitioner for professional services. Health insurance then evolved to provide insurance for those costs. Medicare, when it was introduced, followed the same model.

    But what was suitable for cottage-industry medical practice is not necessarily appropriate as a payment system for big corporations. More than three in every four Medicare-billed pathology tests are analysed by one of two big corporations: Sonic Healthcare and Primary Health Care. Both companies suffered a share price drop when the MYEFO cuts were announced.

    Many parts of the pathology schedule are now highly automated. The large corporations benefit from economies of scale as the costs of an additional test to run through an analyser are trivial. But Medicare pays the same for the tests processed by the machine for the thousandth patient as it does for the first.

    Same service, lower costs

    A 2011 discussion paper on pathology funding proposed that Medicare negotiate with providers to share the benefits of technological change by discounting the schedule for high volumes by, say, 5%. The Commonwealth Department of Health should dust off this paper and use it as a basis for proper commercial negotiations with the big pathology corporations.

    The bulk-billing incentives should be in the mix as well. Serious negotiations of that kind would save taxpayers about A$175 million per year; A$100 million from bulk-billing incentives, the balance from a 5% trim.

    The government should also consider going to tender for the right to bill Medicare for out-of-hospital pathology. In other words, companies would bid to be involved in the out-of-hospital pathology market by offering to provide tests at particular prices.

    The tender specification might incorporate provisions that the price to be paid by government goes down after a particular number of tests is performed.

    A pilot scheme of tendering should be established in Victoria for 2017, with the scheme allowing for multiple successful winning bids to ensure continued competition in the pathology marketplace. Tenders could be rolled out in other states after an evaluation of the Victorian experience.

    Tendering should generate greater savings than the 5% trim.

    Tendering introduces price competition into the pathology market. Rather than companies responding to a government-regulated price, they would have to specify the prices at which they think they can operate. If a company bids at too high a price, they may not be among the group of successful tenderers.

    The 2011 pathology discussion paper notes strong savings from other departments tendering pathology services:

    • Victoria has tendered out most of its regional
      public pathology services for more than 20 years. Negotiated prices are 65-75% of Medicare fees, equating to a 10-20% saving.
    • Defence tendered pathology services for military personnel. It settled at 80% of Medicare fees, without patient initiation fees. This was equivalent to a 5% discount.

    Neither paid the equivalent of a bulk-billing incentive. Further savings, on top of a negotiated trim, could therefore be achievable.

    There are savings to be made in pathology payments and they should come from narrowing the margins of profitable corporations, not from cutting services to the ill and vulnerable.

    In a time of increasing deficits, the government must prioritise reforms that reduce spending without compromising the health of Australians. Pathology payment reform provides an opportunity to do this – an opportunity that should not be missed.The Conversation

    Stephen Duckett is Director of the Grattan Institute‘s Health Program. 

    This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

  • The benefits of migration.

    In this article in fivebooks.com, Ian Goldin speaks about the benefits of migration although those economic benefits are often widely and differently dispersed. He points to the disconnect between the benefits of immigration and often the political downsides where some communities feel disadvantaged. He notes that the business community often calls for more migrants and refugees when politicians are moving in the opposite direction. Ian Goldin is Professor Globalisation and Development and Director of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

    See link below:

    http://fivebooks.com/interview/immigration/

  • John Menadue. Our humanitarian program.

    Some issues have no place in partisan politics, they may be topics that are politically charged, but they are not ideological battlegrounds – they are about the personal and the human. Our stance on refugees and on protection is such an issue. It is an area that has been supported by the left and the right, and in darker moments, disowned by both. It is an issue that is deeply tied to our national psyche and yet heavily influenced by the words of our national leaders. Our treatment of refugees has revealed the best in us and defined some of our worst moments. Of late, it has come to be our Achilles heel, damaging our international reputation and corroding our national debates. But the voices of our better angels may again be gaining strength.

    In the past weeks we have seen some of Australia’s most influential business leaders speak out in support of increasing our humanitarian program. Tony Shepherd, the immediate past president of the Business Council of Australia and Chairman of the Commission of Audit has become a vocal advocate for an increased intake and has called for businesses to get behind the settlement process and provide jobs for refugees. He has been joined by Innes Willox, the head of the Australian Industry Group who wrote eloquently on the plight of Syrian refugees and our need to do more. Both men were part of a UNHCR led business delegation that recently travelled to Turkey and Lebanon to see the unfolding humanitarian crisis first hand. Both have reflected on their experience of the human side of refugee movements, of the families they met and the conversations that will linger.

    The business community should be commended for stepping up. Not only because it is morally right, but also because it is strategically important. In a world where the movement of people has become one of the greatest international challenges of our time, our policies have ramifications beyond the daily grind of domestic politics. Nations that show courage and pull their weight will be seen a global leaders in the decades to come. How we are perceived around the world matters, in trade, in investment and in our appeal as a destination for business, for tourism and for migration.

    Perhaps even more importantly, it goes to our morale. An outwardly looking country, confident in our capacity for generosity is a happier and more productive nation. Business long ago understood the intimate connection between outreach and personal drive. All our big companies have in place strong community engagement and corporate social responsibility programs offering staff the chance to mentor disadvantaged youth or engage with community projects. At a national level, our humanitarian program is as much for us as it an act of charity. It refreshes our values and charges the national soul. Offering protection gives us purpose and reminds us of our privileged position.

    As a nation our better side has shone through when the community has owned this issue and when a broader leadership has become vocal. Whether it is the reaction of Brian Owler, the Australian Medical Association’s president, to the possibility of the removal of baby Asha or the force of community discontent over the prospect of one child suffering, the tide might be turning. Willox and Shepherd are an important addition to the chorus, their voices come from a new quarter and from one that has the ear of Government.

     

  • Measuring the misery of those forced to flee.

    Robert Shiller, a 2013 Nobel Laureate in Economics says

    ‘Under today’s haphazard and archaic asylum rules, refugees must take enormous risks to reach safety and the costs and benefits of helping them are distributed capriciously . It does not have to be this way. Economists can help by testing which international rules and institutions are needed to reform an inefficient and often inhumane system.’

    For link to article in AFR, see below:

    http://www.afr.com/opinion/measuring-the-misery-of-those-forced-to-flee-20160126-gme8ch

  • Business can take lead on refugees to end ‘execution by indifference’.

    In this article, Tony Shepherd, former President of the Business Council of Australia, urges Australia to be more generous in helping asylum seekers from Syria. He says:

    ‘As I stare out the window on the plane ride home (from the refugee camps in the Middle East) I think that if history has taught us nothing else, it is that generosity is always rewarded. Our nation, Australia, was built by immigration;  it has been the secret of our success. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nations that chose to open their hearts and invest in new people, over the decades to follow, came to dominate diplomacy and lead in the global economy.’

    See link below to this article by Tony Shepherd in the AFR.

    http://www.afr.com/opinion/business-can-take-lead-on-refugees-to-end-execution-by-indifference-20160202-gmjcyj

  • Spencer Zifcak. Special Envoy on Human Rights. Ruddock. What?

    In 2003, I wrote a short book entitled Mr Ruddock Goes to Geneva. The book was not as superficial as its title might have suggested. It was in fact a serious study of Australia’s vexed relationship with the UN Human Rights Treaty System. My argument was that the Howard Government should have given the recommendations from UN Human Rights Treaty bodies about ways in which Australia could improve its observance of human rights more thoughtful consideration.

    Instead, the Government had adopted the habit of rejecting any criticism of its human rights record out of hand. This came at the cost potentially of retarding the interests and well-being of many disadvantaged Australian citizens, not least those of the nation’s indigenous peoples and those seeking asylum in the country.

    The book’s title, however, had meaning. It referred to a now legendary performance by then Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, before the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in its 2002 periodic review of Australia’s compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

    Mr Ruddock’s appearance took place against the background of a considerable change in the Government’s attitudes and actions in relation to human rights. The Government had wound back native title. It had steadfastly refused to apologise to or compensate the stolen generations. Aboriginal reconciliation had ground to an acrimonious halt. In response to a surge in people seeking political asylum, the Government had hardened the policy of mandatory detention, and built far flung detention centres in which asylum seekers were detained behind barbed wire fences.

    Mr Ruddock’s performance before the UN Committee was, by any account, a dismal failure. His demeanour was arrogant and condescending. His arguments served only to harden the Committee’s opinion that Australia, a nation whose human rights record had been admired, had joined the ranks of countries known routinely to violate the freedoms and entitlements of their citizens.

    In his presentation before the Committee, the Minister began by suggesting that it would be difficult for the Committee to come to any reasoned conclusions about Australia’s human rights record because it lacked the expertise to do so. He referred erroneously to Committee members as delegates, thereby implying wrongly that they were beholden to their governments. They are not. They are chosen for their human rights expertise. Nevertheless, he frequently deflected criticism by Committee members by engaging in counter-criticism of the human rights record of their countries of origin.

    His responses to substantive, and increasingly critical questioning were no better. Asked about the continuing health, educational and economic disadvantages experienced by Aboriginal peoples, he suggested that the problem stemmed principally from their choice of lifestyle, rather than with any deficit in government policy.

    On mandatory sentencing, he asserted that it was not the role of the Commonwealth to override State legislation, even if that legislation breached Australia’s international human rights obligations. He denied that mandatory sentencing had the effect of discriminating against indigenous people, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

    He justified the decision not to apologise to the stolen generations because the Government had already expressed regret for the hurt and trauma that many Aboriginal people continued to feel. The fundamental distinction between an expression of parliamentary regret and a national apology seemed to elude him.

    This, then, is the man that the Prime Minister has chosen to lead Australia’s campaign to be elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2018. If that campaign is to be successful, as I hope it will be, a more inappropriate appointee could hardly be imagined. Still, that single appearance at the UN would not be sufficient to damn the appointment without more. There is plenty more.

    Philip Ruddock is the architect of the ‘Pacific Solution’. We should call this for what it is. It is a government policy pursuant to which ‘boat people’ including ‘boat children’ are subjected to calculated persecution, cruelty, degradation and damage in order that other people who have suffered from persecution, cruelty, degradation and damage in their home countries should be deterred from flight to Australia by sea. The ‘Special Envoy for Human Rights’ bears principal responsibility for this policy, though it may readily be acknowledged that a number of his successors as Minister for Immigration have rendered the policy ever more abhorrent.

    When Minister, Mr Ruddock misled the Australian public grievously when, with his devious colleague Peter Reith, he asserted that the children of asylum seekers had been thrown overboard in order to place pressure on the government to allow them to land on Australia’s shores. The claim was always untrue. Ruddock has never apologised.

    As part of the Government’s response to terrorist attacks elsewhere, Philip Ruddock introduced draconian sedition laws, which had they been implemented in full could have put a stop to critical journalistic and public discussion and debate concerning terrorism and the justification or otherwise of measures to prevent it. In response to initial protest at the laws, he referred them to the Australian Law Reform Commission. The Commission recommended either full repeal or major amendment. In a blow to freedom of speech, its recommendations were shelved.

    When Attorney-General, Mr Ruddock disgraced himself by expressing his support for the American system of military commissions established to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay. His support arose from contention concerning the fate of David Hicks, an Australian citizen detained there. Any bush lawyer could see that the commissions were biased and that their procedures were grossly unfair. Our Attorney-General, the nation’s first law officer, defended them.

    He went further. He failed to utter one word of criticism concerning the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Instead, he surmised that sleep deprivation might not constitute torture at the same time as suggesting that admissions made under such conditions may be admitted as legitimate evidence. Later, the US Supreme Court declared the military commissions unconstitutional and the charge against Hicks as invalid because the relevant criminal law did not exist at the time the alleged offences were committed. So much for the Special Envoy for Human Rights’ legal perspicacity and morality.

    Human rights are a subset of a broader commitment to the rule of law. As Attorney-General, Mr Ruddock seemed to have little time for the idea. He was well known for not reappointing members of the Refugee and Immigration Tribunals with whose decisions he did not agree and replacing them with his supporters. In this way, he substantially undermined the Tribunals’ independence.

    He sought time and again to narrow the scope of judicial review of immigration decisions. So, for example, he introduced an amendment to the Migration Act that inserted a privative clause the effect of which was completely to remove all but administrative and mechanical migration decisions from legal challenge or appeal before the Federal Court of Australia.

    Mr Ruddock made criticism of the judiciary into an art form. Departing from the centuries’ long convention that one core element of an Attorney-General’s role was to defend the judiciary against attacks by executive government, Mr Ruddock became the courts’ most ardent critic. The ferocity of these attacks moved former Justice of the High Court, Michael McHugh, to remark that:

    “If the Executive Government is continually criticising the Judiciary, the authority of the courts of justice is likely to be undermined and public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judges is likely to be diminished. Continuing conflict is also likely to induce the Executive Government to prevail on the legislature to take the extreme step of reducing or abolishing judicial review with the result that the rule of law is undermined”.

    Taken together, the frank human rights violations of which Mr Ruddock has been guilty during the course of his long political career, and I have mentioned only a few, suggest two principal conclusions in relation to his appointment as Special Envoy for Human Rights.

    First, had he even a scintilla of insight concerning his record, he should courteously have refused the Prime Minister’s offer of the position, regarding himself as particularly unsuitable. Secondly, the Prime Minister’s judgment must be called into question. He has just shot Australia’s bid for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 in both feet.

    Spencer Zifcak is Allan Myers Professor of Law at the Australian Catholic University and Immediate Past President of Liberty Victoria

     

  • John Nieuwenhuysen. Multiculturalism Today and the Little Evil

    According to the ABS, the proportion of Australians born overseas has reached its highest point in 120 years. At about 6.6 million people, the overseas born represent 28 per cent of the country’s total, and, since 2005, migration has contributed half of total population growth. Some 47 per cent of Australians in 2015 were either born overseas or have parents who were.

    The diversity of Australia’s population has also increased, and the days of White Australia are long since gone. The traditional major country sources of immigration remain Britain and New Zealand, which represent 20.8 and 9.1 per cent respectively of our overseas born population. But Asian migration has been rising; and, in 2015, 6 per cent of Australia’s overseas born were from China; 5.6 per cent from India; 3.5 per cent from Vietnam; 3.2 per cent from the Philippines; and 2.2 per cent from Malaysia.

    How do the Australian people view continuing high levels of immigration, and its increased diversity, at a time of record overall population growth? And how stands its opinion of multiculturalism?

    According to the annual surveys by Monash University’s Professor Andrew Markus for the Scanlon and Australian Multicultural Foundations [Mapping Social Cohesion, 2015, National Report P.41], there has been “a consistently high level of endorsement for multiculturalism.” In response to the proposition that “multiculturalism has been good for Australia,” the survey found agreement in the three years 2013, 2014 and 2015 in the range of 84-86 per cent. The proportion in the survey registering strong agreement with the proposition increased from 32.2 per cent in 2013 to 43.3 per cent in 2015.

    Since, as Professor Markus notes, the meaning of multiculturalism in Australia is open to interpretation, survey respondents were asked to indicate their agreement with five different statements on multiculturalism. The survey showed that “the strongest positive association was with its contribution to economic development [75 per cent agree] and its encouragement of immigrants to become part of Australian society [71 per cent.]”

    This positive attitude to multiculturalism has co-existed not only with a high net overseas migration intake but also temporary admissions of entrants and New Zealand citizens to Australia, totalling close to two million people.

    This persistently high net migration level and such a great number of temporary entrants would in past years have aroused heated debate. As Professor Markus notes [page 34]: “Whereas in the early 1990’s, a large majority [over 70 per cent at its peak] considered the intake to be ‘too high’, most surveys between 2001 and 2009 indicated that opposition to the level of intake was a minority viewpoint.”

    Subsequently, in the last two years, with the collapse of the mining industry, slow Chinese economic growth, and government deficits, Markus [page 34] notes that there it was expected that support for the existing level of immigration would fall. But instead the reverse has happened-in both 2014 and 2015, Markus found that around 60 per cent of respondents considered that the intake was “about right” or “too low”.

    Professor Markus speculates on the reasons for this continuing support and considers [page 35] that, among other causes, it may reflect the “…perceived effectiveness of government asylum seeker policy…” as well as possibly a misunderstanding of the numbers of asylum seekers.

    Any observer who recalls the heated debates about immigration policy in the early 1990’s, when the Commonwealth Bureau of Immigration Research provided a plenitude of both scholarly works and public forums, and compares that time with today, can note how the asylum seeker controversy dominates current media coverage. That concentration seems to have pushed aside previous issues, such as the size and composition of the migrant intake.

    In many ways, I think this is highly unfortunate. Australia has enjoyed a good reputation for its successful settlement of people from all around the globe. Now, the harshness and inhumanity of the “Stop the Boats” policy is dominating the image of the country. The obsession of both major political parties to try to ensure that Australia is absolved from facing up to the harsh reality that wars, poverty and civil strife create streams of legitimate asylum seekers, is a deep scar on the country’s contemporary history, especially since it has public support. In particular, it ignores the great success of the absorption, under the leadership of Malcolm Fraser, of such a multitude of refugees after the Vietnam war.

    The credit that Australia deserves for its overall immigration program is thus being sadly undermined by a harsh and obstinate attitude to asylum seekers, and a neglect of obligations under the UNHCR convention. Hugh Mackay [The Age, January 26] has rightly damned the policy as “…immoral, because it treats people who have committed no crime as criminals….and fails to honour a moral principle we should claim as one of Australia’s core values-fairness.”

    Perhaps political leaders think silently of the asylum seeker policy as a little evil which is compensated for by the great, enlightened good of the general immigration program. But as the author of Cry the Beloved Country, Alan Paton once wrote:

    “Consent to a little evil, and it will grow…and a great evil will overwhelm us…No shame or remorse will save us then. Therefore consent not to… evil at all.”

    John Nieuwenhuysen AM FASSA is an Emeritus Professor at Monash University

     

  • John Menadue. Regional cooperation on refugees, Bali and a Track II Dialogue.

    I attended a Track II Dialogue in Bangkok recently to try to help develop a framework of shared responsibility to manage in a humane and efficient manner, displaced people movements in the region.

    There is concern that the Track I Regional Dialogue at government level has not been particularly fruitful. So much of the response to asylum seekers, refugees and displaced people in the region has been ad hoc, fragmented and political.

    The Track II Dialogue included a range of government officials in their private capacities, refugee experts, international agencies and people from think-tanks. The Dialogue was initiated by the Centre for Policy Development in Australia. It now has many additional conveners and supporters including from Mahidol University in Thailand, ISIS Malaysia, the Sydney Myer Fund, the Planet Wheeler Foundation, the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation, Qantas and Corrs Chambers Westgarth.

    Australia’s successful participation in the Indochina refugee program would not have been possible without the cooperation of regional countries. There were several key elements in that cooperation ,one being that  regional countries would hold Indochinese asylum seekers in safety and facilitate processing. That commitment from regional countries was backed by a broad agreement that countries such as the US, Canada, France and Australia would assist in resettlement. This basic pact between regional countries and settlement countries was messy around the edges, but it worked. My experience with the Indochina program is the reason for my contention over many years that we need to build a regional framework or architecture to manage the flow of displaced people into and within our region.

    But whilst the principles of that earlier pact over the Indochinese outflow are still valid, it is also obvious that no two situations are the same. Most of the asylum seekers from Indochina into South East Asia were in direct flight from Indochinese countries. Many asylum seekers in the region now are not in direct flight but are in transit. There are also many economic migrants in the region who are not asylum seekers but seek improved economic opportunities for themselves and their families. In many ways these displaced economic migrants bring an economic benefit to host countries but their status is irregular and precarious.

    These regional countries face far greater problems over irregular movements than we do. For example in 2015 Malaysia had 272 000 people of concern to the UNHCR, Thailand had 625 000, Indonesia 13 000, Bangladesh 233 000 and Myanmar 1.5 m. Australia had 58 000 people of concern to the UNHCR.

    So the situation faced by regional countries today is different from the situation faced by those countries at the time of the Indochina outflow.

    But there is another major difference. A key to the resettlement of asylum seekers in regional countries in the aftermath of the Indochina war was that relatively wealthy countries were prepared to accept large numbers of refugees for resettlement. The US did the heavy lifting with other countries such as Australia, France and Canada. But now, regional countries cannot rely on this same degree of outside help in resettlement. As regional countries, we have to collaborate and address our problems together. That is not a bad thing but it means building a new framework of regional cooperation.

    Amongst other things Track II seeks to build on the ‘Bali Process’ which was established in 2002 at the initiative of the Australian and Indonesian governments.   Australia then faced an earlier flow of boat arrivals mainly as a result of wars in the Middle East that we involved ourselves in at the request of the US.

    There are now 45 member countries of the Bali Process, including key countries Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Australia and Indonesia are co-chairs of the Bali Process at both ministerial and official level.

    The Bali ‘process’ has been cumbersome, ad hoc and fragmented. Australia has been a fair-weather friend to the region on refugees. When the Indochina program closed down in the mid 1990s, we left regional countries with responsibilities for many handicapped and disadvantaged Indochinese asylum seekers. After the Bali Process was initiated in 2002, we lost interest when boat arrivals to Australia fell away. In the recent Andaman Sea crisis, when many asylum seekers from Myanmar were stranded at sea, the response from ‘Bali’ was very slow. Many souls died of starvation and dehydration. The Australian government was asked whether it was prepared to help and Tony Abbott infamously said ‘Nope, nope, nope’. This was despite the fact that our Minister for Foreign Affairs was and still is co-chair with Indonesia in the Bali Process. Eventually the Thai government stepped in with support from Malaysia and Indonesia and the desperate people stranded at sea were allowed to land.

    There is quite a way to go in the Bali Process to build a framework of cooperation. It is very clear for Australia and for other regional countries that we cannot manage this problem on our own. There must be shared responsibility and burden-sharing. We need to build trust and a structure that will provide dignity and protection for vulnerable and displaced people.

    The recent Track II Dialogue in Bangkok made the following recommendations to the Bali Process Ad Hoc Group. 

    The Track II Dialogue recommends the Bali Process Ministerial Meeting authorise senior officials to:

    (a) review the response to the 2015 Andaman Sea situation, the resulting caseload, and ongoing maritime movements there and in the Bay of Bengal, within the commitments and principles outlined in the Regional Cooperation Framework (‘RCF’), to share those lessons among Bali Process members and work to implement necessary improvements; and

    (b) Take a broader focus and, drawing on the RCF, make any recommendations necessary to improve national and regional contingency planning and preparedness to enable more predictable and effective responses on forced migration, utilising existing capacity such as in ASEAN, IOM, UNHCR and civil society. Recommendations should reflect the principles that effective policy responses require shared responsibility and distributed capacities.

    The Dialogue offers to support the Bali Process in these endeavours to develop a more effective regional architecture over time.

    These recommendations are made with a view to upcoming fora relevant to the Bali Process, including the UN High-Level meeting on ways to address large movements of refugees and migrants on 19 September 2016. 

    The Bali Process Ad Hoc Group Senior Officials responded positively to the recommendations made by the Dialogue at their meeting in Bangkok on 2 February, agreeing to submit them to Ministers next month in Bali. The Co-Chairs of the Ad Hoc Group Senior Officials released a statement following their meeting, and referred directly to the Dialogue in paragraph [12]:

    The Meeting welcomed an update from the Co-Chairs on the recent meeting of the Track II Dialogue on Forced Migration, held in Bangkok on 29-30 January 2016, and noted recommendations sent by the Dialogue conveners to the Bali Process Co-Chairs. Members agreed to recommend to Bali Process Ministers that officials be tasked to conduct a review of the regional response to last year’s irregular migration events in the Andaman Sea, and share the lessons among Bali Process members. It will also identify recommendations to improve national and regional contingency planning and preparedness to enable more predictable and effective responses on forced migration. Members reaffirmed the importance of engagement with the Track II Dialogue and other civil society, and agreed that the Co-Chairs continue such efforts to engage with key civil society stakeholders.

    Government and non-government members of the Track II Dialogue in Bangkok all showed strong commitment to the overall process and to maintaining involvement to build an architecture of regional cooperation to manage and assist people displaced in the region.

    The next two meetings of the Track II Dialogue will be held in Malaysia in September 2016 and Indonesia in early 2017.

    The Track II Dialogue is already providing a flexible, sustainable and credible platform for regional cooperation and for influencing government policy. Good progress has been made, but a lot of work remains to build a regional framework/architecture.

    What is critical is not the process of consultation but practical and humane outcomes.

    Further information about the Track II Dialogue and its second meeting in Bangkok is available on the CPD website here.

    https://cpd.org.au/2016/02/secondadfmmeeting/

  • John Menadue. Privatising Medicare’s payments system and the erosion of Commonwealth Public Service capability.

    The government has apparently accepted the advice of the Commission of Audit that Medicare’s payments system should be reviewed with the possibility of privatisation. The payments system includes Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, Aged Care Services and Veterans’ Affairs.

    It sounds like another expression of neo liberalism, that only the private sector can be efficient and cost-effective.Let us see whether that is so through market testing. I remain sceptical.

    As a regular user of Medicare services and payments, I am not aware of problems in the payments system. But if there are problems, the government should fix them.’.

    This proposal on privatizing Medicare payments is part of the continuing trend to degrade government capability in both policy and administration of programs. The Australian Public Service is becoming short of senior people who understand the complex world of business strategy and those things required in commissioning the delivery of services or planning infrastructure investments and their delivery. In social policy it is not at all clear that the Commonwealth now has the people who understand the big systems that are so essential to a large part of what the public sector does.

    In between jobs, the new Secretary of PM & C put the problem this way in an interview with Laura Tingle in the AFR in May 2015. He said:

    ‘I think our institutions are being eroded in their capability and eroded in public trust. … Over time large parts of the public service have lost their policy development edge.’

    He has been replaced in Treasury by John Fraser, most recently a banker. Yet much of the governments’ deficits around the world have occurred as a result of governments having to bale out the banks for poor decisions and poor risk management.

    The problems that we apparently have with Medicare are common to many agencies. Good accounting in government has been abandoned and replaced with narrow financial metrics. Outside a few agencies, there just isn’t the capacity to do proper cost/benefit analysis. Many decisions are made on the run on the basis of cash outlays over four years.

    This failure of government administration suits private providers who exploit ministers’ and bureaucrats’ lack of analysis capacity and the domination of short-term cash outlays in the public presentation of the budget.

    It also suits neoliberals to get as much off the budget as possible even if the community is worse off. This is happening in the health sector. Some government expenditure is relieved by pushing business towards private health insurance, but we know that administrative costs of private health insurance are three times higher than Medicare. Furthermore we know that the growth of private health insurance makes it harder for Medicare to control fees. So whilst the budget may look a little better, the community is much worse off.

    We have had glaring examples of how government policy, capability and operations have been run down to the benefit of accounting and consulting firms who come and go with projects and their ‘economic models’, but there is little building of intellectual capital in the process.

    Staff numbers in the Australian Taxation Office have been cut back at a time when we have record tax avoidance and hundreds of our major companies paying no tax at all.

    I have rarely seen a root-and-branch criticism of a department as we saw with the Australian Public Service Commission Capability Review of the Department of Health and Ageing last year. The Secretary of the Health and Ageing at the time is now Secretary of Finance.

    The Department of Immigration and Border Protection has become securitized with a focus on border protection and control at the expense of nation-building and humanitarian programs. Senior and competent people with knowledge in nation-building and refugee programs have left the department. We see the result most graphically in the snail-pace response to settling 12,000 refugees from Syria. Less than 10 have arrived! Canada has put us to shame.

    The Attorney General’s Department failed to tell security agencies about the risk of Mann Haron Monis weeks before he entered the Lindt Café. The Attorney General’s Department has carriage of the policy and implementation of ‘meta data’ through the Data Retention Act. We were told at the time it was urgent because of the terrorist threat. But the policy cannot be introduced until the end of 2017at the earliest because of flawed implementation. AG’s department has just not been up to the job.

    One reason for the pink batts problem was the loss of  implementation capability in the Department of the Environment. That same department has bungled the approval of the Carmichael mine.

    The Department of Defence is subject to very little effective checking of its very expensive capital projects. It keeps making the same mistakes. As John Stanford put it in this blog on 11 December last year

    ‘Our defence acquisitions keep repeating the mistakes of the past, from mixing and matching systems inappropriately and accepting excessive risks, to allowing political judgements to override efficiency considerations and the proper regard for the public purse. In the new submarine acquisition, we seem to have learned nothing from the Collins Class procurement’.

    When the new submarines are delivered China and India will have nuclear submarines.

    The Department of Defence has a one-line budget appropriation which effectively denies rigorous examination of mega-dollar projects by the Department of Finance and others.

    The sorry story continues with the mega funding of roads. As Mike Keating and Lucas Fraser pointed out in the policy series in last year’s blog

    ‘A reasonable projection of planned road expenditures indicates that the accumulated stock of debt to FY 2023-24 could be of the order of $114 b. When added to the already accumulated debt, this amounts to a total accumulated road-derived public sector debt of $140 b. within a decade, a matter than until now has been entirely unreported’. Where is the Department of Transport or Infrastructure Australia when we have such gigantic and wasteful expenditures on roads”?

    There is a dismal and concerning story about how the capital of government is being deliberately eroded.

    We are paying a very heavy price for neoliberalism and the down-sizing of government that goes with it. The selling of Medicare’s payments system may be another step along this path.

    The coinage of the Australian Public Service is being seriously devalued. Can the threads of good policy development and administration be recovered? It is getting late.

  • Frank Brennan SJ. The Taxpayer’s Liability for Long Term Detention on Nauru (and Manus Island)

    As the Commonwealth Government contemplates what to do with the Bangladeshi woman in the recent High Court asylum case and her baby born in Australia, it will be relevant to consider the possible civil liability of the Commonwealth for its participation in her detention on Nauru for six months at a time when the Commonwealth Parliament had not specifically authorised the Executive Government to take action or make arrangements co-operating in such detention with a refugee processing centre (RPC).

    Last year the Immigration Department advised the Senate:

    It was originally planned that the RPC would operate as an ‘open centre’, comprising ‘community living institutions’ with minimal security, from which asylum seekers would come and go with relative autonomy, and engage with the local community. In ensuing consultation with the Government of Nauru, the model ‘evolved’ such that from its conception the centre operated as a closed facility, with movement outside the RPC only allowed on an escorted basis. On 25 February 2015, open centre arrangements were introduced at the RPC for certain cohorts of asylum seekers. The department advised that this was being ‘incrementally expanded to include all eligible asylum seekers’.

    The High Court decided that ‘the Commonwealth did not itself detain the plaintiff’. But that was not the end of the matter. French CJ, Keifel and Nettle JJ said that ‘the plaintiff’s case concerns the participation by the Commonwealth and its officers in the detention by Nauru of the plaintiff. It is that participation which is required to be authorised.’

    It is that participation which might found an action in tort for wrongful detention.

    French CJ, Keifel and Nettle JJ said, ‘It may be accepted that the Commonwealth was aware that Nauru required the plaintiff to be detained. In order to obtain Nauru’s agreement to receive the plaintiff, the Commonwealth funded the Centre and the services provided there in accordance with the Administrative Arrangements. The Commonwealth concedes the causal connection between its conduct and the plaintiff’s detention.’ Equally it may turn out that Nauru was aware that the Commonwealth required the plaintiff to be detained, or that the Commonwealth and Nauru reached agreement that the plaintiff should be detained. But why?

    The Commonwealth Parliament passed retrospective legislation authorising the detention regime. But just before the case commenced, the Nauruan government announced that they would no longer detain asylum seekers within refugee processing centres.

    French CJ, Keifel and Nettle JJ said: ‘If the regional processing country imposes a detention regime as a condition of the acceptance of UMAs removed from Australia, the Commonwealth may only participate in that regime if, and for so long as, it serves the purpose of processing.’ Did the six month detention of the plaintiff serve the purpose of processing, given that Nauru no longer requires the detention of asylum seekers while processing them, given that Nauru originally intended to process asylum seekers without detaining them, and given that the Nauruan decision to detain asylum seekers ‘evolved’ through discussions with Commonwealth officials?

    Justice Bell said that the Commonwealth brought about the plaintiff’s detention ‘in a practical sense’:

    The Commonwealth did not seek to have Nauru detain persons taken to it for regional processing. Nonetheless, by applying for an RPC visa in the plaintiff’s name and by taking the plaintiff to Nauru, in a practical sense the Commonwealth brought about her detention under the regime that applied in Nauru. The Commonwealth parties accept so much.

    Justice Bell said, ‘As a condition of its acceptance of a transferee from Australia, Nauru required that the transferee be detained in custody while any protection claim was processed and while any arrangements were made for removal from Nauru in the event the transferee was found not to be in need of international protection.’ Her Honour concluded, ‘The Commonwealth parties brought about the plaintiff’s detention in Nauru by applying for the issue of an RPC visa in her name without her consent.’ Justice Bell accepted that the plaintiff’s detention in Nauru ‘was, as a matter of substance, caused and effectively controlled by the Commonwealth parties’. Justice Bell said, ‘If a transferee were to be detained for a period exceeding that which can be seen to be reasonably necessary for the performance of those functions, the Commonwealth parties’ participation in the exercise of restraint over the transferee would cease to be lawful.’

    Given that Nauru originally intended to process people without detaining them, and given that Nauru is once again committed to processing people without detaining them, the question arises: what was the purpose of the six months detention of the plaintiff? Was she detained for a period exceeding what was reasonably necessary to effect the processing of her claim?

    Justice Gageler said that the focus had to be on the capacity of the Executive Government of the Commonwealth ‘to procure or enforce a deprivation of liberty’.   He concluded that the Commonwealth’s contractor Wilson Security staff ‘exercised physical control over the plaintiff so as to confine her to the Regional Processing Centre’.

    He concluded ‘that Wilson Security staff exercised that physical control over the plaintiff in the course and for the purpose of providing services which the Executive Government of the Commonwealth had procured to be performed under the Transfield contract’.

    Justice Gageler said that the Commonwealth Parliament’s retrospective law was directed at ‘nothing other than conferring statutory capacity or authority on the Executive Government to undertake action which is or might be beyond the executive power of the Commonwealth in the absence of statutory authority.’ Most significantly, he insisted, ‘The section has no effect on the civil or criminal liability of the Executive Government or its officers or agents under Australian law or under the law of a foreign country. The lawfulness or unlawfulness of Executive Government action under Australian law or under the law of a foreign country conversely does not determine whether or not that action falls within the scope of the statutory capacity or authority conferred by the section.’

    Gageler J found: ‘The requisite connection with that role would be broken were the duration of the detention to extend beyond that reasonably necessary to effectuate that role or were that role to become incapable of fulfilment.’ He thought that the plaintiff’s claim ‘that the Commonwealth and the Minister acted beyond the executive power of the Commonwealth by procuring and enforcing her detention at the Regional Processing Centre between 24 March 2014 and 2 August 2014 was well-founded.’ Thus the need for the Commonwealth Parliament to pass a retrospective law validating the Commonwealth action in 2015.

    There is no doubt that the Commonwealth’s involvement in the six month detention of the plaintiff was unauthorised when it occurred. Prior to the plaintiff’s detention, Nauru saw no need to detain asylum seekers in order to process their claims. Now, Nauru sees no need to detain asylum seekers in order to process their claims. It could be a live issue for a court to investigate how the model of processing evolved to warrant detention. If there be evidence that the long term detention of the plaintiff and people like her contributes nothing to the efficacy of the processing of their claims, then the Commonwealth’s participation in a scheme aimed at effecting and financing the detention would arguably create a civil liability regardless of the retrospective Commonwealth law permitting the Commonwealth Executive to effect and finance detention but only for the purpose of processing.

    Mr Dutton has a lot to think about. As Treasurer, Mr Morrison might also continue to have a few worries about the long term detention of persons on Nauru which he participated in when Immigration Minister.

     

     

     

  • David Isaacs. Secrets and lies and bad morality: Australia’s policy on people seeking asylum

    The latest episode in the long, sorry saga of how badly we can treat people seeking asylum was played out in the High Court in February 2016. Long because the story started in 1992 when the Paul Keating Labor government introduced mandatory detention ‘as a temporary measure’ in reaction to a handful of people arriving in leaky boats from Cambodia. And I use the term ‘people seeking asylum’ advisedly, because the term ‘asylum seekers’ dehumanises the people and has been shown to cause Australians to switch off. The High Court found it is legal for the Government to send babies born in Australia and children and adults transferred to Australia for mental health and other problems back to Nauru. This decision was predictable because the Government passed retrospective legislation making it legal. As the human rights lawyer Daniel Webb put it so eloquently, the law is complex but the morality is simple. Bad Governments pass bad laws to allow them to do things that are morally wrong. I am a doctor not a lawyer, so I am not qualified to say at what point the High Court has a duty to make sure our Government does not exact really heinous legislation, but this is pretty bad. Excising Christmas Island from the mainland and sending people into detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island is our Guantanamo. These are ‘black sites’ where people can be severely mistreated under a veil of secrecy: out of sight and out of mind.

    To argue that people are now free to come and go from the detention centre on Nauru is disingenuous. They are not safe if they leave the detention centre and they are not safe in the detention centre. Their visas to stay on Nauru are restricted to 5 years, so their future is as uncertain as ever. Nauru is their prison. Mr Dutton has stated that the hospital on Nauru is comparable to Australian hospitals. I did a clinic at the Republic of Nauru (RON) Hospital in December 2015 and it is far, far worse than any Australian hospital I ever visited. Furthermore, the staffing is as important as the facilities and the RON Hospital struggles for qualified staff. Of course, Mr Dutton will argue things have changed in the last year. Verifying the truth is impossible when the only journalist allowed in for years was a single Murdoch Press Government sympathiser and doctors who speak out risk two years in prison.

    Ethics can be defined as ‘how we ought to behave’ and medical ethics as how health professionals ought to behave. I recently published a paper (available on request) in the Journal of Medical Ethics (http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2015/12/20/medethics-2015-103066.abstract) in which I argue that prolonged immigration detention fulfils all the criteria for torture. I then argue that doctors and other health care professionals are conflicted: they have a duty to their patients to help them but they also have a duty not to condone torture. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) argues to this day that water-boarding prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was not torture because the technique was devised by psychologists and supervised by doctors. The doctors would presumably argue that the water-boarding was going to happen anyway and they were ensuring the prisoners did not drown. Highly respected colleagues and lawyers have said to me “Nauru is not as bad as Guantanamo”. Is it not? Are we to have degrees of torture? There have been unconfirmed (probably unconfirmable) reports by a guard of water-boarding and ‘zipping’ being inflicted on people in immigration detention in Nauru (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-14/guard-tells-parliamentary-inquiry-asylum-seekers-tortured-nauru/6699162). Why would the guard lie? Mr Dutton denied it, but he would wouldn’t he.

    The harms we are inflicting on adults to punish them for having the temerity to flee persecution in their homelands are immoral. We treat innocent adults worse than we do convicted criminals. But the public are more likely to sympathise with the argument that children are innocent victims. Gillian Triggs realised this, which is why her Forgotten Children enquiry is so powerful. Alison Light, in her wonderful book “Common people”, describes how the 19th century English workhouses were intended to punish men who did not want to work, but the biggest victims were women and children. I was struck by the parallels with immigration detention centres. I am proud that increasing numbers of paediatricians and paediatric nurses have decided to speak out against what is being done to children by our Government in our name. Alanna Maycock, Hasantha Gunasekera, Karen Zwi and Josh Francis have all risked imprisonment for telling the truth.

    What should happen? The Government mantra, ‘We’ve stopped the boats’, means the immigration detention centres are redundant. Keeping people imprisoned can only be to deter other desperate people from seeking asylum. Europe, struggling with a far bigger immigrant problem, has not resorted to such vulgar deterrent policies, although extreme right wing European groups cite Australia as an example to follow. We should allow the derisory number of children to remain in Australia with their parents. We should close the detention centres on Nauru and Manus, which are not only immoral but hugely expensive (it costs over half a million dollars per year for each person kept on Nauru). Mr Turnbull committed his Government to a tough stance on border control. If that stance includes continuing to torture innocent people we should hang our heads in shame.

    Professor David Isaacs is Senior Staff Specialist, Department of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology and Clinical Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Sydney. He works at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

  • Ravi. Poems from detention.

     

    My pen and paper

    I walk a deep sadness path with my loneliness. This emptiness makes me slow.
    I fall to my knees and cry out loudly.
    Tears knock silently at my eyes.

    I can’t find anyone to share my pain with so I make friends with my pen and paper. I share with them all my pain.
    They cry with me.

    The paper becomes wet with their tears.

    • Ravi

     

    Feelings of Loneliness

    I am alone
    very alone.
    And this is what alone is:
    To be nothing
    To have nothing
    To hurt so badly
    Aching not only in your heart
    But in every cell of your body.
    I am ignored,
    utterly unnoticed,
    thrown aside
    as a completely uncared for orphan.
    And friendless
    because they’ve all gone.
    Their love,
    their smiles
    all gone.
    I was left behind
    with no one to walk with.
    Oh how I want them back! With no friend to see or hear my agony I cry.
    With all possibility of hope
    vanished
    sorrow moves in to love me.

    After travelling to Australia from Sri Lanka by boat, Ravi was detained in Nauru Regional Processing Centre and Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation for over three years. He is now living in the community and has published a collection of his poems written from within our detention centre system.

     

  • John Menadue. The collapse of the Malaysian Arrangement has led to the depravity of Manus and Nauru.

    Having done its best in Opposition to wreck the Malaysian Arrangement in 2011, the Turnbull government is now seeking the help of Malaysia over detainees in Manus and Nauru. For political cynicism, this is hard to beat.

    In May 2011, the Australian and Malaysian governments announced an ‘in principle’ arrangement that up to 800 boat arrivals would be transferred from Australia to Malaysia for their asylum claims to be heard. In response Australia would be prepared to accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia. The arrangement with Malaysia was signed on 25 July 2011. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees gave it qualified support. At that period, boat arrivals were running at four to six per month.

    The Gillard government introduced legislation to give effect to the arrangement with Malaysia which was necessary as a result of a High Court decision on the transfer of people. That legislation was bitterly opposed by the Coalition and others in an evenly divided House of Representatives. The legislation failed in September 2011 when boats were running at only four in the month.

    In this opposition to the Malaysian arrangement, the Coalition was actively supported by the Greens and some key NGOs.  The Greens and the NGOs wanted more than was on the table and finished with nothing – or something worse – Manus and Nauru. NGOs need to be politically astute and consider government’s responsibilities on security, economy and society. Or as Gough Whitlam put it pungently in another context. ‘Only the impotent are pure’.

    Failure to pass the legislation to implement the Malaysian Arrangement opened the door for people smugglers to really get to work. As a result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement, boat arrivals rose from about four or five a month to 48 in July 2013. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison were not interested in stopping the boats. Their political objective was to stop Labor stopping the boats.

    Having helped defeat the legislation in the parliament, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison seized every opportunity to bash Malaysia’s human rights record and ‘canings’.

    But now we find that despite this history, the Turnbull government is now discussing with Malaysia ways to resolve the Manus/Nauru mess, a situation which no-one believes is sustainable. Consistent with what I have heard in the region, Laura Tingle in the AFR on February 4, 2016, said

    ‘Now it emerges that we are once again talking to Malaysia – the country with whom the Labor government was doing a deal … which was supposedly so abhorrent to the Coalition and the cause of human decency. ‘

    We have gone cap in hand to the Cambodian government and paid it over $50 million to resettle four refugees from Manus/Nauru. Our government has also been in discussions with the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan but without success. Now the government is talking again to Malaysia which Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison reviled in 2011.

    Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people smugglers by successfully but unscrupulously contributing to the defeat the Malaysian Arrangement.

    The Malaysian Arrangement was not ideal, but it would have significantly helped manage the flow of desperate people. It would also have been a building block for a regional framework which is necessary to manage displaced people in our region.

    I will be writing further about the importance of this regional framework.

    The result of the failure of the Malaysian Arrangement is the depravity of Manus and Nauru. Political cynicism has been exposed but at great cost to very vulnerable people.

    We have become a pariah in our treatment of asylum seekers.Even if we are stuck with Manus and Nauru for a while yet, there is no excuse for the Australian Government allowing detainees being treated so inhumanely.

    See link to earlier articles, Parts 1 and 2,  I wrote with Peter Hughes on this subject ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 1’. See also post ‘Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 2’.

     

  • Bruce Duncan. Australia’s moral crisis: shipping babies and families off to Nauru

    How has it come to this, that the Australian government is poised to send back 37 babies, 54 children and their families – 267 in all – into the traumatic conditions of Nauru?

    Only a few years ago many Australians would have considered it inconceivable that our governments should have imposed such shocking treatment on people who fled to our country seeking asylum as refugees.

    What has brought matters to a head is the government’s cynical manipulation of the law to prevent the High Court of Australia ruling in favour of a Bangladeshi woman who had been brought from detention in Nauru to Australia because of complications in her pregnancy in 2014. She brought an action in the High Court to prevent her being returned to Nauru.

    The government responded by rushing new legislation through both houses of parliament on 24 and 25 June 2015, changing the migration act to justify any action taken by the government to support its regional processing policies. The law came into force on 30 June 2015, but was backdated to take effect from 18 August 2012. Only one judge, Justice Gordon, dissented from the judgment of the other six judges of the High Court.

    As Professor George Williams wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 February, by sending people back to Nauru, Australia was washing it hands of responsibility. ‘There is no requirement that children are well treated or that their best interests are safeguarded. There is also no need for asylum seekers to be treated fairly, such as by having their claims promptly and properly assessed.’ http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/news/2016/02/asylum-seekers-nauru-are-legal-black-hole

    Waleed Aly in the Age of 5 February was more trenchant. ‘Nauru has become a screen behind which we hide our own culpability; its sovereignty a charade, really – a sort of legal fiction we use to obscure the consequences of our own policy’. We had descended into a ‘world of make-believe’ and become adept at ‘lying to ourselves’. https://theconversation.com/sending-children-back-to-nauru-risks-creating-a-generation-of-damaged-people-54115

    The issue has provoked a crisis of conscience among many people, including politicians and decision-makers, about where the logic of deterrence of asylum seekers has led us. Undoubtedly many politicians are conflicted about the dilemma they face. Labor member for Fremantle and a former lawyer at the United Nations, Melissa Parke, insisted that Australia’s laws were ‘certainly a serious violation of our international legal obligations and are utterly repugnant in a moral sense.’ http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-03/labor-mp-melissa-parke-hits-out-at-immigration-laws/7137508

    On the one hand, we all want to prevent asylum seekers arriving by boats, resulting in hundreds of people drowning at sea. To stop the boats, Australia established the deterrent of indefinite detention in harsh and remote detention on Nauru or Manus Island.

    On the other hand, church, human rights and medical authorities http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-03/mental-health-children-detention-darwin/7137858 , and https://theconversation.com/sending-children-back-to-nauru-risks-creating-a-generation-of-damaged-people-54115

    are protesting vigorously that our policies are driving hundreds of detainees into mental illness, especially children. It is unprecedented that Fairfax papers have given their front pages in early February to photos of many babies about to be sent back into detention with their mothers or families.

    Growing protests against treatment of asylum seekers

    Various Anglican and Uniting churches http://www.baptistcareaustralia.org.au/documents/item/965 have invoked the ancient right of sanctuary to prevent these children being carted back to Nauru, an island of 10,000 people with a barely functioning government, weak policing and very limited resources. Church leaders harbouring these asylum seekers could themselves face arrest.

    Significant protest marches and meetings have been held in cities throughout the country, attended by many mainstream voters, as well as church and community groups. Mums and dads are undoubtedly moved by the thought of what harm such detention in the conditions on Nauru would do to their own children.

    Morally it is repugnant to punish current detainees on Manus Island and Nauru in order to deter other asylum seekers who might think of arriving by boat, by demonstrating how harshly they will be treated, and keeping in indefinite detention with no prospect of settlement in Australia.

    New Zealand offered in February 2013 to take 150 of the asylum seekers each year for three years, but Australia turned down the offer lest the refugees gain NZ citizenship after five years’ residence and then enter Australia. With the migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East, few other countries will accept them. A handful has gone to Cambodia at a cost of $55 million to our government, which has also approached Kyrgyzstan and the Philippines. A small number of refugees has also tried to settle in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. However, most of the asylum seekers are in despair, and face years in detention.

    What is to be done?

    Many people are appealing to Mr Turnbull that the limited numbers of newborns and their families can be allowed to remain in Australia without reviving the boat arrivals. Church, community and academic http://opcvoice.com/index.php/news/item/45-letter-to-prime-minister-malcolm-turnbull-open-letter-to-prime-minister-calling-for-release-of-children-in-onshore-detention-and-on-the-nauru-opc and medical groups have been particularly prominent.

    In Melbourne, Bishop Vincent Long, spokesman for the Australian Catholics bishops and a former refugee himself, urged Prime Minister Turnbull and Immigration Minister, Peter Dutton, to show compassion and not cause more harm to these people. He called on the government to ‘ensure that no child is subject to an unsafe and harmful environment’ and that no one be returned to face ‘physical, psychological and sexual violence and harm.’ He said the Catholic Church opposed mandatory and detention and offshore detention. http://mediablog.catholic.org.au/media-statement-from-bishop-vincent-long-ofm-conv-australian-catholic-bishops-delegate-for-refugees-regarding-the-high-courts-decision-on-offshore-processing/ Thirty years ago Long set out from Vietnam, drifting at sea for seven days before spending 16 months in a refugee camp.

    Robert Manne in The Monthly also appealed to Mr Turnbull. ‘The idea that allowing a few children out of detention in Australia would act as an international signal that would see the return of the people smuggling trade was insane.’ https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/robert-manne/2016/03/2016/1454477557/how-has-it-come

    Fr Frank Brennan in Eureka Street argued that turning back the boats has stopped the arrival of unauthorised asylum seekers; the harsh deterrent policies of Nauru and Manus Island were no longer needed, and hence they could be closed. Most immediately, the children in Australia should be allowed to remain here with their families, he wrote. http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=45948#.VrSD-E9yK4M

    One of Australia’s most respected journalists, Michelle Grattan, saw some hope in Mr Turnbull’s cautious response that each case needed to be considered individually and that he wouldn’t ‘send children back into harm’s way.’ https://theconversation.com/governments-tough-reaction-to-high-court-judgment-contains-just-a-little-wriggle-room-54129

    Public opinion on these most vulnerable of refugees has shifted decisively, as the latest appeals from state and territory government leaders in Victoria, Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT indicate. It is no longer seen as a party-political issue, but as a matter of human decency. All eyes will now be on Prime Minister Turnbull to recast our policies on refugees and asylum seekers and end this moral blight on the conscience of our country.

    Bruce Duncan is a Redemptorist priest who lectures in social ethics at Yarra Theological Union within Melbourne’s University of Divinity. He is one of the founders of the ecumenical advocacy network, Social Policy Connections.

     

     

  • How long can we keep lying to ourselves.

    In the SMH on February 5, 2016, columnist Waleed Aly says ‘The history of asylum seeker policy in Australia will be remembered as a story of how successive governments legislated their lies to justify a world of make-believe borders and imaginary compliance.’

    See link to article below:

    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/nauru-how-long-can-we-keep-lying-to-ourselves-20160204-gml6or.html

  • Frank Brennan SJ. High Court not the answer to Nauru depravity

    The moral depravity of Australian funded and orchestrated holding of asylum seekers, including children, on Nauru and Manus Island is to continue.

    On Wednesday the High Court made clear that it is in no position to question the retrospective law passed by the Commonwealth Parliament on 30 June 2015 authorising the Australian Government to do whatever it takes to assist countries like Nauru with the detention of asylum seekers sent there by Australia as of 18 August 2012.

    The court ruled by six to one that offshore detention and processing of asylum seekers was valid according to this law authorising the Australian government to enter into agreements with other governments and contracts with corporations to provide ‘garrison and welfare services’ in offshore regional processing centres such as Nauru and Manus Island.

    The sole dissentient was the newest judge, Justice Gordon.

    The case arose out of a claim by a Bangladeshi woman (categorised as an ‘unauthorised maritime arrival’ or ‘UMA’) who had been intercepted on 19 October 2013 on a boat headed for Australia seeking asylum. She was transferred to Christmas Island the next day. Three months later she was transferred to Nauru where she was held in detention at a refugee-processing centre for over six months.

    Because of medical complications with her pregnancy which could not be treated adequately on Nauru, she was transferred temporarily back to Australia where she gave birth to her child on 16 December 2014. Not relishing the thought of taking her baby to the hellish conditions of Nauruan detention, she applied to the High Court questioning the legal validity of the offshore detention and processing regime.

    The Commonwealth’s lawyers obviously thought she had an arguable case. On 30 June 2015, the Commonwealth Parliament enacted the Migration Amendment (Regional Processing Arrangements) Act 2015 (Cth), which inserted s 198AHA into the Migration Act, with retrospective effect to 18 August 2012. This law authorised the government to take any action or ‘make payments, or cause payments to be made, in relation to the arrangement or the regional processing functions’ in other countries.

    Presumably the Nauruan government lawyers and political advisers also thought there might be some problems. On 2 October 2015, just days before the High Court hearing, the Government of Nauru announced its intention ‘to allow for freedom of movement of asylum seekers 24 hours per day, seven days per week’ from 5 October 2015 and to introduce legislation to that effect at the next sitting of the Nauruan Parliament. The High Court was duly informed of these developments.

    It is fair to say that prior to October 2015, the Commonwealth expected Nauru to detain these people, and with that expectation being realised was prepared to remunerate Nauru very handsomely, with retrospective parliamentary endorsement.

    With the air of unreality reserved to the highest courts (and perhaps some religious authorities) three of the judges observed that ‘the Commonwealth could not compel or authorise Nauru to make or enforce the laws which required that the plaintiff be detained’ and thus the Commonwealth was not legally responsible for the detention.

    These three majority judges did concede some limit to Commonwealth complicity in Australian funded detention of asylum seekers by another country: ‘If the regional processing country imposes a detention regime as a condition of the acceptance of UMAs removed from Australia, the Commonwealth may only participate in that regime if, and for so long as, it serves the purpose of processing.’

    Another of the majority judges, Justice Keane, said ‘the plaintiff’s submission that regional processing is punitive because it is designed to have a deterrent effect on the movement of asylum seekers must be rejected. A deterrent effect may be an intended consequence of the operation of regional processing arrangements, but the immediate purpose of s 198AHA is the facilitation of the removal of unauthorised maritime arrivals from Australia.’

    I daresay none of these judicial niceties will bring much comfort to the Bangladeshi mum who might feel that her baby is being punished by being taken to Nauru where both of them could remain for up to ten years should they be found to be refugees, pending resettlement in Cambodia or any other participating third country.

    If the Australian Constitution contained provisions similar to the human rights protections contained in the Nauruan Constitution, the High Court may have been able to offer some relief. But the High Court made clear that the detention of asylum seekers on Nauru was detention by the Nauruan government authorised by the Nauruan parliament, and thus it would be a matter for the Nauruan courts to determine if such executive action and legislative authorisation were constitutional.

    The Nauruan Constitution, unlike the Australian Constitution, sets strict limits on the government’s and the parliament’s power to detain persons and to deprive them of their liberty. Australia just happens to fund and facilitate the arrangements authorised by the Nauruan government and parliament, whether or not those arrangements are constitutionally valid.

    Justice Gageler rightly observed: ‘Their detention at the Regional Processing Centre has been under the authority of Nauruan legislation, the validity of which under the Constitution of Nauru is controversial.’

    Justice Gageler, our strongest civil libertarian judge (having been the Commonwealth Solicitor-General during some of the more difficult years of Australian asylum policy), considered that ‘the plaintiff’s central claim (that the Commonwealth and the Minister acted beyond the executive power of the Commonwealth by procuring and enforcing her detention at the Regional Processing Centre between 24 March 2014 and 2 August 2014) to have been well-founded until 30 June 2015, when s 198AHA was inserted with retrospective effect’.

    If returned to Nauru, presumably the plaintiff and her baby will no longer be detained, given Nauru’s newfound commitment to liberty for asylum seekers transferred from Australia. That then raises the fundamental political and moral question: why do we still want to transfer people like this (including babies) to countries like Nauru, Manus Island and Cambodia?

    Just after Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister, I wrote to him and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten suggesting a bipartisan announcement at the opening of parliament this year. I suggested that each address the Parliament reconfirming their commitment to stopping the boats and turning back those who are not in direct flight from persecution in Indonesia. I urged the announcement of an agreed date for the closure of the facilities on Nauru and Manus Island.

    I conceded that immediate closure of these facilities might allow unscrupulous people smugglers to ply their trade again with the message to asylum seekers in Indonesia that the appointment of a new Australian Prime Minister warranted renewed attempts at gaining access to Australia. I wrote, ‘But after an appropriate delay, you could negate that possibility and you could close these facilities without any risk of asylum seekers thinking that Australia was once again a possible boat destination.’

    Neither Turnbull nor Shorten was interested, repeating the mantras about preventing people smuggling, saving lives at sea and maintaining the integrity of Australia’s borders. But all this can be done without sending this mum and her baby to Nauru. We’re now told it can be done without actually detaining anyone on Nauru.

    In the past, we were solemnly assured that it was necessary to detain these people in order to send a message to other asylum seekers waiting in Indonesia. The boats have stopped. They will stay stopped. Any boats that try to get here will be turned back provided only there can be the assurance that no one on board is in direct flight from persecution in Indonesia.

    The people smugglers and their prospective clients now know that people are no longer held in detention on Nauru. It is no longer the hellish or uncertain conditions (with or without detention) on Nauru that deters people from getting on boats. It is the vigilance of our intelligence and military personnel which does that. The door is locked.

    All major political parties are agreed on the need to stop the boats. The heads of the Australian defence force are now confident that the boats have stopped and that any future boats will be stopped or turned back. This is a very different situation from four years ago.

    When Prime Minister Gillard failed to have her Malaysia solution implemented, she set up an expert panel chaired by Air Chief Marshall Houston. In August 2012, the Houston panel told the government that ‘the conditions required for effective, lawful and safe turnbacks of irregular vessels headed for Australia with asylum seekers on board are not currently met in regard to turnbacks to Indonesia’.

    So they looked for other short-term measures. Having studied Prime Minister Howard’s 2001 Pacific solution, the panel concluded that ‘in the short term, the establishment of processing facilities in Nauru as soon as practical is a necessary circuit breaker to the current surge in irregular migration to Australia’. Four years on, the Houston assessment of turnbacks would appear to be outdated and there is no longer a need for a circuit breaker. There is no surge; the boats have stopped.

    Before becoming Prime Minister, Turnbull insisted that our treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island was ‘harsh, but not cruel’. Now that there is no purpose to be served by maintaining the facilities on Nauru and Manus Island, the treatment of those persons is cruel as well as harsh.

    A prompt resolution of the matter is required unless Australia is to be left with a legacy of shame which will be sure to be disclosed at a future royal commission with plaintive cries from our past leaders and retired public servants: ‘We didn’t know the trauma caused to children and others fleeing persecution by being placed in such uncertain, isolated hell holes.’

    There is no joy to be found in our High Court applying a Constitution even more bereft of human rights protections than the Nauruan Constitution. It’s time for our politicians to address the political and moral question: what purpose is actually served by sending this mum and her baby back to Nauru, given that the boats have stopped and will stay stopped regardless of where we now place this mother and child and others like them?

    It’s time to walk and chew gum at the same time. It’s not an either/or proposition. There is no longer any need for a circuit breaker. The circuit is permanently cut. We can prevent people smuggling, save lives at sea, maintain the integrity of our borders and deal decently with the residual caseload of asylum seekers including this mother and her child.

     

    Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at Australian Catholic University and Adjunct Professor at the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture. This article was first published in Eureka Street on 3 February 2016.

     

  • John Menadue. What has happened to the 11,990 Syrian refugees?

    After telling us for months that Australia would not take additional Syrian refugees, Tony Abbott announced on September 9 last year that the government had ‘agreed to settle 12,000 Syrian refugees … one of the world’s largest (intakes) to date’. We were told that the first refugees would arrive by Christmas and the 12,000 by June 2016. State governments, community groups and churches then geared up to respond.

    But to date, after five months, only about ten Syrian refugees have arrived.

    We should contrast our performance with the generous and efficient response of the Canadians. The Canadian government website reveals that at the 31 January 2016, 15,157 Syrian refugees had landed in Canada since November 4. That number of arrivals was made up of 8,767 government-assisted refugees, 1,049 blended Visa-Office-Referred refugees and 5,341 privately sponsored refugees. By the end of January 165 Canadian communities had welcomed Syrian refugees. There had been 57 government organised flights.

    In Canada, at the 31st December 2015 there were 13,881 applications in progress, with 6,381 applications finalised but the refugees had not yet travelled to Canada.

    For this generous and efficient response the Canadians put us to shame. Why? I suggest there are several reasons.

    The first and most important reason is the political leadership and will of the new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. What a contrast with Abbott, Morrison, Dutton and now Turnbull.

    The second is that our ‘Immigration’ Department has been changed dramatically and is no longer adequately equipped to handle a movement such as this with expedition and efficiency. Senior and experienced people with expertise in the area have left the department. The ‘settlement’ function which has been so critical for managing newcomers to Australia has been transferred out of the Department of Immigration to the Department of Social Services. Furthermore, just as our foreign policy has become securitized, so our refugee and immigration programs have been overwhelmed by border control and border protection. We even have a military style Operation Sovereign Borders. The Department is not really involved in nation-building any more. It is about border control and we saw an example of this in the Melbourne fiasco late last year. Once upon a time Australia had a well-managed ability to move people quickly who are in need of resettlement. Ministers Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton have participated in the crippling of that ability.

    The third and a more specific problem is the delay in the large backlog of cases that are waiting ASIO checking. This is despite the fact that ASIO in recent years has received a substantial increase in personnel and other resources. Checking is necessary but the fear of foreigners that has been promoted by ministers has effectively thrown the weight of effort into control rather than a humanitarian response. There are always risks in the speedy movement of large numbers of desperate people but in the past we have been able to manage that efficiently – and reasonably quickly. And the lesson of terrorism in France and elsewhere in recent months is that it is mostly young people born to earlier arrivals rather than new refugees that have turned to terrorism.

    Canada has shown us a better way to help Syrian people in great need. The Canadian Government web site puts it this way. ‘Resettling refugees is a proud and important part of Canada’s humanitarian tradition. It reflects our commitment to Canadians and demonstrates to the world that we have a shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted.’

    In Australia we also used to have that humanitarian tradition of shared responsibility to help people who are displaced and persecuted. The Coalition and the ALP are trashing our proud tradition.

    We should make amends by increasing our Syrian intake to 25 000 and really applying ourselves to the job. The Canadians have shown us the way.

     

  • Another face of the refugee crisis.

    What beautiful photos of refugees – our sisters and brothers, our children and grandchildren!

     

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/frederic-seguin-refugee-photos_us_56a1439ce4b0d8cc10993c79?ir=World§ion=australia

  • Bob Kinnaird. Turnbull Government buries the FTA bad news

    The Turnbull government has proved just as determined as the Abbott government to hide from the Australian community the truth about what their FTA deals mean for the 457 visa and other temporary work visa programs.

    Under the Turnbull administration, the conclusion of Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations was announced on 6 October 2015 and the TPP text released on 5 November 2015. The China FTA (ChAFTA) entered into force on 20 December 2015.

    In both cases, the Turnbull government has treated the Australian community like the proverbial ‘Mushroom Club’.

    The TPP

    Three months after releasing the TPP text, no Turnbull government Minister has yet admitted publicly that it has once again negotiated away Australia’s sovereign right to regulate key temporary visa programs in crucial areas.

    Australia has committed not to apply labour market testing (LMT) or caps (quotas) in the entire 457 visa program to all citizens of Canada, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam; or to all foreign nationals who are employees of businesses in Canada, Peru and Mexico who transfer to an Australian branch of that business (‘intra-corporate transferees’).

    On top of that, Australia has also made a standing offer to do the same for the three other TPP countries without a total 457 LMT exemption (the USA, Peru and Singapore) if they provide access to limited categories of ‘Australian business persons’ down the track.

    The ChAFTA concession not to apply LMT to ‘installers and servicers’ of machinery and equipment on 400 visas has also been extended to eight TPP countries – Brunei Darussalam , Chile, Japan, New Zealand, Peru, Canada, Malaysia and Mexico.

    The only public admission of Australia’s real TPP commitments on what FTA-jargon calls ‘the Movement of Natural Persons’ (or MNP) was extracted from an official of the Department of Trade in Senate Estimates by Labor Senator Penny Wong in October 2015.

    Ms Elizabeth Ward, First Assistant Secretary, Office of Trade Negotiations in DFAT had this exchange confirming LMT ‘waivers’ for various categories of persons from several TPP countries:

    Ms Ward: In this particular agreement what we have done is provide MNP on a category-by-category reciprocity basis. If parties offered to us, then we offered to them. Many of them already have had LMT waived as a result of previous FTAs. The additional LMT waivers, as a result of the TPP, are intra-corporate transferees for Canada, Peru and Mexico and contractual service suppliers for Canada, Peru, Mexico, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.

    Senator WONG: We reserved policy space for LMT in the Malaysia free trade agreement. Has that been removed by the TPP?

    Ms Ward: That has.

    Ms Ward was not asked why the DFAT TPP ‘Fact Sheet’ failed to mention that Australia had committed to ‘waive’ LMT in 457 visa program and the 400 visa program for the various TPP countries.

    The best that DFAT could do was: ‘Australia’s TPP commitments are consistent with Australia’s existing immigration and workplace relations frameworks and the approach taken in other free trade agreements’.

    Apparently the drafting instruction was ‘Don’t mention we’re removing 457 labour market testing’ after the bruising ChAFTA experience.

    ChAFTA

    The main effect of Australia’s ChAFTA obligations on the 457 visa is that from 20 December 2015, Australia has given up the right to apply labour market testing or quotas in the standard 457 visa program to all Chinese citizens or nationals; and to all foreign nationals who are employees of businesses in China and transferring to an Australian branch of that business (‘intra-corporate transferees’).

    There was no official announcement of this important change by Trade Minister Robb, Immigration Minister Dutton or any Turnbull government Minister when ChAFTA entered into force.

    This was despite Trade Minister Robb putting out two media releases (on 9 and 20 December 2015) announcing that ChAFTA would enter into force on 20 December. Both neglected to mention the 457 visa program changes in the list of claimed ChAFTA ‘benefits’.

    On Friday 18 December 2015, the Immigration department quietly updated its 457 visa website to incorporate the ChAFTA 457 obligations described above, with a link to the relevant legislative instrument. Neither the Immigration Minister nor his department made any public announcement of the update.

    The Immigration Minister also had nothing to say publicly on 4 December 2015 when he signed the formal legislative instrument listing the categories of ‘natural persons’ for which ‘the imposition of labour market testing would be inconsistent with international trade obligations of Australia arising under the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement’. This ‘Determination’ is the only regulatory change needed to implement all of Australia’s temporary work visa obligations under ChAFTA.

    The instrument was simply posted on the Comlaw website along with all others made that day.

    The Turnbull government’s silence on ChAFTA and the 457 visa program follows the same pattern set by the Abbott administration. When the Korea and Japan FTAs entered into force in 2014, there was no public announcement that they removed 457 LMT for all ‘citizens/nationals/permanent residents of Korea’ and ‘citizens/nationals of Japan’; and for all foreign employees of businesses in Korea and Japan transferring to an Australian branch.

    The Immigration 457 website was simply updated, with a link to the relevant legislative instruments.

    In fact, the department’s email advice to Registered Migration Agents on the removal of 457 LMT in the Korea and Japan FTAs even warned that ‘this information is not for external distribution or publication’!

    Apparently the Immigration department wanted migration agents to play their part in keeping the Australian public in the dark about how these FTAs removed labour market testing from the 457 program – or, more likely, their Ministers did.

    The Department also told Senate Estimates in December 2015 that it would communicate any impact of ChAFTA to ‘relevant stakeholders’ – which apparently does not include the general Australian community.

    Conclusion

    The Federal Labor Opposition, having voted for ChAFTA in the Parliament, is not likely to draw attention to the Turnbull government’s efforts to hide the truth about ChAFTA, other FTAs and the 457 visa program either.

    The irony is that it is only because of Labor’s 457 reforms to the Migration Act in 2013 that the Australian community has faintest chance of knowing anything about the impact of FTA obligations on the 457 visa program.

    Labor’s June 2013 457 amendments provide for the Immigration Minister to make a publicly-available legislative instrument setting out the categories of persons in FTAs and other international trade agreements for which ‘the imposition of labour market testing would be inconsistent with international trade obligations of Australia’ (s.140GBA of the Migration Act 1958).

    As a result, the Immigration department must now also publish information on its website and elsewhere about the precise 457 LMT exemptions due to Australia’s international trade obligations, as determined by the government of the day.

    Before Labor’s 2013 amendments, Ministers and bureaucrats had no legal obligation to disclose this information, did not voluntarily disclose it and obfuscated when asked.

    Labor’s decision to support ChAFTA means it is now less likely to hold the Turnbull government to account when it fails in its duty to inform the Australian community about what proposed FTA obligations mean for the 457 and other temporary visa programs.

     

    Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.

     

     

     

  • John Menadue. Australia Day doing well, but could do better.

    The following repost is from Australia Day 2014.

    I wonder what indigenous people thought when they saw Captain Phillip with his ships come uninvited and sail up Sydney Harbour in January 1788. There does not seem any doubt that despite their concerns they were less hostile than we are to boat people 226 years later.

    Succeeding generations came by boat in their millions, including my ancestors who came from agriculturally depressed Cornwall in SS Northumberland to desolate Port Willunga in SA in 1847. Migration has never stopped. It has dramatically changed Australia, mainly for the better.  I don’t think any country has done it as well. It has brought vibrancy and greater openness If I could be more precise, I think Australia has benefited most from refugees.  Whilst the first generation of refugees may often lack skills and education, they more than make up for it in enterprise, courage and risk-taking.  That enterprise and high aspirations are often expressed through their children who often outperform others in education.  Refugees are by definition risk-takers who will abandon all for a new life.  They select themselves much better than a migration officer can ever select them.

    We have seen the benefits of migration refugees and multiculturalism, but seem hesitant about new people.  But this hesitancy and sometimes hostility to newcomers, in time gives way to acceptance and pride in our common achievements.  This has been our experience with waves of newcomers.  Irish Catholics were initially depicted as different and perhaps disloyal.  We were prejudiced against Jewish newcomers.  German migrants, particularly in the Barossa Valley, were harassed for decades. We were sceptical of balts, reffos and dagos We were initially wary about the Indo-Chinese and what damage they might cause to the Australian way of life.  But over time, it changed.  Even the early Afghans who built the transport links in Central Australia now have a train, the Ghan, named in their honour.

    Whilst Australians are invariably hesitant about newcomers, what gives me confidence is our pragmatic acceptance.  That seeming contradictory response is shown consistently in opinion polling and over long periods.  We are favourably impressed with the personal experience we have of the neighbour or shopkeeper who is Italian, Chinese or Vietnamese.  Is there something in the casualness and our easy-going acceptance that overcomes ideological and philosophical opposition?  We eschew the extremes and don’t get too excited by ideologies at either end of the spectrum.  If November 11, 1975, couldn’t even provoke a general strike, what could?  Insurrection is rare.  There isn’t much blood on the wattle.  We bump into each other, but we don’t cause a great deal of hurt

    One important reason for our successful integration of newcomers has been our settlement programs, particularly English language training. Unfortunately the Abbott Government has now taken these settlement services out of the Department of Immigration which is now focussed on border protection rather than settlement and nation building.

    As the host, Australia has particular responsibility to provide opportunities for newcomers. But it is not a one way street. The leadership of the new communities also carries responsibilities. Most have provided that leadership. Some have obviously failed both their own communities but also the wider Australian community. There is a lesson to be learned here.

    I believe that we do not place sufficient emphasis on citizenship, not in the jingoistic way of the United States but as a symbol of our unity. There must be strong commitment to Australia and new comers must place that ahead of loyalties to former homelands. Australian residents or citizens who go to fight in wars in their former homelands must be dealt with very firmly.

    We welcome diversity but not for its own sake. Diversity must be of benefit to the common good. For example we fought too long and hard for the separation of church and state to be prepared to give way to sharia law. We have built a superstructure of enriching diversity. But that diversity has been built on a strong substructure of shared institutions and values…our constitution, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national language and tolerance and equal opportunity.

    In addition to time healing differences, we have also had leaders who have inspired the best in each of us or ‘touched the better angels of our nature’ (Abraham Lincoln).  Ben Chifley overcame public opposition in allowing Jewish refugees after World War II.  Robert Menzies, on coming to office, continued the acceptance of the displaced people of Europe.  Harold Holt skilfully, but in defiance of public opinion, commenced the dismantling of White Australia.  John Gorton and Gough Whitlam continued the process.  When Malcolm Fraser responded to the anguish of the Indo-Chinese people, he knew that he was acting contrary to public opinion.  Bill Hayden and then Bob Hawke supported him.  Yet no-one today would argue that these leaders got it wrong.  We applaud their courage and leadership. John Howard and Tony Abbott were the first post war leaders to break from that bi partisan tradition and engender fear of newcomers.

    Border protection is clearly necessary to maintain public confidence in migration and refugee intakes.  But it is possible to do that, as Malcolm Fraser showed without dividing the country and punishing the most vulnerable people on earth.

    What gives me confidence, is the Australian people.  I know of a Jewish refugee boy who went to school in inner Melbourne after World War II.  He told me his story.  His sister and he were called before the headmaster. As they were leaving his office, the headmaster asked them whose photo it was on the wall.  They didn’t know, but surmised that it might be head of the police or the head of the military.  The headmaster told them who it was, but the name meant nothing to them.  They then asked their schoolmates and were told it was Don Bradman.  That Jewish man said to me recently ‘I knew then that we were safe’.  If the most important public figure for the headmaster was a famous sportsman, there was little to fear and a lot to be looked forward to in Australia.

    Our nation will always be dynamic .It will be work in progress. 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.

    Fear holds us back from expressing the generosity we all possess.

  • What do we owe each other?

    In this opinion piece from the New York Times, Aaron James Wendland draws on work by Emmanuel Levinas in response to the surge of refugees around the world and particularly into Europe. Levinas describes the allergic reaction to refugees. In response he suggests three things. First, an appeal to the ‘infinity’ in human beings, that other people are always more than our categories can capture.  Second, faces confront us directly and immediately. Thirdly, hospitality involves curtailing our enjoyment of the world when confronted with another’s wants.

    See link to article below:

    http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/opinionator/2016/01/18/what-do-we-owe-each-other/

  • I stand at the door and knock.

    Pope’s Message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees

    January 17, 2016

    Dear Brothers and Sisters,

    In the Bull of indiction of the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy I noted that “at times we are called to gaze even more attentively on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Father’s action in our lives” (Misericordiae Vultus, 3). God’s love is meant to reach out to each and every person. Those who welcome the Father’s embrace, for their part, become so many other open arms and embraces, enabling every person to feel loved like a child and “at home” as part of the one human family. God’s fatherly care extends to everyone, like the care of a shepherd for his flock, but it is particularly concerned for the needs of the sheep who are wounded, weary or ill. Jesus told us that the Father stoops to help those overcome by physical or moral poverty; the more serious their condition, the more powerfully is his divine mercy revealed.

    In our time, migration is growing worldwide. Refugees and people fleeing from their homes challenge individuals and communities, and their traditional ways of life; at times they upset the cultural and social horizons which they encounter. Increasingly, the victims of violence and poverty, leaving their homelands, are exploited by human traffickers during their journey towards the dream of a better future. If they survive the abuses and hardships of the journey, they then have to face latent suspicions and fear. In the end, they frequently encounter a lack of clear and practical policies regulating the acceptance of migrants and providing for short or long term programmes of integration respectful of the rights and duties of all. Today, more than in the past, the Gospel of mercy troubles our consciences, prevents us from taking the suffering of others for granted, and points out way of responding which, grounded in the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, find practical expression in works of spiritual and corporal mercy.

    In the light of these facts, I have chosen as the theme of the 2016 World Day of Migrants and Refugees: “Migrants and Refugees Challenge Us. The Response of the Gospel of Mercy.” Migration movements are now a structural reality, and our primary issue must be to deal with the present emergency phase by providing programmes which address the causes of migration and the changes it entails, including its effect on the makeup of societies and peoples. The tragic stories of millions of men and women daily confront the international community as a result of the outbreak of unacceptable humanitarian crises in different parts of the world. Indifference and silence lead to complicity whenever we stand by as people are dying of suffocation, starvation, violence and shipwreck. Whether large or small in scale, these are always tragedies, even when a single human life is lost.

    Migrants are our brothers and sisters in search of a better life, far away from poverty, hunger, exploitation and the unjust distribution of the planet’s resources which are meant to be equitably shared by all. Don’t we all want a better, more decent and prosperous life to share with our loved ones?
    At this moment in human history, marked by great movements of migration, identity is not a secondary issue. Those who migrate are forced to change some of their most distinctive characteristics and, whether they like or not, even those who welcome them are also forced to change. How can we experience these changes not as obstacles to genuine development, rather as opportunities for genuine human, social and spiritual growth, a growth which respects and promotes those values which make us ever more humane and help us to live a balanced relationship with God, others and creation?
    The presence of migrants and refugees seriously challenges the various societies which accept them. Those societies are faced with new situations which could create serious hardship unless they are suitably motivated, managed and regulated. How can we ensure that integration will become mutual enrichment, open up positive perspectives to communities, and prevent the danger of discrimination, racism, extreme nationalism or xenophobia?

    Biblical revelation urges us to welcome the stranger; it tells us that in so doing, we open our doors to God, and that in the faces of others we see the face of Christ himself. Many institutions, associations, movements and groups, diocesan, national and international organisations are experiencing the wonder and joy of the feast of encounter, sharing and solidarity. They have heard the voice of Jesus Christ: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Rev 3:20). Yet there continue to be debates about the conditions and limits to be set for the reception of migrants, not only on the level of national policies, but also in some parish communities whose traditional tranquillity seems to be threatened.

    Faced with these issues, how can the Church fail to be inspired by the example and words of Jesus Christ? The answer of the Gospel is mercy.
    In the first place, mercy is a gift of God the Father who is revealed in the Son. God’s mercy gives rise to joyful gratitude for the hope which opens up before us in the mystery of our redemption by Christ’s blood. Mercy nourishes and strengthens solidarity towards others as a necessary response to God’s gracious love, “which has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom 5:5). Each of us is responsible for his or her neighbour: we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, wherever they live. Concern for fostering good relationships with others and the ability to overcome prejudice and fear are essential ingredients for promoting the culture of encounter, in which we are not only prepared to give, but also to receive from others. Hospitality, in fact, grows from both giving and receiving.

    From this perspective, it is important to view migrants not only on the basis of their status as regular or irregular, but above all as people whose dignity is to be protected and who are capable of contributing to progress and the general welfare. This is especially the case when they responsibly assume their obligations towards those who receive them, gratefully respecting the material and spiritual heritage of the host country, obeying its laws and helping with its needs. Migrations cannot be reduced merely to their political and legislative aspects, their economic implications and the concrete coexistence of various cultures in one territory. All these complement the defence and promotion of the human person, the culture of encounter, and the unity of peoples, where the Gospel of mercy inspires and encourages ways of renewing and transforming the whole of humanity.

    The Church stands at the side of all who work to defend each person’s right to live with dignity, first and foremost by exercising the right not to emigrate and to contribute to the development of one’s country of origin. This process should include, from the outset, the need to assist the countries which migrants and refugees leave. This will demonstrate that solidarity, cooperation, international interdependence and the equitable distribution of the earth’s goods are essential for more decisive efforts, especially in areas where migration movements begin, to eliminate those imbalances which lead people, individually or collectively, to abandon their own natural and cultural environment. In any case, it is necessary to avert, if possible at the earliest stages, the flight of refugees and departures as a result of poverty, violence and persecution.

    Public opinion also needs to be correctly formed, not least to prevent unwarranted fears and speculations detrimental to migrants.
    No one can claim to be indifferent in the face of new forms of slavery imposed by criminal organizations which buy and sell men, women and children as forced labourers in construction, agriculture, fishing or in other markets. How many minors are still forced to fight in militias as child soldiers! How many people are victims of organ trafficking, forced begging and sexual exploitation! Today’s refugees are fleeing from these aberrant crimes, and they appeal to the Church and the human community to ensure that, in the outstretched hand of those who receive them, they can see the face of the Lord, “the Father of mercies and God of all consolation” (2 Cor 1:3).

    Dear brothers and sisters, migrants and refugees! At the heart of the Gospel of mercy the encounter and acceptance by others are intertwined with the encounter and acceptance of God himself. Welcoming others means welcoming God in person! Do not let yourselves be robbed of the hope and joy of life born of your experience of God’s mercy, as manifested in the people you meet on your journey! I entrust you to the Virgin Mary, Mother of migrants and refugees, and to Saint Joseph, who experienced the bitterness of emigration to Egypt. To their intercession I also commend those who invest so much energy, time and resources to the pastoral and social care of migrants.

    To all I cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing.

     

  • John Menadue. Australians who fight in overseas wars.

    Repost from 02/03/2015

    The government has been concerned, as many of us are, about Australians fighting for IS in Syria and Iraq. The government is threatening to revoke the Australian citizenship of dual nationals who involve themselves in this war.

    Whether this will be successful is a very moot point. It is asserted by many that prosecution under our existing laws would be much more effective. But a government in trouble about its own security has to be seen to be ‘doing something’, e.g. revoking citizenship.

    There are an estimated 100 or so Australian citizens fighting with the IS in Syria and Iraq. That number looks to be increasing.

    Estimates suggest also that at least a similar number of dual Australian citizens are fighting with the Israeli Defence Forces. Australians have fought in all of Israel’s wars since 1948.

    The Muslim community in Australia has been very critical of Australians who go and fight under the IS flag but rightly asks why Australian citizens are able to fight with the IDF but not with IS. I would have thought that the policy on this matter would be quite clear – that no Australian citizen should be allowed to fight overseas without the approval of the Australian government and if they do they will be prosecuted and if found guilty severely punished.

    There are several reasons that our Prime Minister and ASIO have given for the apparent double-standard in treatment of Australian citizens fighting for IS and for IDF. The first is that IS has been described as a terrorist organisation, whereas the IDF has not. Second, fighting with an overseas army of a recognised national state is different. Thirdly, the Israeli’s are not under sanctions so the IDF is a ‘free port for Australian volunteers’ according to the former Director General of ASIO.

    If it is maintained that Israel has not been designated as a terrorist state or is under sanctions, it cannot be said that the IDF is not a lethal organisation. In its savage attack on Gaza last year, the IDF made over 5,000 air strikes in which 2,104 people were killed. According to the UN estimates, 69% of persons killed in Gaza were civilians. The Israeli’s lost 67 soldiers and six civilians.

    Where is the balance and logic in the way successive Australian governments have favoured Israel in so many ways? One thing stands out very much; the power of the Israeli lobby in so many countries including our own.

  • Vale Malcolm Fraser

    Repost from 21/03/2015

    I am sure that Malcolm Fraser’s concerns for human rights were always there. But as he grew and matured, that concern flourished and became obvious to all. He became our moral compass on human rights.

    I was first conscious of Malcolm’s concern for human rights when I listened to his speech in September 1975 at a luncheon in Parliament House Canberra to honour Helen Suzman. She was an anti-apartheid campaigner who for 13 years was the sole opponent of the apartheid regime in South Africa’s parliament. For the first time that I can recall, Malcolm Fraser spelled out his opposition to apartheid and white rule in Africa. It surprised me. But, I found it very encouraging. It was the beginning of my better understanding of Malcolm Fraser.

    Later he became a firm opponent of white rule, in Africa. Despite Maggie Thatcher he was determined to do what he could to end white rule in Southern Rhodesia.

    I next became aware of Malcolm Fraser’s concern for human rights in Africa in the first cabinet meeting of the Fraser government after the dismissal of the Whitlam government.

    There had been a lot of media reports in Australia that money raised by the World Council of Churches for humanitarian aid in Southern Rhodesia was being diverted to assist the underground political and military opposition to Ian Smith, the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia. In Cabinet the issue was raised by a senior NSW minister. I was really taken by surprise by Malcolm Fraser’s pungent response. He said that Ian Smith was not only politically culpable for racism in Southern Rhodesia, but that he was ‘mad’. To my knowledge this matter was never raised again in Cabinet, or at least while I was there. No Minister dared!

    In government from 1975 to 1983, Malcolm Fraser took up many of the human rights issues that Gough Whitlam had put on the agenda. Gough Whitlam started the process to establish land rights for indigenous Australians, but it was Malcolm Fraser who had the first legislation enacted.

    From his western Sydney electorate of Werriwa, with migrants from so many countries, Gough Whitlam laid the groundwork  for multiculturalism. The fundamental principle of multiculturalism was that all people deserve dignity and respect regardless of their background. In our white Anglo-Celtic community, that was something quite new. But it was Malcolm Fraser who expanded and entrenched multiculturalism. SBS was established and settlement programs for migrants and refugees were co-ordinated and then well-funded following the Galbally Report.

    Following piecemeal reform by Holt, Gorton and McMahon, Gough Whitlam ended White Australia by legislation. But under the Whitlam Government the abolition of White Australia was never put to the test in the community. Migrant and refugee intakes in the Whitlam period were the lowest since the Great Depression.

    Malcolm Fraser put the abolition of White Australia to the test by accepting tens of thousands of Indochinese refugees.  Through the policies and programs initiated by the Fraser Government, including later family reunion, we now have 250,000 persons of Indochinese background living in Australia. What a great credit they have been to Australia, to themselves and to Malcolm Fraser’s vision.

    He broke the back of White Australia and as an anti-White Australia activist since my university days in the 1950s it was wonderful to see what Malcolm Fraser had achieved. Racism and opposition to foreigners is often a dormant but potent factor in public life, but Malcolm Fraser determined that we had a humanitarian obligation to the people who had fled Indochina.

    He didn’t wait for opinion polling or focus groups to decide what we should do. He gave us leadership. It wasn’t easy given our history of White Australia and the knowledge that fear of the foreigner could be so easily exploited. But with leadership, Malcolm Fraser showed that we all have generous instincts and with his leadership we responded because we knew in our heart of hearts that he was right. If only we had that leadership today!.

    I am certain that my appointment as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs in 1980 stemmed from Malcolm Fraser’s lively concern about racism. In my posting in Japan, I spoke to scores of community groups about Australia. On almost every occasion I would be asked about White Australia. It irritated me, particularly given Japan’s exclusivist policies on race and migration. As I came to the end of my posting Malcolm Fraser was visiting Japan and he asked me what I wanted to do when I returned.  I mentioned to him how White Australia had followed me all round Japan, so I told him I would like on return to Australia to do what I could to help bury White Australia. His response was instantaneous and to the point – ‘You’re on’!.  Within three months I was back in Canberra as Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs.

    In that role I was able to continue to help expand the Indochina program. But In the department I encountered programs, staff attitudes and a culture  that reflected the old days of White Australia. I set about changing it and was quite public in what I was doing. I know that Liberal Party backbenchers were concerned about my activities. But never did Ian Macphee, my minister, or Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, criticise or ask me to desist. We were all on the same page.

    Almost to the day of his death, Malcolm Fraser was in the front line to support asylum seekers and those whose human rights were being attacked. One of his latest projects was  how the community could be galvanised to support Gillian Triggs the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission who had been so unfairly attacked by our Prime Minister and the Attorney General.

    He took to twitter with enthusiasm to shed light on dark places in our public life.

    It turned out that he and Gough Whitlam had more in common than they knew in those turbulent days of 1975. They were both badly bruised but their personal relations mellowed and healed. The two political titans of our era came to terms.

    Gough Whitlam often said that he hadn’t disagreed with Malcolm Fraser for 20 years! Malcolm Fraser delivered the Whitlam Oration in 2012. He opened the oration with ‘Men and Women of Australia’.

    At the Sorry Day in Parliament House in 2008, most former Prime Ministers were photographed. together. With a walking stick, or ‘cane’ as Gough would have called it, in one hand – he put his other hand on Malcolm Fraser’s shoulder for support. It was quite moving to see the old combatants so close.

    About three months before Gough Whitlam died, Malcolm Fraser called to see him in his Sydney office. He presented Gough  with his latest book ‘Dangerous Allies’. He had inscribed in the book –

    “Dear Gough, with great respect and great affection, Malcolm.”

    It had been a long and colourful journey for both of them, but there was clear respect and affection at the end.

    We will miss Malcolm Fraser’s steadfastness on human rights.

    A light has gone out.

  • Bob Kinnaird. Foreign worker exploitation.

    To reduce foreign worker exploitation, enforce employer sanctions laws

    2015 produced a never-ending stream of stories of exploited foreign workers on all kinds of temporary visas. They include overseas students, working holiday and 457 ‘skilled’ visa-holders. Nearly all temporary visas and some permanent residence visas are implicated.

    A Senate committee on Australia’s temporary work visa programs is due to report by end- February 2016.   Changes are needed in many policies and practices.

    In an earlier blog (9/10/15), I argued for changes in ‘government international education and visa policies that are feeding the growth in Australia of a vast underclass of temporary visa holders desperate for work and ripe for exploitation’.

    This blog shows that strengthened employer sanctions provisions of the Migration Act 1958 put in place by the former Labor government are not being adequately enforced by the Coalition government. These came into effect in June 2013. They would deter much exploitation of visa workers if more effectively enforced.

    Background

    Fairfax investigative journalist Adele Ferguson exposed the staggering scale of wage fraud at 7-11 convenience stores. 7-11 has now agreed to fund up to $25 million of wage fraud claims. If the claims exceed $25 million, franchisees will pay the next $5 million with anything more split equally between franchisees and 7-11 head office.

    The 7-11 case and many others involve allegations that overseas students have to work beyond the maximum hours permitted by their visa conditions (40 hours/fortnight during term, unrestricted hours outside term). Their employers then use this visa non-compliance against the students, threatening to report them to Immigration and have their visas cancelled unless they accept even more substandard wages and conditions. The practice has been going on for years.

    Nearly all these employers engaging overseas students to work in breach of their visa terms are committing an offence under the employer sanctions provisions. Strangely there has been little or no public discussion of these and other relevant laws that can and should be used to penalise these employers and deter the practice. This includes the Senate committee on temporary visas, whose October 2015 interim report did not mention these laws.

    As the 2010 Howells review of employer sanctions laws said, the absence of an effective deterrent to these practices has serious consequences. They include ‘the vulnerability of such workers to severe exploitation, the distortion of the labour market and the tendency for their presence to be associated with cash industries and abuses of Australia’s taxation, employment and welfare laws.’

    Targeting the employers who exploit foreign workers is central to effective deterrence.

    Every Coalition Immigration Minister repeats a version of the mantra that their government is as tough on employers exploiting visa workers as it is on people-smugglers. This includes the current Immigration Minister Dutton:

    “Australians can be assured that we are committed to being as tough on those who seek to rort our migration programmes as we are on those who arrive illegally by boat. We will devote the same resolve, resources and commitment that is necessary to get the job done,” Mr Dutton said. 

    “Under the Coalition Government, immigration compliance teams are not just targeting illegal workers but also employers who are doing the wrong thing. The Government will actively pursue substantial fines to deter further illegal work practices.” (Minister Dutton media release, ‘17 illegal workers detained in Woody Point Brisbane’, 29 April 2015).

    But the evidence shows the Coalition government is nowhere near as ‘tough’ on these employers. Contrary to Mr Dutton’s claims, it is not pursuing the ‘substantial fines’ against them available under Labor’s strengthened employer sanctions provisions.

    The key provisions created a new ‘no-fault’ or strict liability civil offence for employers and others (eg labour hire companies) of allowing or referring ‘illegal workers’ to work. ‘Illegal workers’ here means foreign nationals working in breach of their visa conditions, or those with no valid visa (‘unlawful non-citizens’, mainly visa ‘overstayers’).

    There is no need to prove that a business knew of (or was reckless as to) the person’s visa status. The provisions also establish liability for principal contractors and others who ‘participate in an arrangement’ but are not themselves the direct employers of the illegal workers. Criminal offences and penalties including prison time were also maintained for more serious breaches.

    The 2013 legislation provides very substantial maximum penalties for the ‘no-fault’ civil offence of employing illegal workers – $16,200 for ‘individuals’ (eg a sole trader) and $81,000 for companies. Note that these penalties apply for each illegal worker. So a company found with say three ‘illegal workers’ is strictly liable for a maximum penalty of $243,000.

    The provisions also allow for lesser sanctions: an’ Infringement Notice’ fine – maximum $3,240 fine for sole traders and $16,200 for companies, and ‘Illegal Worker Warning Notices’ (carrying no fine at all).

    Enforcement under the Coalition

    The Coalition’s enforcement of the employer sanctions provisions can only be described as derisory. In 2014-15 there were:

    • No prosecutions at all for the civil or criminal offences, and hence no penalties.
    • Only 8 ‘infringement notices issued to non-compliant employers, with fines totalling $62,730’ – less than the maximum civil penalty for a single company with one illegal worker ($81,000), and an average of only $7,840 per employer.
    • 655 ‘Illegal Worker Warning Notices’ (carrying no fine) issued ‘to educate businesses about their responsibilities when hiring non-citizens and (warn) them of the consequences of continued non-compliance with legislation.’ Of these, 210 notices to businesses related to visa holders working in breach of their visa conditions.

    (This information is from the DIBP Annual report, 2014-15 and DIBP email to author, December 2015)

    This is an incredibly low level of serious activity when considered against the scale of the practice of employers allowing or referring illegal workers to work, and the government’s claim that it is seriously committed to ‘pursuing substantial fines’ to deter the practice.

    There is no official data on the total number of ‘illegal workers’ or the number of employers that they work for. A December 2015 Auditor-General’s report concluded that even today ‘the extent of non-compliance with other visa conditions, for example visa holders working illegally, is not well understood’ by DIBP.

    My best estimate is that there were at least 140,000 ‘illegal workers’ in Australia, and around 49,000 or so employers of these ‘illegal workers’ in 2014-15.[i] This means there are more ‘illegal workers’ than 457 primary visa-holders (104,000), and more employers of ‘illegal workers’ than of 457s (36,500).

    Even the 655 employers served with ‘Illegal Worker Warning Notices’ – the least effective sanction available – represent a mere 1.3 per cent of the estimated 49,000 or so employers of ‘illegal workers’ in 2014-15.

    The Coalition’s ‘softly-softly’ approach to employer sanctions enforcement is not surprising. The LNP vehemently opposed Labor’s 2013 employer sanctions bill from Opposition.

    The Coalition’s real intentions are revealed in the 2015-16 Budget papers. They are merely to ‘promote voluntary compliance by Australian employers with employer sanctions legislation through the provision of targeted education and engagement activities’, where ‘voluntary compliance is maintained as the primary approach to resolving breaches’.

    The Coalition government also appears less than enthusiastic about enforcing other Labor legislation relevant to the more extreme forms of employer abuse of temporary visa workers.

    Labor also introduced new laws in 2013 creating new criminal offences of ‘forced labour’ and ‘servitude’ (outside the sex industry) under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995, alongside the existing ‘sexual servitude’ offence.

    As at end-2015, there have been no prosecutions under the new ‘forced labour’ provisions and only one has commenced under the ‘servitude’ provisions. The ‘servitude’ case involves allegations that 24 young Taiwanese on working holiday visas were locked in rented Brisbane houses by Asian crime gangs and forced to participate in phone scams extorting Chinese nationals.

    Conclusion

    This week Senator Cash,the Employment Minister told The Australian that ‘when there is an effective regulator who enforces laws with meaningful penalties,people will think twice before breaking the law’.

    The government should acknowledge that its ‘voluntary compliance’ approach to the employer sanctions provisions has not been an effective deterrent against employers engaging ‘illegal workers’.

    It should now give priority to serious enforcement action under the civil penalty provisions. Any future claims that its actions are deterring the practice of employers engaging ‘illegal workers’ should be backed up with evidence, the collection of which is long overdue.

    Bob Kinnaird is Research Associate with The Australian Population Research Institute and was National Research Director CFMEU National Office 2009-14.

    [i] The 2010 Howells review of the employer sanctions regime found there could be over 100,000 ‘illegal workers’ in Australia, not including overseas students working more than their permitted weekly hours. It did not estimate the number of employers of these workers. My employer estimate assumes the same employer profile as for 457 visa-holders – an average of around 3 per employer – and is conservative.

  • John Menadue. Radicalism and terrorism.

    Repost from 15/10/2015

    Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is talking a lot about his government’s commitment to counter radicalisation in the Muslim community. The NSW Premier and Police Commissioner also keep talking about countering radicalisation. At least this is preferable to the endless talk we had before about a ‘death cult’ and ‘team Australia’.

    But radicalism and terrorism are not the same thing. Radical politics and radical religion are surely acceptable and widespread. But what is not acceptable is to commit acts of violence and terrorism. Making this distinction between radicalism and terrorism is not some semantic play with language. We had better understand the essential difference between the two or we will never stop terrorism.

    Radicalism is about going to the core of a subject or issue. Radical surgery for example is attempting to address the core of the ailment. As a university teenager I was probably a radical student. I am still probably radical on many things. But that radicalism has never been about violence. It was quite the opposite.

    I am not surprised that many young Muslim teenagers are offended, indeed radicalised by the violence that the West, including Australia, has inflicted on the Muslim people of the Middle East. I think I understand how the humiliation and violence we have inflicted would radicalise young Muslims.

    Malcolm Turnbull says that John Howard was ‘our greatest prime minister with the possible exception of Robert Menzies … I learnt so much from John Howard. Every day I am PM, I’ll be benchmarking everything I do against how John Howard would have handled these challenges’. But does Malcolm Turnbull seriously believe that he should benchmark himself by justifying John Howard’s involvement in the Iraq War which is a root cause of conflict and terrorism in the world today.

    There is not much doubt that it was John Howard’s cooperation with George Bush in the invasion of Iraq that unleashed the violence and terrorism that we face today. John Howard helped open the Pandora’s Box of tribal, ethnic and sectarian violence in the Middle East and made us less secure. Most Australian people know that that is true. As I pointed out in an earlier blog, 45% of Australians feel less secure from terrorism because of our continued military meddling in the Middle East and most recently in Syria. Only 13% of Australians feel safer.

    We are reaping violence at home for what we have sown abroad. But Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t mention this and wants to benchmark himself against the person who helped trigger so much to the violence and terrorism we face today.

    Last night on the 7.30 program the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, Andrew Colvin said that terrorism in Australia was getting worse but he didn’t know why. He was not asked the obvious follow up question, what is the link between our military involvement in Muslim countries in the Middle East and terrorism at home.

    In 2004 a former Commissioner of the AFP Mick Kelty was very clear that ‘our involvement in Iraq made us a greater target for terrorism’. In 2010 the head of UK’ MI 5 Baroness Manningham-Buller told the Chilcott Inquiry ‘that our involvement in Iraq…radicalised a whole generation of young people…who (in addition) saw our involvement in Afghanistan as being an attack on Islam’

    The facts are clear but our leaders will not admit their mistakes. Instead they deliberately avoid an honest discussion.

    Combatting violence and terrorism will require responses on many fronts.

    The first is early intervention and active cooperation with the Muslim community to calm the hot-heads and misfits that exist in every community. Muslim leaders who can’t speak English are not going to be effective bridges between the Muslim and wider Australian communities. They will just not cut it. There may be important role models for young people in the Muslim community, but it is not clear to me.

    Secondly, we need to publicise the Jihadists who return and admit their mistake. We then need to help rehabilitate them into the Australian community.

    Thirdly, we will need to rely increasingly on the competence of our security and police forces. They are much better resourced and have more power than ever before. Yet they are invariably asking for more money and more powers. And Prime Ministers and Premiers, wanting to be seen to be doing something usually agree

    But are our security agencies and police up to the job? There is no doubt that the Man Haron Monis case was seriously mishandled by both our security services and the police, including the botched rescue attempt. We have had very few convictions of alleged terrorists. The evidence presented in many cases has just not stood up. Why?

    Organisations that operate in secret and with a lot of untested information need close and effective supervision.  The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security is under resourced to do the job.

    My experience is that our security services attract more ‘odd bods’ than I have found in any other organization. That experience was some time ago, but I doubt that much has changed. Ministers are easily seduced into the twilight world of fact, fiction, gossip and speculation. I have seen it many times. I have even fallen for it myself.

    In a recent article, ‘Narrow focus on radicalisation won’t stop terrorism’ Greg Austin, Visiting Professor at UNSW put the issue in the following way. ‘Radicalisation and terrorism are two different phenomena – legally, politically, psychologically and morally. While a terrorist is by definition radicalised, the mere fact of being radicalised does not explain the transition to terrorism – a choice for violence. In most scenarios, there are many “radicals” in any cause for each person who becomes a terrorist. A policy that screens radicals for terrorists is not workable or reliable, nor scientifically defensible. It will always record significant failures.’

    We won’t get on top of our current problems with terrorism whilst Malcolm Turnbull and others conflate radicalism and terrorism and pursue policies in the Middle East that foment terrorism at home.

  • John Menadue and Peter Hughes. Slogans vs Facts on Boat Arrivals, Part 2

    Reposted from 23/09/2015

    Tony Abbott did not stop the boats

    In this blog yesterday (22 September 2015) we pointed out 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 in September 2011. By this action, he helped turn on the green light for people smugglers.

    Moreover, the data just does not support the claim that, after coming to power in September 2013, Tony Abbott “stopped the boats”. The media uncritically accepted the Coalition’s line in the confused period of the changeover of governments and in the context of drama and secrecy surrounding a small number of boat turn-backs.

    The data shows that the downward trend in boat arrivals began in August 2013. By October and November 2013 maritime asylum seeker arrivals had dropped by 90% compared to the corresponding two months in 2012 (547 arrivals versus 5115 arrivals). These reductions occurred well before the first boat turnaround by the Coalition Government on 19 December 2013. See table below:

    Number of illegal maritime arrivals who arrived in Australia by month            (1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014), by port arrival date.

     

    SIEVS/BOATS IMAs
    2011 January 3 223
    February 3 149
    March 7 419
    April 6 318
    May 6 333
    June 4 235
    July 4 228
    August 5 335
    September 4 319
    September Abbott failure to support Malaysian Arrangement
    October 5 259
    November 10 734
    December 13 1,070
    TOTAL 70 4,622
    2012 January 5 301
    February 9 849
    March 3 110
    April 11 837
    May 16 1,286
    June 24 1,642
    July 31 1,756
    August 37 2,078
    September 31 2,062
    October 47 2,452
    November 44 2,663
    December 18 1,017
    TOTAL 276 17,053
    2013 January 11 541
    February 17 973
    March 35 2,320
    April 47 3,329
    May 47 3,252
    June 40 2,750
    July 48 4,230
    19 July 2013 Rudd announcement not to settle IMAs in Australia
    August 25 1,585
    September 15 829
    October 5 339
    November 5 208
    December 7 355
    19 Dec 2013 First Abbott turn-backs
    TOTAL 302 20,711
    2014 January 0 3
    February 0 1
    March 0 0
    April 0 0
    May 0 0
    June 0 0
    July 1 157
    August 0 0
    September 0 3
    October 0 0
    November 0 0
    December 0 4
    TOTAL 1 168

    The source of this data is the Senate Select Committee on the Recent Allegations relating to Conditions and Circumstances at the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru: Submission 31 from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). Crew are excluded. 

    Note that the table refers to the number of ‘Illegal’ Maritime Arrivals (IMAs). ‘Illegals’ is not a term that we think is appropriate, but the term is used in the material from DIBP.

    Three measures put in place by the Labor Government before the election caused the dramatic fall in the number arrivals, (allowing for a short time lag).

    The first was “enhanced screening” of Sri Lankans and quick return of non-refugees to Sri Lanka.

    The second was a decision by Indonesia, at Australia’s urging, that Iranians could not enter Indonesia without visas.

    The third and most important was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on the 19 July 2013 that in future any persons coming by boat, who were found to be refugees, would not be settled in Australia. We may argue about the wisdom of that policy, but it effectively crippled the people-smugglers.

    Fortuitously for the Abbott Government when it was sworn in on 18 September 2013, the flow of maritime arrivals was well on its way to being finished as a result of measures already taken.

    By the time Operation Sovereign Borders geared up for its first boat turn-back on 19 December 2013, the number of boats was down from 48 in July to 7 in December.

    Operation Sovereign Borders was applied to the “tail end” of a phenomenon that had largely been stopped. The game-changer was Kevin Rudd’s announcement in July 2013.

    Arguably, boat turn backs would not have been ‘successful’ at all without the July 2013 decision. For example, the Navy and Customs were able to turn back three boats in December 2013. It’s hard to believe that it would have been physically possible to turn back 48 boats if they had continued to arrive at the monthly rate that occurred in July 2013 and that Indonesia would have quietly acquiesced.

    Tony Abbott’s role in “stopping the boats” was at the margins and vastly overrated.

    John Menadue was Secretary, Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-83. Peter Hughes was a senior officer in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for 30 years until he retired as Deputy Secretary in 2011.

     

  • John Menadue and Peter Hughes. Slogans versus facts on boat arrivals. Part 1

    Reposted from 22/09/2015

    How Tony Abbott helped to keep the door open for people smugglers.

    The ABC provided us with excellent coverage of the Turnbull-Abbott shoot out, but the various commentators still swallowed the myth that Tony Abbott stopped the boats. That is a great piece of spin, but the reality is different.

    This blog on 26 July 2015 argued that Tony Abbott did not stop the boats. The game changer was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on 19 July 2013, two months before the election, that any persons arriving irregularly by boat would not be settled in Australia. Boat arrivals fell quickly and dramatically as a result of this announcement, coming on top of other measures the Labor government had already taken. We will update that blog in the next day or so in Part 2.

    For the present, however, our argument is that Tony Abbott kept the door open for tens of thousands of boat arrivals in the first place. His failure to support the Malaysia Arrangement in September 2011 resulted in the surge of boat arrivals over the next two years.

    Consider key dates. In May 2011 the Australian and Malaysian governments announced an ‘in principle’ arrangement that up to 800boat arrivals would be transferred from Australia to Malaysia for their asylum claims to be heard and, in response, Australia would be prepared to accept 4,000 refugees from Malaysia. The arrangement with Malaysia was signed on 25 July 2011. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) gave it qualified support.

    At that stage, people arriving irregularly by boat were running at about 2-300 per month. The table below shows the numbers at that time and what followed in the following 28 months.

    Number of illegal maritime arrivals who arrived in Australia by month            (1 January 2011 to 31 December 2014), by port arrival date. 

    SIEVS/BOATS IMAs
    2011 January 3 223
    February 3 149
    March 7 419
    April 6 318
    May 6 333
    June 4 235
    July 4 228
    August 5 335
    September 4 319
    September Abbott failure to support Malaysian Arrangement
    October 5 259
    November 10 734
    December 13 1,070
    TOTAL 70 4,622
    2012 January 5 301
    February 9 849
    March 3 110
    April 11 837
    May 16 1,286
    June 24 1,642
    July 31 1,756
    August 37 2,078
    September 31 2,062
    October 47 2,452
    November 44 2,663
    December 18 1,017
    TOTAL 276 17,053
    2013 January 11 541
    February 17 973
    March 35 2,320
    April 47 3,329
    May 47 3,252
    June 40 2,750
    July 48 4,230
    19 July 2013 Rudd announcement not to settle IMAs in Australia
    August 25 1,585
    September 15 829
    October 5 339
    November 5 208
    December 7 355
    19 Dec 2013 First Abbott turn-backs
    TOTAL 302 20,711
    2014 January 0 3
    February 0 1
    March 0 0
    April 0 0
    May 0 0
    June 0 0
    July 1 157
    August 0 0
    September 0 3
    October 0 0
    November 0 0
    December 0 4
    TOTAL 1 168

    The source of this data is the Senate Select Committee on the Recent Allegations relating to Conditions and Circumstances at the Regional Processing Centre in Nauru: Submission 31 from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP). Crew are excluded. 

    Note that the table refers to the number of ‘Illegal’ Maritime Arrivals (IMAs). ‘Illegals’ is not a term that we think is appropriate, but the term is used in the material from DIBP.

    On 31 August 2011 the High Court found against the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship’s powers to transfer people to Malaysia under the Arrangement. In response, on 21 September 2011, the Gillard government introduced legislation – the Migration Amendment (Offshore Processing and Other Measures) Bill 2011 – which was designed to modify those parts of the Migration Act which caused the problem in the High Court. There was strong opposition to the Bill in the House of Representatives by the Coalition led by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who were bitterly critical of Malaysia. Bandt (Greens), Katter and Wilkie also opposed the Bill. Oakeshott said he would also oppose the Bill if there were not specific amendments. As the Bill was doomed, the government decided not to proceed with the legislation. (It was subsequently passed by the parliament in August 2012 after the Houston Report).

    There were some lags in the response of asylum seekers and people smugglers to gear up to the opportunities the Coalition and others had left open for them. The timing of boat arrivals were also affected by bad weather and heavy seas, typically in the period December-March.. Surges of people  of different ethnic background can also change the dynamics of people flow. But it is clear that after the legislation stalled, there was a substantial increase in boat arrivals, particularly from Sri Lanka and Iran. People smugglers saw the High Court decision and the failure of the Australian Parliament to amend the Migration Act as a clear signal that their business could proceed.

    From November 2011 monthly asylum seeker arrivals began to trend up again. In the month of May 2012 they reached 1286 and, allowing for seasonal variations, kept rising inexorably to a monthly peak of 4230 in July 2013.

    The Coalition had made clear its opposition in every possible way to the Malaysia Arrangement. That left the way open for a dramatic increase in boat arrivals.

    The Coalition under Tony Abbott was not interested in stopping the boats at that time. Its primary interest was to stop Labor stopping the boats – and they succeeded. Wikileaks revealed that a key Liberal Party strategist in 2009 told the US Embassy that ‘the more boats that come the better’.

    Political objectives drove Tony Abbott’s actions with little regard for the national interest and or the government’s attempts, in cooperation with Malaysia, to start building a regional cooperation framework to manage boat arrivals.

    There can be no doubt that the implementation of the Malaysia Arrangement, in the context of the numbers at the time, would have stopped the flow of maritime arrivals. It simply removed all incentive to make the last leg of the journey. It is unlikely that all of the 800 places would have been used. Coalition turn-backs have amounted to less than 700 people over a period of two years according to a recent announcement by the Minister Dutton.

    Tony Abbott must bear some responsibility for the more than 32,000 people who arrived irregularly by sea between September 2011 when he frustrated the Malaysia Arrangement and mid-2013 when harsher measures were reluctantly taken by the Labor government.

    As we mentioned above, we will also be updating an earlier blog that shows that Tony Abbott’s actions after the 2013 election were not the key to stopping the boats. The new Abbott Government dealt with the tail end of a dramatically reduced flow of people, but the real game changer was the announcement by Kevin Rudd on 19 July 2013 that any further boat arrivals would not be settled in Australia.

    The secrecy and drama surrounding a small number of boat turn-backs created the impression that they were the decisive factor, but, it’s time for a cooler assessment of the facts.

    John Menadue was Secretary Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-83. Peter Hughes was a senior officer in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for 30 years until he retired as Deputy Secretary in 2011.

     

  • Magical thinking about ISIS.

    Adam Shatz is the contributing editor at the London Review of Books. He lives in New York. In this article he says

    ‘The attacks in Paris don’t reflect a clash of civilisations, but rather the fact that we really do live in a single, if unequal world, where the torments in one region inevitably spill over into another, where everything connects, somethings with lethal consequences.  … For all its medieval airs, the caliphate holds up a mirror to the world we have made, not only in Raqqa and Mosul, but in Paris, Moscow and Washington.’

    See link to article below.

    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n23/adam-shatz/magical-thinking-about-isis

  • John Menadue. Drownings at sea.

    Repost from 22/04/2015

    The recent tragic loss of 800 Libyans in the Mediterranean has given once again an opportunity for the Government to infer that Australia’s refugee policies are designed particularly to stop people drowning at sea.

    It is self-deception or worse for the Government to suggest that its policies towards refugees have been motivated by humanitarian concerns and not political advantage. Perhaps with guilty consciences self-deception is necessary.

    In Opposition the Coalition was not interested in stopping the boats to save people drowning at sea. Its political objective was to stop the Labor Government stopping the boats. That is why the Coalition with cooperation from the populist Greens voted in the Senate against amendments to the Migration Act which would have allowed the Malaysian Arrangement to proceed and curb boat arrivals, in cooperation with UNHCR. By frustrating the government, the Coalition showed no interest in stopping drownings at sea.

    On 10 December 2010 the SMH reported from Wikileaks that ‘A key Liberal Party strategist’ had told a US diplomat in Canberra in November 2009 that the issue of asylum seekers was ‘fantastic’ for the Coalition and ‘that the more boats that come the better’. With such a cynical approach, it’s hard to see much concern for innocent asylum seekers who might drown at sea.

    Scott Morrison told us on many occasions that asylum seekers bring disease, everything from TB to Hepatitis C, to Chlamydia and Syphilis. He told talk-back radio that he had seen asylum seekers bring wads of cash and large displays of jewellery. He urged the Coalition to ramp up its questioning … to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment. Does that sound like genuine concern for the lives of asylum seekers?

    Scott Morrison and Senator Abetz both called for the registration of asylum seekers moving into residential areas on bridging visas, just like paedophiles. Does that sound like genuine concern for asylum seekers?

    To provoke hostility to asylum seekers, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison both continue to call asylum seekers ‘illegals’. They hope that we would think that asylum seekers were akin to criminals. That didn’t show much concern for the rights of asylum seekers.

    The Coalition’s campaign to demonise asylum seekers was overwhelmingly for political reasons. They succeeded.

    But please spare us the propaganda of suggesting that the Coalition’ policy on refugees was to stop drownings at sea.  It was not. It was crass and cruel politics.