Category: Immigration

  • Repost. Refugee advocates and offshore processing. John Menadue

    This is a repost from 23 September, 2013. 

    The insistence on onshore processing for all asylum seekers is damaging the case for humane and sensible refugee policies.

    The blanket opposition to any offshore processing is understandable but it is just not working. Just look at the election result on September 7. The important issue is not where processing occurs but whether it is just, fair and efficient. Many of the asylum seekers who claim protection in Australia are not in direct flight from persecution. Most transit Malaysia and Indonesia. Some are asylum shopping.

    The major political parties  now compete with each other to deter and punish boat arrivals. In the public debate the preoccupation with boat arrivals by both politicians and the media has dramatically reduced support for an increased humanitarian intake and the end of mandatory detention.

    For many years I was a strong supporter of all asylum seekers coming to Australia  being processed in Australia. But I have changed my mind as the facts have changed, with over 17,000 boat arrivals in the six months to June this year. In world terms the numbers are small but the political mood has gone very sour which is threating the humanitarian case for generosity. Before the High Court decision on the Malaysian Agreement boat arrivals were about 300 people per month. They quickly quadrupled after the High Court decision and have continued to increase ever since. The High Court decision striking down the Malaysia Agreement undoubtedly gave oxygen to people-smugglers and many desperate people who were prepared to risk dangerous sea voyages. We cannot ignore their human rights.

    We need to urgently think again about transfers and regional processing.

    The UNHCR in a statement to the Australian Parliament on 30 September 2011 welcomed the transfer and regional arrangements with Malaysia. The Greens and refugee advocates cooperated with Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to reject amendments to the Migration Act to allow the Malaysian Agreement to proceed. Asylum seekers are paying a heavy price for this unity ticket between the coalition, refugee advocates and the Greens

    There is a long history of UNHCR support for transfer of asylum seekers in appropriate circumstances. In 1998, the executive committee of UNHCR recognised that irregular migration, people smuggling and asylum flows are complex matters but concluded that a return to a transit country like Malaysia may occur provided there are appropriate safeguards, accepted international standards and effective protection against refoulement. Whilst 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.

    The UNHCR in Australia has just issued a ‘Guidance Note on bilateral and/or multilateral transfer arrangements of asylum-seekers’. It can be found on its website.

    Paragraphs 1 and 2,  say ‘It is UNHCR’s position that asylum seekers and refugees should ordinarily be processed in the territory of the state where they arrive or which otherwise has jurisdiction over them. This is also in line with general state practice. The primary responsibility to provide protection rests with the state where asylum is sought. Nevertheless there are an increasing number of initiatives in various regions involving the transfer of asylum seekers from one country to another for the purpose of processing their asylum claims. Such arrangements have typically involved the transfer of asylum seekers either (a) to the state where they first sought (or could have sought) asylum; or (b) to other countries with which the asylum seeker has no previous links. They have also involved both bilateral and/or multilateral (regional) arrangements.’

    The Guidance Note then went on to outline the principles against which any transfer arrangements should be assessed.

    In a joint article with Arja Keski- Nummi, published in the Melbourne Age on 13 December last year, we outlined a system of ‘practical protection’ that should apply to any transfer arrangements in our region. We set down several steps.

    • All countries should commit to the principle of non-refoulement.
    • Provide people with a legal status and access to work and education.
    • Work to help not only displaced people but also host communities.
    • Increase our refugee intake from our region.
    • Work with partners in the region in association with UNHCR to create an atmosphere of safety and trust.
    • Amend the Migration Act to assert the principle of ‘effective protection’ as outlined above.

    We badly need a political compromise based on effective processing whether onshore or offshore. This is necessary if we are to put an end to the political poisoning of the well of public support for asylum seekers and refugees, and to discourage desperate people making dangerous and fatal sea voyages.

    We need to rethink our blanket opposition to offshore processing. It is not helping the people most in need of our help. It has played into the hands of those, who for political reasons want the boats to keep coming as thick and fast as possible and in the process encourage us to fear and even hate asylum seekers.

    We need to fight harder and more astutely to help those in need of our protection. This is not the time to throw in the towel.

     

  • Asylum seekers – Tony Abbott and I share a Jesuit education. John O’Mara

    Like many Australians, I look on the way the Abbott government is handling the matter of asylum seekers with ever increasing dismay. Tony Abbott’s mantra “stop the boats”, is unprincipled, contrary to signed UN agreements and impractical. It is hard to erase the pre-election memory of the Western Sydney interviewee..”I’m going to vote for Abbott, because he’ll stop the boats “.

    What dismays me most is that Tony and I shared an educational experience at the hands of the Jesuits and then a friendship that reaches back almost 40 years.

    Like Tony, I’m very grateful for my time at a Jesuit school. In our day a substantial number of our teachers were Jesuits and we had the benefit of their highly trained minds, sharp moral sensitivities and educational method that always emphasized evidence over rhetoric. Even though the Jesuits were strong on presentation skills in argument, the argument had to have substance.

    Their clarity of thought and pursuit of learning for its own sake sets them apart from all other educators especially those I encountered at Sydney University. Their ability to look at all sides of an argument prior to coming to a conclusion was both stunningly simple, and at the same time extremely thought provoking.

    Surprisingly, our religious education in latter years included a look at many religions…Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Protestantism and others. We were shown the merits of these religions and taught an all encompassing view of life and peoples.

    We were taught quite simply that the major requisites of Catholicism were: love, inclusion, and protecting or looking after those more needy…of any denomination. Fr Gerald Drumm went further, stating that as we were boys starting life from a privileged position in a Jesuit School, we owed it to our God, the Jesuits and ourselves to put our teachings in to practical effect if we were ever in a position to do so. It was as black and white as that!

    Tony and I were, from our earliest days taught people had an inherent dignity and to use them as a means to an end is the antithesis of anything the Jesuits taught us.

    Tony and I were both members of the SRC and had many battles with “the lefties”, both verbal and physical. We both enjoyed playing Rugby for Sydney Uni, if not for Australia. It was a time of great frivolity and for forging life-long friendships. But those playful undergraduate days are long gone. And now in government, the play is for real.

    Instrumentalizing desperate human beings for political advantage is absolutely unacceptable. As I said to Tony a couple of years ago over dinner…”Mate, you and I would be the first in a boat with our families were we to encounter the atrocities they have had to face“.

    The solution is again very simple. We must embrace these poor desperate souls, get them in to our communities and enrich our lives, and theirs. Give them the dignity to live without fear, give them the dignity to work and pay tax. Let us take the lead in a regional resettlement program to accommodate these people. No more detention centres, political bottom feeding, refugee camps or queues. Let’s get the Australian psyche back to where it should be.

    As Tony should know, playing to the xenophobes in Australia just flies in the face of well known facts about people movement and its cause in our region.

    Asylum seekers ARE NOT ‘ILLEGALS” they are our brothers and sisters.

    Tony’s and my Jesuit teachers are turning in the graves for the lack of logic, human sympathy and compassion let alone any reflection of what Jesus had to say about welcoming the stranger and going the extra mile. Bad luck for the Good Samaritan. He was a mug and would never get endorsement as a Coalition candidate.

    John O’Mara is Managing Director of Big Image Sydney Pty Ltd

  • Journalists are not welcome in Nauru. Elaine Pearson

    Dramatically increasing the cost of visas to enter Nauru places severe restrictions from the ability of journalists and others to let us know the truth about asylum seekers being held there. John Menadue

    Here’s an innovative way to discourage foreign media scrutiny of a touchy human rights issue: jack-up the cost of a journalist visa 40-fold, from A$200 to A$8000 (US$178 to US$7108). That’s precisely what the government of the small Pacific nation of Nauru has done, dressing up that skyrocketing increase as a means to “increase revenue.”  The fee is non-refundable even if the visa application is rejected.

    The real impact of the visa gouging will be to deter foreign media outlets and freelance journalists from seeking to report on Nauru’s main story of foreign interest – its treatment of asylum seekers. Currently, there are more than 700 people including pregnant women and dozens of children detained on the island, transferred from Australia in an offshore processing arrangement paid for by the Australian government.

    So what might Nauru have to hide? Poor conditions at the detention facilities, for starters. Asylum seekers are housed in tents, often with inadequate ventilation. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is unequivocal, stating that the “harsh physical conditions… not only do not meet international standards – they also have a profound impact on the men, women and children housed there.” Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has praised the conditions in the detention camp in Nauru as “certainly better than in Australian mining camps.”

    So far the Australian government has refrained from commenting on the move, with an immigration official saying “This is a matter for the government of Nauru.” But Nauru’s new measure is in line with Australia’s secrecy about asylum seeker policy and information on boat arrivals, claiming that national security permits its broad restrictions on access to information. It has been politically convenient to ship asylum seekers to isolated Nauru, far from the public view, where Australian media and voters can ignore their plight. It’s time for that approach to end.

    The new fees are nothing less than an attack on media freedom, intended to leave the world, and Australians in particular, with little way of holding the government of Prime Minister Tony Abbott accountable for its refugee policies. With no stories or pictures to present factual accounts of their treatment, the Australian government can continue to demonize those who seek asylum there. The Abbott government needs to make clear that it’s not a party to this outrageous infringement on the right to freedom of expression, by publicly demanding that Nauru drop this fee so that the world can know what is happening there.

    Elaine Pearson is the Australian Director of Human Rights Watch. HRW has just opened an office in Australia. See HRW.org. 

  • Repost: Don’t tamper with the Refugee Convention. John Menadue

    It would be dangerous to open up the pandora’s box of the Refugee Convention. It has served us well. Who would seriously suggest that persons facing persecution should not be protected. Given the world wide agitation against refugees and ‘outsiders’, a review of the Convention would be a great opportunity for extremists to run their campaigns against foreigners. It would be a field day for the Scott Morrisons of this world.

    This is a repost from 19 July, 2013.

    When will the nonsense stop on boats and refugees? A few days ago Foreign Minister Carr suggested that too many economic migrants were being accepted as refugees. He produced no evidence. What public information I have seen suggests that he is wrong. I would discount the advice he gets from his own department.

    Now the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is saying that the Refugee Convention needs revising, presumably to make it harder for asylum seekers and refugees.

    Where is this mistaken advice coming from? Unless Minister Burke is careful, he will become the fourth Labor minister in a row who has failed in the Immigration portfolio.

    There are sound reasons, both humanitarian and practical, why we should leave the convention alone.

    • Historically Australia has a proud record in protecting the persecuted and the vulnerable. The 1951 Refugee Convention was signed and ratified by the Menzies Government. The 1951 convention dealt largely with the holocaust and refugee problems in Europe in the aftermath of WWII. The 1967 protocol also endorsed by a Liberal government in Australia extended the convention beyond Europe to the rest of the world. The convention is no longer just a post WWII document. It is current and covers refugees around the world. 150 countries or states have signed the convention or protocol.
    • No-one has suggested that the convention is irrelevant although the dog-whistling leads one to the conclusion that some people think it is too soft. I have not heard anyone suggest that a well-founded fear of persecution should be put aside. No-one has suggested that fear of persecution on such issues as political thought and activity, membership of a social group, ethnicity or religion should be discounted. Does anyone seriously suggest that we should reduce protection in these areas?
    • A fundamental and sacrosanct part under the convention is of course ‘non refoulement’ – not returning persecuted people to their country of origin where they could face torture or death. Does anyone want to change that?
    • Why should other countries be sympathetic to our bleatings about revising the convention when our problems are so small? Only this week the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called on more international cooperation to assist the 1.8 million who have fled Syria. Most will want to return to their homes when the civil war and sectarian violence ends. But some will have to be resettled. 200,000 Coptic Christians have fled Egypt since the downfall of President Mubarak. Many will claim protection under the Refugee Convention. In our own region, 250,000 people, mainly Rohingya Muslims, have been forced to flee Buddhist Myanmar. Australia has sent troops to Iraq and Afghanistan. We must accept responsibility for persons fleeing those two countries as a result of our participation and occupation. In 2012 Pakistan had 1.6 million refugees, Iran 870,000, Germany 590,000 and Australia 30,000. In that same year, South Africa had 97,000 asylum seeker applications, France 98,000, the US 66,000 and Australia 29,000. Our problem is exaggerated out of all proportion for cynical political reasons. The media must bear a heavy responsibility for the manipulation of public prejudice and ignorance. Other countries are amazed at the cynicism of our political debate and the failure of political leadership. Why should other leaders around the world cooperate in our futile attempt to amend the convention?
    • If Australia, with such a small problem, believes that the Refugee Convention needs changing, what is there to stop other countries wanting to try to manipulate other conventions, particularly the Geneva Convention that protects our troops in places like Afghanistan? Do we want to be part of an unravelling process?
    • I am also concerned on practical and political grounds. Starting a process to amend and presumably soften the Refugee Convention could open a “Pandora’s box”. It would give the Scott Morrisons of this world free-kicks to continue their attacks on asylum seekers and refugees. (See my blog of March 5 in which Scott Morrison in his maiden speech said ‘From my faith I derive the values of loving kindness, justice and righteousness’). In the present anti-immigration environment, encouraged by the political right in Europe, Australia and elsewhere I fear we could be unleashing further attacks on refugees and would cement what Pope Francis has diplomatically called ‘the globalization of  indifference’ to refugees.

    The Refugee Convention is not broken. We should leave it alone and work with it. Let’s stop being side-tracked by nonsense about economic migrants and changing the Refugee Convention.

    The one area where Kevin Rudd should employ his considerable diplomatic skills and experience is to help negotiate a robust regional arrangement. Everything else is fifth-rate. A lot is also nonsense.

    ( Arja Keski Nummi and I have written extensively on this subject)

  • Towback of boats to Indonesia. Frank Brennan SJ

    ​It is essential that we receive unambiguous public confirmation that Indonesia is agreeing to the tow-back of boats.  Unilateral action by the Abbott Government is just not on.  It would fracture our relationship with Indonesia, would be counterproductive and contrary to our international legal obligations.

    All you need do is consider Recommendation 19 of the 2012 Expert Panel chaired by Angus Houston who had headed our armed services and Michael L’Estrange who had been head of John Howard’s Cabinet Office and then head of the DFAT.

    Recommendation 19 reads: “The Panel notes that the conditions necessary for effective, lawful and safe turnback of irregular vessels carrying asylum seekers to Australia are not currently met, but that this situation could change in the future, in particular if appropriate regional and bilateral arrangements are in place .”

    In their report the Expert Panel spoke about turnbacks at para 3.77:  “Turning back irregular maritime vessels carrying asylum seekers to Australia can be operationally achieved and can constitute an effective disincentive to such ventures, but only in circumstances where a range of operational, safety of life, diplomatic and legal conditions are met:

    • The State to which the vessel is to be returned would need to consent to such a return.
    • Turning around a vessel outside Australia’s territorial sea or contiguous zone (that is, in international waters) or ‘steaming’ a vessel intercepted and turned around in Australia’s territorial sea or contiguous zone back through international waters could only be done under international law with the approval of the State in which the vessel is registered (the ‘flag State’).
    • A decision to turn around a vessel would need to be made in accordance with Australian domestic law and international law, including non-refoulement obligations, and consider any legal responsibility Australia or operational personnel would have for the consequences to the individuals on board any vessel that was to be turned around.
    • Turning around a vessel would need to be conducted consistently with Australia’s obligations under the SOLAS Convention, particularly in relation to those on board the vessel, mindful also of the safety of those Australian officials or Australian Defence Force (ADF ) personnel involved in any such operation.”

    They then say, “In the Panel’s view, the conditions noted above and required for effective, lawful and safe turnbacks of irregular vessels headed for Australia with asylum seekers on board are not currently met in regard to turnbacks to Indonesia.”

    Mr Abbott and Mr Morrison, we need to know what’s changed.  This is not war.  This is the rule of law on the high seas during peacetime.  This is Australia.

    Fr Frank Brennan SJ, Professor of Law, Australian Catholic University 

     

  • A place of refuge: responses to international population movements. Arja Keski-Nummi

    For over 60 years Australia has played a vital role in the development and strengthening of a system of international protection for refugees. It was one of the earliest signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention. It has been an active member of the Executive Committee of the UNHCR and has held the Chair on several occasions. Australia was one of the key countries in the development and implementation of the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo Chinese Refugees (CPA). Two Australians have been awarded the UNHCR Nansen Award for Refugees: Sir Tasman Heyes in1962 and Major General Paul Cullen in 1981.

    Australia has one of the largest humanitarian resettlement programs globally and contributes substantially to international efforts in support of displaced people and refugees. Despite this, in the past decade, Australia, like other developed countries, has grappled with the increasingly contentious nexus between asylum, irregular migration and secondary movements. The public debate is now so polarised that it has become difficult to have a rational and constructive dialogue on the best ways to respond to such movements.

    This essay reviews recent developments and focuses on some practical strategies that could be taken by Australia in strengthening the regional and international protection system.

    Globalisation is testing the tolerance levels of developed countries regarding population flows, immigration and asylum. We know we need immigration, but in the asylum context we just don’t like the apparent self-selection that occurs. It offends both our sense of a fair go and an orderly process. Alongside this concern is the emergence of organised people smuggling activities (a low risk /high profit venture) that facilitate the movement of people when migration systems fail them or do not accommodate their needs. Finally we are often suspicious of the motivation for such population movements, particularly secondary onward movements. Is it opportunistic? Is it out of fear for safety or merely economic? Is it because legal channels have been cut off? The answer probably lies in a complex mixture of all of these.

    These various strands of concern have coalesced into a sense of crisis regarding the perceived uncontrolled onward movements, especially by boat, and the capacity of the international protection system to respond effectively in a way that addresses both States’ legitimate concerns and individual protection needs. In our domestic policy context we see this being played out with ever-changing and often more restrictive policies on asylum, immigration, border control, interception and attempts at disruption, arrest and prosecution of people smugglers

    While such policy responses may temporarily have some impact, they fail in essence to tackle what is at the heart of the issue – the need by people forced to flee their countries to find a place of safety.

    This has been compounded further by the shrinking protection space for displaced people globally. For the past 60 years the complementary elements of an international protection system have been:

    • asylum – the obligation under the Refugee Convention that States provide protection to refugees who are in their territory, and
    • burden-sharing – the concept expressed in the preamble of the Convention whereby States contribute to the protection of refugees who are in the territory of other states.

    However after thirty years of mass outflows of people because of wars and civil unrest, from the Vietnam War to Syria today, the international system has struggled to find an effective way to balance these dual responsibilities.

    We do know it can be done. The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo Chinese Refugees in this region, and in Europe the airlift from Kosovo, shows what is possible when national and international interests come together. Despite being controversial and contentious at the time, both achieved their objectives of keeping borders open and providing at least some protection in the region until durable solutions were available.

    However the examples of failure to act quickly are horrific: the hesitation to intervene in Rwanda that saw over one million people killed; and the current indecisiveness on Syria where over two million have fled across the borders and where, the UNHCR estimate, there are some 4.25million people internally displaced.

    For over a decade there has been intense discussion on enhancing international cooperation and yet no consensus on a framework has been achieved, largely because governments have not seen what is in it for them (1) The reality is that any framework that is developed must take account of States’ national interests or it will not succeed. This is not Australia’s “problem” to fix but, as in the past, we have an important role to play in finding regional solutions because until we do we cannot hope to reach a reasonable response to the complexities of such population movements.

    To achieve this, three complementary approaches that build on current arrangements are examined here.

    1. Building a strategic policy dialogue

    The foundations already exist, but they often appear ad hoc and uncoordinated with little appreciation by others of what is being done. This includes the Bali Process and its various working groups as well as the Regional Support Office; the Regional Cooperation Framework endorsed at the last two Bali Process Ministers conferences, and in civil society, the work of the Asia Pacific Regional Refugee Network (APRRN) (2).

    The missing link in these arrangements is a mechanism that engages government and civil society in a strategic policy dialogue. There is an urgent need to start the work of establishing such a process and creating a framework that brings Governments and civil society in the region into a structured and constructive policy dialogue.

    One approach could be modelled on the “Track 2 Diplomacy” dialogue that has been effectively used in the Asia-Pacific region on security related issues. The objective of this unofficial dialogue would be to develop a shared understanding and a shared acknowledgement of the problem and the role of diverse players. This would include people working in immigration, security, intelligence and border protection areas of government as well as refugee and asylum experts in civil society.

    Done well, this approach has the potential to be transformational in breaking down the unproductive suspicions of the different parties, the current dynamics of which are self-perpetuating and so reinforcing of the stalemate that exists.

    While building a track 2 dialogue takes enormous effort and commitment the dividends can be many:

    • It can remove the discussion on asylum, people smuggling and displacement from public contention to a neutral space;
    • It can give greater freedom to explore alternative perspectives and formulate new (joint) ideas as well as giving all players a stake in the partnership and responsibilities in addressing the issues;
    • It can present an opportunity for those players outside Government to influence new policy thinking and for government officials, often stuck in rigid roles and with less flexibility, to explore and test new policy models which gives them the opportunity to “think aloud”;
    • It can promote a rational public discourse using facts and reason and can strengthen the voices of moderation;
    • It can kick start a process that could lead to a new framework balancing the complementary concepts of asylum and burden sharing regionally.

    If successful such a dialogue could conceivably be expanded into a regional approach sitting alongside or under the Bali Process.

    2. Alternative Migration options

    A central focus of the international discussion on population movements and asylum has been the concept of mixed migratory movements. The literature and research on such movements highlights the complexities inherent in making simple assumptions. A migration path that on the face of it might have started principally for “economic” reasons might, when more fully probed, have compelling refugee dimensions as well. In a 2004 study on mixed migration the absence of alternative migration pathways was cited as one possible reason for the growing “asylum” populations because no other alternatives existed (3). We should understand these dynamics better and examine ways to use extant visa programs as one way of easing the pressure on asylum systems as the only migration option available.

    We have faced such dilemmas before and responded with arrangements such as the Orderly Departure Program from Vietnam or the Special Assistance Category visas created for specific circumstances to release migration pressures that could otherwise have moved into an irregular migration pathway.

    The government, therefore, has in its toolkit a number of visa options that could be considered, and there is a persuasive case for the creation of a negotiated Orderly Departure and/or Special Assistance Category program from targeted countries such as Afghanistan or Sri Lanka. In the case of Afghanistan it could be incorporated into the discussions on the changing nature of Australia’s engagement with Afghanistan in the wake of the draw-down of our military presence. Other vulnerable populations that could be considered are, for example, the Tamils in Sri Lanka or Rohingya in Burma.

    While there will always be difficult bilateral issues with such arrangements these can be addressed through robust diplomatic engagement and discussion, as they have been in the past.

    3. Building a Regional Protection Space.

    Most people displaced by war and conflict will largely remain within their region of displacement (4). People continue to move when the protections in the country of first asylum become precarious or where processing is taking so long that they start to lose faith in return.

    It is important to provide a humane and responsible way to for people to search for alternative protection arrangements elsewhere. We need to work with host countries along the displacement corridors to support populations so as to minimise the need to move on or use smugglers for their onward movements. Such support includes timely registration and processing of claims, access to shelter, education and health services, as well as some capacity for self-sufficiency pending a durable solution.

    In this context the need to pursue regional processing arrangements through which resettlement or return can occur is urgent. Such an arrangement needs to be regarded in the broader context of supporting the continued development of a regional framework. If done well, it could assist in developing a common asylum processing system and infrastructure in the region.

    Balanced with a commitment to resettlement and appropriate alternative migration pathways, as well as safe and transparent return for people who are not refugees or who do not qualify for other visa programs, this would go a long way to restoring the spirit of international cooperation envisaged in the refugee convention.

    References

    1. See for example James Milner, Refugee Studies Centre Working paper No4 Sharing the Security Burden: Towards the Convergence of Refugee protection and State Security, May 2000.

    2. A key NGO umbrella organisation that brings together civil society and regional NGOs to identify and work out practical ways to support the development of a protection framework in the region for displaced people.

    3. Crisp, Jeff and Christina Boswell Poverty, International Migration and Asylum; Policy Brief No.8, UNU- WIDER 2004.

    4. See for example UNHCR Global Report 2012.

    Arja Keski-Nummi was formerly First Assistant Secretary of the Refugee, Humanitarian and International Division of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2007-2010. This article was published as a contribution to ‘Australia21’. It was part of a series of articles on refugees and asylum seekers.  See www.australia21.org.au. 

     

  • Repost: Nation building or border policing? Guest blogger: Peter Hughes

     This was posted on November 15, 2013. 

    Increasingly refugee policy is portrayed in terms of border protection and stopping the boats. We are losing sight of the enormous nation-building benefits that we have received from immigrants and refugees.  John Menadue

    The repositioning of the Immigration and Citizenship portfolio as “Immigration and Border Protection” was a clear indication by the incoming government of its political priority – stop the arrival of maritime asylum seekers!

    In the process of shuffling programs around to accommodate this, Australia lost something.

    The settlement programs that provide initial support to migrants and refugees after arrival in Australia were moved from the Immigration portfolio to the Social Services portfolio. The Adult Migrant English Program was moved to the Industry portfolio (after inexplicably spending two weeks in transit in the Employment portfolio).

    Through these programs last year, some 15,000 refugees were assisted with specialised humanitarian services and around 60,000 adult migrants received English language training. 216 grants were made to organisations assisting migrants with their initial transition into Australian society. Many other services, including translating and interpreting, were also delivered.

    It has been hard to find an articulated rationale for the portfolio changes. Apart from one commentator on this blog, public commentary has been muted.

    The Immigration portfolio and the Department, since its inception in 1945, has been primarily about nation building. This has continued under successive governments, with a short break in continuity in the early 1970s.

    One of the great strengths of Australian national administration of immigration over that period has been that the Department has had a strong connection with migrant communities through its management of the initial settlement process. This has given it an important insight into the experiences of migrants and refugees when they get to Australia. It has enabled nimble adjustments to programs to deal with the particular circumstances of constantly changing national groups coming into the country. It has also enabled preparation for Australian Citizenship to be built in at an early stage.

    Australia’s immigration program is regarded as one of the most successful in the world. The fact that last year saw the largest immigration program in the nation’s history absorbed into our society, with almost no controversy, is a testament to that. Our “one-stop shop” has been one of the secrets of our success. Why discard it?

    One other equally unheralded shift of policy responsibility also took place. Responsibility for national multicultural policy also shifted from the Immigration portfolio to the Social Services portfolio. Interestingly, the community debate about its location after it moved from the Prime Minister’s portfolio to the Immigration portfolio in 1996 has been whether or not it should once again come under the Prime Minister’s wing. The idea that multicultural policy is just another social service is a novel one.

    The previous Coalition government updated multicultural policy in the late 1990s with a strong and effective policy under the banner of “Australian Multiculturalism”. It then let the policy wither on the vine in 2007. The challenge is now for the responsible Parliamentary Secretary, Senator Fierravanti-Wells, to keep multicultural policy (reinstated by the Labor government in 2011) alive and kicking.

    The problem of maritime arrivals, although seemingly intractable, is likely to prove transitory. In the meantime, we must neither lose focus on the enduring, longer term, goal of nation building through immigration nor weaken our capability to deliver it.

    Peter Hughes is Visitor at the Regulatory Institutions Network, ANU, and formerly Deputy Secretary, Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

  • People like us: personal reflections. Guest blogger Trevor Boucher

    One of my great-great grandfathers on my mother’s side was transported to Australia in the early 1840’s for stealing lead from a chapel roof. The lash and Van Dieman’s Land didn’t reform him, although marriage in Geelong to an Irish orphan helped- even though a couple of manslaughter convictions followed.

    Not that I knew about this as a child born in 1936 in remote eastern Victoria. My family historian brother later extracted the information from a reluctant Mum (a crusading Salvationist’s daughter). Her opinion was, “We don’t need to talk about that sort of thing.” With hardworking and upright Dad being a Methodist local preacher, the numerous local Catholics (of Irish origin) were to be treated with some reserve –not really people like us. For their part, they probably saw us as “wowsers”. The hundreds of Chinese alluvial gold miners who once dug up the place had long gone. They didn’t meet “White Australia” prescriptions anyway.

    During the Second World War years Dad returned from a visit to relatives in the Western District with stories of how a companionable Italian POW assigned to them sat at the family dinner table.

    A few years later Dad employed on our farm one of the “Balt” refugees then coming into the country. Although he spoke funny, he seemed to be a decent person to have around.

    Both my parents had limited educational opportunities. In Dad’s case it was through family and financial circumstances, in Mum’s because she was a girl. They wanted their kids to have a better chance.

    So they sent me off to boarding school in Melbourne in 1949. Boarders included Chinese “boys” sent by the Missions from Rabaul, people whose wartime internment by the Japanese had delayed and interrupted their schooling. They were great fella’s; impromptu and illicit after hours Chinese tucker in the boarding quarters provided a great introduction to different food. Another student was the daughter of a Jewish refugee doctor from central Europe.

    Then came teenage hitchhiking around north-east Victoria. I was a bit of a problem for my mates. Being blonde and blue eyed, I looked too much like a “reffo” from the Bonegilla migrant camp. The word was out that they, not being “people like us”, were a problem if you let them into your car. So I was hidden away from the edge of the road while the mates did the hitching.

    Back at the school I was elevated to dormitory master. There were different faces in the streets as the mass immigration recruiting ground of Arthur Calwell (he of “two Wongs” fame) was moved from northern European climes to the warmer Mediterranean, bringing in “wogs” and “dagoes”. A Greek kid arrived at the school with not a word of English, and was fluent within weeks.

    By then the melting pot of the Snowy scheme was a great demonstration of how Australia could manage the welding together of many diverse cultures. The term “New Australian” was coined in an attempt to get away from derogatory references to newcomers. It worked for a while.

    Like others, I was caught by National Service Training requirements. I spent my twenty-first birthday with the Melbourne University Regiment in the bush at Puckapunyal, helping set up a jungle training shooting alley as part of national preparations against the “coming hordes from the North”.

    In late 1972, another brother escaped being Vietnam fodder. Malcolm Fraser later let in Vietnamese boat people; something I remember each time I visit my highly competent Vietnamese dentist.

    Through most of my early life, people of aboriginal descent were in the shadows around my old country market town, Bairnsdale, having come from nearby Lake Tyers Mission settlement. The lawyer in me found the Mabo decision when handed down by the High Court a road to Damascus, yet despite formal constitutional and judicial recognition, attitudes of other Australians generally remain apathetic towards dealing effectively with the continuing profound disadvantage that stands in the way of First Australians being “people like us”.

    My elder daughter Katherine has married Colin, an ethnic Chinese from Malaysia. They have three gorgeous and talented children – Nicholas, Hannah and Julia. What a gift!

    A few years back I took Bryce, the elder son of my younger daughter, Nicole, from Canberra to the cricket in Sydney. Going up the afternoon before, we walked down a Sydney suburban shopping street. I was struck by the fact that nearly all shop signs were in Chinese or another non-English language. There was scarcely a Caucasian face. I said to Bryce, “Do you notice anything different around here?” He said he didn’t and we walked on. A few minutes later he said he had spotted the difference. “What is it?” Bryce’s answer: “They’ve all got I-pads.”

    Some days on after- school pickup of his young blonde brother Trent,  I meet the latter’s best mate, a refugee kid from deep in the Sudan- someone with the best smile and the brightest dark eyes, the best rugby player in the team.

    Waiting in the schoolyard each day are parents from all over the globe. Among them are modestly dressed mothers who I take from their dress to be Muslims. Happy kids mix with each other. At a well attended school concert, kids dance as they sing a song in Arabic.

    As I chat about these things on the way home Paige, sister of Bryce and Trent, chimes in from the back seat to say matter-of-factly that her school friend (from Indonesia) has been fasting all day because of Ramadan and will be away, at prayers, the next day. This leads me to reflect on how religious observance and practice were a major part of my upbringing, my Protestant Mum going to great lengths to ensure that we ate fish on Good Friday.

    Travelling interstate, I can’t remember the last time that the taxi driver from and to the airport was someone who once would have been described as “dinki-di”. Someone has to do that tough and not greatly rewarding job, just as other immigrant people work hard at jobs that are not appealing to the “mainstream”.

    Names in today’s telephone book, like names of players in sporting teams, strongly demonstrate a world-wide spread of family origins of Australians.  On the other hand, when I indulge my pastime of attending country clearing- sale auctions I don’t see the faces of a typical urban Australian street, just faces reflecting the time of my childhood.

    Last weekend a couple, friends of over 50 years, visited. We got talking about the latest drownings of boat people – this time of people trying to get into Europe from the African continent and the Middle East. Leaders overseas have called for broad solutions. Our friends tell us that they are both offspring of boat people. Both sets of parents came by ship as “10 Pound Poms”.

    It strikes me that ten quid is not much compared with the amounts desperate boat people are reported to be paying to “people smugglers” or (dare I say) as air fares for a “legal” arrival followed by a visa overstay.

    The old Protestant/Catholic divide has gone but religious prejudice stays around. It seems funny that proposals for a Muslim school, a mosque and even recently a Muslim cemetery in the country still meet with NIMBY- type objections (for example, adverse traffic effects). Sadder still to me (now an agnostic) is that if one follows the claimed lineage of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, they all lead back to the same “big fella”. Were I to choose to be buried, which denominational section would I be put in? Would it matter?

    While my great-great grandfather came involuntarily to a continent then little changed from the way it had been managed by indigenous people for centuries, succeeding waves of boat people –people seeking a better life-  and their descendants have created a diverse society that is rightly envied elsewhere. People once feared as being “different” have not only fitted in, widening the sense of “us”, but greatly enriched Australian life.

    My granddaughters, Gracye, Ellanor and Maddison, sing the National Anthem at morning line-up at their little country school at Numeralla. They are too young to catch the irony in the words that “for those who come across the seas” we have “bounteous plains to share”.

    Australian society and its composition have changed and pressures for further change will not go away. Sitting on our island we would be both foolish and inhumane not to recognize that there are many more at-risk human beings beyond our shores who are desperate for somewhere to go and who, on any analysis, are simply people like us.

    The great thing is that kids of today don’t see the differences between people that my generation did.

    The Australia of my childhood has changed. It is still changing. But is it better and does it hold more promise?

    You bet!

    PS  The daughter of the great-great grandfather referred to earlier married a man (my great grandfather) who had changed his name on arrival in Australia. He was a Swedish seaman who jumped ship in Melbourne. That means that I am a descendant of someone who today would be classed as an “illegal maritime arrival”.

    Trevor Boucher was Commissioner of Taxation for eight years. This was followed by two years as Australia’s Ambassador to the OECD.

    This article by Trevor Boucher was published before Christmas in ‘Australia 21’. For further information see www.australia21.org.au.

  • People smugglers – villains and heroes. John Menadue

    In 2009 Kevin Rudd called people smugglers ‘the absolute scum of the earth … who should rot in hell’.  Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison echo and expanded this view.

    Others will point to people smugglers like Oskar Schindler who saved hundreds of lives.

    Life is anything but simple for people facing persecution. There will be grades of grey rather than black and white when we look at the history of people escaping from persecution to freedom. We know that some agents helping people flee may be driven by greed. Some will have genuine humanitarian concerns.

    The focus on people smuggling has the effect, partly by design, to divert attention from vulnerable and desperate people that need our protection. It is condescending for anyone to suggest that they know better what is good for people facing persecution and using agents or people smugglers. Scott Morrison has been reported as telling colleagues that he is genuinely concerned about deaths at sea. But is that the whole story? The focus on people-smugglers and the risks at sea is in many instances hypocritical humbug designed to hide the brutality of policies and actions.

    We wax indignantly about people smugglers who bring people by boat but ignore the people smugglers who help bring people by air. Some people smugglers are seen to be OK!

    Governments need to be concerned when asylum seekers use people-smugglers to take them on dangerous and possibly fatal journeys. But where there is persecution and violence and no legitimate or obvious way to escape, asylum seekers, if they have the money, will probably turn to people smugglers.  Hundreds of thousands of Jews who came to Australia and other countries during and after WWII paid people smugglers or agents to escape. In our own region, people smugglers provide a valuable service to help North Koreans escape into China across the Tumen River.

    If there is a need someone will provide a service to help people escape.

    It is also legitimate for governments to make a distinction between people trafficking and people smuggling. In the case of people trafficking, the object is usually the exploitation of persons in the country of destination. Prostitution is an obvious example. In many cases people smuggling does offer the prospect of freedom in the country of destination- at a price.

    Just look at some of the famous or infamous people smugglers in recent history. In all of them there was a mixture of heroism and perhaps some opportunism.  We all have better angels and darker angels. We are all likely to respond differently depending on the circumstances.

    OSKAR SCHINDLER is what we would describe today as a ‘colourful business identity’. He is credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the holocaust. He was initially an opportunist interested mainly in profit. His front was the Nazi intelligence service. He worked the black-market and bribed officials extensively. He had been a bankrupt and fined for public drunkenness. He was a well-known womaniser with a drinking problem. He was chronically in debt. Yet in the end he was a hero. He was named ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by the Israeli Government.

    CHIUNE SUGIHARA was the Japanese Consul General in Lithuania in the 1940s. He disobeyed his government in Tokyo and illegally issued visas for Jews to escape occupied Nazi territory. 6,000 Jews were thus able to escape via Vladivostok to Kobe in Japan on the trans-Siberian railway. After Soviet imprisonment, he returned to Japan and was forced to resign by the Japanese government. He was also named ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by the Israeli Government.

    CARL LUTZ persuaded German officials, including Adolf Eichmann, to tolerate his protection of Hungarian Jews. He is credited with saving over 62,000 Jews, the largest rescue operation of Jews in WWII. He was also named ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by the Israeli Government.

    RAOUL WALLENBERG is widely celebrated for the rescue of over 10,000 Jews from Nazi occupied Hungary. His family had strong commercial links with the Nazi government. He facilitated the issue of false documents and bribed Hungarian and German officials. He won the support of Adolf Eichmann. He was also named ‘Righteous among the Nations’ by the Israeli Government.

    These people were all people-smugglers. They did it for various motives. Almost all broke the rules, forged documents and bribed officials.

    When we join in the attacks on people smugglers we should recall the lessons of history. Hundreds and thousands of people both in the past and in the present owe their freedom to people smugglers.

    Last Sunday was ‘Holy Family Sunday’ which recalls the story of the plight of Joseph, Mary and Jesus to Egypt. That flight is often depicted in religious art as being assisted by a young guide. Perhaps the Holy Family was helped by a people smuggler wonder what Tony Abbott thought as he heard the gospel story!

    People smugglers exist because there is a demand for their services. Would any father with daughters facing the threat of the Taliban in Afghanistan refuse to pay a people smuggler if that was the only way to provide protection.

    We should choose our words carefully when condemning people smugglers. Unfortunately the attacks on people smugglers are often dishonestly designed to take attention away from the real issue – desperate people in need of protection.

  • Repost: Are most asylum seekers and refugees Muslims? John Menadue

    Repost for holiday reading.

    Well, as a matter of fact, they are not.

    But I am sure that many commentators and a lot of the community believe that most are Muslim. The dog-whistlers like Scott Morrison feed on this assumption .According to Jane Cadzow in the Sun Herald he urged the Coalition parties “to ramp up its questioning … to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment”.

    Figures on this issue are extracted from the DIAC Settlement data base. One reason for the difficulty in analysing the figures is that a religious test is not applied to persons seeking refugee status, and neither should it. Ascertaining religious background often then depends on voluntary declarations.

    The Refugee Convention is blind to religion but the Convention recognises that religious persecution is a valid ground for claiming protection.

    But based on DIAC Settlement data the general picture becomes reasonably clear. For settlement purposes refugees are asked on a voluntary basis to declare their religion as it is likely to assist in settlement in the community.

    In the figures for the year from January 1 2010 there were 8,342 arrivals of refugees and other humanitarian entrants. The religious affiliations were as follows:

    • Christian 4,263 – 51%.
    • Muslim 2,223 – 26%
    • Hindu 1,125 – 13%
    • Other 731 – 10%
    • Total 8,342 – 100%

    In the period 1 April 2011 to 31 March 2012, humanitarian arrivals including refugees were as follows.

    • Christian 5,523 – 34%
    • Muslim 6,732 – 42%
    • Buddhist 445 – 3%
    • Hindu 1,089 – 7%
    • Other 2,255 – 14%
    • Total 16,044 – 100%

    These figures give a fairly reliable guide to the religious background of humanitarian entrants in recent years. The increase in Muslim arrivals in the year to 31 March 2012 is largely due to the persecution of Hazaras both in their own country Afghanistan and more recently in Pakistan. This trend is continuing.

    The pattern will vary from year to year, depending on the religious composition of the country where the persecution is occurring, and if a particular religious group is being persecuted.

    I would expect that the number of Christians currently facing persecution in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt and Syria, is likely to increase. Christians represent about 10% of the population in both countries the highest in the Middle East. If the Assad regime in Syria falls both minority Alawite and Christian communities are likely to be in jeopardy. Over a million Syrians have already fled to neighbouring countries.

    Christians in the Middle East, the birthplace of Christianity, have fallen from 20% in the early 20th Century to about 5% today.

    The religious pattern of asylum seekers and refugees is hard to predict. What is clear is that it is nonsense to assume that most of them to date are Muslim.

    John Menadue

  • Remarks by Sir William Deane AC on “Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Finding a Better Way”.

     On 17 December, Sir William Deane, former Governor-General launched Australia21 – essays on refugees and asylum seekers. Sir William Deane’s remarks follow.

    Paul Barratt’s acknowledgement of the traditional custodians in which I respectfully join, serves to remind us that apart from indigenous Australians we are all migrants or descended from migrants and that many of us were asylum seekers or are descended from asylum seekers. My own great-grandfather came to Australia with his wife and young family, including my grandfather who was aged 7 from Tipperary in 1851 on a wooden sailing ship called the Harry Lorrequer. They sought asylum on this side of the world from the devastation of the great famine. After disembarking in Melbourne and time on the goldfields near Ballarat, my great-grandfather took his family to Wahring near Nagambie in rural Victoria where he became the legal owner of land taken without compensation from the Taungurung people. That land, which we now know was unlawfully acquired, provided the basis of his and his family’s subsequent well-being.

    The first point which I wish to make through that brief reference to a rather typical Australian family history is that we Australians should have understanding and compassion for the actions of those who subject themselves and their families to serious risk of disaster at sea, to escape from violence or terror or unbearable hardship and seek asylum in a new country which they dream of making their homeland. We will never know precisely how many of the wooden sailing ships, bearing asylum seekers from Europe to Australia in the 19th century didn’t make it. Or how many men, women and children died through the awful sicknesses and conditions on the way. The Harry Lorrequer  did make it. But parts of the journey were so stormy that 45 passengers and seven sailors were washed overboard and the youngest of my great-grandfather’s children, Martin, died as a result of the sicknesses which threatened all on board.

    Perhaps some would criticise all those early Australians and present would-be Australians for subjecting themselves and their families to such awful risks. Most of us would however see them as bravely seeking a better life for themselves and their families in circumstances where they saw or see no really worthwhile alternative. The other point is that from the earliest days of European arrivals and constantly thereafter, our country and its people, both indigenous and nonindigenous have faced extraordinary and at times seemingly overwhelming challenges and problems.

    The challenge which we as a nation face in relation to refugees and other asylum seekers who arrive, or seek to arrive by boat is a very difficult one. But it is not the most difficult which has confronted our nation. And while it seems to me that there are no obvious complete answers or solutions, I believe that we are as a nation capable of dealing with it, with both justice and decency. In that regard it is well to remember that other countries are facing much greater challenges as regards refugees then we are. For example as the violent crisis in Syria enters its third winter, Lebanon with a considerably smaller population than ours is currently engulfed by more than 800,000 refugees.

    The book which we are gathered to launch “Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Finding a Better Way” demands the attention and careful consideration of any Australian who is concerned with that challenge. Its contents are of immeasurable national value and importance as a basis of understanding, of discussion, of planning and of hope. The authors of the essays are outstanding Australians with extraordinary expertise and profound practical and theoretical experience in the field. They identify what they see as current problems, difficulties and shortcomings and suggest what they see as possible lines of investigation, discussion and solution. As the editors explain in their thoughtful preface, the objective of Australia21 in initiating and publishing the book has been to provide the foundation for the convening of a roundtable of stakeholders and decision makers next year to examine the feasibility of a fresh, new bipartisan approach.

    It is only a couple of weeks since the world’s most respected authority on refugees, the United Nations High Commission delivered its assessments of our detention camps, officially called “regional processing centres” on Nauru and Manus Island. There is close correspondence between the published findings in relation to each place. As regards the Nauru centre which has been established or re-established for more than a year, the United Nations Refugee Agency found, that “The current policies conditions and operational approaches do not comply with international standards, constitute arbitrary and mandatory detention under international law; do not provide a fair and expeditious system for assessing refugee claims and do not provide safe and humane conditions of treatment in detention”. As regards the children who are in our nation’s care and detained on Nauru, the agency found “The harsh and unsuitable environment is particularly inappropriate for the care and support of child asylum seekers” and that “children do not have access to adequate educational and recreational facilities”. Finally, and relevant to the description of the Nauru detention centre as a regional processing centre, the agency found that “Only one claim for refugee status had at the time of inspection been finally determined and handed down in the 14th month period since the transfer of asylum seekers to Nauru commenced in September 2012.

    Hopefully, our government and the relevant authorities will in due course, properly respond to the United Nations Refugee Agency’s criticisms. But pending such a response one cannot but fear that at least some of the findings, particularly those relating to children held in detention and unsatisfactory processing are justified. If they are correct, the United Nations reports diminish our country’s hard won and long justified international reputation as an upholder of human rights and dignity. More important, they give rise to questions relating to our decency and sense of fairness and justice as a community and as individuals, which we cannot properly ignore.

    In that context, the publication of this book and Australia21’s call for open discussion and dialogue and a search for national consensus about a new and better way, come at a  particularly apposite time. I sincerely hope that all concerned, particularly the legislators and decision-makers in government and the administrators in the field, will welcome that call and fully participate in any ensuing discussions and exchanges, and that at everyr every stage of such discussions there will be a conscious awareness of the fact that the lives, the well-being and the futures of extraordinarily vulnerable human beings including children are involved.

    Let me conclude by congratulating and thanking all who have contributed to the initiation, writing and publication of this book, authors, editors, publishers and the members of Australia21. I join them all in wishing it every success.

    “Refugees and asylum seekers: finding a better way” is now officially launched.

    Earlier posts on ‘Refugees and asylum seekers’ can be found in the categories to the right of this page.

  • 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?