Pearls and Irritations

Category: Immigration

  • Malaysia, Manus, Nauru and offshore processing.

    I have not always held the view that asylum seekers who come to Australia could be transferred and processed in another country. I changed my mind on that partly because of the rapid increase in boat arrivals after the Agreement with Malaysia fell over in 2011. The large number of boat arrivals was reducing public support for a generous and humane refugee program.

    I came to the view that what was important is that asylum seekers are treated with humanity and that the process is fair and efficient. The issue of where that processing occurs, on shore or offshore is a secondary issue.

    For the present we have comprehensively lost the argument of opposition to offshore processing of boat arrivals

    I also supported the proposed Malaysian Agreement for two other reasons. First, I saw it as part of an important building block in regional cooperation. Secondly, the UNHCR was prepared to work with us in the proposed arrangement with Malaysia. The UNHCR does not support the transfers to Manus (PNG) and Nauru and the processing in those countries.

    Unfortunately the agreement with Malaysia was made impossible by the combined support of the Greens and the Coalition in the Senate to block amendments to the Migration Act. The action of the Coalition and the Greens in the Senate was supported by refugee advocates across Australia. .

    The collapse of the Malaysian Agreement was the turning point. We have been on a slippery slide ever since. Boat arrivals quadrupled as a result of the High Court decision and the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement. In the second half of 2013 asylum seekers arriving by boat were running at a rate of over 40,000 per annum. We may wish it otherwise but no Australian Government can keep intact a generous humanitarian refugee program with boat arrivals at over 40.000 pa. At the peak of the Indo China outflow the largest number of people arriving by boat was 1423 people in 1977/78. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement it was almost thirty times higher.

    My own view is that the Fraser Government could not have sustained our generous acceptance of Indo Chinese refugees if boat arrivals had been anywhere near the rate the Rudd government faced in mid-2013. To think otherwise is kidding ourselves. I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs for some of the time involved

    The failure of the Malaysian Agreement triggered Manus and Nauru.

    The UNHCR has a long history of support for the transfer of asylum seekers in appropriate circumstances. Late last year the UNHCR issued a ‘Guidance Note on Bilateral and Multilateral Transfer Arrangements of Asylum Seekers’. It set out clear conditions, including important issues of non-refoulment and protection of the rights and the safety of asylum seekers in the country to which they were to be transferred.

    In the Melbourne Age on 13 December last year, Arja Keski-Nummi and I outlined a system of ‘effective protection’ that should govern any transfers of asylum seekers in our region. We set down several important criteria.

    • All countries should commit to the principle of non-refoulment.
    • Provide asylum seekers with a legal status and access to work and education.
    • Work to help not only displaced people but also host communities.
    • Increase our refugee intake from our region.
    • Work with partners in the region in association with UNHCR to create an atmosphere of safety and trust.

    Clearly few of the conditions have been met in the arrangements with PNG and Nauru. Importantly, the UNHCR will not cooperate in our arrangements with either country.

    We need to think again about total opposition to transfers and regional processing. That opposition has led us into a tragic cull de sac

    A way to minimize the damage to asylum seekers and our own credibility is to now press for such things as

    • Increasing the annual “regular” refugee intake to 25,000 from its present 13,750.
    • Negotiate Orderly Departure Agreements with Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. The governments in those countries are likely to welcome the departure of some of their opponents. In 1983 we negotiated an ODA with Vietnam under which 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia without risky journeys.
    • Develop alternate migration pathways e.g. 457 visas for Iranians. There is often a blurred line between refugees and persons fleeing for economic reasons.
    • Wind back mandatory detention which is cruel and expensive.It punishes but does not deter as we have seen time and time again. Stopping boat arrivals in recent months is not because of mandatory detention. It is not because of Operation Sovereign Borders. It is because of government policy that no boat arrivals will ever be settled in Australia. That is the deterrent.
    • Allow asylum seekers in the community to work

    We may indulge ourselves with tears and criticism over what has happened but we need to apply ourselves where improvement is possible to help people in great need. It will require political pragmatism and compromise.

  • Creating a Long-Term Framework for Asylum Seeker Policy

    Last Friday 11 July 2014, I attended a roundtable at Parliament House, Canberra to discuss possible actions that could be taken to find a way out of the present divisive and harsh treatment of asylum seekers. The media release following that roundtable is reproduced below. The roundtable drew on  discussion paper ‘Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders’, prepared by Peter Hughes and Arja Keski-Nummi. That discussion paper can be found by clicking on my website at the top of this page. The paper is described on the website as ‘Final Policy Paper – Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders’.  John Menadue.

    High-level Roundtable held at Parliament House, Canberra

    A diverse group of 35 high-level policymakers and experts, including a former Indonesian Ambassador to Australia, a strategist from Malaysia, and parliamentarians from three of the four major parties, met all day Friday 11 July to discuss a long-term framework for Australia’s asylum seeker policy.

    Jointly organised by Australia21, the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW, and the Centre for Policy Development, the roundtable was conducted under the Chatham House Rule.

    Members of the Steering Committee, Bob Douglas, Jane McAdam and Travers McLeod, said today:

    “This roundtable marked the start of a new conversation about a complex policy area that has been a political hot potato for too long. It aims to be a contribution which is helpful to all sides of the political spectrum and which reflects Australian values.”

    Participants recognised there is no panacea in this debate, and that a focus on politics over policy is unhelpful. They noted that forced migration is a global phenomenon, not something that Australia can control on its own, nor is asylum seeker policy one that should be viewed in isolation from other aspects of national and foreign policy. The ultimate goal was to consider how Australia could facilitate a sustainable immigration policy that balances protection, safety, transparency and prosperity.

    Discussion paper released today

    The roundtable drew on a discussion paper ‘Beyond Operation Sovereign Borders: A Long-Term Asylum Policy for Australia’ prepared by two former senior Immigration Department officials, Peter Hughes and Arja Keski-Nummi, working with the Centre for Policy Development. Released today, the paper suggests pathways to better policy responses for the future. Drawing on lessons from the past, it examines the evidence, including the rate of irregular maritime arrivals and the regional implications of refugee flows, including the way refugee policy has evolved in Australia since asylum seekers first began arriving by boat in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

    Common ground at the roundtable

    Contributions at the roundtable were frank, respectful and constructive. Fresh positions were adopted. Although the participants in this first roundtable did not seek to reach consensus on a new policy, some important areas of common ground did emerge:

    • While emphasising that Australia must respect its international legal obligations, the roundtable also recognised that the community wants reassurance that Australia retains control over who becomes Australian citizens and under what circumstances.
    • Participants stressed the importance of implementing fair, transparent and efficient refugee status determination procedures, wherever processing takes place. They supported raising Australia’s humanitarian intake, perhaps set as a percentage of our annual migration intake.

    Media  Release – 13 July 2014

    • Participants expressed concern at the militarisation of current approaches, and emphasised the need to build regional protection capacity and foster bilateral partnerships built on trust and respect.
    • There was support for extending the rights available to asylum seekers awaiting the outcome of their protection claims, including the right to work, and for phasing out mandatory detention.
    • Participants recommended measures to expedite the processing of particular cohorts of claimants, and encouraged new community initiatives, especially in regional Australia, that bring Australians into direct contact with refugees and use their skills to help rehabilitate depressed areas.
    • The participants are committed to creating a ‘second track’ dialogue that will engage the community, policymakers, experts and politicians in rethinking our approach.
    • Finally, it was noted that any new approach must use language carefully, recognising the humanity of those in search of protection.

    A full report on this project will be released later in 2014.

    Attendees

    Paris Aristotle AM,  Adam Bandt MP, Paul Barratt AO, Admiral Chris Barrie AC, Father Frank Brennan SJ AO, Julian Burnside AO QC, The Hon Fred Chaney AO, Dr Joyce Chia, Noel Clement, Dr David Corlett, Senator Sam Dastyari, Professor Bob Douglas AO, Erika Feller, Ellen Hansen, Dr Claire Higgins, Peter Hughes, Associate Professor Mary Anne Kenny, Arja Keski-Nummi, Dr Anne Kilcullen, David Lang, Ben Lewis, Libby Lloyd AM, The Hon Ian Macphee AO, Professor Robert Manne, Professor Jane McAdam, Dr Travers McLeod, John Menadue AO, Right Reverend Professor Stephen Pickard, Reverend Elenie Poulos, Paul Power, Ambassador Wiryono Sastro Handoyo, Jo Szwarc, Angus Taylor MP, Oliver White and Steven Wong.

    Media contacts             

    Bob Douglas
     Australia 21
     Tel: 0409 233 138, email: bobdouglas@netspeed.com.au

     Professor Jane McAdam
    Andrew & Renata Kaldor
    Centre for International Refugee Law
    Tel (02) 9385 2250, email j.mcadam@unsw.edu.au

    Travers McLeod
    Centre for Policy Development
    Tel: 0487 302 927; email: travers.mcleod@cpd.org.au

    About the organisers 

    Australia21 is a non-partisan, non-profit, registered research organisation which seeks to develop and promote new frameworks for understanding and acting on complex questions that are important to Australia’s future.

    The Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW is the world’s first academic research centre dedicated to the study of international refugee law and policy.

    The Centre for Policy Development is an independent and non-partisan think tank which develops and promotes policy proposals to help Australia thrive and lead in a fast-changing global environment over the long-term.

  • Tony Smith. Singing out for asylum seekers.

    Recent poll results that show rising support for the Abbott Government’s approach to border security are disturbing even if not entirely surprising. Asylum seekers have been detained offshore, out of general sight and conveniently out of mind for those Australians who prefer not to think about the issue, and the Labor Opposition has consistently failed to offer any decent alternative. Given that refugee advocates have had the better of the Government on details of truth and on virtually every moral and economic argument, they might well be wondering what they must do to convince Australians that our approach to asylum seekers is shameful and urgently in need of change.

    While advocates must maintain the arguments and keep pressure on government to tell the truth about what is happening in our proxy prisons, other approaches also have the potential to appeal to the popular imagination. Writers, visual artists, dancers and musicians are all playing important roles in the campaign to make Australian policy more just, humane and positive. The CD Reclaim Your Voice: Stopping the Punishment of Asylum Seekers deserves recognition as an important addition to this campaign. The album of 18 very strong and moving tracks was assembled and produced by Andy Busuttil, whose musical skill is matched by his compassion towards asylum seekers.

    There are clear messages in these 18 tracks, each of which demands attention for its sincerity and power. For example, Blindmans Holiday sings the late Alistair Hulett’s ‘Behind Barbed Wire’ which presents internment as a measure of our own fears and a mutual constraint: it is we who ‘retire behind barbed wire’. Just as Hulett’s song is now a classic, the prolific Shortis and Simpson point out that their ‘Detainee’ was written twelve years ago but there is no sign that our understanding and compassion have increased during the twenty-first century.

    Spike Flynn’s beautiful ‘Further On Down the Line’ speaks of the hope that refugees must hold in order to survive. The down side is that it reminds us that we are effectively their only hope. The Bridge Project – including Andy Busuttil – tell the tragic tale of a man from Lebanon who witnessed the drowning of his eight children and pregnant wife between Indonesia and Christmas Island. In ‘Fruit of the Earth’ Andy recites the poem of Hossein Babahmaadi who was forcibly returned to Iran after enduring the ‘hell hole’ of Manus Island for three months. Kavisha Mazzella’s mother escaped Rangoon when it was bombed by the invading Japanese military. ‘May I Be A Raft’ is her Bodhissatvas-inspired prayer for asylum seekers.

    In ‘The Journey’ Christina Mimmochi sings of the ‘nameless, faceless refugee’ asking for our assistance. She laments the way that the news seems to be always the same, with a list of the ways that we disappoint them and eventually ourselves. She asks simply whether Australia will play its part in relieving the distress of some fraction of the millions cast adrift by the failure of politicians or whether we have lost our national heart. Here we sit ‘girt by sea’ and dare to judge people who have never known the peace and prosperity we enjoy by the accident of where we were born.

    Contributors to Reclaim Your Voice use a wide variety of musical sub-genres. As well as Ben Iota’s hip-hop and Getano Ban’s reggae ‘Stop Da Boats’ there are pieces that would be fine additions to blues, folk or rock albums. There is also wide variety in instrumentation thanks to Andy Busuttil’s skilful mixing and the donation of time and skills by session musicians.  He can be contacted at.. andy@bluemountainsound.com.au  All proceeds from the sale of the album go to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. www.asrc.org.au

    If there is a most commonly occurring term it is ‘humanity’. The songs and verse appeal to the listener to respond to asylum seekers with a greater sense of our shared humanity. In dealing with this issue, refugee advocates know we are not alone but sometimes knowing is not enough. Reclaim Your Voice operates on an emotional level, helping us to feel we are in excellent company. The warmth and strength on offer in Reclaim Your Voice should open the hearts of many of those people who have closed their minds. While the contributors to this excellent album speak from their hearts, Reclaim Your Voice is not a despairing cry but a hopeful demand for action.

     

    Tony Smith is a former academic, regular contributor to Eureka Street, Australian Review of Public Affairs and Australian Quarterly. He is now a keen “folkie”

  • Elenie Poulos. Morrison’s Vision of the ‘National Interest’ Does Us No Good.

    The parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible (Luke, chapter 10) has become common place and almost clichéd in Christian conversations about the current Australian Government’s increasingly cold-hearted and abusive responses to asylum seekers. Christian conversations in the public space about this issue matter because the Minister for Immigration has made much of his Christian faith over the years (his first speech to the Parliament is worth a read). The Samaritan, of course, stopped to help a Jewish man (a traditional enemy) who was robbed, beaten and left by the side of the road to die. Two Jewish priests had already crossed the road to avoid the beaten man. We can confidently assume that the priests crossed the road because they deemed it not in their interest to stop and help. It was a foreigner, an outsider, who provided the care that was needed.

    Last week, the Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison, in a flagrant move to circumvent the rule of law, announced that he would personally be assessing every request for permanent protection by an asylum seeker or refugee and make his decision against ‘a national interest test’. This test is set negatively, that is, the conditions describe what will not be deemed in the national interest. Those conditions include not doing anything that would: send a signal to people smugglers that they can still advertise potentially good results from the use of their services; negatively affect our relationships with our partners in the region; undermine the confidence we all have in the Government’s resolve to force ‘an orderly’ system into being and protect our borders; or been seen to reward people who don’t follow the rules.

    It is disheartening to say the least, that in the context of our humanitarian program and our obligations under the Refugees Convention to protect people regardless of their mode of arrival, there is nothing positively framed in this ‘national interest’ test.

    I’ve been working as a refugee advocate on behalf of the Uniting Church in Australia for over 12 years. In terms of public policy reform, it has been consistently frustrating and all too often demoralising. I have watched the progressive demonisation of asylum seekers who come by boat by both the Liberal and Labor parties for the purpose of base political gain and seen how the political rhetoric of ‘illegals’, ‘queue jumpers’ and border security have hardened the hearts of so many Australians. The militarisation of our response to what is a humanitarian problem has proved incredibly popular. It is unlikely that this latest move will raise a ripple among most voters. It must be said, however, that this explication of the ‘national interest’ is profoundly impoverished at best and at worst morally bankrupt.

    I don’t agree with, but I understand the classic neoliberal economic ideology that underpins the Abbott’s Government’s approach to every area of public policy. I do not understand what continues to drive Mr Morrison to increasingly creatively cruel responses to asylum seekers who come by boat; and I do not understand how the tests for permanent protection he is now relying on can possibly be in the national interest.

    It is not in the national interest to create a society in which people’s hearts are so hardened to the needs of those (relatively few by global standards) who come to us seeking care and protection. A robust, fair, efficient and transparent refugee status determination system, open to independent and judicial review, would identify those who do not have these needs. An approach which recognised the reality of the situations from which people are fleeing could inspire the growth of an outward-looking nation, making seriously hard-working and positive contributions to the development of peace in our world. Surely that would be in the national interest!

    It is not in the national interest for a country’s citizens to be supportive of policies deliberately designed to punish and break people. These policies are causing life-long harm to vulnerable, powerless people. There are too many ways for asylum seekers fleeing torture and persecution to die, including the tragedy of dying on a leaky boat but this Government can no longer claim that it is primarily concerned about saving people. Sending Tamil asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka without proper consideration of their protection claim risks their lives in just as real ways as people smugglers do. For asylum seekers kept captive in our detention centres and especially the horrendously harsh prison camps of Manus Island and Nauru, the slow, agonising torture they are suffering will, for many of them, affect the rest of their lives. And we have already seen the violent death of one man and the critical and permanent injuries done to others as a direct result of the abusive conditions of entirely unsuitable locations. Surely it would be in the national interest to be a society which responded with generosity and hospitality to those who knock on our door, especially the needy uninvited.

    It is not in the national interest for Australia to be regarded in the region as a bully who can buy its way out of the international and moral responsibilities it has, shifting what is a small ‘problem’ for us, onto the poorest, most insecure countries around us. Australia’s international relationships have already been damaged. What would be in Australia’s national interest would be to start turning this around with a show of good faith such as dramatically increasing (not reducing) our refugee resettlement intake from the region and working cooperatively with other countries to find long-term durable solutions that focus on protection and uphold people’s human rights rather than abusing them.

    It is also not in the national interest for such secrecy on the part of a democratically elected Government about how it’s implementing its policies. It is in the national interest for our governments to be open, transparent and accountable to the people they are elected to serve.

    Quite some time ago, I stopped expecting that our asylum seeker policies couldn’t get any worse but with the potential deliberate refoulement of Tamil asylum seekers and this new definition of the national interest surely we must be close to hitting rock bottom. 

    Elenie Poulos is the National Director of Uniting Justice Australia, the national policy and advocacy unit of the Uniting Church. She is an ordained minister of the Uniting Church.

  • Elaine Pearson. The civil war may have ended, but not the persecution.

    What’s happening to boatloads of Tamil asylum seekers on the Indian Ocean? Allegations that Australian authorities have intercepted at least two Tamil boats and handed them over to the Sri Lankan navy after only brief telephone interviews are extremely troubling. Until now, the Australian government has neither confirmed nor denied these allegations – giving the now long-tired excuse of secrecy around all operational matters concerning border security. 

    If Tamils are being handed over to the Sri Lankan armed forces, then the Australian government may well end up with blood on its hands. Sri Lanka has a long and well known record of repression and abuses by its security forces. The UN has implicated the Sri Lankan armed forces in war crimes during the 27-year conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Human Rights Watch has also documented the Sri Lankan authorities’ use of torture and rape against people suspected of links to the LTTE after the conflict, including those returned as failed asylum seekers from countries such as Australia.

    Given such evidence of torture of returnees, it was always peculiar that Australia used the Orwellian “enhanced screening” procedure for Sri Lankans arriving by boat – essentially a fast-tracked deportation procedure after a cursory interview.  Now, it appears such interviews may be occurring by teleconference from the boats. This practice, without access to due process and access to lawyers, is unlawful in light of Australia’s obligations under international law.

    The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) maintains that identification and processing of asylum seekers is “most appropriately carried out on dry land.” The agency notes that shipboard processing often fails to meet procedural standards for determining refugee status, including the failure to provide adequate access to interpreters, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of interviews, access to counsel, and lack of appeal. In addition to these considerations, people who have been interdicted often are dehydrated, exhausted, traumatized, and fearful of authorities; they are usually in no condition to articulate refugee claims.

    If Australia is transferring asylum seekers into the hands of the Sri Lankan navy without adequately reviewing their claim this amounts to refoulement – sending someone back to a country where their life or freedom may be threatened or where they would face a real risk of torture or other ill-treatment.

    Australia may want to protect its borders, but it should not risk being complicit in torture by sending Tamil asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka without a proper process to assess the legitimacy of their claims. Australian authorities need to come clean about what is happening at sea and give asylum seekers all the rights they are entitled to under international law.

    Elaine Pearson is the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch Australia.

  • Kerry Murphy. The four questions quiz for refugees.

    When Malaysian Flight MH370 disappeared, the Australian Government made a major contribution towards the international search operation.  Almost daily there were announcements by Prime Minister Abbott and other Ministers about new information they were checking and hopes of finding the plane.  Media accompanied the air force on the search and the Australian contribution was a genuine effort as part of an international search mission. 

    What a contrast when a boat or two of Sri Lankan Tamils arrives seeking our protection. Minister Morrison refuses to even acknowledge there is a boat or two.  The refuses to comment on ‘on water matters’.  Then we hear there is a possibility the asylum seekers will be returned to Sri Lanka, after they are asked four questions, three of which are about identity.

    Under international refugee law, the worst possible thing you can do is to return someone to a country where they could be persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group.  That is called the non-refoulement obligation.  The fact that only one question is asked about why they came to Australia, and done in circumstances not conducive to seeking information but ticking a box so we can send them home, is a serious indictment of how Australia adheres to its international obligations.

    We do not know exactly what happened, because it is all too secret.  However some information has come out.  The Labor party have unclean hands on this because they were using a similar process for ‘enhanced screening’ of Sri Lankans in late 2012.

    Many Sri Lankans were returned to Sri Lanka under Labor without a careful and thorough investigation of their case.  There is no way you could simply write off someone just because they give a poor answer to the final of four questions.  This is about our international obligations, not some pub trivia quiz knockout.

    UNHCR has criticised the ‘return oriented environment’ on Manus Island and this process shows the same focus on sending people home and stopping the boats, regardless of the seriousness of the claims.   If someone manages to raise strong protection claims, what happens then?  Are they taken to Manus, Nauru?  Who decides they have raised strong enough claims and what criteria are used?  Is there some checking process to ensure no mistakes are made?

    The four question quiz seems totally inadequate for assessing someone’s claims for protection, and there are no apparent safeguards.  If someone seeks legal advice or help, what happens?  It is all too secret to tell us.

    The Prime Minister then comes out and tells us how good Sri Lanka is now since the end of the brutal 30 year conflict:

    ”But I want to make this observation, Sri Lanka is not everyone’s idea of the ideal society but it is at peace . . . a horrific civil war has ended. I believe that there has been a lot of progress when it comes to human rights and the rule of law in Sri Lanka.”

    Sorry Prime Minister but that is not the correct legal test.   It seems DFAT are not aware it is so calm either. The Smart Traveller website warns against travel to Sri Lanka and says:

    • We advise you to exercise a high degree of caution in Sri Lanka at this time because of the unpredictable security environment.
    • Security forces maintain a visible presence throughout the country. Military and police checkpoints are present along some roads and road closures can occur without warning.
    • You should avoid all demonstrations and large public gatherings as they may turn violent or be a target for politically-motivated attacks. Police have used tear gas in response to protests.
    • In the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, which includes Mannar, Vavuniya, Mullaitivu, Kilinochichi and Jaffna Districts, post-conflict security force activity is ongoing.[2]

    There are reports from Human Rights agencies and UNHCR about serious human rights concerns in the troubled island of Sri Lanka.  These include reports of arbitrary arrest, assault and torture.  It is progress from being shot straight away maybe, but still far from a human rights paradise.

    Australia has shown it is generous when it comes to helping with disasters such as the tsunami in Indonesia, helping find MH370, and many others.  Sadly, when it comes to people arriving by boat seeking our protection we have a major blind spot. Tragically, a country that does have a reasonable record in helping refugees and respecting human rights is trashing its reputation for a three word slogan.

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who practices in immigration and refugee law.

     

  • Kerry Murphy. More punishment for asylum seekers and refugees.

    “As a young boat people refugee, I arrived here 36 years ago with nothing but an invisible suitcase filled with dreams, [with] a dream to live in a peaceful, safe and free country and to live a meaningful and fulfilling life.” said the new Governor of South Australia Hue Van Le OAM.  He arrived on a boat in Darwin back in 1978, a ‘boat person’ from Vietnam, or an ‘íllegal’ as Scott Morrison would prefer. Mr Le and his family were accepted as refugees and granted permanent residence. The announcement was made public, appropriately just after refugee week.

    On World Refugee day (20 June) the High Court held that the limit on granting permanent visas for refugees in Australia announced by Minister Morrison on 4 March was invalid.  The Court held it conflicted with an obligation in the Migration Act to decide protection visa cases within 90 days, a provision inserted under the Howard Government in 2005.   At the time, the Howard Government stated ‘that decisions on protection visa applications should be made in a timely and efficient manner so as to provide greater transparency and certainty for protection visa applicants.’

    It seems this objective to provide ‘greater transparency and certainty’ is no longer the view of the Coalition in Government.  Now the focus is on punishment with a policy that resembles a ‘fundamentalist belief’ rather than a properly articulated and balanced system.  The obsession with people on boats is remarkable and has driven the Coalition especially under Morrison.  It seems that there is nothing that people arriving by boat could do that would improve their image with the Government apart from taking money and going home to face the persecution they fear.

    The recent changes announced yet again to our refugee process illustrate the obsession in punishment and deterrence rather than a fair system that seeks to ensure our international obligations and human rights are respected.  The innocuously named Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014 is not all bad, but you have to look hard amongst the 38 pages of Bill and 73 pages of explanatory memorandum to find anything positive.

    There are a number of key issues of concern and space restricts the ability to provide a full commentary so it may be better to focus on the major points.  Refugee determination is a complex process of fact finding but this Bill tries to simplify the process to enable more refusals, not to make it easier for refugees.  On 31 March the Minister announced that money provided like legal aid to assist applicants prepare their cases would be cut off for all arriving by boat, and also cut off entirely for those in the review process.  This Bill has several measures which make competent representation more important for applicants who do not speak English, and may be traumatised by experiences in their home country, or even the boat journey to Australia

    It proposes a requirement that an applicant ‘specify all particulars of their claim and supporting evidence to Immigration and if they raise new claims or provide new evidence to the Review Tribunal, there is a rebuttable presumption against their credibility.  Commonly it can take some time to get a full story from an asylum seeker and the short time to prepare and present cases in detention takes many dangerous short cuts. The system we have is inquisitorial or investigative, not adversarial however this proposal makes the process more likely an adversarial one, especially for unrepresented or poorly represented applicants flailing their way through the complexity of Australian refugee law.

    Another change is a requirement to refuse a case where a person has no identity documents or has destroyed them.  It is common for people to have few identity documents but the detail they can provide about themselves, their family and where they lived helps satisfy decision makers as to identity.  Some people have even been asked to get identity documents from their Government, despite their cases still being on review or appeal, or their limited funding to pay rent and food in the community could be removed.  This again shows the ‘return oriented environment’ referred to by UNHCR when discussing Manus detention centre that is a theme of this government.

    A third major change is the change in the threshold for protection under Complementary Protection (CP).   CP covers our non return obligations under the Convention Against Torture and ICCPR.  The current threshold test is the same as the Refugee test- a real chance.  This test was explained in a US Supreme Court case as like the ancient Roman punishment of decimation – killing one in ten.  If you are in the group of ten and you know one will be killed, you have a well-founded fear, and there is a real chance you could be the one.  Unlike a probability test, which is better than 50% which is the test the Government wants. Making the test a probability one increases the risk of someone facing serious harm or persecution and is at odds with similar laws in a number of countries including the UK and New Zealand. It makes protection less likely and the risk of the refugee suffering harm on return more likely.

    It is expected there will be more changes to reintroduce Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) despite the overwhelming social and psychological evidence against TPVs.  TPVs are another obsession of this Minister.  Sadly for refugees, the future is bleak and vilification and demonization continues.  Maybe there is some hope with the appointment of Mr Le as Governor for as he says,  “This appointment, however, says much more about our society than about me. It sends a powerful message affirming our inclusive and egalitarian society.”

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in Immigration and Refugee law.

     

  • Xenophobia and strange behaviour over boats.

    UN High Commissioner Antonio Guterres criticises Australia’s ‘strange’ obsession with boats

    Excerpts from his address and answers to questions at UNHCR  NGO  consultations, Geneva, 17 June, 2014.  

    I think it is .. important to underline that, especially from the perspective now of refugee protection, we are facing also the development in several parts of the world of manifestations of xenophobia and similar other problems – Islamophobia, racism – that are particularly worrying. If you analyse the result of the last European elections, you have seen that xenophobic parties made remarkable increases in the number of votes. And even from the point of view of, for instance, borders, we see, in several situations in the world, borders being closed. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Bulgaria. We see it in Australia. We see it in many other parts of the world – and manifestations of xenophobia at the same time targeting refugees in communities in very dramatic circumstances. The plight of Somalis for instance in many countries, including in African countries, is a very dramatic demonstration of this dimension…..

    We will not fail to provide our colleagues the financial and other aspects of the capacity to go on monitoring when allowed the situation in Nauru but also in Papua New Guinea and eventually, if that will be the case, in Cambodia. This is something that we have been very worried about. The findings that were presented about Nauru clearly underline that Nauru is not a place where adequate protection can be granted. This is quite obvious. We insist that this is the responsibility of the country that receives the people and that this should be an Australian responsibility. The fact that Cambodia has signed the Convention doesn’t mean that Cambodia is an adequate space for meaningful protection for people in need. Our position has always been, as you know, very reluctant in relation to those agreements, very reserved in relation to them. Of course, we can do our best to support people in the circumstances where we might be able to operate. But that doesn’t mean that we are in agreement with this kind of extra processing of refugees without giving the guarantees that those found to be in need of protection will be accepted in countries, or be resettled to countries, where that protection can be effectively granted, which, of course, is not the case with Nauru and eventually will not be the case with Cambodia…

    The problem is when we discuss boats and there, of course, we enter into a very, very, very dramatic thing. I think it is a kind of collective sociological and psychological question. (Australia)  receives, I think, 180,000 migrants in a year. If you come to Australia in a different way, it’s fine but if they come in a boat it is like something strange happens to their minds. That problem I know that we have and it is a serious one. But if there is anything that we can help, we will do it.

     

    Mr Guterres’ address and his responses to questions can be viewed at http://new.livestream.com/4am/unhcr

    These extracts were supplied courtesy of the Refugee Council of Australia.

  • The disastrous outcome on climate change and the Greens’ culpability

    As a result of the Clive Palmer intervention, we are now unlikely to have any carbon reduction policy in place. In a few weeks’ time it is likely the Senate will vote down the Carbon Tax, its successor an Emissions Trading Scheme and Direct Action.

    The party that is chiefly responsible for this fiasco is the Greens. The same is true of its holier-than-thou approach on asylum seekers, but I will leave that for another day.

    I set out my views on the enormous damage that the Greens have done in my post of September 2 last year ‘Holier than thou … but with disastrous results’. That blog is reposted below. As Gough Whitlam put it in a different context ‘Only the impotent are pure’. The Greens have been giving us policy purity in truckloads, but on a sensible policy on climate change they have given us ‘a big fat nothing’.

    That quote is from an article today by Phillip Coorey in the AFR, page 55. The article is headed ‘Green opportunism leaves carbon policy at zero’.

    Coorey writes

    ‘The only mainstream party never to have taken a risk, never to have put any skin in the game and never to have lost a vote [over climate change] is the Greens. Throughout the entire eight year saga they have chained themselves to the altar of policy purity and watched others suffer for their ideals. The result is a big fat nothing. … Because they believed the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme introduced by Rudd to be inadequate, they voted it down twice. The second time was the day after Abbott knocked off Turnbull. Liberal senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce realising the need to establish a foothold for carbon pricing, crossed the floor to vote with Labor. The Greens helped the Coalition kill it. … Even when Labor was dying last year and Abbott was at the gate of the lodge, vowing the carbon tax would be the first policy put against the wall and shot, the Greens attacked Rudd for cowardice when he announced … that if he was elected the fixed price would move to a much lower European linked floating price on July 1 2014, one year earlier than scheduled.

    As I mentioned in my blog of September 2 last year, the defeat of Rudd’s CPRS brought on an acrimonious and divisive debate and a denial of the science of climate change. As a result public support for a carbon tax on an Emissions Trading Scheme has plunged from 75% in 2007 to less than 40%. The Greens cannot wash their hands of this debacle. They triggered it in the Senate.

    Whether on climate change or asylum seekers, Australia is paying a heavy price for the Greens’ policy purity. They have played into Tony Abbott’s hands.

    But for the Greens an ETS would have been done and dusted five years ago.

  • Repost. Holier than thou … but with disastrous results. John Menadue

    The posturing of the Greens on the two big issues of this election, asylum seekers and climate change has given us two appalling policy outcomes. They sided with Tony Abbott in the Senate on both critical issues to defeat improved policy. The country is now paying a very heavy price. The perfect became the enemy of the good.

    The Malaysian Agreement was not ideal and needed improvement but it was an important building block towards a regional arrangement. In opposing   the processing of asylum claims in Malaysia the Greens were unremitting in their bashing of Malaysia. The collapse of the Malaysian arrangement gave oxygen to people smugglers in persuading desperate people to take dangerous sea voyages. The evidence is clear. When the High Court rejected the Malaysian Agreement in August 2011 irregular maritime arrivals were running at less than 300 per month. By May2012 they had increased to 1200.They have been rising rapidly ever since, reaching  over 14,000 in the six months to June 30 this year The rot set in with the collapse of the Malaysian Agreement. We have been in a downward policy spiral ever since…. Nauru, Manus, PNG, TPV’s, turn backs at sea and even buying clapped out vessels in Indonesia. The madness continues. The Greens cannot wash their hands of the havoc they have wrought. The Government attempted to amend the Migration Act to correct the problems identified by the High Court but the Greens colluded with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to block the amending legislation.

    Yet that Malaysian Agreement was actively supported by the UNHCR. The Director of UNHCR in Australia told the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 that

    “Many persons of concern to UNHCR stand to benefit from the programme (with Malaysia) by having their status regularised. It could mean all refugees in Malaysia would, in addition to their registration and ID documents from UNHCR, be registered with the government’s immigration data base and thus protected from arbitrary arrest and detention. It would also mean that all refugees in Malaysia would have the right to work on a par with legal migrants in the country. This would also entitle them to the same insurance and health schemes as documented for legal migrant workers.”

    This agreement could have been quite historic, a first between a refugee convention signatory country and a non-signatory country in our region. For Malaysia, this agreement was also quite remarkable progress. This is in a country that has a burden of much larger numbers of refugees than we have. But because the agreement with Malaysia was not enshrined in law it was discounted by the High Court. What that means is that if it wasn’t enshrined in law we could not trust the Malaysian government. What an awful outcome for refugees and our relations with the Malaysian government.

    It is true that the numbers of boat arrivals who seek asylum in Australia are miniscule in world terms. . But we have a political problem with boats that is exploited by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. The Greens abetted the coalition in the name of policy purity. Then the Labor government joined the rush to the bottom.

    The Greens must also accept major responsibility for the decline in public support for effective action on climate change. They opposed in the Senate the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme of the first Rudd Government. Belatedly the Greens then supported the Gillard Government’s legislation including the carbon tax which is much inferior to the CPRS. In the intervening years we have seen acrimonious and divisive debate and a denial of the science on climate change. As a result, public support for a carbon tax or Emissions Trading Scheme has plunged from 75% in 2007 to less than 40% today. The Greens cannot wash their hands of this debacle. They triggered it in the Senate.

    Whether on climate change or on asylum seekers, Australia is paying a very heavy price for the Greens’ policy purity. Asylum seekers are paying an even heavier price.

  • Michael Kelly SJ. The banality of evil

    Denial has many faces. Some of them are necessary. If any of us entertained what might befall us each day and the harm we could come to, we would never get out of bed. But denial also has corrosive and destructive effect if we deny the facts of our experience or refuse to be honest in questioning our own behavior.

    Watching Scott Morrison behaving like an outdated school master in telling asylum seekers what their fate is to be, as reported with the original video in the The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/25/morrison-asylum-seekers-should-go-home-or-face-very-very-long-detention is about as complete an example of one human being bullying and brutalizing others as you need to see.

    But what makes it even worse is the abject failure of the Minister to realize that this is not just Australia’s problem but one shared with many countries in the Asian region which needs a regional solution – something in the Australian Government’s power develop.

    Witnessing such inhumanity is not a pretty sight. It’s not so much that such behavior is the work of some calculating monster. Scott Morrison is just following Government orders and telling Australia’s armed forces and immigration officials to do the same.

    The dehumanization involved in such behavior echoes what exercised Hannah Arendt said http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt when she witnessed first hand the Jerusalem trial the Nazi mass murder, Adolf Eichmann

    A Jewish escapee herself from a Nazi camp in France, Arendt earned the opprobrium of Jews around the world for her assessment of Eichmann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

    She thought that the common understanding of Eichmann had missed the most important fact. What upset most of her critics was her claim that anti-Semitism was not the primary motivation for his villainy.

    After observing Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, she formed the view that the man was a simple mediocrity, a bureaucrat with nothing more than ambition to progress through the Nazi hierarchy to motivate him and a complete absence of any sense of personal responsibility for the heinous acts that filled his days.

    Arendt came to believe that ideologically based interpretations of his behavior and motivation greatly exaggerated his significance and capacity and missed the most obvious fact about Eichmann: he was simply a nobody who became somebody through being part of something which just happened to be the SS murder machine.

    Far from being the monster he was made out to be, Eichmann was an instance of what Arendt called “the banality of evil.”

    His condition is something that extends well beyond the obvious infamy of Adolf Hitler and the determination of Heinrich Himmler to provide the “final solution” to the “problem” of the Jews.

    She explained the conclusion she came to about Eichmann’s banality in terms that she learnt from her professor, lover and mentor, Martin Heidegger, who described human beings as human beings if they can connect head and heart in searching thought.

    The absence of that connection is the abject inability to connect human passion and reflective thought in consciousness. The self-conscious and objective evaluation of actions according to a standard of good and bad, right and wrong defines the difference between humans and animals.

    Eichmann failed the test because, as he repeatedly said, he was “just following orders” and accepted no personal responsibility for the moral quality of the orders. In other words, Eichmann was not smart or even very efficient. He was just a bureaucratic automaton.

    Minister Morrison is getting and giving orders. He is following his orders that come from Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his Cabinet. The Coalition endorses them and the Labor Party has complied with them. The military and Departmental officers are implementing a set of orders that consign 30,000 people to life destroying experiences that are justified by being “policy”.

    It’s the banality of it all that fails to raise objections from enough Australians to see the policy and the orders changed. We know what Hannah Arendt would say. But spare a thought for Harold Macmillan a British Prime Minister in the 1950s and ‘60s who observed in the 1930s that when the Establishment is of one voice about anything, you can bet they’re wrong.

  • Patty Fawkner SGS. Permissible victims.

    Permissible victims are defined as those whose life and dignity is violated with very little notice, outrage or public protest.

    Only once have I been ‘bumped off’ a plane. It was in the USA on a 6am domestic flight.

    I recall the sequence of emotions: surprise, dismay then anger as I became acquainted first-hand with the airline practice of over-booking planes to guarantee full flights. The airline officials were regretful – professionally so – for any inconvenience that I might subsequently experience.

    A minor incident with no long-lasting consequence. However, it was a sobering experience to be treated as a commodity. I was simply a ‘permissible victim’ of the airline’s policy and business plan to maximise profit.

    More broadly, permissible victims are defined as those whose life and dignity is violated with very little notice, outrage or public protest. They are the expendables, a by-product of a ‘whatever-it-takes’ mentality that enables others to achieve their goals.

    Think permissible victim and think sexual abuse victim, John Ellis, eclipsed by the Church’s concern for reputation and material assets. Think permissible victims and think asylum seekers who attempt to come to Australia by boat. “Stopping the boats” may be a worthy goal, but spare a thought for those who pay the price for this policy and are now housed in harsh, remote off-shore detention facilities for an indefinite duration.

    Permissible victims are those who lack leverage and influence, those whose potential for being forgotten and discounted is great. More often than not they are the voiceless, the faceless, the weak and the poor – in a word, those least able to defend themselves.

    One definition of a prophet is one who stands in solidarity with permissible victims. The Old Testament prophets railed against the ruthless pragmatism of a society, similar to ours, which creates ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and their ilk, including the wonderfully named Obadiah and Habakkuk, weren’t liturgical police; their message wasn’t “you’ve forgotten the rituals of the temple” or “you’re not reading the Scriptures”. Their consistent message was “You are creating permissible victims by forgetting the poor”. God doesn’t want sackcloth and ashes, holy days and sacrifices, good as these things are, says Isaiah. No, God wants us to free captives, break bonds, feed the hungry, and clothe the naked.

    This is the prophetic message, manifesto and mission of Jesus, the prophet of the Reign of God. José Pagola’s Jesus an Historical Approximation a book as refreshing as it is illuminating in exploring the pre-Easter Jesus, portrays Jesus as an itinerant preacher and healer who stands in solidarity with the permissible victims of his day. Jesus’ healings and exorcisms are signs that the reign of God had come to the most alienated sectors of society.

    Pagola says that Jesus’ behaviour was strange and provocative on two counts: he flouted the establishment’s prevailing social and religious codes of conduct, and he befriended undesirables. Jesus was shockingly inclusive, surrounding himself with society’s dregs including tax collectors and prostitutes. He fraternised with Middle Eastern ‘bogans’ and beggars, the socially marginalised and sinners. He interacted with women in culturally inappropriate ways and, my goodness, accepted them among his disciples.

    There was nothing haphazard about the way Jesus did these things, Pagola claims. Jesus was intentionally saying that God’s reign is open to everyone, with no one excluded or marginalised. God’s schema does not allow for any permissible victim. Each person is precious in God’s sight.

    Jesus’ modus operandi was extremely threatening to the priestly aristocracy. With the support of Roman officialdom they conspired to eliminate him. “It is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed,” observes ruthless Caiaphas (John 11:50). Jesus becomes the scapegoat, the permissible victim. Pragmatism reigns supreme.

    It’s all too easy to create permissible victims. We do it constantly and by diverse means.

    1. We create them when we adopt a differing scale or different criteria in assessing who is worthy of human dignity, security, access to resources and who is not. We may muse, as some commentators have done, that it’s “regrettable” that four-year-olds in Pakistan may have to die in US air strikes so that American four-year-olds do not become victims of terrorism. In the ‘war on terror’ the Pakistani four-year-olds simply become that most ugly of euphemisms, ‘collateral damage’.

    Foreigners who fly to Australia, overstay their visa and then seek asylum are deemed, by some odd Down Under logic, more worthy than those who board the proverbial leaky boat in an attempt to reach our shores.

    2. Permissible victims are less likely to be ‘one of us’ and more likely to be ‘one of them’. Would our country’s shameful indifference to the loss of life of the Siev X, which sank in international waters just south of Java on October 19, 2001, killing 146 children, 142 women and 65 men Middle Eastern asylum seekers, been as great had those on board been carrying British passports? I think not.

    3. Stereotyping and labelling creates permissible victims. Once we ascribe a person with our label of choice – “bleeding heart”, “ultra-conservative”, “red-neck” – it is easy to dismiss them and ignore their contribution. Apart from being evidence of sloppy thinking, stereotyping and labelling, it causes us to close ourselves to the unique mystery of the other. We fail to acknowledge their full personhood.

    4. Bad religion and bad nationalism create permissible victims. We build straw gods to justify political action. For decades Scripture was used to justify the apartheid regime in South Africa (for example, Romans 13:1-7). We readily recognise the false god of the Islamist suicide bomber and we see it on ‘our side’ as well. George W. Bush said that God guided his decision to bomb Afghanistan and that “God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq”. Such a god and not the God of Jesus Christ, justifies the creation and extermination of permissible victims.

    5. We create permissible victims when we make ourselves the centre of our universe. We greedily take for ourselves the greater bulk of the earth’s resources. We ravage the earth with hardly a thought for other species who share our planet home. We scapegoat, we wage war, we allow torture, and we turn a blind eye to the desperation and needs of others. We have done this in Syria and Manus Island.

    From the lofty realms of my moral high horse, I readily point the finger at those who create permissible victims. Yet honesty demands that I acknowledge how seamlessly I slip into the practice. I have betrayed and victimised as many people who have betrayed and victimised me. I have labelled others as often as they have labelled me. My contempt for others is the corollary of my self-righteousness.

    My practice can be subtle and sophisticated. It is de rigueur for me ‘to have a go’ at this person, to make that group the butt of my jokes, to rail against the treatment of this group, but not care a slither about that group, to dismiss what someone has got to say even before they’ve said it.

    What to do?

    I can try and be more mindful of the reality of permissible victims. I can choose to stand in solidarity with one particular victimised group. Rather than skimming and scanning I can commit to the careful reading of news reports for this group. I can be grateful that God’s ways are not my ways and pray for a deeper sense of kinship and empathy with others.

    I can also hope that the next time I’m metaphorically ‘bumped off’, I can try and redirect my anger away from my own self-pity and spare a thought for the real permissible victims in my world.

    I can but hope and try.

    Good Samaritan Sister, Patty Fawkner is an adult educator, writer and facilitator. Patty is interested in exploring what wisdom the Christian tradition has for contemporary issues. She has an abiding interest in questions of justice and spirituality. Her formal tertiary qualifications are in arts, education, theology and spirituality.

    This article was first published in The Good Oil, the e-magazine of the Good Samaritan Sisters. www.goodsams.org.au


     

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  • All at sea again.

    Lt Gen Angus Campbell, the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders is at it again highlighting the policy and political achievements of the Coalition government on asylum seekers rather than sticking to his last, and ensuring that Australian naval vessels don’t stray into Indonesian waters.

    Gen. Campbell says that as a government employee, he doesn’t comment on government policy. But apparently he has no constraint about commenting when it suits him. He declines to comment when there are embarrassing political questions. He then says they are ‘on water’ matters.

    On Tuesday this week at a speech to the Royal United Services Institute of NSW  he made two political points as reported by the Guardian.

    The first was that Australia was among the top three nations resettling refugees, according to the UNHCR. That is technically correct, but it is quite misleading. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

    There is a UNHCR resettlement program which resettled 88,578 refugees in 2012. We were ranked third behind the US and Canada in this program. This is a useful program but it is quite minor when set against the total refugee problem. In 2012 there were 15.4 million refugees in the world. There were another 28.8 million displaced persons. The numbers would have increased since then particularly with the disasters in Syria and Iraq.

    Of the 15.4 million refugees in 2012, the top five hosting countries were Pakistan 1.638 million people, Iran 868,000, Germany 590,000, Kenya 565,000 and Syria 477,000. Australia ranked number 49 in the world in hosting 30,000 refugees. Taking into account our population, we had a world ranking of 62 and on a wealth/GDP basis, we were ranked 87. That is all a long way from the third ranking that Gen. Campbell tells us about. His claim just does not bear close examination when we consider the total problem.

    The second thing that Gen. Campbell said to the Royal United Services Institute was that the policy that he was implementing in OSB had saved lives. He estimated that without OSB, up to 180 more people might have been drowned.

    Is he really suggesting that the purpose of OSB is to stop drownings? It may be a consequence but it is not the objective of OSB. The objective of OSB as Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison cannot help telling us is to ‘stop the boats’. It is not to stop drownings. Gen. Campbell’s public relations gloss is designed to hide immoral and cruel policies. If it was about saving lives at sea, the government would be nominating him for a human rights award.

    The Director General of UNHCR, Antonio Guterres, has recently spoken of our ‘strange’ phobia about boat arrivals when we ignore the 8,000 plus asylum seekers who come by air each year and, in world terms, the few asylum seekers that come to Australia. As with refugees, Australia ranks well down the list in the number of asylum seekers coming to our shores and seeking protection. That is one of the benefits of our remoteness. In 2012 the five top countries receiving asylum seekers were Turkey 325,000, Jordan 136,000, Lebanon 135,000, South Sudan 101,000 and France 98,000. Australia ranked number 20 with less than 30,000 asylum seekers coming to our shore either by boat or by plane. In relation to our population our world ranking was down at 29 and in relation to our wealth/GDP we ranked 52 in the world.

    We are nowhere near as generous as Gen. Campbell suggests in trying to justify the immoral policies which Australia is pursuing and which he is helping to implement.

  • Those Feisty Iranians

    Amongst our asylum seeker population Iranians feature very prominently. And it is not just because of Reza Barati, an Iranian asylum-seeker who was murdered at Manus Island on our watch.

    A feature of the Iranian asylum seekers, apart from their number, is that they have a reputation of being quite “pushy”. As past and current Immigration officers tell me ‘they are always in our face’. I am afraid that this view of Iranians does not help in the way they are treated. But the same qualities make them good settlers – determined and highly motivated. I wish more of our migrants were like that.

    The number of Iranian asylum seekers in Australia stands out. If we look at the figures before the Manus/Nauru ‘solution’ and Operation Sovereign Borders, we see that in the June quarter 2012, Iranian asylum seekers represented only about 10% of boat arrivals. Within a year they had risen to about 40% of boat arrivals. The actual numbers told the same story – up from 352 in June quarter 2012 to an estimated 3,600 in the June quarter 2013. Later data is not available.

    After appeal processes, over 80% of Iranians are usually found to be genuine refugees.

    There are still a lot of Iranians in detention. At the end of May this year, there were 4,016 people in Immigration Detention Facilities. 27% were from Iran, almost double the percentage for the second largest group, Vietnamese at 15%. Of the 1,081 Iranians in Immigration Detention Facilities, 255 were children. In addition to those in Immigration Detention Facilities, at the end of May this year there were another 2,955 people in the community under Residence Determination. The largest group again were Iranians with 841, or 28%.

    In addition to the large number of Iranian asylum seekers arriving, there is another reason why many remain in detention. In many cases the Iranian government will not accept returnees to Iran that have claimed refugee status in another country,been refused and are subject to deportation.

    There is obviously great pressure on Iranians to leave their country and for a variety of reasons. As I pointed out in my blog of July 28 last year

    ‘The population of Iran is increasing very rapidly. It has been referred to as a population time-bomb. The population is young (with over 60% of the population under 30). The middle class is also growing rapidly. It is well-educated. Iranians have a lot of “get up and go”. My observation is that they make very good migrants. They are determined people and perhaps for that reason they get up the nose of Immigration officials.

    They are also repressed by the mullahs but probably more importantly the sanctions imposed by the West are biting hard. Not surprisingly with population and economic pressures at home, they want to leave Iran. It must be possible to open a different migration pathway for eligible Iranians through some type of skilled migration program, perhaps a 457 visa or sponsored migration. Surely we have Australian companies that would be supportive. Iran is an important market for Australian wheat.’

    Unfortunately the migration application process is difficult and lengthy in Iran and elsewhere. As a result Iranians often decide to risk all and flee and hope that countries such as Australia will give them a new chance in life.

    In the last decade Australia has received almost 1.5 million migrants because of their skills, family connections or other special eligibility.

    We would be doing ourselves a service as well as helping young well-educated and entrepreneurial Iranians if we opened more migration opportunities for them and discourage them from making hazardous and dangerous voyages.

    Former and current Immigration officials do express quite different views about Iranian asylum seekers. The first is that they are demanding. The second is that ‘they won’t cop any shit’.  I must confess that I admire those qualities in people-being prepared to push back.

    Many Iranians would make excellent settlers in this country, even if they do not meet our refugee criteria. We need to consider alternate migration pathways for young people in Iran who are under pressure.

    Amongst our asylum seeker population Iranians feature very prominently. And it is not just because of Reza Barati, an Iranian asylum-seeker who was murdered at Manus Island on our watch.

    A feature of the Iranian asylum seekers, apart from their number, is that they have a reputation of being quite “pushy”. As past and current Immigration officers tell me ‘they are always in our face’. I am afraid that this view of Iranians does not help in the way they are treated. But the same qualities make them good settlers – determined and highly motivated. I wish more of our migrants were like that.

    The number of Iranian asylum seekers in Australia stands out. If we look at the figures before the Manus/Nauru ‘solution’ and Operation Sovereign Borders, we see that in the June quarter 2012, Iranian asylum seekers represented only about 10% of boat arrivals. Within a year they had risen to about 40% of boat arrivals. The actual numbers told the same story – up from 352 in June quarter 2012 to an estimated 3,600 in the June quarter 2013. Later data is not available.

    After appeal processes, over 80% of Iranians are usually found to be genuine refugees.

    There are still a lot of Iranians in detention. At the end of May this year, there were 4,016 people in Immigration Detention Facilities. 27% were from Iran, almost double the percentage for the second largest group, Vietnamese at 15%. Of the 1,081 Iranians in Immigration Detention Facilities, 255 were children. In addition to those in Immigration Detention Facilities, at the end of May this year there were another 2,955 people in the community under Residence Determination. The largest group again were Iranians with 841, or 28%.

    In addition to the large number of Iranian asylum seekers arriving, there is another reason why many remain in detention. In many cases the Iranian government will not accept returnees to Iran that have claimed refugee status in another country.

    There is obviously great pressure on Iranians to leave their country and for a variety of reasons. As I pointed out in my blog of July 28 last year

    ‘The population of Iran is increasing very rapidly. It has been referred to as a population time-bomb. The population is young (with over 60% of the population under 30). The middle class is also growing rapidly. It is well-educated. Iranians have a lot of “get up and go”. My observation is that they make very good migrants. They are determined people and perhaps for that reason they get up the nose of Immigration officials.

    They are also repressed by the mullahs but probably more importantly the sanctions imposed by the West are biting hard. Not surprisingly with population and economic pressures at home, they want to leave Iran. It must be possible to open a different migration pathway for eligible Iranians through some type of skilled migration program, perhaps a 457 visa or sponsored migration. Surely we have Australian companies that would be supportive. Iran is an important market for Australian wheat.’

    Unfortunately the migration application process is difficult and lengthy in Iran and elsewhere. As a result Iranians often decide to risk all and flee and hope that countries such as Australia will give them a new chance in life.

    In the last decade Australia has received almost 1.5 million migrants because of their skills, family connections or other special eligibility.

    We would be doing ourselves a service as well as helping young well-educated and entrepreneurial Iranians if we opened more migration opportunities for them and discourage them from making hazardous and dangerous voyages.

    Former and current Immigration officials do express quite different views about Iranian asylum seekers. The first is that they are demanding. The second is that ‘they won’t cop any shit’.  I must confess that I admire those qualities in people-being prepared to push back.

    Many Iranians would make excellent settlers in this country, even if they do not meet our refugee criteria. We need to consider alternate migration pathways for young people in Iran who are under pressure.

  • Emily Howie. Australia’s dangerously close relationship with Sri Lanka..

    In March 2014 the United Nations Human Rights Council established an historic and long-awaited international investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses committed during the final phases of Sri Lanka’s civil war. The resolution is widely regarded as an important step towards reconciliation and peace. In addition to establishing a mechanism for examining past violations, including the deaths of 40,000 to 70,000 civilians, the resolution establish critical monitoring of the serious ongoing human rights situation in Sri Lanka.

    Whilst the UK Prime Minister David Cameron welcomed the resolution as a “victory for the people of Sri Lanka,” the Australian government stunned many observers with its vocal opposition to the resolution.

    Australia is not a member of the Council so it could not vote on the resolution. Nonetheless, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, said she was “not convinced that the resolution’s call for a separate, internationally-led investigation, without the co-operation of the Sri Lankan Government, is the best way forward at this time.” She said that the resolution did not properly acknowledge the economic growth and progress in Sri Lanka or the brutality of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

    Bishop’s comments put Australia directly at odds with some of its closest allies – the United States, UK and Canada – who supported the resolution.  Surprisingly, her comments aligned Australia with countries known for their obstructionist approach to the resolution at the UN Human Rights Council.  You could have been forgiven for thinking she was accidentally reading from the notes of the Russian, Chinese or Iranian foreign minister.

    Australia’s opposition to the Human Rights Council’s investigation aiming to achieve justice and reconciliation in Sri Lanka is counterproductive, short-sighted and extremely disappointing.

    Sadly, this position is consistent with Australia’s deteriorating approach to human rights in its foreign affairs with Sri Lanka. The Australian government claims that “engagement” with Sri Lanka, not “isolation,” is the best way forward.

    However, in reality Australia is now so closely engaged with, and dependent on, Sri Lanka to conduct border control, that Australia is increasingly unwilling to criticise Sri Lanka on any account, even when it comes to some of the most serious human rights abuses in our region.  The close relationship puts Australia at risk of violating its international human rights obligation of non-refoulement.

    A dangerously close relationship

    To understand Australia’s unprincipled position on Sri Lankan war crimes it is necessary to consider domestic Australian immigration policy.

    In the last two years over 8000 Sri Lankan people have arrived irregularly in Australia by boat and Sri Lankan authorities claim to have blocked a further 4500 people attempting to leave. These arrivals were just some of the record number of boat arrivals to Australia during that time.

    The Australian Government’s obsession with ‘stopping the boats’ and its reliance on Sri Lanka to help block people from leaving their country is the root cause of Australia’s position on accountability for Sri Lankan war crimes.

    This is nothing new. In September 2013, Australia elected a new, conservative government led by Prime Minister Tony Abbott, however the previous Labor government formalised Australia’s close ties with Sri Lanka years earlier.

    Since 2009 Australia has forged a dangerously close relationship with the Sri Lankan military and police as part of Australia’s measures to prevent asylum seekers from arriving on Australian shores.

    In March 2014 the Human Rights Law Centre published a report, Can’t flee, can’t stay: Australia’s interception and return of Sri Lankan asylum seekers, detailing the way in which Australia encourages, facilitates and resources Sri Lanka to block its people from leaving the country as a part of Australian border control and anti-people smuggling operations.

    Australian Federal Police officers currently work inside Sri Lanka with their Sri Lankan police counterparts to prevent boat departures. Sri Lankan police had no “illegal migration” surveillance capacity at all until Australia established it for them in 2009.

    Australia also provides around $2 million dollars in material support to the Sri Lankan navy each year.  Recently Australia provided two patrol boats to the Sri Lankan navy to assist with on-water surveillance and interception.  Australia also shares intelligence with Sri Lankan security forces to aid the interceptions.

    Mr Abbott now describes Australia as having “the closest possible cooperation” with Sri Lanka.

    Australia’s efforts at ‘stopping boats’ are jeopardising the ability of Sri Lankans at risk of persecution to gain access to safety and asylum. The most recent data on Sri Lankan boat arrivals to Australia indicates that between 50% and 90% of Sri Lankans who flee are found to be refugees.

    Australia’s support for the Sri Lankan security forces’ interceptions increases the likelihood that Sri Lankan people fleeing persecution are exposed to torture and mistreatment. Australia is well aware of the serious human rights situation in Sri Lankan and the brutal track record of its partners. The Sri Lankan Navy is part of the military now being investigated for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009. The Sri Lanka Police have a long and well-documented track record of torture and mistreatment in custody, including the rape of men and women.

    Refoulement

    These risks are compounded by Australia’s domestic policy of forcibly returning Sri Lankan boat arrivals in Australia without properly assessing their refugee status or monitoring their safety on return.

    Australia has forcibly returned over 1100 Sri Lankans who arrived in Australia since October 2012.

    Australia’s Immigration Minister has made it clear that his preference is for Australia to return all Sri Lankans arriving by boat.

    This means that despite evidence that the majority of Sri Lankans arriving by boat are genuine refugees, Australia bases its treatment of Sri Lankans on the politically expedient assumption that they are economic migrants.

    Australia uses a so-called ‘enhanced screening process’ for Sri Lankans that arrive by boat. Enhanced screening is a truncated assessment process in which detainees have no access to a lawyer and no independent review of the decision is available. It is a flimsy short-cut and a grossly inadequate way to handle what are potentially life and death decisions. Sri Lankans have a legal right to have their protection claims heard properly – instead Australia subjects them to a less rigorous process and thereby exposes them to harm on return.

    Australia claims that no returnees have been harmed upon return to Sri Lanka, however there is no monitoring of returnees sufficient to allow Australia to make that assessment.

    The Human Rights Law Centre obtained documents through freedom of information that show one instance where the Australian High Commission in Colombo received a complaint that a returnee had been “severely tortured.” In that case the Australian Federal Police officer based in Colombo declined an invitation from the Sri Lankan police to meet with the complainant to assess his well-being.

    This kind of monitoring is woefully inadequate considering the gravity of the complaints made. It also raises questions about the Australian government’s assertions that nobody has been harmed on return.

    Other Commonwealth nations

    Australia is not a member of the Human Rights Council, although it is a candidate for membership in 2018. It is difficult to know what position Australia would have taken if it had been required to vote on the Sri Lanka resolution.

    There was not a unitary position among Council members from the Commonwealth: Botswana and UK voted for the resolution; Kenya, Maldives and Pakistan voted against the resolution, and Namibia, South Africa and India abstained from voting. Abstentions were critical in the result as the vote was 25 in favour, 12 opposed and 12 abstained.

    Abstention may have saved Australia’s relationship with its border security partner, but the new Australian government would have failed to live up to its own human rights standards.  The government’s foreign policy, at least on paper, includes taking a robust and principled approach to human rights abuses in the Asia Pacific region. Denying access to justice to victims of some of the region’s worst war crimes can hardly be consistent with that.

    Emily Howie is the director of advocacy and research at the Human Rights Law Centre. You can follow her on Twitter @emilyhowie.

     

  • John Tulloh. Misery accomplished in Iraq as disintegration threatens.

    Perhaps dictators have their place after all. Saddam Hussein presided over Iraq for 24 years. While he was cruel and vainglorious, he generally succeeded in ensuring Iraqis stayed in line and kept the peace. He was toppled in 2003 when the U.S., with the support of Australia and other allies, invaded the country with the aim of introducing democracy and an altogether more acceptable way of life. Today his country is unravelling with astonishing speed as a small Islamic extremist group takes control of large areas with impunity. Iraq could be even on the verge of disintegration.

    Since the 2003 invasion, by the most conservative estimate, half a million people have lost their lives. They have been killed as the result of fighting throughout the country, religious violence, executions, lawlessness, random bombings and widespread other terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of people have been uprooted and forced to flee for their lives to seek refuge elsewhere in Iraq or other countries.

    President George W.Bush called the initial bombing of Baghdad a ‘shock and awe’ campaign and within six weeks proudly declared ‘mission accomplished’. Given the results 11 years on, it has proved to be as shocking and awesome on any scale of political and humanitarian disasters.

    It is all the more so when you consider the calamity now facing the Iraqi government with the fall of its second largest city, Mosul, to Islamic insurgents, who are said to be heading in the direction of Baghdad. Now Kirkuk in the north has been taken over by the Kurds who might see this as an opportunity to establish their long-desired independent homeland.

    It is a catastrophic setback for a weakened regime still trying to establish itself. That a movement – the Islamic State in Iraq in Syria (ISIS) – of said to be less than 10,000 fighters could take over a city of more than 1,500,000 people and intimidate the security forces there to shed their uniforms and flee is the humiliating reality of the state of Iraq today.

    ISIS declared it had come to ‘liberate’ Mosul. It hoisted its flag over the city. It was no colourful, reassuring victorious pennant. It was a sinister flag in the grim black and white style of the piratical skull and crossbones. Little wonder when reports said that half a million Mosul residents had fled the city. They had good reason.

    As relatively small as it is, ISIS already controls other parts of Iraq and reports says it has enforced its rule with a reign of terror, including assassinations, beheadings and amputations. It is so extreme that even its former partner. al-Qaeda, severed ties. It is reported to have attracted the interest of hundreds of foreign fighters eager to support its ambitions.

    It is a force which started in Iraq as part of al-Qaeda before splintering. It then moved into Syria during the uprising against the Damascus regime. It had no interest in working with other rebel groups in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad, but simply wanted to establish an Islamic state there. Now, with ISIS back in Iraq in a big way, it wants to eliminate the border with Syria altogether to form one state, hence its name.

    It is an unwelcome crisis for President Barack Obama whose cautious, tip-toeing foreign policy has been heavily criticised. After initial threats to take action in Syria, he decided that the tragedy there could somehow take care of itself without US involvement. But after what has transpired in the past 11 years in Iraq since the initial shock and awe and now a terrorist body of potential mass destruction and misery roaming the desert landscape, does the U.S. have any moral obligation to rescue what it created?

    Washington certainly wouldn’t want to revisit its military occupation which cost its own forces 4500 lives. Iraq has a weak and almost helpless government. Its parliament cannot even raise a quorum at a time of grave emergency. It faces rising tensions between the dominant Shiites in Baghdad and the Sunnis whom ISIS supports. Its troops seemingly have no will to do their duty. Mosul and Kirkuk, both important commercial hubs, are lost for now. And the billions of dollars the U.S. has spent on training and equipping the Iraqi military have proved a dubious investment.

    But what can the U.S. and its Western partners do? President Obama says the U.S. is considering all options short of sending in ground troops. That probably will be limited to what the U.S. can do from the air. Tony Abbott, ever eager to please, is not ruling out Australian involvement.

    So while the policy-makers wonder what to do next, spare a thought for the innocent victims of this upheaval who so often are forgotten. The estimated 500,000 Iraqis who’ve fled Mosul join four million other Iraqi refugees around the world, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. UNHCR says nine million Syrians have had to flee their homes since the uprising three years ago. About 2.5 million of them – more than the population of Brisbane – are sheltering in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and even Iraq. Their future is even more uncertain now.

    The Iraqi and Syrian borders were drawn up by Britain and France after World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Who knows, nearly 100 years on, current events may force cartographers to have to change their atlases with new borders.

    A poetic postscript: Mosul, famed for its muslin fabric, is on the Tigris River on the opposite bank from the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Once upon a time, every Australian schoolchild learned John Masefield’s poem ‘Cargoes’. Its first verse was:

    Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

    Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

    With a cargo of ivory,

    And apes and peacocks,

    Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

    If only a tiny semblance of that charming scenario were so today.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Frank Brennan SJ. Why I am not just “getting over” the boats stopping.

    Some people keep saying, “The people have spoken.  The Abbott government is right.  The boats have stopped.  So just get over it.”  I am getting a little weary of this populist refrain.  I am quite prepared to accept that the majority of Australians want the boats stopped.  Then arise the questions: how can this be done ethically? How can it be done respecting the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament and the separation of powers?  Even the second question should be of concern to all citizens, and not just lawyers.

    The historical perspective is important. The High Court struck down the Malaysia solution. Both sides of Parliament agreed that they did not want the High Court scrutinising this sort of deal again.  So it was agreed that the scrutiny would be applied ‘with a light touch’ by both houses of parliament being able to disallow any future arrangement.  At no time did anyone suggest that it be done by the Executive with no scrutiny other than the three year ballot box which is not the rule of law but populist rule of the mob.

    Both houses waved through the resurrected Pacific solution.  A year later, Kevin Rudd then decided that he could use the existing designations for Nauru and PNG as temporary offshore processing countries as the basis for a completely new arrangement for permanent offshore resettlement countries – an arrangement which has never been scrutinised by Parliament.  Imagine if Sarah Hanson Young had stood up in the Senate back in 2012 and opposed the designation on the basis that it opened the door to permanent relocation of refugees to Nauru and PNG.  Many senators and commentators would have told her to stop being so shrill and to stop following her wild imagination and that she should get back to the matter at hand.  Presumably the government thought that the High Court was locked out.  I am still not certain about that.  And time will tell no doubt when a challenge is ultimately brought.

    But meanwhile we have an arrangement designed and put in place by the Executive without parliamentary approval and without the opportunity for parliamentary disallowance.  This is a serious democratic deficit particularly when community leaders including all our bishops (and the Pope!) are questioning the morality of what is in place.

    There is an added public policy reason for seeking the parliamentary review.  The boats have now stopped.  The Abbott government is confident that the smuggling racket is smashed and that the Indonesians are now basically on side.  So the boats will remain stopped whether or not there is any one left on Nauru or Manus Island.  So what ethical or political imperative is there for keeping people locked up in such inhumane circumstances?  When the inevitable royal commission on all this is ultimately convened, we would all save the taxpayers many millions in compensation if we could terminate the gulags as quickly as possible.  If we were serious about looking after those people, we would have sent in our own military rather than contracting the matter out to inexperienced, profit seeking corporations and the well motivated Salvos.  It is imperative that our Senators on the cross benches take a long hard look at this once they are all in place next month, for the good of the detainees, and for the good of our democracy.

     

  • Persecution of Tamils.

    Last weekend Tamil asylum seeker Leo Seemanpillai committed suicide in Geelong. His colleagues are bereft as a result. They believe that he feared deportation back to Sri Lanka and would suffer persecution. Tamil refugee advocate Aran Mylvaganam said ‘the particular area where Leo is from you are automatically branded as a Tamil Tiger sympathasiser if you get deported back to Sri Lanka and Leo had genuine fears of being tortured by the Sri Lankan army and possibly even getting killed … if he was sent back to Sri Lanka’.

    The Human Rights Law Centre released a report last month in which it expressed serious concerns first about the actions of the Sri Lankan government, supported by Australia, to stop Tamils fleeing from Sri Lanka. The second concern was that Australia’s ‘enhanced screening processes’ was denying Sri Lankans access to proper refugee status determination. The report by the Human Rights Law Centre can be found at this link:

    http://hrlc.org.au/report-launch-australias-cooperation-with-sri-lanka-to-intercept-asylum-seekers-is-in-urgent-need-of-rethink/

    John Menadue

  • Mark Isaacs. The Salvos on Nauru.

    Judging the Salvation Army’s role in Nauru is difficult. Their job was to provide humanitarian support to asylum seekers in a detention centre that was established to deter desperate people from seeking protection by subjecting them to cruel conditions. The contradictory nature of the Salvation Army’s position meant they were damned by the government if they assisted the asylum seekers, and damned by their staff if they didn’t. Despite this the employees of the Salvation Army, my colleagues, showed utmost care for the asylum seekers we worked with and implemented a wide range of programs that alleviated some of the mental pressure placed upon these people This justified the need for a humanitarian organisation to act as a service provider within detention centres.

    Having said that, my introduction to Nauru highlights several issues in the Salvation Army’s implementation of their contract in Nauru that were not confined to my initial experiences, but rather became consistent, systemic failures.

    I was hired by the Salvation Army in September 2012 to work in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre as a support worker, or ‘mission worker’. The camp had been established just two weeks prior.  The Salvation Army were desperately hiring people to fly out to Nauru on four week contracts. Accounts from members of the Salvation Army suggest that the organisation wasn’t expecting the camp to be opened so quickly, that they thought they had more time to prepare.

    I was hired without a job interview and without training of any kind. I was given no concept of what work I was about to become involved in. There was no job description or mission brief provided to staff in these early days. There was no idea of what the Salvation Army hoped to achieve by accepting the contract to run the centre. There were no clear directives to the staff in how we could meet these mysterious goals of the mission that one would assume the Salvation Army had discussed before accepting the contract. There was no education provided on the type of men we would be working with; where they came from, their cultural sensitivities, the types of stories we might hear, or why they were coming to Australia. I was given no guidance on how to work with traumatised refugees, or mentally ill clients who could be, and some proved to be, suicidal. The only advice given was to ‘go out and help the men’. My experiences were not isolated. In fact, in the first deployments, the most common characteristic of the Salvation Army support workers was an inexperience in working with asylum seekers and refugees.

    The Salvation Army have since responded to these claims by stating that the role of a support worker was to ‘fulfil unskilled duties in support of the provision of basic needs for transferees’ and that ‘support worker roles typically do not require individuals to have particular skills or experience’. The Salvos also refute my claim that I wasn’t interviewed prior to being offered a position in Nauru, suggesting that a phone interview was conducted before deploying me. I would assert that this brief phone conversation was not a sufficient format through which to assess my skills for a role as important as a support worker for asylum seekers. Having said that, the role I was taking did not require me to have ‘particular skills or experience’.

    I believe that, although the Salvation Army’s motives were admirable in accepting the brief to assist some of the world’s most desperate people, the inexperience of their managing staff in working in the refugee sector was detrimental to the well-being of the men they were contracted to care for and the workers they employed to enact this task. The statement mentioned above, provided almost eighteen months after my initial deployment, either demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the needs of asylum seekers in a place such as Nauru, or an equally complete disregard for the workers’ and the asylum seekers’ welfare.

    I believe that from day one there emerged a trend of the government pressuring the Salvation Army into submission. It was a commonly accepted view amongst my colleagues that the government would argue points of contention by threatening to ‘tear up the contract’, and the Salvation Army management would toe the line. Often this was at the expense of the asylum seekers well-being and that of Salvation Army staff. Greg Lake, former head of the Department of Immigration in Nauru, states that the Salvos were contracted by the government as the lead agency in the Processing Centre. The ramifications of the Salvos inability to assume the lead agency role meant that the humanitarian care for the men suffered.

    I can support all my claims with a number of examples, but in this blog I have only space for one.

    It took the Salvation Army over a month to hire their first professional case managers whose role it was to monitor the men’s well-being, a responsibility that we were led to believe was one of the Salvation Army’s contractual obligations. Prior to this Wilson Security assumed the responsibility of welfare services. The first two Salvo case managers were expected to establish case management practices in a camp that housed over two hundred men, the numbers increasing weekly. The impracticality of my colleague’s workload became apparent when one of her clients became involved in a prolonged hunger strike. The Department of Immigration demanded a file be presented on the client, a file that did not exist. Rather than support my colleague, Salvation Army management demanded she write a case file retrospectively.

    I believe the Salvos did not do enough to defend the human rights of the asylum seekers, and that this was a disservice, not only to the men imprisoned in Nauru, but to the Australian public who could rightly assume that the presence of a humanitarian organisation in Nauru would mean that human rights would be upheld and if those human rights were being abused, then the Salvos would voice their concerns.

    In summation, I believe that although the original motives of the Salvation Army were admirable, the implementation of the ‘Nauru mission’ suffered due to inexperience, poor preparation, and the Salvation Army’s inability to defend the asylum seekers’ human rights and handle government pressure. This resulted in a far more oppressive atmosphere for inmates that could have been avoided. Furthermore, the lack of respect shown to their own employees has left many embittered against the organisation and the experience of working in Nauru.

    Having recently been employed as a case manager for an asylum seeker settlement service in Sydney, I see how organisations can work in this intricate political space of advocating for clients while still being contracted by the government, reinforcing my belief that the role of humanitarian support in these camps is essential to the asylum seekers’ welfare.

    Mark Isaacs also wrote a guest blog which was posted on March 28 – ‘Deterring boat arrivals’.

     

    Mark Isaacs is the author of ‘The Undesirables: Inside Nauru’

     

    www.markjisaacs.com

    https://twitter.com/MarkJIsaacs

    https://www.facebook.com/isaacsmark1

     

  • Walter Hamilton. Postcard from Poland and Auschwitz

    Poland this month is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its rebirth as a democratic state. It is also marking 10 years since it became a member of the European Union. The country thus provides an interesting vantage point from which to observe Europe’s schizophrenic politics.

    To the west––notably in the UK, France and Germany––so-called Eurosceptic parties took the spoils in recent elections for the Strasbourg Parliament (with every intention, too, of being spoilers); to the east, meanwhile, Ukraine is struggling to attach as much of itself as Vladimir Putin will allow to the EU locomotive. It is the Disenchanted versus the New Believers. While voters in the west have flocked to rightwing parties opposed to sharing their baguette with new arrivals, in the east, where they’re still biting on black bread (to extend the metaphor), and where stateless Africans are scarce, most believe the opportunities flowing from European unity far outweigh the costs.

    Today’s Poland is where Ukraine hopes to be in a decade or two––which is why Kiev is willing to give almost anything––including, tragically, a measure of its people’s blood––to grab on to the EU. Poland, they tell me, is the only country in Europe to have experienced 20 years of uninterrupted growth. Able for the time being to use its own (undervalued) currency, it is experiencing a tourism boom, while the many new manufacturing and distribution plants of international firms erected on the periphery of major cities attest to an investment surge.

    That’s not to say Poland’s EU journey has been all smooth sailing. One might describe the general appearance of the country as one of ‘receding decay’. The downtown precincts of cities like Poznan and Wroclaw are sophisticated, smartly dressed and thriving; the suburbs tend to be graffiti-scarred and grey. The new rich want more, while many others on meagre wages need to work long hours to stay afloat. In a Warsaw supermarket, a woman of 70+ years who served me at the checkout at 8am was still there when I went back 11 hours later. Our host in Warsaw, a retired teacher, also in her 70s and still working part time, bemoaned the 13% national unemployment rate and the much higher joblessness (26%) among the young. As we drove out of the capital she pointed out abandoned industrial plant (Soviet-era and obsolete), which she blamed on the EU experience. And where was the livestock that every family farm once proudly displayed? Disappeared under mass-produced food imports. But if I detected nostalgia for the past, she quickly corrected me: ‘Communism was awful through and through; nobody, except perhaps some party boss, wants to go back to that’. Food queues are no more, inflation is zero and, even if unacceptably high, current unemployment is below the long-term trend, and falling.

    Poland, historically a gateway between East and West, now emphatically faces west. When President Obama was in Warsaw recently, the Polish government repeated its request for NATO to establish new bases on its territory. Sensibly, Obama refused to be drawn.

    If Polish history teaches us one thing, it is that all frontiers lie: they lie to those who believe they can secure the homeland, and they represent lies to those who wish to change them. Heading north out of Krakow, our driver Michael pointed out two buildings on either side of the road ahead. ‘Prepare your passports,’ he joked. ‘We are now leaving Austria and about to enter Prussia.’ The border checkpoints, operational until 1918, stand as reminders of the eighteenth-century partition of Poland when it ceased to exist as a nation (as it did again from 1939). The idea behind European union––distinct nations united by a shared destiny––is an undoubted improvement for Poles after centuries of partition and domination. Affirming this, as they do, they take a wary glance back in the direction of their old nemesis, Russia. Though the fighting in Ukraine seemed far removed from the beer and food-laden tables of Krakow’s teeming Old Square, the ordinary Poles I spoke with believed Moscow’s territorial ambitions extend well beyond Crimea.

    Frontiers are a European obsession these days, much as they are in Australia. With internal borders essentially open, an unauthorized entrant can make his or her way to any of the member nations of the EU. If they survive their journey in a leaky boat across the Mediterranean (Italy has received 40,000 unauthorised arrivals, mainly crossing from Libya, so far this year), theoretically they might end up in Bayeux or Bonn or Birmingham (or so the sloganising goes; the reality is somewhat different). This, more than any other issue, is hardening attitudes and inflaming rhetoric, and threatening the European experiment. New scapegoats have been found to blame for economic dysfunction and social stress, in a pattern that has terrible antecedents.

    In Block 6 at Auschwitz, the main hallway is covered with photographs of former inmates of the notorious concentration camp. Nothing, not all the books and films, can completely prepare you for a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is fine and warm on the day we are there, and many hundreds of tourists are being guided through the two camps (Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, the purpose-built extermination camp, is many times bigger than the other). Among the images on the wall at Block 6, I come across that of a Polish girl aged about 10. The caption tells me that she survived only a fortnight after being brought to Auschwitz in 1942. My eye alights on the next photograph: her identical twin sister.

    There is something about their expressions I cannot immediately fathom. Bewilderment I see, certainly, and fear; but what is the other thing? It would be grotesque to compare the sufferings of the 1.3 million people, mainly Jews, who perished in Auschwitz to the present-day treatment of asylum seekers in Italy or Australia, and I do not intend to do so; and yet, as I walk past the rows of photographs, taking in the individual faces and reading the individual names, it occurs to me how easy it is to forget that, behind barbed wire somewhere bleak and inhospitable today, and also incarcerated for no crime and provided no date of release, are many nameless, faceless individuals for whom we have a duty of care. It becomes a compelling thought when in Auschwitz, but it should not be necessary to travel here to feel it.

    And now I understand what it is about the portraits of the twin sisters that has so puzzled and disturbed me. In their anguished moment before the camera they ceased to be photographer’s subjects, just two more victims of a distant horror. Rather, they became cameras pointing at us, capturing an image of our souls, interrogating our hearts and consciences. It seems facile to speak of ‘ghosts’ in such a context, but for the first time in my life I truly felt that the mirror had been reversed.

    Walter Hamilton is the author of Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story.

     

  • Hugh Mackay. Immoral acts – that’s one way to stop the boats.

    “No boats have arrived for 36 days!” That was the recent proud claim of our immigration minister, Scott Morrison, delivered in a tone that suggested we should all cheer such a wonderful accomplishment.

    In fact, given the strategies employed to achieve this result, we should hang our heads in shame. We are living through a dark period in our cultural history where politicians like Morrison are actively encouraging a dulling of our moral sense by appealing to that most dangerous moral principle of all: “The end justifies the means”.

    It’s not just this government, of course: the stain on our national conscience has been spreading for years, through the life of several governments from both sides of politics. And an odd things about this situation is that our leaders – normally so timid in the face of the polls – are seriously out of step with the majority of Australians (who, according to two reputable national surveys, favour rapid, onshore processing of asylum-seekers’ claims).

    We can tip-toe around this and speak of “human rights abuses”, or a lack of compassion, or a failure to honour our international treaty obligations. But why mince words in the face of the intentional brutality – psychological and physical – being inflicted on asylum-seekers imprisoned on Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island, by an elected Australian government? Why not call our asylum-seeker policy what it is: immoral.

    It’s immoral because it treats people who have committed no crime as if they were criminals. It’s immoral because it fails to honour that most basic of all moral principles: treat others as we ourselves would wish to be treated. Even if we add the caveat “in the circumstances”, the principle doesn’t go away.

    There are many situations in which we are bound to treat people more harshly than we would wish to be treated ourselves: we do it with criminals; we do it with enemies; we do it with people we’re retrenching, or lovers we’re abandoning. But even in situations like those, members of a self-proclaimed civil society are obliged to treat everybody with appropriate dignity and respect – two ingredients glaringly absent from life in an Australian detention centre.

    Our asylum-seeker policy is also immoral because it involves bad behaviour in the pursuit of a “good” goal. Given the vast scale of the world’s refugee crisis, it’s arguable whether stopping the boats is, in fact, a morally praiseworthy goal, but let’s accept, for the moment, that it is (and stopping rapacious people-smugglers is undeniably good). Precisely because it is a good goal, everything done in pursuit of that goal must be good. If not – if we fall for the mad idea that we can behave badly in pursuit of a good goal – then we have compromised our own integrity and tarnished the very values we are claiming to uphold.

    If you embrace the idea that the end justifies the means, then you’ll be stuck with accepting torture as a legitimate way of extracting useful information. You’ll accept that bribery and corruption are justifiable ways of achieving political or commercial goals. You’ll endorse assassination as a legitimate tool of the political struggle.

    Is that us? Is that the moral framework Australians want our governments to adopt when dealing with hapless souls who arrive here, by whatever means, as asylum seekers? Are we so committed to the sloganistic ideal of “stopping the boats” that we think it’s morally okay to incarcerate such people – men, women and children – in conditions deliberately designed to dehumanise them, rob them of hope and destroy their faith in the future (including their faith in Australia as an honourable, civilised, compassionate society). Do we seriously believe this strategy can be justified on the grounds that it might discourage others from trying to come here?

    Do we think it’s morally acceptable to condemn authentic refugees to the crushing uncertainty of temporary protection visas, and to deny them the right to work here? (Economic stupidity, as well: fancy deciding it’s better to support them than to encourage them to support themselves and, in the process, make a useful contribution to our economy.)

    We have become participants in a tragedy that will attract as much opprobrium in the future as the “stolen generations” and White Australia do now. Having chosen to behave immorally, we are setting ourselves up not only for international condemnation, but also for massive compensation claims in the future and, no doubt, yet another hollow apology to the thousands of people we have abused because we adopted that tacky mantra “whatever it takes”.

    If we really want to stop the boats, we should demand that our politicians, diplomats and aid agencies find morally acceptable ways of doing so. To pursue such a difficult goal in a state of moral blindness is hazardous in the extreme.

    There’s an ironic little twist to this tale. Many Australians who support the present brutal policy seem to think they are defending “Christian values” against an invasion of infidels. But isn’t the very essence of those values that we should show kindness to strangers, offer support to the weak and disadvantaged, and succour to the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed who come knocking at our door?

    Hugh Mackay is a social researcher and author.

     

  • Tuong Quang Luu, AO. Cambodia, a deterrent or an opportunity lost?

     

    My old friend looked straight at the stage with a strong determination, and perhaps, a touch of sadness. Sitting next to him, I sensed that the events of 60 years ago for Bern Brent, were rolling back to him as he mentally relived his teenage years. The occasion was a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Dunera Boys’ arrival at SydneyHarbour in 1940.

    I first met Bern in the late 1950’s when he taught me English as a lecturer at the University of Saigon. He was my first contact with Australia. Unbeknown to me at the time, Bern had been a ‘displaced person’ or an unattached refugee minor prior to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. It was an unforeseen irony for both of us that I should follow in his foot steps a quarter of a century later.

    Berlin-born to parents of Jewish background, the 16 year-old Bern was sent by his mother to London to escape the Nazi tyranny and persecution. His search for safety went terribly wrong when he and thousands of others in the same circumstance were shipped on HMT Dunera by mistake to Australia. He became unwittingly a ‘boat person’ joining the First Fleeters in 1788 and other subsequent arrivals by boats from the United Kingdom. The Crown or more correctly His / Her Majesty’s Government organised these transportations as a state policy, so no one and much less the Aboriginals dared to label the organisers as today’s ‘people’s smugglers’

    Indeed, Australia has resettled many hundreds of thousands of displaced persons mainly from post-war Europe and refugees from all parts of the world, including those who came directly to Australia.

    In 1977, Hieu Van Le, a young man in his twenties, waded with his wife and scores of other exhausted Vietnamese asylum seekers to the shores of Darwin in search of freedom. Found to be refugees, they were allowed to stay permanently in this country. Hieu Van Le has subsequently gone on to become the longest serving member and chairperson of South Australia Multicultural and Ethnic Affairs Commission, and is currently lieutenant governor of the state.

    Of course not everyone amongst the Australians of a refugee background can be as successful as Bern Brent or Hieu Van Le in their respective careers, or as Frank Lowy, an entrepreneur in the business world. By and large, surviving refugees tend to possess a strong will to overcome calamities and generally demonstrate a good entrepreneurial spirit to succeed. Their contribution to Australia has never been in doubt and their commitment to this country as a democracy has never been questioned.

    Until 2013, Australia normally allowed on-shore asylum seekers who were found to be Convention refugees to resettle, subject to security clearance. Only when both sides of politics, in my view, competed against one another for electoral advantage that denial of a permanent residency in Australia became part of a suite of deterrent measures against potential asylum seekers.

    But why was Cambodia chosen?

    The government has said correctly that Cambodia is now a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention. But Cambodia – and for that matter, Papua New Guinea and Nauru – are the poorest amongst developing countries. One can assume that these three countries have agreed to settle refugees only on the basis of generous financial aid from Australia, but one cannot assume that Australian tax payers’ monies will be properly spent as intended, because local corruption is rampant.

    Cambodia has promised that it will provide welfare and education to refugee families who come ‘voluntarily’ as settlers, while at the same time failing to look after its own people, including around 1 million ethnic Vietnamese Khmers without citizenship, employment and education.

    As a signatory of the 1951 Convention, Cambodia has an abysmal record of treating refugees and at times has sold them down the river as in their dealings with Beijing (relating to Uighur asylum seekers), and Hanoi (relating to Vietnamese dissidents). Some Vietnamese dissidents supposedly under the UNHCR protection in Cambodia had to escape a second time to Thailand to avoid forced repatriation back to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

    To force those asylum seekers who are found to be refugees by Australia under the Australian legal mechanism is not just to deny them a legitimate desire to live in a democracy after fleeing authoritarian regimes, but also to take away from Australia a group of potentially good contributors

    The writer came to Australia as a Vietnamese refugee and is a former Head of SBS Radio (1989-2006)

     

  • Elaine Pearson. Cambodia: A poor choice for Australia’s refugee resettlement

    “It’s not about whether they are poor, it’s about whether they can be safe,” Australia’s Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said in defence of Australia’s plan to resettle refugees currently housed on Nauru to Cambodia. It appears Cambodia and Australia are in the final stages of signing such an agreement.

    But is Cambodia a safe place for refugees?

    Not if you’re from China. In 2009, under pressure from China, Cambodia forcibly deported 20 ethnic Uighurs back to China. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had already issued “persons of concern” letters to the Uighurs—most had fled China for Cambodia after July 2009 protests in Urumqi that the Chinese authorities brutally supressed. We know some of those returned to China have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

    Not if you’re from Vietnam. Human Rights Watch has long reported on the forced return of Khmer Krom activist monks straight into the hands of Vietnamese security services. Cambodian authorities have used the threat of forced return to Vietnam to stamp out any activist activities, preventing monks from forming, joining or meeting with local Khmer Krom groups, distributing bulletins, or participating in protests.

    Cambodia is not particularly safe if you’re Cambodian. Freedom of expression, assembly and association are under regular attack, while corruption is rampant. Let’s hope no resettled refugee end up in Cambodia’s courts, where matters are decided by bribes and political influence, not law and facts. Decades of authoritarian rule under Prime Minister Hun Sen have empowered Cambodian security forces to commit abuses such as killings, torture, and arbitrary detention with impunity. Those especially vulnerable include government critics, activists, journalists, and those living on the margins.

    Human Rights Watch has documented the arbitrary arrest, detention and mistreatment of “undesirables” housed in squalid detention centres run by the Ministry of Social Welfare, where beatings and rapes by guards continue with impunity. Where will the refugees Australia sends away be housed, and which Cambodian ministry will be responsible for their care and integration? What freedoms will these asylum seekers have to live where they please and get education or find jobs?  How long before the authorities might consider them “undesirables” as well?

    These are among a long list of questions that the Australian government has avoided, stonewalling on the specifics of what the agreement will entail.

    Another key question is what has the Australian government offered Cambodia in return for agreeing to resettle refugees? Cambodian officials deny being offered money, though it is hard to believe there will be no economic benefit to Cambodia.

    When Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison made recent visits to Cambodia, they failed to speak publicly about the serious human rights concerns there. Hun Sen, in power for 28 years, has not of late had to worry that Australia would be a regional critic of his series of flawed elections and a coup and a long history of human rights abuses.

    Australia sold out human rights in Sri Lanka, appeasing the Rajapaksa regime and protecting it from international criticism rather than trying to protect Sri Lankans from abuses by their government. Ostensibly, this was in order to “stop the boats” of Sri Lankans coming to Australia, and ensure Sri Lanka’s cooperation in sending Sri Lankans back home.

    Australia should not make the same shameful mistake with Cambodia. Hun Sen may have maintained a grip on power for decades, but opposition is growing. Australia should not discount the voice of the opposition which has strongly condemned using Cambodia for Australia’s refugees.

    Cambodia is one of the few Asian countries that is a party to the Refugee Convention. Yet it has long made a mockery of its refugee commitments.  Australia should help Cambodia become a rights-respecting, safe and stable place — but the best way is by holding the government to account for its abuses while providing capacity-building assistance.

    Australia needs to stop setting a bad model for the region by shirking its obligations. What incentive is there for countries in the region to ratify the Refugee Convention, when they see Australia and Cambodia render signatures meaningless through their actions? Australia’s policy of sending asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea and Nauru for months on end with no long-term prospects has been bad enough. When detainees are considering “voluntary returns” to war-torn Syria, then we know how limited their options are.

    Australia needs to end the suffering and indecision on Manus and Nauru, but not by sending people to Cambodia. Rather, it should do what’s fair and right by abiding by the long-standing principle that refugees are deserving of a durable solution. Australia should take the responsibility to examine asylum seekers’ claims, return those found not to be in need of protection, and integrate refugees who cannot return to their home countries.

    Australia, not Cambodia, has the capacity to restore their rights and enable them to become productive and self-sustaining contributors to their host country.

    Elaine Pearson is Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. 

  • Michael Keating. Part 2. The Budget and our Values

    The Budget is always the clearest guide to a government’s priorities and values. In the present instance, the Coalition Government wants to define this budget as being all about “contribution”.  Their rhetoric is that we should all make a contribution towards restoring the nation’s finances. Spreading the burden would be fair and therefore consistent with Australian values. But nothing could be further from the truth. Disadvantaged and low income people are being asked to make very big sacrifices, while most of us will be little troubled, and a few very rich people will be better off as a result of this Budget.

    In addition, not only is the Budget unfair, but it also represents a deliberate attack on our social capital. Our aspirations for an inclusive society are being trashed, as first the Government demonised refugees, and now has moved on to demonise unemployed people, and tear up the grants to many community based organisations which are critical to maintaining our social capital and an inclusive society.

    As many people recognised immediately, the notion of six months on and six months off unemployment benefit up to the age of 30 is appalling. The Minister for Social Security says that now unemployed people will have to get off their couch and look for work, which shows how little he knows about the circumstances of the people he is meant to be responsible for, and/or just how perverted his values are. Anybody who has worked with long term unemployed people, or who has talked to those who do work with them, would know how much the vast majority of job seekers want a job. The reality is that most often these people are the victims of circumstances beyond their control, and without adequate skills they are simply not suitable for the jobs that are available.

    Furthermore, there is nothing new about a policy of “work or learn”.  It has been the official doctrine for many years, but unemployed people cannot learn or work when their training funds have been slashed by over $1billion in this budget. As a partial offset the Government now proposes a modest increase in job subsidies, but years of experience has shown that such subsidies are relatively ineffective and do not lead to continuing employment.

    The real problem is that many long-term unemployed people lack basic employability skills, so they are not employable in the modern labour market even with a subsidy, or for that matter with a lower minimum wage. They need training to get these skills, preferably training tied to a job, and in addition, they typically need a lot of support services and mentoring; indeed the reason why they are unemployed is because they suffer multiple disadvantages and all their sources of disadvantage need to be addressed in a coordinated manner.   At present this coordination and associated support services are provided most often by community-based organisations, but this Budget has also slashed the funding of many such bodies. In short if this is Joe Hockey’s ladder of opportunity then he has cut the bottom rungs off.

    Other vulnerable groups who will suffer as a result of this budget include some of the world’s poorest people who depend upon the generosity of foreign aid, which was the biggest single cut in the Budget, and indigenous Australians whose funding has also been severely cut. Less tough but still significant is the impost on single income families. An unemployed lone parent will experience a cut in disposable income of 11 per cent. While a single income family living on a near average annual wage of $65,000 will lose almost 10 per cent of their disposable income in 2017-18 because of changes to family benefits and the scrapping of the school kids bonus.

    But if the most disadvantaged people are to be hounded and not supported, what about the rest of us, and what are we contributing under this Budget? The fact is that the majority of Australian households are comprised of healthy people with two incomes, plus a further substantial number of healthy one person households. Essentially this majority could spend a dollar or two more a week on health, another dollar on petrol, and several dollars less on electricity after repeal of the carbon tax. In sum the majority are being asked to contribute next to nothing, and no doubt that was intentional so that this majority of households will not have a financial reason to change their vote.

    And then if you are in the top 4 per cent of income earners you will have to pay the 2 per cent “temporary Budget repair levy”.  But even if you are in the top 1 per cent income bracket, with an annual income of $300,000, this levy will still only cost you around 1 per cent of your income. While if you are a super rich miner you will be laughing with no mining tax, no carbon tax and, despite the call for a ‘contribution’, the diesel fuel rebate continues.

    Other areas of expenditure that have been singled out for cutting are the arts and research other than the always favoured medical research. And of course the War Memorial has had extra funding added to its already very generous base, while all the other national institutions’ funding has been severely cut.

    In short this Budget seems to reflect a very narrow conception of society and our duties to one another as citizens. There is still plenty of ‘entitlement’ for those people and organisations that are favoured by the government, but the basic inequality of sacrifice and the bias in the areas targeted for savings in this budget is deeply disturbing. Indeed this Budget seems to reject;

    1. the traditional Australian notion of a ‘fair go’ where those who suffer from misfortune should be given a helping hand, and be assisted to realise their potential capabilities; and
    2. the state has an obligation to assist community-based organisations and to provide adequately for those things that we enjoy collectively, which enrich our culture, and which are critical elements of our social capital.

     

     

  • Michael Kelly SJ. Why Protestants are more popular than Catholics in China

    Questions abound over the recent vicious actions of the Chinese government towards Christians in the prosperous Zhejiang Province just south of Shanghai. The actions of the government during the fortnight after Easter against both Protestants and Catholics are unprecedented in recent decades and, justifiably, have received world attention.

    As with all actions in a country as vast as China, whose government could never be accused of transparency, it is difficult to discover who is making the decisions and what they hope to achieve. But one issue that has surprised many people outside China is both the size of its Christian population and the ruthlessness, born only of fear, that the government’s violence displays.

    A recent claim by a US-based Chinese academic to London’s Telegraph newspaper – that China would have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030 – was not only exaggerated but also factually wrong. Will Brazil (200 million Christians) and Nigeria (85 million Christians), for example, simply stop producing Christians in the next 15 years?

    The reality is that no one knows how many Christians there are in China. In fact, there’s good reason why Christians do not declare their growth. Just look at what’s happened in Zhejiang in the last fortnight, where the growth of the Christian community has been declared “unsustainable” by the authorities who have command of assessments of the “sustainability” of faith communities.

    Put your head up as a Christian in China and it will be cut off. Catholics have maintained a standard figure for their own numbers for three decades. It was 12 million in 1980, 12 million in 1990, 12 million in 2000 and – surprise, surprise – it was 12 million in 2010. No one in any religion declares real figures in China. It only attracts government attention and then persecution.

    That there is a massive growth spurt among Christians in China is indisputable. What has not been addressed is what has made the exponential growth among Protestants possible, far outstripping the growth among Catholics.

    But it’s not something the officials know anything about because they have such a rudimentary and uninformed view of what Christianity is that they are the last to know what’s happening. For example, only the Chinese government thinks that Protestants and Catholics are separate religions.

    They are two of the five it recognizes along with Buddhism, Islam and its homegrown religion, Daoism. No one else in the world thinks Protestants and Catholics are anything but parts of Christianity.

    Whatever one is to make of the uninformed view that the Chinese authorities have, Protestant Christianity is growing far more quickly and extensively than Catholicism. Why?

    Maybe the Chinese authorities have something to tell us. After Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949, China was established along lines that the Communists learned about from their then friends, the Soviet Union, and the real maker of 20th Century Communism, Vladimir Lenin, the founder and first father of the Soviet Union.

    The Chinese Government manages religious groups through the Religious Affairs Bureau, a department of the Communist Party’s United Front organization for controlling the country’s disparate movements, groups and institutions such as Protestants and Catholics.

    The Catholic Church in China, divided as it remains, is caught: its strength is its weakness. Everywhere in the world and with local variations in China, its universality (with an accepted pattern of worldwide relationships), its institutions (parishes, seminaries, welfare services, publishing houses), its statuses (clergy and religious) and its ceremonies (the sacraments) are visible and remain the continuous and coherent identifications that draw or repel membership and participation.

    In a Communist country, they are an easy target for a Leninist administration intent on detailed control. And then, when some comply with government structures while other Catholics see those acting in such a way as cowardly and cooperating with the enemy, many form the view that rather than complicate their lives, they leave the established and regulated Church well alone.

    The same applied to Protestant denominations and was institutionalized through the three self- movements (self–government, self–financing and self-propagation; or no foreign missioners). This approach run through the United Front’s Religious Affairs Bureau captured the attention and controlled the practices of Protestant Christians throughout the People’s Republic.

    But the recent explosion in Protestant Christian numbers has happened outside this rubric. Most of the buildings, churches and Christian gathering points have been built on local initiative without government authorization. And most of the communities around the often triumphalist buildings that have been damaged or demolished in recent times in China began life as small communities of little more than a dozen people – gathering in friend’s homes outside the net of government supervision.

    Protestant Christianity, in contrast to the institution-based approach to community building familiar to Catholics, has thrived on its nimble, light-footed and adaptable response to local opportunities. In China, it has grown out of small communities sharing prayer, Bible study and videos at home or in a work place. At times, Christian businessmen and manufacturers have workplace Christian groups that form and meet for prayer and Bible study on their business premises.

    Meeting all over Eastern China in clusters of no more than 12, groups gather for what Catholics would call primary evangelization. Two-hour Bible study programs conducted over two to three months and often aided by a Chinese version of the Alpha Course provide a neat and compact way to introduce Christianity. The Alpha Course is a 12-part video series first created by an Anglican priest in London, Nicky Gumble, that has gone worldwide and has a Catholic version.

    These groups are unencumbered and unregulated by the Religious Affairs Bureau. Multiply the dozen members of these groups by thousands of such small groups in homes and work places and you reach hundreds of thousands pretty quickly. But when you get to that scale, as China has in the last 20 years, it’s not long until you need a larger, dedicated building – a church. That’s where these emergent communities have run into the brick wall of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the fear that the entire Chinese political leadership has had of any group, especially a religious one, that it can’t control.

    Fr Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com and is based in Bangkok.

  • Refugees to Cambodia

    ​The Australian government appears to have struck a deal with Cambodia to house 100 refugees in exchange for a massive increase in foreign aid. But Cambodia is far from a safe place to settle.

    (more…)

  • Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley…Regional Cooperation on refugees

    In November last year Penne Mathew and Tristan Harley of the Australian National University undertook field work in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia to examine the treatment of refugees in those countries and to discuss the possibilities of improved regional cooperation amongst themselves and also with resettlement countries such as Australia. I am strongly of the view that shared responsibility and cooperation is essential

    The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa recently put the case succinctly. “For Indonesia, the message is crystal clear: the cross border and complex nature of irregular movements of persons defies national solutions…There is no other recourse but to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach…a sense of burden sharing and common responsibility should be the basis for our cooperation.

    .John Menadue

    The Executive Summary and Recommendations follow. This report is based on fieldwork that Professor Penelope Mathew and Mr Tristan Harley conducted in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia in October – November 2013. The authors gratefully acknowledge all of the participants in our research who graciously offered their time, expertise and hospitality. The purpose of the fieldwork was to examine the treatment of refugees in each of the three countries and discuss the issue of regional cooperation with respect to refugees in the Southeast Asia region. Some key findings of the fieldwork are:

     

    a)      Thailand and Malaysia remain reluctant to become party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol because they believe that it will lead to an increase in the number of refugees arriving in their territory and they believe that there are associated security threats. On the other hand, ratification is currently part of Indonesia’s national agenda. However, there are concerns that this process has been stalled and may not be realised.

    b)      States in the Southeast Asia region have indicated a desire to cooperate with one another in the area of refugee protection, particularly through the Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime (the Bali Process) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). However, states continue to act unilaterally in ways that endanger refugees and cause friction among states. Current Australian policies undermine efforts at regional cooperation.

    c)      Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia recognise that regional cooperation is necessary in order to address the particular refugee situations that each country is facing individually and to tackle the initial causes of displacement in countries of origin. While ASEAN members adhere to the principle of non-interference in the sovereignty of other states, it was suggested that ASEAN could be an appropriate forum whereby states could assist countries of origin to minimise the need for persons to flee the country and seek asylum elsewhere.

    d)      Interviewees in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia suggested that resettlement programmes in the region should be increased and that states from outside the region should increase their efforts to help share the responsibility of hosting refugees.

    e)      Malaysia and Indonesia appear willing to consider granting refugees the right to work. However, there are strong concerns about how this policy would affect national migrant worker schemes and domestic labour supply. States are also concerned about the ‘pull factor’ that they perceive such a policy may produce.

    This report concludes by making recommendations for states to enhance the protection framework for refugees. These recommendations are divided into short, medium and long terms goals. Some key recommendations in this report include the following:

    a)      Skills training programmes should be established in countries of first asylum that prepare refugees for either resettlement to another country, voluntary return to their country of origin or local integration in the host county. These programmes can be funded by donor and resettlement countries;

    b)      Refugees should be granted the right to work in countries of first asylum and employment programmes for refugees should be established in areas and industries where there is high demand;

    c)      Refugees should be allowed to access health care at the same cost as nationals and refugee children should be allowed to access the public education system;

    d)      United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offices in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, should be expanded and more funding allocated with the particular focus of improving both speed and fairness of refugee status determination (RSD) procedures;

    e)      Resettlement states should increase their annual intakes to provide protection to a greater number of refugees and share responsibility with countries of first asylum.

    f)       New projects and programmes should be established which simultaneously aim to support both refugee communities and local communities hosting refugees; and

    g)      The 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol should be ratified by states in the region.

    Penelope Mathew is Freilich Professor, ANU College of Arts and Sciences

    Tristan Harley is Freilich Foundation Research Assistant at ANU.

     

  • Michael Sainsbury. Australia and Cambodia’s shady asylum seeker deal.

    Australia’s history of dealing with asylum seekers continues to spin into a dizzying spiral of contempt. Already under fire for shutting its doors to some of the world’s most vulnerable people, the Canberra government is now in talks with Cambodia, the latest in a rollcall of poor, dysfunctional neighbors to whom it will “outsource” its so-called asylum seeker problem.

    Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, who counts as a ‘success’ every asylum seeker he can banish, last week became the second member of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Cabinet to visit Cambodia this year, following Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s whistle-stop trip to Phnom Penh in February. Seemingly peripheral to the talks was any discussion of Cambodia’s own woeful rights record, and how that may impact on the refugees Australia is unwilling to shelter.

    Abbott’s aggressive but election-winning asylum seeker policy is a marked departure from Australia’s once proud record of handling those forced to flee their homelands. In the 1970s, the Liberal/National Party government under Malcolm Fraser threw the doors open to over 70,000 Vietnamese escaping the communist invasion from the North. That era is now confined to history – unlike most other western democracies, Australia wants to shirk its moral and ethical obligations to help the ever increasing numbers displaced by war, political oppression and persecution.

    The request for help from Cambodia, which relies on foreign aid for nearly half its annual budget, also coincides with Australia slashing billions of dollars in aid to the Southeast Asia region. Cambodia will receive money from Canberra if it does agree to take asylum seekers, but Prime Minister Hun Sen’s own record of embezzling large chunks of the state budget does little to boost confidence that the money will be spent on the welfare of those whom Australia deports to Cambodia.

    But back to Australia. The citizenry’s own fears of an asylum seeker “crisis” are grossly inflated, but have been used as a cynical ploy by politicians, notably Abbott, who campaigned on an anti-asylum seeker platform, to win votes. Australia has a per capita GDP that now ranks only behind oil-rich Norway and Singapore, and has to date been relatively sheltered from the global burden of accommodating refugees.

    According to figures from the UN Human Rights Commission, Australia had 10,900 asylum seekers in 2012. That year, Belgium had more than 14,000, as did Ecuador, still a developing country. France, where politicians and citizens alike fear imminent collapse due to the heavy refugee traffic, muddled along with almost 50,000 in 2012. Europe’s economic powerhouse, Germany, had 85,000.

    Pledges from the Abbott administration that the policy will alleviate pressure on the taxpayer to fund the wellbeing of asylum seekers runs into problems, given estimates that the outsourcing program will cost some US$2.85 billion. Papua New Guinea was reported to have received an initial US$25 million in “aid” in exchange for allowing Canberra to send human cargo to a now-notorious holding facility on Manu Island.

    So turning to Cambodia will do nothing to boost Australia’s global standing. Hun Sen, who has been in power for 36 years, has a less than stellar record with asylum seekers, having returned to possible incarceration people trying to escape to Cambodia from China and Vietnam upon request of the two governments who have helped to prop him up.

    His treatment of political opponents, lawyers, rights campaigners, thousands of whom have been either murdered, tortured or locked up in dark holes, should give further pause to Australia. Even the Australian Trade Department says: “A key disincentive to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has been the lack of an effective judicial and legal system and a poor corporate governance environment.”

    Apparently this hasn’t registered, and rights groups have accused Abbott of neglecting his obligations to international rights protocols.

    “It’s quite clear that Cambodia does not have any sort of appreciable service for refugees,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “They have a shoddy record of protecting refugees despite having ratified the refugee convention and there’s very little political commitment from the Cambodian government to ensure the ongoing support or safety of refugees.

    “One wonders how Australia thinks the Cambodian government would be in a better position to provide support and protection than Australia would be.”

    Tony Abbott and his lieutenants rail against the grubby human traffickers who take the money of people desperate to escape oppression by any means, shifting them across borders and across oceans on rickety boats. Yet they consciously move the very same human traffic, handing out cash for others to take the problem off their hands. All told, Australia’s prime minister wants to send people desperate to escape from oppressive regimes right back into the arms of another.

    Michael Sainsbury is a Bangkok based journalist who writes for www.ucanews.com

     

  • John Menadue. Using the military for political purposes

    In my blog of March 26 (below) ‘Using the military for political purposes’, I drew attention to three instances in which the Australian Defence Forces have been used, apparently willingly, to support the party-political aims of the government.

    That political support has now been stepped up several notches by the comments of the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Angus Campbell, on a government television advertisement.

    In a series of government advertisements on U-Tube, Angus Campbell, standing next to a sign ‘No way’ says ‘The message is simply, if you come to Australia illegally by boat there is no way you will ever make Australia home.’  Angus Campbell then adds ‘The Australian Government has introduced the toughest border protection measures ever … it is the policy and practice of the Australian Government to intercept any vessel that is seeking to illegally enter Australia and safely remove it beyond our waters.’

    In this government advertisement General Campbell goes far beyond operational responsibility for government policy. He has allowed himself, apparently willingly, to become an arm and an advocate for the government’s political policies.  John Menadue

    Repost follows.

    On March 20 guest blogger Susie Carleton drew attention to the blanket acceptance of accounts by our service people in treatment of asylum seekers despite the record, according to former Defence Minister Stephan Smith of 2000 incidents of mis- treatment within the military itself including sexual abuse.

    Last night’s 7.30 ABC program lent more credibility in my mind to the allegations against our service personnel in their treatment of asylum seekers.

    We need to examine carefully what our military is doing.

    In my blog of March 5 ‘The war on asylum seekers’, I drew attention to the misuse of the Australian military in Operation Sovereign Borders. That military style operation gives the impression that we are really being threatened and invaded and that our response to asylum seekers must be regarded as a military challenge. Operation Sovereign Borders also gives the government a threadbare excuse that the public is not entitled to be told what is really happening. ‘On water’ issues will not be discussed. The language is also about war. Tony Abbott told us that we are being invaded by boat people. Scott Morrison said that the government is ‘Using the full arsenal of measures’ to stop the boats. What should be a humanitarian issues backed by action by Customs and Immigration has become a war. Governments have used ‘the war on terrorism’ as an excuse for limiting our freedoms, ignoring our rights to information and exciting xenophobia. The same approach is now being made with the war on asylum seekers.

    Unfortunately, the Australian Defence Force is allowing itself to be drawn into this abuse of their real responsibility. They have allowed themselves to become part of a political cover-up in their involvement in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    But this misuse of the military by the government and the complicity of the military is not restricted to Operation Sovereign Borders. As reported in the Hobart Mercury of March 14, the Defence Chief David Hurley rebuked the Palmer United Party Senator-elect Jacqui Lambie. Jacqui Lambie, a ten-year military veteran, said ‘It’s clear from information that’s become public, and information received privately, that abuse, including sexual abuse in Australia’s Defence forces is an intractable problem’. She added that there was a ‘high level and poisonous culture of cover-up within Defence that has stopped abuse victims speaking out’. She was publicly rebuked by General Hurley in a letter in which he said that he was ‘alarmed’ by Ms Lambie’s use of emotive language to make accusations against senior military officers. He added ‘I encourage you in future to provide me an opportunity to address any matters of concern you may have rather than becoming aware of them through a media release. Ms Lambie reacted and accused General Hurley of using ‘patronising and condescending’ language. She said ‘For the head of Australia’s military, uninvited, to interfere with the public work of a democratically elected representative, attacks the very foundation of our system of democratic government’. General Hurley obviously thinks that ex-military people, particularly women, are fair game. The Minister for Defence has said nothing.

    Not to be outdone by this bullying and abuse by General Hurley, Tony Abbott decided that he would join in during the South Australian election campaign. A Liberal Party banner was displayed at a Liberal campaign event at an RAAF base at Edinburgh. When this politically partisan act occurred on a military base, with the inappropriate use of the military, Tony Abbott’s office said there was no problem and the Defence minister avoided the issue by saying that he was away.

    If the ADF continues to allow itself to be drawn into political partisanship as in Operation Sovereign Borders, the Tasmanian election and the South Australian election, Australia and the ADF will pay a heavy price. The ADF is a creation of the Australian government. It must act honourably and miscreants brought to account. It must never be part of a party-political operation. The ADF must never identify itself with the Liberal Party or any other party.

     

  • Ben Saul. Australia’s Guantanamo problem.

    Ben Saul has written an article for the New York Times about the imprisonment of 52 people in Australia for up to nearly five years without trial. Secret evidence has been presented against them. They have no prospect of release. 

    Read the full article from the New York Times by following the link below.

    Ben Saul is Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney.

    John Menadue

     

    http://sydney.edu.au/news/law/436.html?newscategoryid=64&newsstoryid=13274