Pearls and Irritations

Category: Immigration

  • No Room at the Inn – Asylum Seekers in Australia, Christmas 2013. Guest blogger: Kerry Murphy

    In the time approaching Christmas, asylum seekers in Australia have been the target for increasingly harsh and punitive policies from the new Government.  None of this is really surprising as the Coalition policy documents stated the broad outline of their intentions.   It may help to outline the recent major events and to put them in context.

    No one is illegal

    Mr Abbott has often stated ‘‘This government will never allow people who come here illegally by boat to gain permanent residency in Australia.’’ [1].  This is an example of the incorrect use of the word ‘illegal’.  Under the Migration Act, people are either lawful non-citizens (s 13) or unlawful non-citizens (s14) – illegal is not mentioned.  There is no punishment for being unlawful, but you face detention and removal from Australia unless you have a visa application in process.  Until September 1994, it was an offence to be ‘íllegal’ but the offence was repealed in September 1994.

    The use of the word ‘illegal’ creates a negative connotation mainly against asylum seekers and this is reinforced by linking asylum seekers with people smugglers.  People smuggling is an offence in Australian law and also in several overseas jurisdictions.  Asylum seekers are fleeing persecution and using smugglers is a common way of escaping persecution.  However by linking the two, and then incorrectly calling the asylum seekers ‘illegal’ – they are stigmatised and seen as undesirable to the general public.

    Temporary Protection Visas

    There are several recent changes in the law which also target asylum seekers.  The first was the reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) on 18 October for those arriving without a visa.  The TPV is only for 3 years, and does not allow the refugee to apply for any other visa nor to sponsor their immediate family.  It was documented as causing psychological harm in the Howard era, and the return to such a punitive visa for people found to be refugees and in need of protection is seriously disturbing.[2]

    The TPV regulations were disallowed by the Senate on 1 December but the same day, the Minister retaliated by capping the number of protection visas to be granted until 1 July 2014 at 1650.[3]  Last year there were 7504 protection visas granted, including 2555 to those arriving on visas and subsequently being granted a protection visa.  Already 1650 was met so it meant no-one could be granted a protection visa until the new Immigration Year.  This affected those refugees who had not come without a visa, but had a visa on arrival and subsequently applied for a protection visa.  Then on 19 December this was revoked after a High Court challenge was commenced.[4]

     

    Abolishing Complementary Protection

    Then the Migration Amendment (Regaining Control Over Australia’s Protection Obligations) Bill was introduced.[5]   The Bill will abolish Complementary Protection.   How control over “Australia’s Protection Obligations” was ever lost was not explained by the explanatory memorandum.  Complementary Protection (CP) was introduced under Labor and took effect from 24 March 2012.  CP introduced a mechanism for people to access protection under the non-refoulement (not be sent back) obligations under the Convention Against Torture (CAT), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and other international Human Rights Instruments.

    This long overdue reform brought into Australian law provisions which already existed in other similar countries such as Canada, UK, New Zealand and the EU.  The only way of accessing such protection in Australia, when it could not be shown it was for a Convention Refugee reason, was to seek the personal unreviewable and non-transparent discretionary intervention of the Minister.   This is only possible after you lose at Immigration and at the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT).  Whilst such a power is needed for the complicated and hard cases, administratively and legally it made sense to reduce the need to access the Minister by establishing administrative procedures at an earlier stage in the assessment process.[6]

    So far only 57 cases were found to meet the Complementary Protection provisions, but that is 57 people who otherwise would have had to try their luck with the Minister.  The Complementary Protection law was reviewed by the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee back in 2009.[7]  The same Committee is now reviewing its proposed abolition.  Abolition of Complementary Protection would be a serious retrograde step and just make a complex system less reviewable and not transparent.[8]

    Code of Behaviour

    13th December was also unlucky for asylum seekers because they learned of yet further changes to commence the next day.  A Code of Behaviour was introduced. This required asylum seekers on a bridging visa E to sign the Code to state they would comply with all Australian laws and comply with reasonable requests to attend interviews.  Curiously, road laws were specifically mentioned, along with sexual offences, violent offences and ‘anti-social or disruptive activities’.   Whilst this may seem innocuous, it is nothing of the sort.  All visa applicants must sign a statement they will comply with Australian laws and values, but only asylum seekers must sign this extra Code of Behaviour.

    Failure to comply with the Code can lean to a cancellation of the Bridging Visa and a return to mandatory detention. So a breach of driving laws which would normally only lead to a fine means the putative refugee will have their visa cancelled before the Local Court even considers the matter.  Once cancelled, they must remain in detention until they are removed or are granted a protection visa.  However another change makes the grant of a protection visa no longer possible.

    Since 14 December it is impossible to get the permanent protection visa if you arrived in Australia without a visa.  This means that a person can be found to meet the refugee or Complementary Protection criteria (a complex process) but not be able to get any visa apart from a bridging visa.

    Another new regulation which authorises the disclosure of information to the State or Federal Police regarding the address details for applicants on bridging visas.  Why do the police need to know where asylum seekers are living?  Only applicants for protection face this demeaning provision – the thousands of others who apply for partner, skilled, student, business or employer sponsored visas are not caught by this odious regulation.   This is yet further vilification.

    Since Labor re-established offshore processing in Nauru and Papua New Guinea on 19 July 2013, all arrivals by boat are excluded from the Australia process entirely, so the changes announced in the last few months by the Coalition Government are designed for around 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived before that date and are still in the process.  Vilifying and targeting a group in the community is a poisonous way of dealing with people, as it makes other forms of discrimination and ill-treatment seem acceptable to the wider public.

    The overall impact of these policies is to deliberately demean and punish a group of vulnerable people, because of how they arrived in Australia.   This is punishment of refugees. At a time when many are expressing hope and peace for Christmas and the New Year, these policies do not promote Australia and Australians in the region as supporters and advocates of human rights.   Maybe we need to change the second verse of our national anthem – where it states’ for those who’ve come across the seas we’ve boundless plains to share’- not anymore we don’t.

    Reflection

    “Hostility comes from ignorance, hospitality from openness. Hostility towards strangers is born in a heart with barriers, hardened and incapable of seeing richness in diversity. The collective hostility of the western world can be healed by learning from hospitality in other cultures. The shift from hostility to hospitality happens when one experiences welcome, this gift of opening oneself to the reality of an individual or a family of refugees.”

    (Luis Magrina sj, In the footsteps of Pedro Arrupe p41)

     

    Kerry Murphy is a solicitor who works in the asylum and refugee area.

     


    [2] Zachary STEEL, Derrick SILOVE, Robert BROOKS, Shakeh MOMARTIN, Bushra ALZUHAIRI and Ina SUSLJIK, “Impact of immigration detention and temporary protection on the mental health of refugees.’  BRITISH JOURNAL OF PSYCHIATRY (2006) 188, 58 – 64,  http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/188/1/58.full.pdf

  • Election aftermath – where to now on asylum seekers and refugees? John Menadue

    Yesterday Sir William Deane launched a book ‘Refugees and asylum seekers – a better way’. A link to the book can be found at

    http://gallery.mailchimp.com/d2331cf87fedd353f6dada8de/files/Refugee_and_asylum_seeker_policy_Finding_a_better_way.pdf

    The book includes a chapter I wrote ‘Election aftermath – where to now on asylum seekers and refugees’. This chapter follows

    Election aftermath- where to now on asylum seekers and refugees?

    Since Tampa in 2001 asylum-seekers and refugees have become a divisive public issue. In that debate, boat arrivals have been the most contentious issue of all.

    Just before the September election the Rudd Government announced that no asylum seeker coming to Australia by boat would ever receive refugee status and permanent residence in Australia, but would be transferred to PNG or Nauru. This hard-line policy with some additional punitive measures in Operation Sovereign Borders has been adopted by the Abbott Government.

    The number of asylum seekers coming by boat fell dramatically in the last weeks of the Rudd Government. That trend has continued. The net result is that the gate has been very nearly closed for boat arrivals for the foreseeable future. But it will never be shut completely.

    Asylum seekers will continue to come by air. Presently about 7,000 to 8,000 asylum seekers come to Australia by air each year. Invariably they state their intention to come as a student, visitor or working holiday maker. They then get issued with a visa, enter Australia and apply for refugee status. Desperate people do desperate things. The chief source country for air arrivals is China and with about 40% of all air arrivals gaining refugee status. This situation is likely to continue. The toxic political debate is only about the mode of arrival. Arriving by aeroplane is OK but not by boat! What a lot of nonsense this is. We are obsessed only by boats.

    But as the gate for asylum seekers coming by boat closes more will seek to come by air.

    Against this unfortunate background where should we now try to focus the debate? Can we find some ground where effective and humanitarian policies can still be pursued? How can we blunt the edges of cruel policies?

    Despite the setbacks of recent years, I still think that there is quite a lot that we can try and do, as difficult as it will be in the present political climate.

    We must change the political narrative with a positive message about persons facing persecution and their contribution to Australia rather than the demonization and fear that has been engendered since John Howard’s days. It comes down to leadership across our community and not just politicians. Polls suggest that boat arrivals do not rate highly against such issues as health and education but it is a hot button issue on its own that produces a very strong and hostile response. It is so easy for unscrupulous politicians and some media people to engender fear of the outsider, the foreigner and the person who is different.  History is littered with such unscrupulous people. We must keep trying to change the debate and appeal to Australians more generous instincts that we all know are there.

    The dialogue between the Government, including the Department of Immigration and refugee advocates has been broken for a long time. We need a “second-track dialogue” – involving government officials, civil society, NGOs and refugee advocates in the dialogue process. A more constructive role by refugee advocates is essential and with a government prepared to listen.

    Progressively we should increase the refugee and humanitarian intake. If we took the same number of refugees today that we took during the Indo Chinese program of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s adjusted for our population increase since then we would now have an intake of about 35,000.  The Gillard Government increased the intake to 20,000 pa but the Abbott Government plans to reduce it to 13,750.  Having been frightened over border security Australians may now feel more secure with the new government in charge! As a result they may now be more supportive of refugees that have been processed in a more orderly way offshore, particularly by the UNHCR.

    Reluctantly, I have come to the view that the blanket opposition to offshore processing of asylum seekers has politically failed and with dire consequences for asylum seekers. A couple of years ago I welcomed with some reservations the agreement with Malaysia on transfers and processing. Unlike the Rudd Government’s agreement with PNG, the agreement with Malaysia was supported by UNHCR. On the contentious issue of offshore processing, the UNHCR in May this year issued a ‘Guidance Note’ on bilateral and/or multilateral arrangements on the transfer of asylum seekers. It emphasised that in any arrangement there must be effective protection. This encompasses (a) people given a legal status while they are in a transit country, (b) the principle of non-refoulement (c) people have access to refugee determination processes either within the legal jurisdiction of the state or by UNHCR and (d) treated with dignity. What is important is not where the processing occurs, but whether it is fair, humane and efficient and consistent with the Refugee Convention.

    The Malaysian Agreement was opposed by the Coalition, the Greens and almost all refugee advocate groups. It was an odd alliance! The failure of this agreement saw a threefold increase in boat arrivals within a few months. These arrivals rose to 14,000 in the six months to June 2013. The result of that large increase and with an election looming was the draconian agreement with PNG.

    In opposing the Malaysian Agreement many refugee advocates sided with Tony Abbott on “canings” in Malaysia. It was quite novel to see Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison defending the human rights of asylum seekers. Tony Abbott gave the impression that he was not interested in stopping the boats but stopping the Government stopping the boats. This was consistent with what a “key Liberal strategist” told the US Embassy in November 2009  that the boats  issue was “fantastic” for the Coalition  and “ the more boats that come the better”( SMH 10 December 2010).

    The agreement with Malaysia was also criticised because of the treatment of children. But children could never have been excluded from the arrangement or the boats would have filled up with children. They are called “anchors” to haul in the rest of the family. Children do need protection through a guardian arrangement but the Minister cannot be both gaoler and guardian.

    We should also pursue alternative migration pathways to discourage asylum seekers taking dangerous boat or other “irregular” Journeys.

    The first alternate pathway is through orderly departure arrangements with “source countries” such as we had with Vietnam from 1983. Over 100,000 Vietnamese came to Australia under this arrangement. We must pursue ODA’s with Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In both Iraq and Afghanistan we will have to bear particular responsibilities for our involvement in the wars in those countries just as we did after the Vietnam War. An orderly departure arrangement with Pakistan would probably have to be managed by UNHCR.  Importantly DIAC must anticipate future refugee flows.eg Syria and Egypt. I just cannot understand why the previous government did not actively pursue ODA’s.

    Secondly we should consider permanent or temporary migration in particular situations. e.g. Iranians on 457 visas. Recent Iranian boat arrivals are mainly single males, well-educated and resourceful. With a population explosion in Iran and the sanctions biting hard many want to leave. In the last 12 months the proportion of boat arrivals from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33%.Iranians are by far the largest national group in immigration detention in Australia. We need alternative pathways to address the special needs of nationals like the Iranians.

    Many asylum seekers in the community on bridging visas are not allowed to work. This is absurd. Work rights for all such visa holders are essential for reasons of human dignity and taxpayer cost. We should also review the ad hoc and confusing support arrangements for all asylum seekers living in the community.

    We should progressively abolish mandatory detention. At the end of August this year there were over 11,000 people in immigration detention. 96% were asylum seekers. At that time there were 1700 children in immigration detention of some form. It is all cruel and expensive. There is no evidence that it deters but politicians believe that it makes them look tough. If we should have learned anything from successive governments it is that punitive policies in immigration detention centres will result in riots, burnings, suicides and other self-harm. We will bear the human, social and financial costs of mandatory detention for decades

    Despite the heavy handed crackdown on boat arrivals there are still some important areas that we could address to help asylum seekers and refugees in their desperate plight. We have a duty to do what we can despite the toxic political environment.

    But we cannot manage these problems on our own.  Regional cooperation is essential, not to shift the burden but to share it. That is why we need to work particularly with both Indonesia and Malaysia in cooperation with UNHCR in the processing and then the resettlement of refugees. Those arrangements will problem not be” legally binding”. They will depend on trust.

    But whatever we do there is no “solution”.  Refugee flows will always be messy. Desperate people will try and cut corners. They will not play according to our rules. But we can do a lot better as we have shown in the past by successfully settling 750,000 refugees in Australia since 1945.

    John Menadue is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development. He was Secretary Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1980-3. He was also Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan and CEO of Qantas.

     

    Postscript:

    Only a few days ago, Tony Abbott released a pamphlet on the government’s achievements since the election. The first subject mentioned was ‘Stop the boats’. At this very time, the UNHCR was been drawing attention to the growing refugee crisis around the world and particularly the outflow of 4 million people from Syria. Yet Tony Abbott took pride in the fact that 33,000 refugees already living in Australia will ‘all be denied permanent residence’.

     

  • Facts on boat arrivals. John Menadue

    There have been a number of claims by Scott Morrison that Operation Sovereign Borders has resulted in a significant reduction in boat arrivals. The ALP has asserted that the reduction in boat arrivals follows the trend set by the Rudd Government.

    It has been difficult to check Scott Morrison’s claims as there has been quite deliberate policy to make it difficult for the public to ascertain what is really happening.

    The ABC Fact Check has reviewed the facts that are available. The Fact Check Report can Facts on boat abe found at

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-10/scott-morrison-not-telling-full-story-asylum-seeker-arrivals/5119380

    The report concludes ‘There has been an 80% reduction in asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat in the comparison period outlined by Mr Morrison. However, the data shows the number of arrivals began to slow significantly under Labor, soon after Mr Rudd’s regional resettlement arrangement was announced’. Fact Check asked specialists in data analysis to comment. Dr. Higginson said ‘… the data shows that … there is no evidence to suggest that the new government’s policies have had any additional impact on arrivals over and above the trend already in place’.

    What a barren media landscape we would have without the ABC!

     

  • Australia’s Foreign Policy Trailing a Leaky Boat. Guest Blogger: Arja Keski-Nummi

    Our foreign policy is more than boats or asylum seekers but that is what the Abbott government has reduced it to.

    We should all be concerned because what is at stake is much greater than stopping boats – it jeopardizes our ability to influence and be taken seriously on issues of greater importance to our long term future and well-being such as cooperation in security related issues, trade and in the longer term building genuine regional cooperation on asylum seekers and displaced people.

    Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop have much to learn if we are to have a credible stand in the region. The sycophancy of Tony Abbott’s comments in Indonesia and Sri Lanka fooled no one and least of all his hosts but it belittled us.

    In Bali on 7 October he said this of West Papua “… The situation in West Papua is getting better, not worse, and I want to acknowledge the work that President Yudhoyono has done to provide greater autonomy, to provide a better level of government services and ultimately a better life for the people of West Papua. ….[and then]…. and while I acknowledge the right of people to free expression, I acknowledge the right of people to fair treatment under the law, I should also make the point that the people of West Papua are much better off as part of a strong, dynamic and increasingly prosperous Indonesia.”  And last week in in Sri Lanka – where he virtually justified the use of torture by saying that. “We accept that sometimes, in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen,”

    Unbelievable and contradictory comments that fly in the face of the evidence. Tony Abbott and his government must be living in a parallel universe!

    Australia is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture. Our long held position has been that we do not condone torture in any form anywhere. Has our policy on this changed? Are we now to “turn a blind eye” to inconvenient truths if it means we can stop the boats?  The import of the Prime Minister’s speeches in Indonesia and Sri Lanka would suggest that he will ditch any ethical positions or long held conventions to “stop the boats”. He will debase our foreign policy to get a domestic issue, largely whipped up by him in Opposition, off his back.

    Equally disturbing is the fact that no conditions have been placed on how the patrol boats gifted to Sri Lanka will be used. One can speculate how they will be used. The cynic in me can see them being a convenient vehicle to facilitate the movement of people out of Sri Lanka via corrupt navy personnel. The other extreme where they become the vehicle for greater human rights abuses by preventing people being able to seek asylum and so potentially we will be putting ourselves in breach of our Refugee Convention obligations. A breach we should take seriously but I suspect under this government will not register as a transgression worth worrying about.

    How we work and cooperate with countries in the region across many issues is important. However, it does not mean that we should or need to go overboard and explicitly endorse what should be for us as Australians fundamental universal freedoms and rights.

    The latest soap opera being played out on the spying allegations against the President of Indonesia, his wife and senior colleagues betray just how fragile the relationship is with Indonesia. Despite his speech currying favour with Indonesia just a few short weeks ago it was not enough. This, together with the government’s seeming disregard of Indonesia’s sovereignty with its own Operation Sovereign Borders policy and Abbott’s his appalling lack of judgment in not even being able to pick up a phone and talk to the President, has meant that his Jakarta not Geneva policy is in tatters for the time being.  It will turn a corner at some point but I suspect the Indonesian government is in no hurry to forgive him; first for how he spoke of the region while in Opposition and now how he has handled the spying fiasco. They know they hold in their hands the success of his domestic policy on boats and will play it for as much as it is worth.

    The tragedy of such games is that it plays with the lives of desperate people – boats will come, tragedies will occur and it need not be so.

    What we need is an approach on asylum seekers that is rooted in reality and underpinned by ethical considerations:

    • It should not be a military operation – how can we be at war with asylum seekers, people often fleeing real wars?
    • We should not turn asylum seekers into criminals but understand that even if they are not refugees they are doing what we all do – aspire to a better life for us and our families.
    • We should accept that we cannot be a “fortress Australia” but what we can be is a country that can help in finding durable solutions for refugees and asylum seekers; this does not always mean that the only outcome is to come or remain in Australia.

    What this episode shows is that we cannot manage these issues on our own. The only way we can do this is working in the region with our partners in governments and civil society and that requires trust and being there for the long haul, not merely until the “problem” is fixed. At the moment we are displaying very little of that in the ham-fisted way this government is pursuing its policy on “stopping the boats”

     

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

     

     

  • Tony Abbott in Sri Lanka. John Menadue

    Tony Abbott  has continued his ‘stop the boats campaign” in Sri Lanka regardless of growing concerns about human rights abuses in that country.

    He offered two patrol boats as part of a ‘foreign aid package’. His justification for this is that it would help save the lives of people drowning at sea. Please spare us this hypocracy. The real reason is that with the cooperation of the Sri Lankan Navy he hopes he stop asylum seekers leaving Sri Lanka and possibly landing in Australia. The previous government used the same phoney excuse that it wanted to stop the boats to stop the drownings.

    But the drownings were really only a secondary part of the story. The main story was attempts to stop the boats carrying asylum seekers who were seeking refuge in Australia. It was politically embarrassing for them to come by boat.

    As asylum seekers in direct flight from persecution, Sri Lankans were unlike many other boat people who were in transit through Malaysia and Indonesia to Australia. Those in transit were not in direct flight from persecution. Because Sri Lankans landing in Australia are in direct flight, they have a particularly strong claim to our protection as the first country of asylum.

    Tony Abbott last week  said that he would not comment on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. But when it suited him he had no hesitation in criticising human rights policies in Malaysia. He criticised ‘judicial canings’ and many other alleged abuses in order to discredit the Gillard Government’s attempt to stem the boats by negotiating an agreement with Malaysia in cooperation with UNHCR.

    Last week the UK Prime Minister went out of his way to visit the Tamil areas in northern Sri Lanka. He expressed concern about human rights abuses. Canada refused to attend CHOGM at all because of  concerns over human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. The Indian Prime Minister did not attend.

    So as with the naval boats, Tony Abbott is quite misleading when he refuses to comment on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

    Successive Australian governments have badly treated Sri Lankans seeking asylum in Australia. Some have been ‘voluntarily’ repatriated to Sri Lanka. Very few people know how much pressure was applied by government officials to persuade them to leave Australia.

    Some Sri Lankans coming to Australia have been found to be genuine refugees but have been refused permanent residence status because of dubious and secret ASIO assessments. These assessments would in part have relied on information supplied by Sri Lankan intelligence agencies who are not known to be friendly to Tamils. The fact also that a person has been a member of the Tamil Tigers should not  automatically rule that person out from our protection. Given the ruthlessness of the Sri Lankan military it is not surprising that young Tamils would join the Tamil Tigers. For the same reason, Irish nationalists would have joined the IRA decades ago. Some are now members of parliament and ministers.

    To break the impasse over the persecution of Tamils and persons fleeing Sri Lanka, the Australian Government should negotiate an Orderly Departure Agreement with the Sri Lankan Government which would enable persons facing discrimination in Sri Lanka to leave that country in a safe and orderly way – perhaps 2,000 to 3,000 p.a.  It would provide an alternate migration pathway. It would not be a refugee pathway as those covered under such an ODA would still be resident within Sri Lanka. It is possible that the Sri Lankan Government would cooperate, at least quietly, as it would probably be pleased to rid itself of Tamil dissidents.

    When I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship in the early 1980s, Australia negotiated such ODAs with the Communist government in Vietnam and the military regimes in Chile and El Salvador. Over 100,000 came from Vietnam under such an arrangement. Thousands came from Chile and hundreds from El Salvador.

    We should seriously consider an alternative migration pathway for Tamils and others facing human rights abuses and discrimination in Sri Lanka.

  • Surely the Indonesians wouldn’t play politics over boat people! John Menadue

    Well – yes they would. They have learnt it from Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. The blokey Australians are no match for the subtle and sophisticated Indonesians.

    In Opposition, the Coalition took every opportunity to exploit boat arrivals. They were not genuinely interested in stopping the boats then. Their main objective was to stop the Labor Government stopping the boats. That was clearly spelt out in what a ‘key Liberal strategist’ told the US embassy in November 2009, as revealed by Wikileaks, that ‘the more boats that come the better’. It is not hard to speculate who the key Liberal strategist was.

    The best and most humane opportunity that the previous government had to reduce boat arrivals was the agreement with Malaysia. But Tony Abbott and the Coalition sided with the pious Greens and refugee advocates to defeat the amending legislation to the Migration Act in the Senate which was necessary after the High Court decision. The failure of the Malaysian Agreement had predictable consequences. Boat arrivals increased three-fold in the following six months and continued escalating month after month. This was only changed by the draconian arrangement which the Rudd Government made with PNG.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison keep telling us that their policies have slowed or stopped the boats, but they will not produce the relevant information. Only time will tell but it is certain that boat arrivals decline dramatically after the announcement of the PNG Agreement with the newly installed Rudd Government.

    Not only did the Coalition play hard to stop the Labor Government stopping the boats, they insulted the Indonesians by assuming that they could infringe their sovereignty by turning boats back to Indonesia. Despite the grovelling apologies that Tony Abbott gave to the Indonesian President recently, the Indonesians at many levels are clearly not happy with the way the Australian Government has behaved.

    When news broke that the Australian Embassy in Jakarta and elsewhere was collecting intelligence information, it was really no surprise. It would not have surprised the Indonesians. But it provided the Indonesians with an opportunity to settle some scores with Australia. As a result, they have refused to accept the return of two or three asylum vessels that had been intercepted by Australian vessels.

    With a Presidential election in Indonesia next year we are likely to see more party politics from Indonesia. Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison are due for some pay back.

    Managing boat people in transit in Indonesia depends on close cooperation between Australia and Indonesia. Exchanging intelligence information is essential. But the heavy-handed politicking over boat arrivals by the Abbott Government has put that cooperation at risk. Scott Morrison is showing himself no more adept about turning questions around than turning boats around.

    The Coalition, for party political reasons has grossly exaggerated the boat issue but as a developing country with numerous challenges, Indonesia must get very impatient with Australia’s overbearing attitude over what to them must seem a small problem. The Australian Government seems incapable of understanding that.

    By the way the human rights problems in Sri Lanka are coming into even sharper focus in the run up to  the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting which is due to commence this Friday in Sri Lanka. Canada has said that it will not participate because of human rights abuses. The Indian Prime Minister will not attend. The UK Prime Minister has urged a thorough investigation into the disappearance of thousands of people in Sri Lanka. The UN has recorded 5676 cases of missing persons in Sri Lanka-more than anywhere else in the wold except Iraq. Yet Australia continues to deport asylum seekers back to Sri Lanka. They are called ‘voluntary returnees’. I am very doubtful. There are an increasing number of reports that indicate that whilst the civil war may be over, peace and human rights have not been restored in Sri Lanka.

  • When “… language itself becomes a weapon” Guest blogger: Professor Ian Webster.

    When “..language itself becomes a weapon.”[1]

    “I know they’re rorting the system; I’ve seen it in the source countries; and I’ve seen it in my own electorate.” It was a party stopper from a Member of Parliament speaking informally with a group attending a meeting about preventing suicide.

    The two words “refugee” and “asylum seeker” provoke private and public dissonance. The criminalisation, the “otherness”, in the way we speak about refugees and asylum seekers stands in stark contrast to our attempts to prevent discrimination against ‘others’ in Australia – people with disabilities, those with mental disorders, suicides and attempted suicides, and others outside the mainstream, and their families. Governments legislate to prevent discrimination and they aim to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

    But refugees and asylum seekers are another matter; they’re fair game. The contrast in these public stances – one of kindness and the other of rejection could not be more extreme.

    To suffer is to be harmed or to fear harm. The health and social systems are expected to assess a person’s risks and harms and to respond to their needs; actions endorsed overwhelmingly by society. Refugees and asylum seekers fear harm and seek protection.

    In the emergency departments of our public hospitals, in our public health services and at the front-line of primary care, treatment is provided according to a person’s needs without moral judgement. It is expected. It is a proud tradition which can’t be reconciled with the way Australia responds to the suffering of those who seek sanctuary.

    Imagine arriving at an emergency department with distressing chest pain and having to demonstrate that you were in genuine need of help, being sent elsewhere to check your credentials and to wait.

    It is an irreconcilable paradox. We expect humane and moral responses from human services and our professions, but we adopt an inhumane and immoral stance to the frightened people who arrive from distant lands on our shores.

    The misguided focus on criminalisation, mandatory detention and the tricks of excising parts of Australia to circumvent our international obligations are a subterfuge for long-term strategies.

    The language and rhetoric of the ‘war on drugs’ has become the driving idiom of the ‘war on people smugglers’.

    The former Secretary of the Departments of Defence and Primary Industries and Energy, Paul Barratt, said on Radio National’s Outsiders on 21st July, “It is a failure to reframe the political discussion, to look more broadly at the refugee issue. It is the same as we have seen in the failed war on drugs – instead of dealing with that as a social and medical problem we focus on the people who are smuggling illicit drugs and say that this is a criminal …a game politicians of both parties are assiduously trying to focus on. The problem is that there are people in desperate need who need to be resettled and there are millions of them around the world.”

    The same point was made in 1959 by William S Burroughs in the Naked Lunch, “If you want to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start at the bottom of the pyramid: the addict in the street, and stop tilting quixotically for the higher-ups so-called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service at.”

    Fiddling with the idea of criminality and imprisoning people smugglers is doomed to failure. Just as the war on ‘drug smugglers’ has failed because it does not deal with the people problems which drive the demand for substances.

    It is an unchallengeable fact that problems of population have to be dealt with at source, at the root causes. In public health it is the fence at the top of cliff compared with the ambulance at the bottom

    Put simply, the problem of refugees and asylum seekers is not the making of people smugglers but of the oppression and violence against already marginalised people in their countries of origin.

    As John Menadue and others have argued, Australia should engage with countries in our region to establish pathways which have predictable outcomes and protection rather than  policies which will escalate even more desperate attempts for asylum.

     

    Professor Ian Webster, Physician and Emeritus Professor Public Health and Community Medicine, University of NSW.

     

     


    [1] Anderson Scott, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Doubleday, Random House, New York, 2013, p xi.

  • Are current maritime asylum seeker policies working? Guest blogger: Peter Hughes

    So what if current maritime asylum seeker policies are working? I mean that question in the narrow sense of reducing irregular maritime arrivals to a trickle.

    The arrival figure of some 339 persons for October 2013 announced by the government represents only 16 per cent of October 2012 arrivals.

    Although it is only the figure for a single month, this is a significant change. If arrivals were to level out at this rate, it would represent 4068 arrivals per year, compared to some 25,000 arrivals in 2012 – 13.

    It is quite possible that the announcement of long-term resettlement in Papua New Guinea and Nauru (as supposed to temporary stay in those countries pending departure for an unspecified destination – probably Australia) has been decisive in changing the decision to travel on the part of those asylum seekers who have not yet paid their people smuggler. Tighter visa procedures on the part of Indonesia might also be a factor. The overlay of stern language by the incoming Coalition government no doubt adds to the general atmosphere of a restrictive approach. We do not know whether the Australian Government has actually turned any boats around.

    However, even on the most optimistic scenarios of reductions in numbers, we are not out of the woods. Australia would still find itself with a huge legacy of people to deal with.

    There are some 2000 asylum seekers in PNG and Nauru. Their cases have to be decided and their futures determined. Those found to be refugees and given residence in Papua New Guinea or Nauru will agitate to come to Australia. Some non-refugees will return home voluntarily. It will not be easy to repatriate, against their will, those found not to be refugees to countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan because of lack of cooperation of those governments.

    There are some 33,000 maritime asylum seekers in Australia in the community on bridging visas or in detention, in various stages of processing. It will take years to finally decide their cases, even under foreshadowed truncated procedures. The grant of temporary stay and limited benefits to refugees will be controversial and legally contested. Achieving return to country of origin of those found not to be refugees will be even more difficult than for those in PNG and Nauru.

    There remains considerable anguish for the government, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection and the asylum seekers themselves as these issues are worked through.

    Even if the current set of policies achieve the result of slowing arrivals to a trickle, the solution based on PNG and Nauru (which are simply not involved in the flow of maritime arrivals to Australia) and threats of turnarounds is certainly not the optimum way of managing the flow of asylum seekers.

    Australia will no doubt face future outflows of asylum seekers from within the region and beyond .A solely deterrent-based approach in partnership with small countries that may not wish to be caught up in our problems again is not a sustainable long-term approach.

    It is a pity that another way was not found for governments and UNHCR to take active responsibility for the protection needs of asylum seekers in the region, while cutting people smugglers out of the picture.

    One could imagine that it might have been a lot better had Australia managed to work with one or more of the countries through which people actually transit to work out an arrangement to return them there and have their future determined as part of established UNHCR processes in that country. It would have been good if those asylum seekers had the opportunity to live and work in those communities pending having their futures determined. It would have been even better if such arrangements could have been reached with the cooperation and blessing of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

    But of course, we did have such an arrangement. It was the Arrangement on Transfer and Resettlement with Malaysia negotiated by the previous government in 2011, before boat arrivals went to unprecedented levels. Australia rejected it. The High Court, with a surprise interpretation of the relevant parts of the Migration Act 1958, decided that the Minister did not have the legal power to make transfers to Malaysia. An odd alliance between refugee advocates, the Greens and the then Coalition Opposition ensured that the simple legislative arrangements needed to make it viable at that time could not happen. It was a truly lost opportunity for a long-term sustainable approach.

    The bottom line is that, even if the current downtrend remains, Australia has somehow ended up with a “one-off fix” based on fairly hard deterrent strategies. It may not be usable or sustainable in the future and certainly does not build any long-term partnership with the major states in the region in relation to asylum and protection issues.

    Of course, if the October arrivals figure turns out not to be the start of a further downtrend and arrival numbers go up again, existing challenges will be exacerbated and even harsher measures will come on to the table.

    Peter Hughes was formerly Deputy Secretary, Department of Immigration and Citizenship. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Why Iranians join the refugee queue. Guest Iranian correspondent Nadia S Fosoul

    In my country Iran, many dads take two jobs. They work hard so that their kids can check more items off their wish list. Moms like other moms in the world sacrifice their comforts for the sake of their children. Despite this, according to UNHCR data (immigrationinformation.org) the number of Iranian youth seeking asylum around the world has more than doubled since 2007. In 2012 nearly 20,000 Iranian sought asylum. Iran has thus, laid claim to producing one of the highest rates of brain drain in the world. Simultaneously Iran is one of the world’s largest refugee havens, mainly for Afghans and Iraqis.

    Why do young Iranians leave Iran?

    Sixty percent of Iran’s population is under 30, and are facing major difficulties in getting jobs. In Iranian families, the value of education is an important cultural element. Almost everyone believes that university education is essential for success. Thus, despite the highly competitive University entrance exams, the percentage of high school graduates who are admitted to universities is high. However, unemployment is one of the thorniest problems. This is because educational planners have focused most of their energy on expanding the universities’ admission rate. This has resulted in graduates having high expectations for their careers but with poor job prospects.

    Over the period 1970 to 2000, Iran experienced a revolution in many ways. The Iraq-Iran war lasted from 1980 to 1989. There was a regime change from conservatives to liberals after the election in 1996. The revolution impeded economic growth and the Iraq-Iran war exhausted resources in the economy and hindered economic growth. Conservatives took over power again in 2005 by electing Ahmadinejad and re-electing him in a fraudulent 2009 presidential election, resulting in a series of protests. According to Anna Johnson and Brian Murphy in June 2009, the Iranian government disputed these allegations, and confirmed the deaths of only 36 people during the protests. Unconfirmed reports allege that there were 72 deaths in the three months following the disputed election. However, the death toll was possibly higher because relatives of the deceased were forced to sign documents claiming their family members had died of heart attack or meningitis. During this period Iranian authorities closed universities in Tehran, blocked web sites, blocked cell phone transmissions and text messaging, and banned rallies.

    To make it worse the U.S. government tightened sanctions on Iran.  These sanctions were directed at ordinary people who bore the brunt in medicine and food shortages. There were also money problems.

    As I mentioned earlier, Iranians put education as their priority, so they try hard despite all the financial and political pressures. However they like to speak out peacefully for their rights and they want to freely write their opinions without fear of interrogation and prison. They look for their legitimate rights in Iran. When they can’t find it in Iran they seek it elsewhere.

    Their choice is immigrant friendly countries such as Australia that value freedom. The International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), states, “That every human being has a right to life, and to personal security, inviolability and freedom.” Countries that have ratified this agreement have taken concrete steps to promote and protect the economic, social and cultural rights of their people. Rights such as the right to work, the right to social security and the right to an adequate standard of living.

     Why opt for immigration?

    For these reasons many Iranians under economic or political pressure decide to leave their home and migrate to a friendly country. However obtaining a visa is not easy. The immigration process now takes more than 3-4 years with no guarantee. So many just give up and look for an alternative way.

    To make matters worse, immigrant friendly countries like Australia have toughened their immigration policies towards Iranians. This is particularly when there are political tensions in migrant friendly countries. However, it should be understood that Iran’s people face political persecution at the hands of the Iranian government. These people have difficulty obtaining legal visas while ironically, members of the regime can easily relocate to other countries on special visas. As a result innocent Iranians are being caught in the crossfire instead of getting support from refugee host countries like Australia.

    Between 1994 and 2000 Australia admitted a large number of Iranian postgraduate students and their dependents. Virtually none returned home. Contrary to common preconceptions, Iran’s education system has been world class – notably in maths and sciences. Australians of Iranian heritage now work as leaders in law, politics, science and the arts in Australia and they have been acknowledged for the contribution they have made to Australian society. (Crock and Ghezelbash –ABC.net.au 25 July 2013)

    There is a need for us to care for each other to make the world a better place to live in. The Persian poet, Saadi, says;

    Human beings are members of a whole,

    In creation of one essence and soul.

    If one member is afflicted with pain,

    Other members uneasy will remain.

     If you have no sympathy for human pain,

    The name of human you cannot retain.

    *******

     In my blog of July 28, I referred to the special problems of Iranians, ‘Refugees or Migrants’. I suggested the need for other migration pathways, perhaps a 4-5-7 visa or sponsored migration.

     In the last 12 months, the proportion of boat arrivals in Australia from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33% of all boat arrivals. At 31 August there were 2,786 Iranians (32%) in immigration detention. Iranians were the largest group by far. A particular difficulty for Iranians who are refused refugee status is that the Iranian Government will not accept any returnees to Iran who have sought refugee status elsewhere. So unless Iranian asylum seekers can find residence in another country they face long detention in Australia.

     John Menadue

  • The apathy and hostility of South Koreans to their Northern cousins. Guest bloggers: Markus Bell and Sarah Chee

    In every way, Yu Woo-seong was a model defector. In his early 30s, he was smart, friendly, ambitious and well-liked. Despite the fact that he had been in South Korea for less than six years, Yu managed to work through his university studies while adapting remarkably well to his new environment, finishing his bachelor’s degree in 2011.

    While taking on organizing roles in a number of Seoul-based clubs and organizations created by North Korean defectors to help new arrivals, Yu gained entry into a master’s degree program, majoring in education in social welfare. Less than one year into his graduate studies he was hired by Seoul City Hall as a special attaché for North Korean defector projects. In every way, he was a model assimilation case – until early this year, when he was arrested as a North Korean spy.

    The evidence against him was based on testimony from his sister, who attempted to defect in October 2012. During an intense and highly secretive interrogation by the National Information Service (NIS) that all defectors are subject to upon entering the country, Yu’s sister, Yu Ga-ryeo, “confessed” her brother was a spy. The plot took a further twist when, on March 5, after 179 days in detention, his sister retracted her accusations against her brother, claiming that she had been subject to physical and psychological abuse at the hands of NIS agents and deceived into making the confession. A number of facts continue to be shrouded in secrecy; one detail, however, emerged as incontrovertible fact – Yu and his family are Chinese nationals who were born in North Korea.

    Further to the ambiguity regarding the significance of Yu’s ethnic background and the difficulties of potentially unravelling the twine of blood and nationhood that marks the socio-political fabric of both Koreas, are basic questions of human rights.

    In the modern, robust democracy that is South Korea, is it right – both morally and in the eyes of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) – that a person arriving and claiming asylum can be detained for up to 180 days? During this time an individual is subject to round-the-clock interrogation without legal representation. Questions including but not limited to place of origin, their motivation and method of escape, their political sympathies, their family networks, their day-to-day life in North Korea, their movements and activities since they were born, their medical history and much more are asked at all times of day and night.

    The question is not one of whether or not the government should be permitted to take the means necessary to defend its borders and citizens. Rather, it is of accountability. The period of time during which agents of the state interrogate asylum seekers continues to be cloistered from the gaze of the public in every way possible – a mysterious process through which it is ascertained – to some vague degree – that an individual is, or is not, an enemy agent and a genuine asylum-seeking North Korean.

    The general public seems at best oblivious to this process that is carried out in its name, and to some degree the absence of public discussion on this subject approaches the tacit condoning of these practices. It must be asked, given the potential physical and psychological harm a process like this can cause, whether it is any surprise that thousands of North Koreans are re-migrating to third countries as soon as they can muster enough funds.

    This is all possible because, on many levels, aspects of the Cold War linger on in Northeast Asia and cries of “spy” and “communist” still bring to attention (and to heel) the general public in passions which are only matched by their complete apathy towards matters pertaining to North Korean new arrivals, the much romanticised idea of reunification, and human rights.

    Yu’s case has underlined the apathy that is endemic in South Korean society, towards human rights and towards issues pertaining to that whose name cannot be spoken – North Korea. This disheartening fact is only compounded when we are faced with a North Korean defector community incapable or ill-prepared to fight for the human rights of defectors in South Korea (that is saying nothing about the human rights of North Koreans in North Korea), a divided leftist activist community, and questions about what constitutes a defector.

    On August 22, after eight months in solitary confinement, during which the highlight of each day was a one-hour exercise period – time also passed alone – Yu Woo-seong walked out of the In-deok detention center in south Seoul a free man. In his verdict reading earlier that day, the judge ruled Yu innocent of all charges.

    As the dust settles and the media loses interest in the latest spy scandal to capture its interest it is worth considering that perhaps Yu’s greatest crime was simply that he was more successful than other North Koreans at being a model defector. This case further highlights the need for media reporting that questions, rather than parrots the government announcements and that still values the old legal maxim “innocent until proven guilty.”

    Markus Bell is a PhD candidate at the ANU. Sarah Chee is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

  • Even-handed Tony Abbott. John Menadue

    In his toxic language over asylum seekers in the last three years, Tony Abbott has been not only derogatory about vulnerable people fleeing persecution, he has also gone out of his way to insult our neighbours in their handling of asylum seekers. He has shown no favouritism. He has insulted them all.

    Within the last two weeks he has offered ‘contrition’ to three regional leaders for his insulting language about their policies and performance. He has described his insults as really only part of a ‘rather intense party-political discussion in Australia’. That is sheer evasion. It has been Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison who have directly and personally led the attack on asylum seekers and our neighbours.

    What must regional leaders think of the intemperate behaviour of our new Prime Minister? In their minds it would not suggest strong and stable leadership on which they can rely. They would reasonably conclude that he will slip into a domestic political mood if that is necessary and ignore relations in the region.

    In Jakarta on his first visit, he had to apologise for his challenge to Indonesian sovereignty. He had earlier said that unilaterally his government would tow boats back to Indonesian waters and would intervene in Indonesia to purchase Indonesian vessels. This was clearly blatant intervention in Indonesian affairs. The Indonesian President was polite, but the real annoyance is best judged by statements by the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Members of Parliament, officials and the Indonesian media.

    Then in Bali this week at the APEC meeting he apologised to a succession of regional leaders.

    He insulted Malaysia in June 2011 when he said ‘Imagine taking boat people from Australia to Malaysia where they will be exposed almost inevitably to the prospect of caning … they will be detained, they will be tagged, they will be let out into the community and in the Malaysian community, people of uncertain immigration status are treated very, very harshly indeed.  … What is supposed to protect people in Malaysia from caning and other very harsh treatment? …. What [the Australian] government is proposing is to take people from Christmas Island, detain them, tag them and then expect that they are not going to be caned.’  Scott Morrison chimed in at the time that ‘Malaysia could not guarantee the human rights of people sent to that country’. For Scott Morrison to espouse the human rights of asylum seekers was surely breath-taking. One would not be surprised that in Bali the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Najib Tun Razak, was left wondering about the behaviour of our new Prime Minister with his belated apology.

    After the meeting with the Malaysian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott then had to apologise to PNG Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill. During the election campaign Tony Abbott said that to buy the cooperation of PNG the Rudd Government had surrendered control of half a billion dollars annually in overseas aid to PNG. The accident-prone Julie Bishop at the same time attempted to put words into the mouth of Peter O’Neill to the same effect. Peter O’Neill responded at the time that the Opposition claims were ‘completely untrue … we are not going to put up with this nonsense’. At the same time, the PNG High Commissioner in Canberra ‘warned Australian politicians to observe international protocols and courtesies when discussing relations with other friendly sovereign nations and not impugn the dignity of our leaders who are attempting to assist Australia in this very complex regional and international issue of asylum-seekers’.

    What enormous damage Tony Abbott has done, not just to asylum seekers who seek our protection, but in relations with our key regional neighbours. The ‘rancorous’ debate we have had in Australia didn’t come out of the air. It was provoked and led by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. It has been at great cost. Loose lips do cause damage. They can even sink ships.

    More importantly Tony Abbott should apologies to the Australian public for misleading us about his boat “policy” and suggesting that he could pull regional countries into line to do his will.

     

  • A somersault – back to business as usual. Guest blogger: Arja Keski-Nummi

    While in opposition Tony Abbot conducted a robust and aggressive policy on boats that effected Indonesia. But now he has done a somersault in order to put the Australian-Indonesian relationship back on a more even footing. As his speech at the official dinner portrays he has gone to the other extreme and engaged in rather sycophantic toadying.

    Tony Abbott’s robust approach to people smuggling and asylum issues in opposition reflected his focus on domestic politics where he was using this issue opportunistically in a volatile political environment and with one eye on the elections. As a result the foreign policy implications of his approach were held at a discount. In government this is no longer possible.

    Lets look at what he said in Opposition – “Operation Sovereign Borders” was his signature policy on how in Government the matter of boat arrivals would be handled. From the outset the discomfort of Indonesia was obvious, particularly returning boats to Indonesia, the use of transit facilities in Indonesia for the transfer of asylum seekers as well as the idea of buying boats and paying for information.  Operation Sovereign Borders seemed to rely on ignoring the sovereignty of another country.

    It was inevitable then that this first visit by Tony Abbott to Indonesia was going to put boats in the spotlight.

    So, what’s new with the Prime Minister’s visit to Jakarta? If the reporting is to be believed nothing has changed.  His speech makes it clear that what he has had to do was adapt his rhetoric to fit into a pre-existing relationship and eat his own words on what he said in Opposition.

    President Yudhoyono threw a bone in Tony Abbott’s direction and he grabbed it.

    The Australian media have likewise breathlessly reported that Jakarta has agreed to bilateral cooperation over the Bali Process and multilateral action.

    The fact is the bilateral cooperation on boats has been strong for some time.  The Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers identified that some $101 million was allocated to combatting people smuggling in the 2010-11 budget. Some $10million was specifically earmarked towards the care and maintenance of people intercepted in Indonesia. The Australian Federal Police had a budget of $12.3 million for capability and capacity building activities for law enforcement agencies in source and transit countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.   Based on these figures a conservative estimate of how much of this was for bilateral cooperation and operations in Indonesia would suggest that it would be close to $30 million across the customs, AFP and Immigration agencies. This does not include development assistance through AUSAID or defence and intelligence operations.

    So, if you were to actually analyse what has been said and agreed to regarding the government’s policy Operation Sovereign Borders by Indonesia it really amounts to much of the same. In 2010 Australia and Indonesia signed the Australia-Indonesia Implementation Framework for Cooperation on People Smuggling and Trafficking in Person which has been the main vehicle for strengthening the bilateral partnership on issues relating to people trafficking, protection claims, people smuggling and asylum seekers in ways that address the particular interests of both countries.  It is through this framework, established under the Labor Government, that practical bilateral cooperation is and will be channeled.

    The AFP will continue to pay for information through its established channels. Maybe just a little more money will flow in that direction. Boats will be intercepted and people intercepted in Indonesia will be referred to UNHCR and IOM for registration, processing and support in housing and welfare.  Protocols and practical cooperation around maritime interceptions, emergency rescues and Safety of Life at Sea will continue to be developed. The bilateral operational working groups will continue to meet and thrash out knotty issues on visas, border management and people smuggling laws.  There will be the usual give and take as assessments are made on how far a particular matter can be pushed before it backfires.

    At the same time the multilateral processes such as the Bali Process will continue to grow as Indonesia knows all too well that they are the “endpoint” of the transit movement and nothing can be achieved unless the countries en route are engaged and supported. They will continue to talk to Geneva even if we don’t because they know that UNHCR is a key to ensuring that any arrangements put in place are sound and has the imprimatur of the international community.

    In short, Tony Abbott’s visit to Indonesia was unremarkable. A few tidbits were thrown his way but when all is said and done it will be more of the same.  But the rhetoric about boats has served its domestic political purpose

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division in Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2007-2010

     

     

  • Israel’s asylum-seeker dilemma. Guest blogger: John Tulloh.

    Like Australia, Israel has a major problem of what to do with asylum-seekers. And, like Australia with our proposed Malaysia solution in 2011, Israeli legislation aimed at curbing the influx has been thrown out by the country’s highest court.

    Those seeking refuge in Israel did not come by boat. They came across the Sinai from Egypt, many having to pay up to $2000 to Bedouin people smugglers. The majority were Sudanese and Eritreans fleeing abusive regimes. They used to fly to Cairo for refuge until police broke up a peaceful demonstration by Sudanese in 2005 and killed 20 of them.

    Last year, with more than 55,000 having reached Israel, there was growing disquiet. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the new arrivals ‘illegal infiltrators’ who threatened the security and identity of the Jewish state.

    Jerusalem decided to act with what was known as the Anti-Infiltration Law. It allowed Israel to detain the asylum-seekers for up to three years without trial. Two detention camps were hastily built – and, like Woomera, the main one is in a desert location. They house more than 1700 people – mainly men, but also women and children – in what social activists call harsh conditions.

    Two weeks ago, the nine members of Israel’s High Court of Justice unanimously ruled the new law illegal because it violated Israel’s law on human dignity and disproportionately impinged on a person’s right to freedom.

    One of the judges, Edna Arbel, noted: ‘We cannot deprive people of basic rights, using a heavy hand to impact their freedom and dignity, as part of a solution to a problem that demands a suitable, systemic and national solution’.

    As welcome as this news was to the incarcerated, they remain locked up at time of writing. The Interior Ministry has 90 days – until mid-December – to review the inmates’ status. The Israeli government is said to be examining other ways of keeping them under detention.

    The governing coalition’s Whip, Yariv Levin, denounced the court decision as ‘insane, breaking all records for anarchy and will turn Israel from a Jewish state into a state belonging to its migrants’. This is hardly likely when Israel has now managed to stem the flow of ‘the illegal infiltrators’.

    Earlier this year, construction of a 230-kilometre fence from Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba to southern Gaza was completed. This has reduced the unwelcome visitors to a trickle.

    Virtually all the now estimated 60,000 asylum-seekers in Israel remain in a legal limbo. Most have temporary protection visas which have to be renewed every three months.

    Although they entered Israel from Egypt, Israel cannot send them back there because Cairo refuses to rule out returning them to their country of origin, where human rights are questionable. News reports in August suggested that Israel was planning to repatriate them to ‘safe’ African countries in return for military and other specialist aid. Jerusalem has denied this.

    Uganda was mentioned as one such country. Ironically, it was a place which Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, once considered as a site for his Jewish homeland.

    The majority of the asylum-seekers have made their home for now in Tel Aviv’s poorer southern suburbs. They have been subject to the predictable demonizing, including being blamed for criminal activity whereas statistics show that the rate of crime by others is much higher.

    The government provides a range of social services, such as free education for children and free medical care for infants. An emergency medical clinic has been established along with psychiatric services for children.

    But, said Sammy, a 32-year-old Eritrean quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, ‘There is one big problem here – we have no ID, no papers, and no life’.

    Mindful of the persecution of the Jews over the centuries and their need to escape, Israel has long championed the rights of refugees. It helped draft the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol protecting the rights of people fleeing persecution.

    Indeed the Jewish Bible – the Old Testament to Christians – exhorts the faithful to ‘love the stranger as thyself, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt’.

    John Tulloh had a 40-year career in foreign news, including 15 as the ABC’s first international editor for television news and current affairs.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Sri Lanka – the civil war may be over but peace has not returned.

    The Australian government in cooperation with the Sri Lankan government and its security services has been returning asylum seekers to Sri Lanka. They are called ‘voluntary returnees’. Increasingly however, doubts are being expressed by many commentators about the continuing plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka. In the following article, published in Catholic News on September 12, Father Regno, Director of the Catholic church’s social work in the Jaffna community, and other commentators describe the plight of many Tamils. John Menadue.

    Like many ethnic Tamils in northern Sri Lanka, for the last four years Reverend Father Regno Bernard has been waiting patiently for a sign.

    Not from his God—from his government.

    “After the war people expected a lot from the government, that there would be reconciliation, peace. But the people have been deceived,” says Father Regno, director of HUDEC Jaffna, the social arm of the Catholic Church of Jaffna.

    “There has been no sign of reconciliation.” 

    For decades the Sri Lankan government was embroiled in a brutal civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an insurgent group that fought to carve out a separate Tamil homeland in the country’s North and East until it was defeated militarily by government forces in May of 2009.

    Both sides stand accused of a range of human rights violations committed during the war, which claimed the lives of 40,000 civilians in its final days alone, according to the United Nations.

    Sri Lanka, which is poised to host the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in November and serve as CHOGM’s chair for the next two years, is keen to whitewash its rights record and simply relegate past offences to the past. 

    But international rights monitors and Western governments have repeatedly called on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government to take steps toward allowing a credible, independent investigation into war crimes alleged to have been committed by the country’s security forces during the final stages of the conflict.

    Its failure to do so has left a huge rift between Tamils and the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated security forces. This has been exacerbated by the fact that the government continues to push stubbornly forward with a policy aimed at achieving reconciliation in former conflict areas through economic development alone. 

    Critics contend that Colombo has interpreted the phrase “road to reconciliation” rather too literally in this case, focusing solely on improving infrastructure such as highways while neglecting Tamils’ calls for a degree of autonomy and accountability for war crimes.

    Driving through the Vanni, the sparsely populated swath of land that formerly served as the stronghold of the LTTE, recent cosmetic upgrades are readily apparent. A proliferation of newly opened banks, military-run shops, and billboards advertising everything from telecoms to fizzy drinks to construction materials now line an ever expanding network of freshly sealed roads.

    “The development is a façade,” says Father Regno. The government is busy “carpeting the road” when what is needed is a “lasting political solution.”

    Such feelings of disillusion run deep in the North.

    Northern Tamils resent that the government has not scaled back its military presence, that Sinhalese are imported from the South for the vast majority of skilled jobs in infrastructure development, that Tamils cannot file complaints at the police station in their own language, that lands seized during the war for security purposes have not been returned, that more has not been done to encourage investment and the creation of jobs, and that harassment and rights violations committed by the security forces continue unchecked.

    “It’s not only about [having enough] rice and curry,” says Eran Wickramartne, a Sinhalese Member of Parliament with the opposition United National Party.

    It’s also about “a feeling of ‘I belong’, that ‘I am respected’, that ‘I have dignity’, that ‘my ideas and proposals count’. ‘Respect for my language, respect for my culture’. Reconciliation is about that. There has to be a holistic approach. I think that is where the government has fallen short,” says Wickramartne. 

    The problem with the government’s approach is that “development is not inclusive” and Tamils are not being consulted in decision making processes, says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based research group.

    “The population still feels it is being treated with suspicion,” he says. 

    Civilians have to inform the military if they want to hold a school program or sporting event – any kind of gathering that could “arouse suspicion” – and then invite the local commander as guest of honor, says Saravanamuttu. In practice, this means any unsanctioned gathering of more than five people is banned.

    It is “such an outrageous and unacceptable rule,” says Jehan Perera, Executive Director of the National Peace Council.

    The omnipresent feeling of being watched by Big Brother pervades almost every aspect of life for Tamils in the North. But the most glaring manifestation of this is that individuals even suspected of having prior links to the LTTE are closely monitored, subjected to frequent questioning, forced to act as informants and—in some cases—subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of the security forces.

    Amitha (a pseudonym) joined the LTTE in 1995, but returned to civilian life in 2005 when she married. After the war she was ordered to check in with the military twice a week at a civil affairs office in Jaffna.

    “On these visits I was sexually abused,” she says. “One guy would put me up against a wall and touch me from behind. He tried to kiss me, but I would not allow it. So he would put his hands on my skirt and pull it up and touch me inappropriately.”

    When she started missing appointments, they came looking for her.

    “One day when I was alone at my parent’s house a soldier came. He tried to grab me. He said, ‘You have to go inside your room and take off all your clothes. I have permission to examine your scars.”

    Amitha refused and pointed out that the civil affairs office would have sent a female officer to conduct this kind of examination if it were legitimate.

    “Finally, he said, ‘If you are not going to do this, I am going to use your thighs’,” she says.

    Amitha ran away, and has been in hiding ever since. 

    Her story, while not uncommon, is one of the more blatant examples of how the government is failing to win Tamil hearts and minds.

    Indeed, the government’s policy has been to categorically deny there is a prevailing culture of silence and impunity for sexual violence in the North.

    Such reports of torture and gender-based violence are “based on hearsay,” says military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya. 

    Many independent observers agree that a lasting political solution can only be achieved once a measure of autonomy is granted to the Tamil-dominated areas in the North and East. To this end, the Sri Lankan government has faced significant international pressure to hold Northern Council elections, which have been slated for September 21.

    “The fact that the government has decided to go along with the Northern Council election is a positive step forward,” says Wickramartne. “It is long overdue.”

    But questions have arisen about just how much power Colombo is actually willing to share. Most discussions on this topic tend to gravitate toward the 13th amendment, which in theory grants police and land powers to the provincial councils. But the government has threatened to dilute these powers, while some observers claim that in practice the 13th amendment already lacks teeth.

    The notion that the amendment would guarantee the Northern Council some level of autonomy is flawed because “everything has to be approved by the central government,” says Thevanayagam Premanand, executive editor of the Jaffna-based Tamil language newspaper Udthayan. “Without the approval of the governor, [the council] cannot pass any law.” 

    “The 13th amendment, as it is today, is not being implemented as it should be,” says Wickramartne. The central government needs to come to terms with the idea of “sharing power with the periphery,” he says.

    The issue of which body controls state land is the key to the discussion, says Kumaravadivel Guruparan, a lecturer in the Department of Law at the University of Jaffna.

    Sri Lanka’s military appears to have been given carte blanche in terms of seizing land, and in the aftermath of the civil war has used lands originally acquired for security purposes to set up hotels, plantations, tour operations and more. This, of course, has aroused the ire of local Tamils.

    “How do these amount to public security?” says Guruparan.

    In the most high profile land-grabbing case, over 1,000 complaints have been filed by property owners demanding compensation or the return of their lands in an approximately 2,430-hectare area, which the government has announced it will retain possession of on the Jaffna peninsula. This area includes the large Palay military cantonment as well as the military-operated Thalsevana Holiday Resort.

    “Those lands cannot be released due to development plans for [an] airport and harbor,” says Wanigasooriya, adding that military bases such as Palay are “essential” for national security.

    The central government, which is primarily concerned with maintaining stability in the former conflict areas as well as pandering to its Sinhalese voting base, is unlikely to budge on the issue of control over state land. 

    “There is a belief that if you give the north land and police powers they will run away with it,” says Saravanamuttu. The primary fear, he says, is that Tamils will once again try to set up an independent state, using land powers acquired through the 13th amendment as a legal means to unify provinces in the North and East.

    These fears are largely exaggerated, says Saravanamuttu, but the current government is willing to do “whatever necessary to hold the support of the Sinhala-Buddhist constituency.”

    When asked about these fears, the government is quick to point the finger at the Tamil diaspora.

    “There are many groups based in other countries propagating the ideology of separatism,” says Wanigasooriya. “We cannot afford to let our guard down, not yet.” 

    The decision to host CHOGM in Sri Lanka is a huge feather in the cap for the Rajapaksa government, despite the fact that the upcoming summit has served as a talking point for critics to refocus attention on Sri Lanka’s reluctance to be held accountable for rights abuses.

    “Certainly Sri Lanka has to make good on its human rights record,” says Wickramartne. “By our own standards we have fallen short.”

    “We are hopeful [that] it is possible for all communities to live together,” says Wanigasooriya. 

    But for people like Amitha, who is desperately trying to secure asylum in a European country, the notion of reconciliation is a hard sell.

    “I can never go back home because I know what happens to female ex-cadres,” she says. “I would rather commit suicide.”

    Father Regno, too, is not optimistic. Over a cup of milky sweet tea he offers one last musing.

    “Without a political solution, we have no future.”

  • Where ignorance is bliss … (’tis foolish to be wise) Guest blogger Arja Keski-Nummi

     

    The Abbott government appears to have signaled that they do not believe in  nation building.

     

    They have created a Department of Immigration and Border Protection and moved the vital settlement support services from this portfolio to be lost in a larger  welfare-oriented agency.  The fact is that migration and settlement are two sides of the same coin and it is this symbiotic relationship that has been fundamental to making sure that Australia’s migration programs have been the envy of the rest of the world.

    We now risk losing that competitive edge at a time when most countries recognize that what they need more than anything else is to attract young, skilled migrants.

     

    To some, it may appear that the new arrangements make sense.  But we would do well to remember history a little bit. The last time Immigration was split and settlement moved into a social service portfolio was under Gough Whitlam when migration reached historically low levels in Australia.  It was not a good move then and it is not a good move now. We again risk jeopardising the very success of our migration programs.

     

    Symbolism matters and what Tony Abbott has done also says to us that migration is no longer about nation building but  it is something to fear, which is why we need our borders protected!

     

    From what? Growth? Wealth generation?  Because that is what a successful immigration program has delivered to Australia for close to seventy years.

     

    He has also shown how shallow his understanding of migration and its role in Australia’s wealth is. He has been hijacked by his own mantra on boats to ignore the more important part of the portfolio – the migration program.

     

    By the creation of a Department  of Immigration and Border Protection he has effectively reversed the underlying philosophy of immigration as a nation building program (remember the old adage populate or perish – it is as true today for different reason as it was immediately after the second world war nearly 70 years ago) into a an essentially militarised border security portfolio.

     

    One of the reasons Australia has been so good at immigration is that we have always recognized that the migration experience does not end with a visa or entry to Australia. Its success has been how we assist in the difficult first months and years of resettlement. Having the space to learn English early and to be assisted in understanding how to negotiate a different and sometimes culturally incomprehensible social services and employment landscape are fundamental to this adjustment.

     

    For the modest amount of outlays allocated to the programs we get a big bang for the buck. These are not welfare services – they are about making the immigration program a success. We have the evidence after thirty years of  a structured settlement support program that the earlier new arrivals have settled and the earlier they are able to move into jobs and into education the faster will they and their families be contributing to the Australian community.

     

    Malcolm Fraser over thirty years ago understood this when he commissioned the Galbally report – the foundation for many of the programs now being moved to the new social services portfolio or to education.

     

    He also knew of the hardships of migrants who arrived in the immediate post war years with limited assistance and support struggling to learn English or to adapt to the new society they had come to. His vision was for an integrated Australian society – not ghettoes and that is what we have managed to achieve. It has not been good luck it has been holding the course and making sure that we have had well managed settlement programs. Even John Howard was not so regressive despite the push from the Pauline Hanson’s of this world at the time.

     

    The risk we now face is that we will undo a migration program that creates wealth .In its place we have the cheap politics of boats.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. She was responsible for refugee policy and programs.

  • Commodifying and dehumanising asylum seekers. Guest blogger Michael Kelly SJ

    The rejection by the Indonesian foreign minister of Tony Abbott’s suggested ways of “stopping the boats” is only the latest assertion of how the Coalition’s policy on asylum seekers was never going to work. It might have made political sense at election time, allegedly in marginal seats though the results in western Sydney throw some doubt on that.

    But now a factious Senate that will be difficult for a Coalition government to woo, a High Court to appeal to about the implementation of a policy that has all to many features similar to the one struck down when the “Malaysian Solution” failed and the unparalleled damage done by the policy to Australia’s standing in the region all indicate that, however loudly proclaimed and possibly significant at the polls, it was never a goer.

    Its absurdity as policy is now clear to anyone wanting to look at how unworkable it is. And Labor didn’t help. Already, despite promises during the campaign from such people as Penny Wong that Labor would never send children, especially unaccompanied ones, to Nauru, it’s happened. And as PM, Kevin Rudd’s dealings with PNG and Nauru only intensified the issue with which the Coalition joined the ALP with glee.

    But there’s something deeper at work in what is, in the medium and long term, just bad policy. It surfaces in people wondering how committed Christians like Rudd, Abbott and Morrison can so politically exploit and instrumentalise vulnerable people and see any coherence with the faith they profess.

    Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in his moralizing pseudoscientific economics. But one thing he did get right was the way capitalist economies can commodify and dehumanize people as “units” in a production process. He called it “reification” which, for those not familiar with Latin, means making “things” of people.

    And that’s what happens when an absence of proper legal process, attentive listening to actual personal stories and a readiness to accept a civilized approach worked out over the last 70 years to dealing with asylum seeker claims are replaced by punishing the claimant before the case has been heard.

    We are all familiar, or should be, with what a relatively insignificant share, by international comparisons with the numbers of asylum seekers in the world, those coming to our country are. But a national category mistake seems to be the order of the day in Australia: we hear politicians waxing ferocious about an “emergency” whose context they don’t get or refuse to acknowledge.

    And in that context, people can be dehumanized and “reified”. Don’t ask me how those doing it can square such an attitude and approach with their claimed “deepest beliefs”. I thought central to being a Christian was what’s celebrated at Christmas through which believers mark that every human is dignified as a carrier of God’s presence.

    As with so many people who propose or enact inhuman solutions to apparent problems and challenges, Tony Abbott is also widely discovered to be not the demon alleged but a very approachable, sensitive and humane individual. Ask some Aborigines in northern Australia.

    Those who know him attest to his gracious and compassionate warmth as a person. His use of site visits and shopping center walk throughs have always been a winner for him because he is an engaging person who is the antithesis of the cartoon ideologue his enemies paint him to be.

    Characterizations of him as a misogynist and a blue tie wearing cardboard cut out are how Labor sought to dehumanize hi

    But characterizing asylum seekers as “illegals” and targeted as people whose story is never to be heard – dehumanizing them – is what he’s done. And why has this happened with someone whose Christian faith is sincere and whose human qualities are well attested to?

    The simple answer given by many is it’s all about politics. And if that’s so, what well deserved reputations politicians have.

    But perhaps it’s also because, for the last 500 years, Christians have so trivialized their understanding of sin – reducing it to the commission of acts that violate a rulebook someone has made – that the fundamental sin of human beings is missed. That sin is the depersonalization of human beings, allowing them to be reduced to figures on a page.

    Marx reviled the process; Jesus decried it; and we all do it. Any time we advance an argument against an actual or perceived enemy and neglect to acknowledge the humanity of our opponent, we are into reification. Any time we propose a process that neglects engagement with the people affected, we are into reification.

    Marx was in the great tradition of Jewish Prophets who decried injustice as not only destructive of human community but an ultimate offence against humanity. He didn’t believe in God. But he got the consequences that his Jewish heritage specified for the way we live for or off each other.

    And now that the black comedy of the election campaign is over, and no matter how many worthy warriors Tony Abbott can muster from the ranks of the retired military to manage “stopping the boats”, there’s a real problem: it won’t work.

    One way or another, Australia is going to have to return to finding a regional solution to the challenge, engage with the real people in the mix of both our regional neighbors and the asylum seekers wanting to come our way or face even greater failures in foreign affairs and the health and quality of Australia’s public culture.

  • Dodging a bullet. Guest blogger: John Young

    It was going to be as bad as 1996 (when Labor lost 31 seats), a sombre Stephen Smith gravely warned us at the beginning of the ABC election night coverage.

    Smith ignored that a few months earlier Labor was facing its worst election defeat, at least as bad as the 2011 NSW State election.

    How had this occurred when the Government was competent and economy was going well? The 2010 hung Parliament does not of itself provide the answer.   The answer lies in the elusive concept of trust.

    The 2010 coup against Rudd destroyed the public benefit Gillard should have enjoyed as the first female Prime Minister. In the 2010 negotiations to form Government, the breaking by Gillard of an explicit campaign promise not to introduce a carbon tax caused the electorate to feel it had been betrayed by Labor.  Gillard never regained that trust.

    Gillard and Swan lacked communications skills to sell Labor’s positive economic record. They exacerbated the trust deficit by absurd promises such as committing to an early return to surplus. This was as stupid as it was dishonest and the mining tax was redesigned in a way that raised miniscule revenue.

    Because Gillard lacked credibility, Abbott was able to perpetuate the lie that Labor was saddling future generations with massive debt.

    The position of minority Government was always less than ideal but the Bracks, Beattie and Rann governments had successfully managed the transition to majority government.

    Gillard deserves credit for her legislative achievements. That said, Abbott persuaded the public the Parliament was in chaos – the Thomson and Slipper imbroglios leant credence to these claims.

    The risk inherent in Rudd’s return to the leadership in June was that it exacerbated the perception the government was hopelessly divided and chaotic.   The fiasco in March when Rudd had refused to run and the impression that he was not a team player and everything was “always about Kevin” fuelled further public frustration and anger with Labor.

    The government had become a soap opera. The impression of instability and chaos was too embedded in the electorate’s mind for a restored Rudd to do more than save some furniture.

    Upon resuming the Prime Ministership, Rudd governed with a deft touch and the capacity to outflank his opponents.

    He neutralised issues such as refugee boat arrivals and Labor’s refusal to reform under Gillard.   The harshness of the asylum seeker policy likely cost Labor some primary support and possibly the seat of Melbourne.  However, “stopping the boats” was virtually unheard during the campaign. Rudd also neutralised the broken promise about the carbon tax.

    If Rudd the Prime Minister matched best expectations, Rudd the campaigner disappointed.

    In contrast to 2007, Rudd’s campaign was patchy. The Labor slogan “A New Way” was absurd for a Government in power for six years amid such acrimony.

    From day one of the campaign, Rudd faced vitriolic attack from the Murdoch media. The tabloids were simply offensive propaganda sheets openly campaigning against the Labor government and slanting coverage to that end.

    This made Rudd’s task of selling Labor’s complicated message that “we have done a great job even though we have been at war” all the more difficult. The most repeated and challenging question he was asked was why should voters support you when your own party sacked you?

    Rudd, who had showcased his campaigning cred for many grateful MPs, did not hit the ground running.

    He was damaged by media criticism that he cheated by taking notes in the first debate with Abbott.  It was a mistake that should not have happened in a professionally run campaign.

    Another mistake was Rudd’s poor judgement posting on social media a photo (selfie) of a shaving cut. This action struck the wrong note and fed into media accusations of narcissism.

    The Northern Territory taxation” thought bubble” damaged Rudd and there was not one vote in it. The criticism that he was making policy on the run for media grabs had validity.

    Critically in the second last week of the campaign Rudd was admonished by officials for over-reaching in his description of costings. The media treated this as a far more serious criticism than it was but with Labor trailing in the polls and struggling for traction, it could not afford setbacks.

    There are legitimate criticisms of Rudd’s campaign performance but he still had the capacity to connect and to inspire. He was unrelenting in his efforts to differentiate Labor from the ideological attacks which the LNP would make on services while they enacted their unaffordable PPL scheme and foolish policies including buying Indonesian fishing boats.

    On occasions, Rudd showed his magic.   Perhaps his finest performance was on QandA where he displayed vision and passionately spoke to the issue of marriage equality.

    Abbott’s campaign was disciplined but far from brilliant.  He made a number of foolish comments which could have derailed his campaign if the media wasn’t pre-disposed to his perceived inevitable victory. Abbott prevailed because of the damage which Labor had inflicted on itself and the leg-up of the Murdoch press.

    Despite the difficulties in selling his message, Rudd was indefatigable defending Labor economic credentials and attacking the fitness of Abbott and the LNP to govern.  The result of the election is proof that he was effective doing this and the dire predictions of a Labor wipe out were wrong.

    In June before the return of Rudd to the leadership, Labor was looking at about an 8% swing and a devastating loss of 40 or even more seats.   It is no exaggeration to say that such electoral decimation would have imperilled Labor’s very survival

    Labor will lose around 15 seats on a swing of about 3%. Importantly every Labor Minister has held their seat. This result confirms Labor made entirely the right decision to return to Rudd. On this occasion, saving some furniture was enough. It can now face the future confident of its history and determined not to repeat the faults of its recent past.

     

     

  • Facing the future. Guest blogger: Prof. Stephen Leeder

    Facing the future in a world where black swan events change everything.

    When considering what we may be facing with a new federal government in Australia, a wise starting point would be a conversation with Nassim Nicholas Taleb, he of the Black Swan theory.

    Taleb has written extensively, using the discovery of black swans in a world that did not believe they existed as his metaphor, about the impact of unpredictable game-changing events. Such events (9/11, the tsunami that led to the Fukushima catastrophe, the internet) change the course of history but we do not see them coming.

    According to Wikipedia, Black Swan events have the following characteristics:

    1. The event is a surprise (to the observer).
    2. The event has a major effect.
    3. After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected; that is, the relevant data were available but [not processed in a way that enabled us to prevent it].

    So perhaps the best that we can do in thinking about what we are facing is to acknowledge that the big things that will shape our history over the next 3-6 years are not predictable.  An epidemic, an earthquake, a nuclear war, a tipping point in climate change that kills all the fish, a crazy person on a rampage with a gun, the discovery of a cure for cancer or dementia – no-one can say.

    In the meantime of course there is a high measure of predictability about our daily lives.  Tony Abbott will continue to conduct his business with intelligence, discipline, an ascetic athleticism, a trenchant debater’s criticism of opponents and a demand for loyalty in his ranks.  He may well manifest a religious concern for the plight of the poor. Think three years in a seminary and then think three years as prime minister.  The differences are unlikely to be profound.  None of us really change much over time.

    Tony Abbott is on record as having little sympathy for those with mental illness, questioning whether what is commonly called mental illness is not a cute name for weakness of character.  He may have moved beyond this caricature: we shall see.

    Stopping the boats and abolishing the carbon tax are core promises.  The first will only be achieved by a more sophisticated and nuanced approach than having the Australian navy intervene.  Settling the xenophobic paranoia whipped up over this matter will take time.  Carbon has a bad history in Australia.  Maybe a Black Swan event is necessary for our nation to address climate change seriously.

    In relation to health care, little has been said to indicate what the new national policies will be.  The challenges – older people, more chronic disease, more technology, more need for national prevention programs, and more resources for general practice – are mainly managerial and only secondarily political, though of course the capacity for faulty politics to stuff things up in health care is substantial.

    The previous government embarked upon a program of change to the health care system as described recently in a blog by John Dwyer.  As he argued, however, much remains to be done to better align the provision of care with the health needs of Australians.  This is especially so in relation to the care of those who have serious and continuing illness who require care from hospitals, general practitioners, community health staff, specialists in the community and home care.  The joining up of these care modalities is best done from a community base and while progress has been made, we lag far behind international best practice.

    The preventive agenda, never enthusiastically endorsed by the conservative side of politics, has much work to do with the disastrous epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.  To address this effectively will require the engagement of the food industry, curbs on our alcohol consumption, revised plans for urban design and much more.  A retreat into assigning responsibility entirely to the individual for lifestyle behaviour and food and beverage choices is unacceptable and silly.  We have done well with a long struggle over tobacco, especially during the past six years, and much more needs to be done across portfolios to address the huge health problems associated with over- and inappropriate consumption of processed foods. Tony, are you listening please?

    We can only wait and see what Mr. Abbott et al. have in mind.  Black Swan events can change everything in a trice.

    In summary, the predictable aspects of the future can be discerned in the character of the principal players and the political context in which they are operating.  But it is the big, unpredictable events that will shape our history. Let’s hope they are good ones that create new opportunities!

     

  • The election – punishing bad behaviour. John Menadue

    One thing the election did was to explode the perceived wisdom that if the economy was doing well, governments are seldom voted out. But the Rudd Government was.

    As I have written in earlier blogs.

    • The Australian economy, by almost any measure is one of the best performing and managed in the world.
    • Our material stand of living is continuing to rise at a rate of about 2.5% p.a.
    • Only two days ago, The Herald – Lateral Economics Wellbeing Index showed that our ‘wellbeing’ rose by 7% last financial year. The index measures not only changes in income but also knowhow, environment, health, inequality and job-satisfaction.

    But there were other factors at work in the election.

    • The public clearly chose to punish bad political and personal behaviour by the ALP – the ousting of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard, his undermining of her and then her overthrow. Division is political death.
    • There were obviously concerns about the flakiness of Kevin Rudd.
    • The ALP campaign was ad hoc and chaotic. There was one thought bubble after another. It lacked a consistent theme based on the values and principles that most people thought the ALP stood for – like fairness, decency and equal opportunity.
    • Kevin Rudd and Chris Bowen were no more successful than Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan in persuading the public of the government’s good record on the economy. Chris Bowen now has two consecutive ministerial failures in his c.v. – Immigration and Treasury.
    • The swing against the ALP in NSW showed that the public did not accept that the ALP in that state had been cleaned up. It could only have been achieved by sacking the whole branch.
    • The easy-ride by the media of Tony Abbott’s policies and the bullying campaign by Murdoch seems to have had an effect. The ALP mistakes, and there were many, were highlighted particularly by the Murdoch media and the coalition was given an easy ride.

    The coalition waged a very successful political campaign with very little substantial policy. Tony Abbott’s campaign over four years has been attack dog style- brutal, dishonest, but effective.

    • We were told that we had a debt crisis and a budget emergency, but it now turns out that that was all phoney talk. Tony Abbott has pledged instead a reduction in taxes, e.g. carbon tax, and increases in spending, e.g. parental leave. There is a fundamental inconsistency in what Tony Abbott has been telling us for years and in what he now proposes to do.
    • Tony Abbott offers us stability after the apparent chaos of the hung parliament. But in terms of legislation and participation by independents, the last parliament was probably one of the most successful for a long time. In the last few days of the campaign Tony Abbott has told us that if his carbon tax legislation repeal is not passed by the Senate, there will be another election. That doesn’t sound like stability!
    • Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have quite deliberately whipped up xenophobic, racist and anti-Muslim sentiment.

    My concern is that on two key issues, climate change and asylum seekers, the election has taken us backwards.

    In his first term, Kevin Rudd said that climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our generation. He was correct. He introduced the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme but it was defeated in the Senate by the coalition and the sanctimonious Greens. Then Kevin Rudd dropped the ball and Tony Abbott has kicked it into touch ever since.

    In the hung parliament, a deal with the Greens and other independents was necessary. The carbon tax was the result. That tax has delivered valuable results, despite the pain inflicted on Julia Gillard. In his brief second period as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd announced that a future Labor government would move to a market-based carbon emissions scheme – the same type of scheme that was proposed by John Howard many years ago.

    Tony Abbott has opposed any meaningful program to reduce global warming. In an off-guard moment he said that global warming is ‘crap’. He then adopted his absurd ‘Direct Action’ scheme to reduce carbon pollution. This was a smoke-screen to divert attention whilst he relentlessly attacked the carbon tax. Malcolm Turnbull has described Direct Action as nonsense, a fig-leaf to provide cover when you don’t have a credible policy. But now it seems that Tony Abbot is even retreating from Direct Action.  He said that the coalition would be spending ‘no more and no less’ than it has committed to Direct Action, even if it doesn’t achieve the 5% emission reduction target by 2020 as promised. Almost every expert says that direct action will not work and it will be extremely expensive.

    Our grandchildren are going to pay a heavy price for our generation’s failure to address the issue of climate change. Month by month the scientific evidence is overwhelming that global warming is occurring and that humans are the cause. The experience of almost all of us, whether in record August temperatures, storms, droughts or cyclones  points in the same direction as the scientific evidence. Climate change is occurring. This is a great moral and environment challenge for which our generation is avoiding its stewardship responsibilities.

    We have also now reached the nadir on boat arrivals. Our slippery slide on this issue started in 2001 with Tampa and children-overboard. Since then the Liberals have been unscrupulously but successfully setting traps for the ALP. The Liberal Party in Opposition did not want boats to stop. The more boats that came the better the politics for them. That is why the Liberals sided with the Greens to block the amending of the Migration Act in the Senate which would have enabled implementation of the agreement with Malaysia. Boat arrivals have increased dramatically since that time. In world terms the numbers are not large, but it became a political plaything for the Liberal party.

    It won’t be easy and it will take time, but we must find a way to change the conversation on asylum seekers and refugees. It is not just an Australian problem. It is a major and serious global problem. Unfortunately John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have successfully drawn the ALP into the quagmire they have created.

    Lord Acton said that power corrupts. Power also reveals. It revealed a lot about Kevin Rudd. What will it reveal about Tony Abbott?

  • Asylum seekers are blocking the M4 freeway and clogging up our hospitals! John Menadue

    On Monday night on 4 Corners, the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, Fiona Scott, said that asylum seekers’ cars were blocking the M4 highway. For readers outside Sydney, the M4 is a 40 km expressway connecting Concord and Penrith.

    I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that such ignorance could be expressed by a candidate who could very well be a member of parliament after next Saturday, if the opinion polls are correct.

    The M4 carries over 50,000 cars in the morning peak per day in both directions. I have met many asylum seekers but I cannot recall ever meeting one who has a car.

    Fiona Scott went on to say that asylum seekers were worsening hospital waiting times. It was another beat up. Asylum seekers can access Emergency Departments but very few have Medicare. However the Refugee Council says that the area surrounding the Nepean Hospital-Blacktown.the Hawkesbury, Penrith and the Blue Mountains-took in only 161 asylum seekers in the last year. The total population is 618, 000. My experience is that almost all asylum seekers have to rely on generous doctors and nurses who give their time freely as volunteers.

    Her outburst is the most manipulative and appalling I have seen for a long time. Traffic congestion and hospital waiting times are two sensitive issues in Western Sydney. Fiona Scott chooses ignorantly and deliberately to target and scapegoat asylum seekers for both problems.

    In other circumstances one would expect the leader of the Liberal Party to intervene to sack Fiona Scott, but that is unlikely because Tony Abbott has been the cheer leader in the demonization of asylum seekers for years.  Even in the press reports of Fiona Scott’s comments, Tony Abbott continued to talk, as he has done for years, about ‘illegal’ asylum seekers. They are not illegal. From the time that Robert Menzies ratified the Refugee Convention in 1954, asylum seekers are entitled to our legal protection. They may be ‘irregular’ entrants but they are not ‘illegal’. Tony Abbott’s dog-whistling is designed to convey the impression that somehow these ‘other’ people are not entitled to our protection and are akin to criminals. It is disgraceful the way he behaves. “Caring for the stranger” is not part of his lexicon.

    Fiona Scott is showing all the signs of being a soul mate of Scott Morrison who demonises asylum seekers for “bringing disease” and ‘wads of cash’.

    Lebanon with a population of just over 4 m people has taken in almost one million Syrian refugees. Sweden has just announced that the 8,000 Syrian asylum seekers in its country will all get permanent residence. Pakistan is host to 2 million refugees.

    What a selfish and sorry country we have become.

    History is full of the stories of unscrupulous people who scapegoat the foreigner and the outsider. The Liberal Party is making the demonization of outsiders an art form. And the problem starts at the top.

  • Boat arrivals are down. John Menadue

    You would hardly know it if you read the Murdoch papers or listened to the Canberra bureau of the ABC but boat arrivals are dramatically down in recent weeks.

    How ironic it would be if even before Tony Abbott becomes Prime Minister, that asylum seekers arriving by boat have been reduced to a trickle. It is early days, but the figures point to a significant decline.

    A Department of Immigration official has been reported in one newspaper that I saw yesterday as advising that ‘After 4236 asylum seekers arrived on 48 boats in July, the number for August dropped to 1585 on 25 boats. The number of arrivals in the last week of August was 71, the lowest weekly figure since February.’

    The Minister for Immigration, Tony Burke, said ‘I have absolutely no doubt now that the policy is having the effect that we hoped’.

    Perhaps the new figures might take some heat out of the absurd political debate, but I am not that confident. The decline in numbers should reduce significantly those asylum seekers who could be transferred to PNG or held in detention on Christmas Island and elsewhere.

    If the new policy is working as the Minister suggests, could the government please consider an increase in the humanitarian intake to 27,000 as Kevin Rudd earlier suggested could occur if the policies to curb boat arrivals worked. This would reassure many people, although only in a small way, who have watched with horror the race to the bottom on asylum seekers.

    Maybe there is a glimmer of hope in all this darkness!

  • From one Catholic to another. Guest blogger: Bishop Hurley, Darwin.

    ​The Catholic Bishop of Darwin has expressed concern to Tony Abbott about the Coalition’s policies towards asylum-seekers and people in detention.  His letter to Tony Abbott follows:

     

    Bishop Hurley letter to Tony Abbott

    The Leader of the Opposition
    The Hon. Tony Abbott MHR
    Parliament House
    RG109
    CANBERRA ACT 2600
    16 August 2013

    Dear Mr. Abbott,

    I have just returned to my office from the Wickham Point and the Blaydin detention centres here in Darwin.

    Sadly, I have been involved with detention centres since the creation of the Woomera centre, followed by Baxter and now, over the last six years, with the various and expanding centres here in Darwin.

    I experienced once again today, the suffocating frustration of the unnecessary pain we inflict on one another. I celebrated Holy Mass with a large number of Vietnamese families, made up of men, women, children and women waiting to give birth. The celebration was prayerful and wonderful, until the moment of parting.

    I was reminded of something a young man said to me during one of my visits to Woomera, all those years ago. I was saying something about freedom.

    He replied, “Father, if freedom is all you have known, then you have never known freedom.”

    I sensed the horrible truth of that statement again today.

    I was also conscious of that beautiful speech made when the UNHCR accepted the Nobel Prize in 1981. In part it states,

    “Throughout the history of mankind people have been uprooted against their will. Time and time again, lives and values built from generation to generation have been shattered without warning. But throughout history mankind has also reacted to such upheavals and brought succour to the uprooted. Be it through individual gestures or concerted action and solidarity, those people have been offered help and shelter and a chance to become dignified, free citizens again. Through the ages, the giving of sanctuary had become one of the noblest traditions of human nature.

    Communities, institutions, cities and nations have generously opened their doors to refugees.”

    I sit here at my desk with a heavy heart and a deep and abiding sadness, that the leaders of the nation that my father, as an immigrant, taught me to love with a passion, have adopted such a brutal, uncompassionate and immoral stance towards refugees.

    I imagine he would be embarrassed and saddened by what has occurred.

    It occurred to me today that neither the Prime Minister or yourself know the story of any one of these people.

    Neither do the great Australian community.

    I find that it is quite impossible to dismiss these people with all the mindless, well-crafted slogans, when you actually look into their eyes, hold their babies and feel their grief.

    There has been a concerted campaign to demonise these people and keep them isolated from the great Australian public. It has been successful in appealing to the less noble aspects of our nation’s soul and that saddens me. I feel no pride in this attitude that leads to such reprehensible policies, on both sides of our political spectrum.

    I cringe when people draw my attention to elements of our history like The White Australia Policy and the fact that we didn’t even count our Indigenous sisters and brothers until the mid 1900’s. I cringe and wish those things were not true. It is hard to imagine that we as a nation could have done those things.

    I judge the attitude of our political leaders to refugees and asylum seekers to be in the same shameful category as the above mentioned. In years to come, Australians who love this country will be in disbelief that we as a nation could have been so uncharacteristically cruel for short term political advantage.

    It seems that nothing will influence your policy in this matter, other than the political imperative, but I could not sit idly by without feeling complicit in a sad and shameful chapter of this country which I have always believed to be better than that.

    Sometime I would love to share with you some of the stories I have had the privilege of being part of over the years. I am sure you would be greatly moved. Sadly, for so many, such a moment will be all too late.

    Yours Sincerely,

    Bishop E. Hurley.

    Most Rev Daniel Eugene Hurley DD
    The Chancery of the Diocese

     

  • Jesuit students rebuke Tony Abbott and other old boys. John Menadue

    For many years, I have been concerned that the Jesuits at St Ignatius College Sydney seem to be producing mainly conservative politicians and merchant bankers. I don’t think St Ignatius would have expected that.

    My confidence in the Jesuits at St Ignatius has been at least partially restored by action by senior students at St Ignatius to rebuke Tony Abbott and others for ‘betraying moral values on asylum seekers’. See the report of their action from the SMH below.

    ​http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/tony-abbotts-old-school-hits-out-at-asylum-seeker-stance-as-betraying-moral-values-20130821-2savt.html

    John Menadue

  • Hitting rock-bottom! John Menadue

    Today Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison have announced draconian measures that will inflict enormous punishment on over 30,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in Australia over recent years by boat.  These draconian policies will apply not just to future boat arrivals but will be applied retrospectively to over 30,000 asylum seekers who are already legally here.

    We can imagine the widespread protests if any Australian government announced retrospective changes in taxation or other important policies, but some of the most vulnerable in the world are fair game in Australian politics.

    What a shameful country we have become. The poisoning of public opinion against asylum seekers which began with Tampa in 2001 is getting worse by the day.

    Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison propose:

    • None of these 30.000 asylum seekers will ever be granted permanent residence even if they are found to be refugees.
    • They will be denied access to any appeal processes. Clerks in the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will exercise control over their lives.
    • Persons found to be refugees will get a temporary protection visa which will deny them the right to sponsor family. The only way that they can re-join their family will be to return to the country from which they fled because of danger.

    Amongst these 30,000 asylum seekers in Australia are many whose lives have been put at risk because of the actions of Australian Governments to intervene in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only has our involvement in those two wars been futile and cost many Australian lives, it has put at risk many Iraqis and Afghans who will now pay a huge price as the civil war in Iraq extends and the withdrawal of Western forces from Afghanistan leaves more and more Afghans exposed to danger. But we show no concern that some of these people now in Australia cannot call on the Australian government or people for protection or decency.

    This announcement today continues the demonization of asylum seekers that has been going on for years. Scott Morrison, who would be the Minister for Immigration in an Abbott Government, said in his maiden speech in 2008 ‘From my faith I derive the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness”. Yet he has told us on many occasions

    • That asylum seekers bring “disease, everything from tuberculosis and Hepatitis C to Chlamydia and syphilis”.
    • He told 2GB talk-back radio that he had seen asylum seekers bringing in “wads of cash and large displays of jewellery”.
    • According to Jane Cadzow, in the Sun Herald he told the Coalition to ‘ramp up its questioning to … capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment’.
    • In early 2002, he complained about the cost of holding funerals in Sydney for asylum seekers who had died in a shipwreck off Christmas Island.  He referred to funding for an 8 year old boy whose parents had been drowned as a ‘government funded junket’.

    Senator Abetz, a migrant himself and apparently a devout Lutheran said that asylum seekers in the community should be registered in the same way as paedophiles.

    Tony Abbott, the seminary-trained and student of the Jesuits, continually calls asylum seekers ‘illegals’ when they are not. He wants us to believe that they are criminals. He has never called Scott Morrison into line.

    Who will call a stop to our inhumanity? In world terms, with 45 million refugees and displaced persons, the number of asylum seekers coming to Australia is miniscule. When will we get out of our parochial stupor and appreciate the real world beyond our shores? But history shows that it is so easy for unscrupulous politicians to exploit fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different.

    Malcolm Fraser we need you now.

  • Minimizing PNG and Nauru. John Menadue

    Before I outline what I suggest we should do after the federal election let me first raise a few important background issues.

    The Indo China program

    In working with Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee I was actively involved in the Indochina refugee program under which Australia took 240,000 people, including family reunion. It was a successful humanitarian program which most Australians now look back on with pride. It also broke the back of White Australia but did not fully banish it. It still shows up to today in a de facto form, in hostility and demonization of asylum seekers.

    There were several keys to that successful program.

    • Regional processing in which regional countries held 1.4 million people for processing.
    • Settlement countries such as US and Australia providing funding and speedily accepting those found to be refugees.
    • Boat arrivals in Australia were minimal. In the period 1976-77 to 1982-83, an average of 10 boats and 340 people arrived by boat each year.  The peak year was in 1977-78 when 43 boats and 1,423 people came
    • That program would not have been possible if we had the 50,000 boat arrivals that are projected presently next year in Australia.
    • There was bipartisan support
    • From that experience I have been a firm supporter of compliance/border protection. The Australian community will support a generous humanitarian/refugee intake provided it is orderly. The same approach is being taken by President Obama…an amnesty for 11 million Latinos in return for stepped up border protection
    • The present strident refugee advocates are not helping the cause. They weaken the case for an expanded refugee intake.   They prejudice multiculturalism and  send a message along with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison that the Australian Government will and must give way

    Agreement with Malaysia.

    The rejection of the agreement with Malaysia by the High Court started the rot that we have today. That High Court decision may have been sound in law but it has had awful consequences for good policy. The agreement with Malaysia needed improvement but it did provide guarantees that Malaysia had never provided before. UNHCR was prepared to actively cooperate.. It would have restarted regional arrangements.  When the High Court rejected the Malaysian agreement in August 2011, Irregular maritime arrivals were then running at less than 300 per month.  The number of boat arrivals increased to 1,200 by May 2012. ’ They have been on a rising trend ever since. The Malaysian failure sent a very clear message. Boat arrivals would succeed. People arriving by boat have increased since the failure of the Malaysia agreement to an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people next year. (In March/June quarters 2012, boat arrivals totalled 4486.In March/June quarters 2013 they had risen to an estimated 14,000 and rising fast). The Government attempted to amend the Migration Act to correct the problems identified by the High Court but the Greens colluded with the Coalition to block the amending legislation. They bashed Malaysia at every opportunity over such issues as judicial canings but ignored for the moment the moat in our own eye, mandatory detention with suicides, self-harm, mental trauma, riots and burnings. The Greens must bear a heavy responsibility for the parlous situation we now find ourselves in. Their moral superiority has helped give us PNG/Nauru. Their conspicuous compassion is damaging the possibility of any sensible humanitarian and political outcome

    Boat and air arrivals

    For years there has been media and political preoccupation with boat arrivals with very little interest or attention to air arrivals who seek asylum. Air arrivals are presently running at about 8,000 p.a. They are mainly persons who arrive in Australia on visitor, working holiday or student visas and then seek refugee status. It is planned in advance. The biggest source for air arrivals seeking asylum is Southern China. About 40% of air arrivals receive refugee protection. They live in the community and can work. Boat arrivals are placed immediately in detention although an increasing number are now released into the community on bridging visas. About 90% of boat arrivals are found to be refugees. We have a remarkable fear about boat arrivals but apparently no concern about asylum seekers who come by air or the 50,000 illegals in the country who have overstayed their visas and disappeared into the woodwork with UK and US citizens high on the list.

    The Pacific “solution”

    The Howard Government’s Pacific/Nauru “solution” did work for a period. In the confusion after Tampa, people smugglers and asylum seekers did not know what might happen to them. The boats stopped. But that changed in the latter part of the Howard Gov. and in the early years of the Rudd Govt.  Of the 1637 on Nauru/Manus who were found to be refugees 96% finished up in Australia or NZ. The Gillard Government was warned that Nauru/Manus would not work a second time. It was reasonable to anticipate, on the basis of previous experience that even if asylum seekers were sent to Nauru after August 2012 they would end up in Australia.And this is what happened. Boat arrivals did not slow down or stop. That is why the Rudd Gov. decided that any person arriving in Aust without a visa in future would never be settled in Aust.

    Another element of the Pacific solution was Temporary Protection Visas. But they failed with more boat arrivals coming after TPV’s were introduced. Unable to sponsor family, many women and children took to the boats. That is why when SIEVX sunk in 2002 with a loss of 363 lives, 288 were women and children

    What can be done after September 7, particularly to minimise PNG and Nauru. 

    • Change the political narrative with a positive message about persons facing persecution and their contribution to Australia rather than the demonization and fear that has been engendered since John Howard’s days. It comes down to leadership across our community and not just politicians. Polls suggest that boat arrivals do not rate highly against such issues as health and education but is a hot button issue on its own that produces a very strong response
    • Bipartisanship between the major parties. Is it too much to hope for! It is so easy for unscrupulous people to promote fear of the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different
    • Second-track dialogue – involve government officials, civil society, NGOs and refugee advocates in the dialogue process. A more constructive role by refugee advocates is essential
    • Processing of asylum seekers in Malaysia and Indonesia in cooperation with UNHCR. Hopefully the regional meeting organised by President Yudhoyono/PM Rudd for Aug.20 will advance this issue.  Progress has been made to restrict visa free entry into Indonesia and Malaysia. The key issue in any arrangement must be effective protection. This encompasses (a) people given a legal status while they are in a transit country, (b) the principle of non-refoulement (c) people have access to refugee determination process either within the legal jurisdiction of the state or by UNHCR and (d) treated with dignity. Unfortunately our performance on refugees in the region is that we are fair-weather friends, walking away when our interests are served
    • Alternative migration pathways.
      • Orderly departure arrangements with “source countries” such as we had with Vietnam from 1983 .We must pursue ODA’s with Sri Lanka, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In both Iraq and Afghanistan we will have to bear particular responsibilities for our involvement in the wars in those countries. The arrangements for orderly departure from Pakistan will probably have to be managed by UNHCR  Importantly.DIAC must anticipate future refugee flows.eg Syria and Egypt
      • Permanent or temporary migration, e.g. Iranians on 457 visas. Recent Iranian boat arrivals are mainly single males, well-educated and resourceful. With a population explosion in Iran and the sanctions biting hard many want to leave. In the last 12 months the proportion boat arrivals from Iran has doubled from 16% to 33%.
      • Work rights for all bridging visa holders and a review of the ad hoc and confusing support arrangements for asylum seekers living in the community.
      • Progressively abolish mandatory detention. There are still 6,000 people in detention including 1000 children. There is no evidence whatsoever that mandatory detention deters
      • Progressively Increase refugee and humanitarian intake to 30,000 plus p.a. and cease deducting irregular arrivals from the total intake.
      • On PNG and Nauru, hopefully the deterrent works and boat arrivals will dramatically slow. If they don’t our overall refugee program will continue under a cloud. For those that do go to PNG and Nauru we will need to provide amongst other things, special skills and technical training for resettlement out of the region. If there is a legal challenge to the PNG/Nauru agreements the people smugglers will be given another lease of life
      • Children cannot be exempted or the boats will fill up with boys under 18 years of age. They are called “anchors” to bring out the rest of the family. Children need special guardianship arrangements but the Minister cannot be both guardian and gaoler.
      • There is no ‘solution’.  Desperate people will still try to cut corners. But we can better manage it. If the government is successful in substantially reducing the boat arrivals, more will attempt to come by air.

     

    We need to think again about the assumption by so many that all asylum seekers entering Australia must be processed in Australia .What is important is not so much where the processing occurs but whether it is fair, humane and efficient.

    In 1998 UNHCR at an Exxon meeting envisaged the possibility of transferring people between states for processing. It concluded…”as regards the return to a third country of an asylum seeker whose claim has yet to be determined from the territory of the country where the claim has been submitted ,including pursuant to bilateral or multilateral readmission agreements, it should be established that the third country will treat the asylum seeker(s) in accordance with international standards, will ensure effective protection against refoulement and  will provide the asylum seeker(s) with the possibility to seek and enjoy asylum”.

    The keys are effective protection, consistent with the Refugee Convention, the treatment of people with dignity and efficiency in implementation. We are still a long way short of that with PNG/Nauru

    Importantly we cannot manage these problems on our own.  Regional cooperation is essential, not to shift the burden but to share it.

  • Is something significant happening in our alignment to our region? John Menadue

    It may be early days, but I sense that some significant change might be afoot. So much of our political dialogue historically has been about Australia’s relationship with the UK and then the US. John Howard spoke of Australia being the deputy sheriff for the Americans in our region. Tony Abbott talks about an Anglo sphere – presumably linkages to English-speaking countries.

    But so much of the discussion in recent weeks about asylum seekers has involved relationships with our own region. In a few short weeks we have seen some quite significant developments.

    PM Rudd met President Yudhoyono and arranged a ministerial meeting on regional cooperation on asylum seekers for August 20.

    • President Yudhoyono rebuked talk about unilateral action by Australian politicians to turn back boats at sea.
    • Indonesia has now agreed that Iranians will no longer get visa-free entry into Indonesia.
    • Malaysia has agreed to limit to 14 days visas issued to persons believed to be in transit through Malaysia to Indonesia for a boat journey to Australia.
    • A regional settlement arrangement has been concluded with PNG. PM O’Neill indicated warm cooperation – although a great deal still remains to be sorted out.
    • PM O’Neill rebuked Shadow Foreign Minister Julie Bishop for suggesting that Australia was handing over to PNG decisions on the spending of ODA money in PNG.

    The language was frank and brusque but that is surely     much better than the platitudes that so much feature in diplomatic discourse.

    Almost without catching his breath, PM Rudd was in Taren Kowt, Afghanistan, thanking Australian soldiers for their service and saying that it was time they came home. The exit from Afghanistan was announced some time ago, but I thought what was remarkable was that Kevin Rudd’s statement was received without any comment or query. Twelve months ago we were still following the US and its pivoting to Asia.

    In the lead up to the general election we would normally expect our political leaders to be tugging their forelocks to the US President rather than being actively engaged with our regional neighbours.

    It is early days yet, but it seems that some significant realignment to our region is under way. I wonder if some of our political class and the media are following.

    The US will continue to be an important ally but with declining US power and influence it is inevitable that we must develop more effective and close relations with our neighbours. The issue of asylum seekers may prove to be an important catalyst in this process.

    Regional cooperation will grow out of dealing with specific issues rather than grand statements of cooperation.

  • A regional refugee instrument. John Menadue

    Forgive me for repeating myself, but you might be interested in a presentation I gave on this subject in February 2012 (see below).

    We have talked a lot about the need for regional arrangements, but progress has been extremely slow. Our political system based on ministerial and departmental responsibility has failed us badly on refugee issues. A new approach  involving civil society – NGOs, academics and others is necessary to help us break out of the awful situation into which we have spiralled.

    A Regional Cooperation Framework

    International Association of Refugee Law Judges

    Melbourne 3 February 2012

     

    There are 33 million persons of concern to the UNHCR throughout the world. There are about 15 million refugees. With instability and failed states, numbers are likely to increase, including in transit countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.

    For our neighbourhood there will be no satisfactory arrangement concerning refugees and asylum seekers and particularly boat people without regional cooperation. It is so obvious, except for those who want to play politics with the lives of boat people.

    I have chosen my words carefully in saying that there will be no ‘satisfactory arrangement’ rather than talking about ‘solutions’. For whatever we can accomplish together with our neighbours, asylum flows will remain chaotic and unpredictable. Desperate and vulnerable people will never abide by the ‘rules’ we seek to impose. But together with our neighbours we can do a lot better.

    The successful resettlement of over 240,000 Indochinese in Australia, initiated by our acceptance of over 100,000 refugees followed by orderly departures and family reunion, could never have occurred without regional cooperation. The same is true today. Regional cooperation in the late seventies and eighties was not pretty at times, but it worked. Regional countries provided temporary protection for 1.4 million people who fled after the fall of Saigon. Resettlement countries were able to catch their breath and then generously respond. Just imagine if 50,000 of that 1.4 million had arrived by boat in northern Australia. The successful programs of the Fraser Government could not have succeeded in those circumstances.

    But in dealing with our region we are often fair-weather friends, turning to them when we have a problem and then walking away. We also seem to have an unfortunate ability to project an air of superiority. Consider our record.

    • In 1996 Australia, together with other resettlement countries terminated the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese which had been a model of regional burden sharing. We left regional countries with thousands of difficult cases.
    • In Bali in 2002 we sought regional help over boat people. But when boat arrivals fell away, although the problem of asylum seekers who came by air remained, we lost interest. We revived the Bali process again in 2009 when the boat arrivals resumed.
    • The countries of our region are often criticised for their toughness towards refugees. But our regional neighbours carry a much heavier burden than we do. The number of refugees in Australia is minimal – 22,000 in 2010. But the countries of our region who have not signed the Convention put our performance to shame. Pakistan has 1.9 million refugees, Malaysia has 82,000 refugees with another 130,000 people of concern to UNHCR, India has 185,000 refugees, Nepal 90,000. In Bangladesh there are 229,000 people of concern to the UNHCR. Thailand has 97,000 refugees and another 550,000 people of concern to the UNHCR.
    • The High Court and others declare that we should not cooperate in processing in a country that has not adopted certain legal obligations, either under international or domestic law. This narrow view makes sensible policy extremely difficult considering that there is not a signatory country to the Refugee Convention in the arc from Yemen to Australia – the route used by almost all asylum seekers fleeing to Australia.
    • But the High Court’s legalistic view becomes more difficult to understand when we consider the performance of countries that have signed the Convention. China has signed the Convention, but regularly refouls North Koreans back across the Tumen River. PNG, a signatory, regularly refouls Irian Jayans back into Indonesia. Nauru obviously signed the convention in June 2011 for financial benefit. Japan, a signatory, collaborated with North Korea and the Japanese Red Cross to ‘repatriate’ about 90,000 Korean residents in Japan back to North Korea between 1959 and 1984. Most of them disappeared or escaped back to Japan.
    • We point to the plank in other people’s eyes, but ignore the brutality of our treatment of asylum seekers in detention centres in this country. By any reasonable interpretation our punishment and cruelty towards boat people in detention is a breach of the Refugee Convention. As the regional representative, UNHCR in Australia, put it before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network in August 2011, ‘Australia’s mandatory detention policy, that denies the right to lawful stay and any opportunities for self-reliance in community-based settings, and is punitive on the basis of the method of entry to Australia, is arguably in contravention of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention and would fall well short of these criteria. UNHCR’s concerns about the legal and severe and negative implications of long-term mandatory detention in Australia are long-standing and well-known.’ Australians seem much more vexed over what happens in Malaysia than how we punish and brutalise vulnerable and defenceless people in our detention centres.
    • Malaysia has made considerable progress on human rights which we choose to ignore. Together with ASEAN, Malaysia has embarked on the development of a human rights instrument, something that we have refused to do. In noting the decision to develop a Political and Human Security Blueprint in 2009, ASEAN ministers declared “Many kinds of human rights violations take place in South East Asia and a regional mechanism can help address this problem. First, the mechanism will ensure that ASEAN member states all adhere to international human rights standards. Second, the mechanism provides a common platform where ASEAN member states, being socio-politically different from each other, can articulate their human rights-related concerns. Lastly, with a human rights mechanism, the region can cooperate to address violations and collectively show its stand on human rights-related issues.’
      The much criticised Australia/Malaysian agreement was described by the Regional Director of UNHCR in Australia to the Legal and Constitutional Committee of the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 in the following terms. ‘Many persons of concern to UNHCR stand to benefit from this Program by having their status regularised. It would mean all refugees in Malaysia would, in addition to their registration and ID documents from UNHCR, be registered within 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.’ Importantly, Malaysia does not punish boat people in mandatory detention as we do. For Malaysia the Agreement was quite remarkable progress. This is in a country that has the burden of a large number of refugees, is much poorer than we are and has a history of communal tensions. But the arrangement is not enshrined in law and so is discounted. This Agreement is also consistent with a decision of the Executive Committee of UNHCR in 1998 that recognised that irregular migration, people-smuggling and asylum flows are complex matters but concluded that return to a transit country like Malaysia may occur provided there are appropriate safeguards, accepted international standards and effective protection against refoulement. While such conclusions are not binding in law, they do guide the work of the UNHCR and governments in what are acceptable international standards of behaviour towards asylum seekers.

    With so few convention signatories in our region, any regional cooperation framework will have to be constructed with non-signatory countries. A regional framework cannot be conjured out of thin air. It must be built from materials available. In that regard, there is an instructive precedent in the 1984 Cartagena (Colombia) Declaration on Refugees. At that time, 150,000 central American refugees were being assisted in the region. There were another 1.8 million people who had fled across a border or were displaced in their own country by conflict.

    The Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela.  Three of these countries were not signatories to the Refugee Convention in 1984 when the Declaration was agreed. The Declaration was a modest start, but it contained a number of important recommendations. Significantly the Declaration broadened the definition of a ‘refugee’ set out in the 1951 Convention to include those ‘who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalised violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order’.

    The Cartagena Declaration was further enhanced by the 1989 International Conference on Central American Refugees and the Mexican Declaration of 2004. Argentina (a non-signatory to the Refugee Convention) and Chile (a signatory) subsequently became parties.

    Not surprisingly, these developments have not been straight-forward. There have been restrictive interpretations of the Declaration and exclusion of some clauses by some countries. But the progress has been clear.

    There are also some lessons that we can learn about a regional cooperation framework in Africa where the numbers and the problems have been much greater than in Central America. In 2009, the African Union Convention for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons in Africa was signed. This African Union Convention was the first legally binding instrument on internal displacement on a continent-wide basis. It provides a comprehensive regional framework setting out provisions for the protection and assistance of internally displaced persons.  

    In our region we must work actively with Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia if we are ever to find an enduring arrangement. If the Malaysian agreement offered anything, it offered the chance of accelerating the process of developing sensible, practical and robust asylum policies in the region. We need to strengthen the Bali process. It could lead to common asylum policies and practices in the region and ultimately to a regional protection instrument. Bali was initially focused on enforcement and criminalisation of people-smuggling, but has progressively shifted to humanitarian issues and population flows.

    Both UNHCR in its ‘10 Point Plan of Action for Refugee Protection and Mixed Migration (2007)’ and OXFAM in its ‘Asylum Seekers; The Way Forward’ have outlined the key elements of a regional framework, including effective screening systems, protection-sensitive reception arrangements, durable solutions including resettlement, alternative migration pathways and repatriation, together with targeted development assistance. A critical element in any regional protection framework is that countries who commit to action are not left to carry the burden of managing and maintaining irregular migrants for prolonged periods.

    There will be important roles for international agencies, jurists, local and international NGOs, regional governments and the Australian Government. Our government would assist by supporting the establishment of a well-resourced policy unit within the Bali Process Secretariat. That secretariat is a collaborative effort of more than 50 countries and international agencies. More strategically, Australia should target its humanitarian development assistance programs to benefit asylum populations in areas such as housing, health, jobs and education.

    If the Malaysian Agreement is viewed through a regional lens, it can become the catalyst together with Bali to start the process of building a durable protection system and delivering protection dividends for all asylum seekers as well as nationals in the transit countries and Australia.

    Second-track Dialogue and the Role of Jurists

    It is noteworthy that the Cartagena Declaration was adopted by a group of ‘government experts and eminent jurists’ from ten countries. The UNHCR described the inaugural meeting in 1984 as a ‘colloquium of experts’.

    Whilst the Declaration was not a treaty, its provisions became respected across the region. In particular the new refugee definition was incorporated in the legislation of most of the countries of the Americas.

    Could the International Association of Refugee Law Judges initiate a similar regional ‘colloquium’ of experts? I notice that your website states that your Chapter is keen to encourage judges and decision-makers from our region to join in biennial regional deliberations. You comment that it might be possible for your Chapter to develop into an Asian-Pacific Chapter. I could only encourage you to explore that as soon as possible. A regional colloquium could help break the log-jamb on regional cooperation and related refugee issues. I think it is clear that the current ministerial/departmental model, together with the politicisation of refugee issues has brought us to the present sorry position, where good policy outcomes are very difficult to achieve. We need to break out of the party-political prison.

    We need a more broadly based ‘track 2 dialogue’ in our region that can promote confidence and resolution of seemingly intractable issues. Such a dialogue would bring together a broad cross section of key players outside government with policy-makers, in their personal capacity as experts, to start the process of building a new dialogue and approach to both regional and domestic refugee issues. My comments here of course refer only to the regional issues.

    Such an approach as this is not something that Australian Governments have traditionally engaged in except at the periphery through ‘consultation’ or commissioning one-off enquiries into certain matters. However, if done well, this type of approach could be transformational in breaking down the misunderstandings and suspicions of different countries and groups. The lack of such an approach serves only to perpetuate and reinforce the current stalemate.

    The objective of this type of dialogue is to develop a shared understanding and a shared knowledge of the role of various countries and players on refugee issues. It can break down barriers and facilitate the development of a common understanding and knowledge of each other’s issues and concerns. This approach requires a long-term and sustained commitment by all parties.

    Ideally this approach should start modestly and then progressively bring together actors from a broad spectrum of regional interests including jurists and the UNHCR. It would include social policy and refugee and asylum experts as well as persons familiar with intelligence and border security issues. Such a wide span of interests can help create a less hostile environment and open the door to mutually beneficial policies without the suspicion that pervades the present approach. It would enable players outside government to influence new policy thinking and create the space for government officials to ‘think aloud’.

    Such an approach would need to have the implicit backing of government to allow officials to participate in their personal capacities.

    Would your Chapter be prepared to sponsor a regional ‘colloquium of experts’ in Kuala Lumpur?

    As I said at the beginning, no satisfactory arrangement is possible without active regional cooperation. We cannot do this on our own and neither can our neighbours. We need a Regional Refugee Instrument which whilst based on the 1951/67 Convention, recognises the particular problems of our region, one of which is that few regional countries are signatories to the Refugee Convention.

    Governments are strengthened when they work collaboratively with each other and with civil society organisations.  We must build trust in the region. Importantly it will mean working with countries, who almost without exception are not signatories to the Refugee Convention.

     

  • Least-worst option and minimising PNG. John Menadue

    In my blog of July 20, I referred to the Regional Settlement Agreement with PNG. With some reservations I described it as the least-worst option. Some were surprised at my comments. I wish it were otherwise, but in the toxic and poisonous political debate over refugees since John Howard’s time, we have had to face up to many unpalatable facts.

    The coalition has been the principal cause of this toxic situation. It broke with bipartisanship on refugees because it felt it was to its political advantage to focus our fears on the foreigner. I don’t think the coalition has genuinely wanted the boats to stop whilst ever it was in opposition. It was political manna from heaven to have the boat arrivals continue.

    The Greens have taken a “holier-than-thou” political position and have sided with Tony Abbott in the Senate on the key issue of the agreement with Malaysia. The Greens and many NGOs have wanted the government to undertake a political ‘mission impossible’.

    The government has failed to provide political leadership or rebutted the crude politics of the coalition. So paralysed by boat arrivals it has failed to develop effective ‘upstream’ policies to reduce boat arrivals on our doorstep. These upstream policies offer the best prospect of success. I will refer to them below.

    What triggered the RSA with PNG was that the government was told that on present trends, boat arrivals could top 40,000 to 50,000 persons a year. That projected figure of up to 50,000 would invite a tough response from any Australian government. Rightly or wrongly, the Australian community would just not cop it. That is a fact of political life. From time to time I wonder what planet some refugee advocates live on.

    I understand that all wings of the Cabinet and the ALP caucus – left, right and centre – agreed that boat arrivals at these projected levels could not continue. That doesn’t imply that the position taken on PNG is necessarily “correct”. But it does say a lot about the political situation when all factions agree.

    I have always been of the view that firm compliance/border protection is essential if we are to have public support for a substantial and growing humanitarian/refugee program. For example if we had today the same scale of intake that we had during the Indochina outflow, adjusted for our population increase, the program today would be about 35,000 p.a. rather than the present program of only 20,000. I was involved with Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee in what is now regarded as the most successful refugee settlement program in our history. My view is that it could not have been sustained if we had then had boat arrivals at the present or projected levels we now have. In the years when the Indochina program was at its peak, there were an average of ten boats a year and an average of 340 boat people a year. The high point was in 1977-78 when there were 43 boats and 1423 boat people. Today it is infinitely greater than that. Even with the small number of boat arrivals during the Fraser period we were very anxious to minimise publicity about the threat of boat arrivals. Furthermore Malcolm Fraser had Gough Whitlam and Bill Hayden broadly in support. It is very different today with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.

    But before I discuss ways to minimise the PNG arrangement, let me say something further about the PNG arrangement.

    • When Kevin Rudd announced the arrangement he said ‘many other steps lie ahead’. He was dead right, particularly now in light of the UNHCR response. The PNG arrangement must be improved and detailed in many respects. It must be regarded as work in progress. There will be no quick fix.
    • I said in my earlier blog that there were two key issues concerning the arrangement with PNG – they were effective protection and implementation. They remain the key issues to be addressed today and in the days ahead.
    • The PNG government obviously sees a financial and economic benefit in the arrangement
    • The bashing we had of Malaysia earlier over its human rights record and judicial canings is now being repeated in the bashing of PNG for its shortcomings.
    • Our sense of superiority in these matters is not very convincing when we consider the mote that is in our own eye; mandatory detention in Australia with suicides, self-harm, mental trauma, riots and burnings.

    How best to minimise PNG

    Together with others, I have been urging for over a decade two particular actions ‘upstream’ to reduce boat arrivals. Malcolm Fraser referred to these in his guest blog of July 15.

    The first is that we must share the burden of asylum seekers with regional countries. In cooperation with UNHCR we need to work urgently with Indonesia and Malaysia to establish regional processing centres in those countries. This would need to be on the understanding that those countries will safely hold asylum seekers for processing and that resettlement countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand, will largely finance these processing centres and promptly agree to resettle those found to be refugees. These were the key features in the management of the Indochina refugee program.

    We have been far too slow in focusing on doing this through the Bali Process. Unfortunately regional countries often regard us as fair-weather friends, running to them when we have a problem and not working to share the burdens in a long-term relationship. We have spent a lot of our political capital in Indonesia on drug smugglers. This regional processing is urgent. Hopefully the meeting that PM Rudd and President Yudhoyono have agreed on can give regional processing a major boost.

    The second key to ‘upstream’ processing is to negotiate Orderly Departure Agreements with key source countries – Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan. We did it with Vietnam in 1983 and brought 100,000 Vietnamese to Australia in safety over many years. ODAs provide a means for persons facing discrimination or worse within their own country to find an orderly way to come to Australia particularly if family members are in Australia. As the civil war in Iraq worsens and the end of Western occupation of Afghanistan draws near, we are likely to see many more people in those two countries facing a grim prospect. We have contributed to the breaking of society in both Iraq and Afghanistan with our own counter-productive military occupation. We will be obliged to help mend what we have helped break.

    The government has been paralysed like a rabbit in a search-light over boat arrivals when it should have been energetically pursuing through diplomatic means upstream processing to minimise pressure on our borders. It is essential now to minimise what we face with the arrangement with PNG.

    The RSA with PNG has been described as a ‘solution’. But it is not a solution. The best we can hope for is to manage the situation better in the future. Dealing with human beings facing a desperate situation will always be messy. They will not necessarily play by the rules that we determine.

  • Iranians – refugees or migrants? John Menadue

    In my blog of July 5, I compared the March quarter 2013 primary refugee protection visa rate for various nationalities and the finally determined grant rate.

    In the case of Iranian nationals the grant rate rose from 55% at the primary stage to 86% on appeal. That is 86% of Iranian boat arrivals were finally found to be genuine refugees in the March quarter 2013. Because of this I queried Foreign Minister Carr’s comments about Iranian boat people being mainly economic migrants.

    I have had to rely on the March quarter 2013 figures as they are the latest available from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. However it should be acknowledged that this March quarter Iranian cohort would be in respect of Iranians who had arrived six or twelve months before. The refugee determination process would normally take six to twelve months or more.

    There could have been a significant change in the profile of Iranian asylum seekers over the last six to twelve months or so.  The first indication of this is that the Indonesian Government has apparently been persuaded of the changing profile of the Iranian boat people by the Australian Government and has now refused to grant visas on arrival to Iranians entering Indonesia. Iranian nationals wanting entry to Indonesia will now have to apply for a visa in Iran or in a third country.

    The second factor is that Foreign Minister Carr has now been much more explicit about Iranian boat arrivals. He recently said ‘The advice I have got is that overwhelmingly the Iranians coming here are middle-class Iranians. They are from the majority ethnic and religious group in the country. And they are coming here as economic refugees. They are coming as economic migrants, not as refugees.’ He added later ‘The profile [of Iranian boat people] has changed’.

    The third factor is that undoubtedly the proportion of Iranian boat arrivals has increase significantly. In the June quarter 2012 they represented about 10% of boat arrivals.  According to media reports they now represent close to 40 % of boat arrivals. The actual numbers tell the same story, up from 352 in the June quarter 2012 to an estimated 3600 in the June quarter this year

    We will have to wait for further information on the refugee determination rates for Iranians and others. But I would not now dismiss completely, the comments by Foreign Minister Carr.

    But there is another way to address this issue if the profile of Iranian asylum seekers is changing.

    The population of Iran is increasing very rapidly. It has been referred to as a “population time bomb” The population is young. The middle class is also growing rapidly. It is well educated.

    Iranians have a lot of “get up and go”. My observation is they make very good migrants. They are determined people and perhaps for that reason they get up the nose of Immigration officials.

    They are 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 many 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

    Perhaps the Government is considering this option if, as seems likely, the profile of Iranian boat arrivals is changing. Unfortunately the Government is so paralysed by boat arrivals it seems unable to focus on more creative and workable programs that would address an ever changing situation.

  • Asylum seeker saga continues. Guest Blogger: Marcus Einfeld

    The saga proceeds in relation to people seeking refugee asylum in our country. The latest contribution in these last few days is that we should seek changes in the UN Refugee Convention because circumstances have changed since it was introduced after WWII. The label “economic migrants” is being resurrected as a reason for refusing refugee asylum to thousands of people protected by the Convention.

    The idea that this situation can be dealt with by negotiating amendments to the Refugee Convention is fatuous. The chances of serious changes being achieved in the lifetimes of the currently displaced asylum seekers and their children, if ever, are non-existent. So is a new Convention. Many years of discussions in Geneva and elsewhere about the possible need to review the Convention in certain respects, in which I played a small part, actually produced proposals for its strengthening, not its weakening to relieve countries like Australia from its humanitarian obligations to provide rescue and relief of people fleeing terror and persecution, and yes, the consequent economic hardship that physical displacement always causes.

    Have circumstances changed in fact since WW2? Once again people are being compelled to flee their homes by brutal, indiscriminate, often racially based armed force.  Because of the immense dangers of not fleeing, they have to leave behind virtually everything they own thus placing them of course at economic peril.

    In western societies, people forced out of their homes by natural or even manmade disasters suffer danger and economic hardship but are supported by governments and public subscription until they can safely return and rebuild. Why should people in other countries fearing death or torture at the hands of armed gangs be any less worthy of support?

    In many decades of assisting refugees and displaced people in some truly awful camps in Malawi, Bosnia, Palestine, Bangladesh and other places, I have hardly met one whose first choice was not returning to their own countries. Home is what they know and love. The request they invariably make is not transportation to Australia or Canada but for help to go home, and support in the meantime so they can keep their kids alive and safe. Many sit and wait for years in terrible conditions. Some cannot wait any longer, as is entirely understandable. In the same situation, would we not move to save our kids from persecution and penury, even death on unseaworthy boats over vast expanses of dangerous oceans?  Demonise them if you must but some people smugglers in history have been heroes, like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg and the European priests and nuns and other ordinary citizens who hid Jews from the Nazis.

    Our recent and current leaders know this story very well. Historically we have a proud record in refugee rescue and relief. They, like we, know that refugees have made towering contributions to Australia’s progress and achievements in many fields. Unfortunately too few are cricketers or footballers or this discussion might not even be necessary. But in recent years our leaders have consistently failed us, and those who suffer, by failing to explain publicly why we as a decent people must help people in need. As a wealthy country of 25 million people, we are simply not going to be adversely affected by taking 25,000 [0.1%] more people over 5 years or more [a tiny number in world terms] who have nowhere to go back to and will, as did their predecessors, make eminently successful migrants and contribute to the growth and success of our country.

    No tidal wave is approaching, merely drips that can seamlessly be woven into our proud cultural tapestry. While ever the world is beset by violence, we cannot stop the boats, still less turn them around. Other solutions can and must be found. But that is another article.