Pearls and Irritations

Tag: Human Rights

  • Kim Oates.  The Forgotten Children

    I have just read the report of the Australian Human Rights Commission on Children in Detention “The Forgotten Children”.

    It is clear, factual and unemotional.  It is supported by evidence and is non-partisan. It is not on the side of any political party. It is on the side of children.

    It made me ashamed about what is being done to these children. It made me sad that our nation can be so cruel. It made me angry about the way the two main political parties responded on the release of the report. The Labour Party was largely silent, although much of what is documented in the report occurred on their watch. The Liberal/National party was belligerent, ignoring the seriousness of the message, blaming others while simultaneously congratulating themselves and trying to shoot the highly respected messenger, Professor Gillian Triggs.

    I have not visited a detention centre.  But I am a paediatrician and have wide experience in child protection and with disadvantaged children. I know the devastating effects of abuse and deprivation in childhood, effects which often continue throughout life.

    I know the paediatricians who gave evidence to the inquiry. They are highly regarded in the medical community. They are not political people, they don’t exaggerate. They care about children.

    The inquiry was established to investigate how life in immigration detention may affect the health and development of children. It interviewed 112 children and their families about the health impacts of detention, using a standardised questionnaire. It held five public hearings and received 239 submissions.

    One of its aims was to see if Australia met its international human rights obligations, such as:  appropriateness of facilities where children are detained; measures to ensure their safety and provision of education, recreation and health services.

    Having pointed out that mandatory immigration detention, especially of children, is contrary to Australia’s international obligations, the report states “It is troubling that members of the Government and Parliament and Departmental officials are either uninformed, or choose to ignore, the human rights treaties to which Australia is a party”.

    The report noted that our leaders, while talking about the value of detention as a deterrent, do not believe this themselves: “As the medical evidence has mounted over the last eight months of the Inquiry, it has become increasingly difficult to understand the policy of both Labor and Coalition Governments. Both the Hon Chris Bowen MP, as a former Minister for Immigration, and the Hon Scott Morrison MP, the current Minister for Immigration, agreed on oath before the Inquiry that holding children in detention does not deter either asylum seekers or people smugglers. No satisfactory rationale for the prolonged detention of children seeking asylum in Australia has been offered”

    The Australian Government’s own Early Years Learning Framework describes three foundations as the basis for healthy childhood growth and progress for pre-schoolers: ‘Belonging, Being and Becoming.’

    The first foundation, “Belonging” points out that pre-schoolers need to belong to a family and a community if they are to establish secure relationships and a healthy sense of self.

    However the report says “All evidence to this Inquiry indicates that the institutionalised structure and routine of detention disrupts family functioning and the relationships between parents and children. Children do not have access to a private family home where it would be expected families would spend time away from other people sharing meals, engaging in shared activities, and having rest-time on their own.”

    The second foundation, “Being” emphasises  play-based learning because play provides the most appropriate stimulus for brain development,  that childhood is a special time in life where children need time to play, try new things and have fun.

    There was little evidence of this need being met for children in detention. 

    “My youngest child has no toys. He only pushes a chair around” said one mother.

    The third foundation ‘Becoming’, is about the learning and development that young children experience. But the most common concern of parents was that their children had little opportunity to learn socialisation skills. Many reported that their pre-schooler was unable to get along with other children.

    These three foundations, established by our government for healthy child development are denied children in detention, children who are under the guardianship of the Minister.

    The inquiry clearly showed that detention was bad for the mental health and wellbeing of children. Almost all children and their parents spoke about their worry, restlessness, anxiety and difficulties eating and sleeping. Thirty four percent of children had mental health disorders that, if they were not in detention with limited health services, would require referral to a specialist child mental health service for psychiatric treatment.  This compares with less than two percent of children in the Australian population.

    Children were reported to experience tearfulness, anxiety, delayed or absent speech, regression in behaviour and nightmares. Observers noted tantrums, sleep disturbance, poor concentration, frustration and agitation. One mother told the enquiry:

    “My daughter is 2 years old. Five months ago she started behaving abnormally. She wakes up screaming and crying in the middle of the night. She always hits us; she pulls my hair and scratches our faces. She has tantrums every day. She broke my glasses. She gets upset without any reason”. 

    The Royal Australasian College of Physicians submitted their concern about ‘the long-term impact of detention on children, noting that the ‘psychological distress resulting from detention can persist for years after release’.

    The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists stated  “… detention of children is detrimental to children’s development and mental health and has the potential to cause long-term damage to social and emotional functioning.”

    This report needs to be taken seriously. It should not be used as an opportunity to blame.  It is an opportunity to right a wrong. It is about protecting children.

    Kim Oates is Emeritus Professor of Medicine at the Sydney University Medical School. He was formerly Chief Executive of the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Westmead.

     

     

     

  • Marie Coleman. Human Rights Commission and the forgotten children.

    In February 2015 the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse found that Cardinal George Pell, the former Archbishop of Sydney, had placed the church’s financial interests above his obligation to a victim of childhood sexual abuse.

    In February 2015 the Prime Minister of Australia, supported by his Ministers, has launched a blistering attack on a distinguished legal scholar and President of the independent statutory Australian Rights Commission, for a report which has found that both the Labor and Coalition Governments have failed to protect children in mandatory detention from abuse and mental and physical harm.

    Professor Gillian Triggs has found that Australia has been and remains in breach of its international obligations- under both parties. Among other straightforward and completely nonpartisan recommendations she has recommended that “An independent guardian be appointed for unaccompanied children seeking asylum in Australia” rather than the current position of the Minister for Immigration being both the guardian of such children, and the Minister responsible for their mandatory detention.

    The Royal Commission has been investigating historic instances of abuse, exploring the approaches which institutions responsible for such abuse have responded to reports of individual cases, as well as options for reparations.

    The thrust of the AHRC Report, The Forgotten Children, is to explore and document what have been the outcomes for children placed in mandatory detention, and to develop future policies and legislation which will prevent such dreadful outcomes ever again being visited on children.

    The Minister for Immigration, Peter Dutton MP, has asserted that the AHRC Report is irrelevant because any instances of maltreatment of children have been historical. The second leg of the Government’s response to the AHRC report seems to be that because Labor did it, then the Coalition’s actions, if harm has been done, are justifiable.

    The Opposition has essentially mumbled.

    The unpalatable situation is that neither Labor nor the Coalition has any way to escape from the fact that one outcome of their policies on immigration and refugees (stopping the boats) has been to put children through hell, and put Australia in breach of its obligations under international law.

    No equivocations about whether for an adolescent girl to go mad and cut herself on Nauru is better than drowning at sea, no claiming that this wouldn’t have happened if the Coalition had allowed Labor to send refugees to Malaysia, will alter the fact that neither Labor nor the Coalition has been able to articulate an acceptable , transparent and  legal method of dealing with the inevitable pressures from populations moving from political anarchy, oppression, assassinations and starvation in home countries.

    The cost of current off shore detention of refugees in 2014-15 was estimated by an Immigration Department official as $1 billion. Running the detention centre on Manus Island has cost taxpayers $632.3 million, and the operational cost of Nauru was $582.4 million, a Senate estimates hearing was told. That’s a billion dollars a year for the foreseeable future…without giving thought to the ultimate health costs for the treatment of health and psychological damages to the refugees. It doesn’t include other costs such as the role of the Australian Navy and Customs in ‘on water’ activities.

    Surely it isn’t beyond the capacity of this nation’s leaders to develop alternative strategies?

    Former NSW Premier Nick Greiner described as “awful” the fact that Australia was the only nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that indefinitely detained children in mandatory detention.

    “The principle that Australia … finds it necessary to be virtually the only civilised nation that does this, I think is just abhorrent,” he said….”we now ought to look at the humanity of what we do”, he said.

    Last month NSW Premier Baird called on Mr Abbott, a close friend, to do more to accept refugees. Asked if children should be released from immigration detention, Mr Baird said “that’s something I’ve supported for a long time”.

    In an interview with 3AW, Mr Abbott said the commission should be ashamed of itself and that its report was a “blatantly partisan” and political exercise.

    He said the commission should acknowledge the government for stopping the flow of asylum seeker boats and dramatically reducing the number of children in detention.

    “I reckon the human rights commission ought to be sending a note of congratulations to Scott Morrison saying well done, mate,” Mr Abbott said, referring to the former immigration minister.

    Asked if he felt any guilt about the remaining 200 children still in detention, Mr Abbott was blunt: “None whatsoever.”

    “The most compassionate thing you can do is stop the boats,” he said.

    He said the only way to ensure there were no children in detention was to ensure there were no boats arriving.

    Numbers of children in immigration detention peaked at nearly 2000 in mid-2013 under Labor. There are now only about 200 children still detained.

    The Australian Human Rights Commission report wants actions taken to prevent such a situation ever developing again.

    “The human rights commission ought to be ashamed of itself,” Mr Abbott said, when asked about the report.

    So that’s all right. The Prime Minister thinks his policy is tops. A great policy in fact.

    As the distinguished PUP Senator for Queensland, Glenn Lazarus might put it ‘you can polish a turd, but it’s still a turd’.

    Marie Coleman AO PSM is a former senior Commonwealth Public Servant with a background in social policy.

  • John Menadue. Fairness, Opportunity and Security – Filling the policy vacuum

    I sense that there is great public concern that both the government and opposition keep playing the political and personal game at the expense of informed public discussion of important policy issues.

    We have become concerned about the trustworthiness of our political, business and media elite. Insiders and vested interests are undermining the public interest. Money is unduly influencing political decisions. There is gridlock on important issues like climate change and taxation.

    After a near death experience Tony Abbott has said the he is open to new thinking and ways of governing. ‘Good government begins today’  Time will tell. Bill Shorten has said that 2015 will be the year of ideas. I hope so.

    In this blog over the next few months I will be posting a series of articles on important policy issues. I posted a three parter on health policy on January 27, 28 and 29.

    There will be range of contributors.Some  have contributed in the past to this blog

    Each of the policy articles will be about 2000 words. They will not be “pie in the sky’ but realistic, given our political and financial constraints.

    It is planned that these policy articles will be published in a book by ATF Press in October/November this year

    Policy areas to be canvassed

    Economic policy

    Fixing the budget

    Taxation

    Federalism

    Productivity

    Job creation and participation

    Foreign policy

    Security, both military and soft power.

    Health

     Development of our human capital in the fields of education, science, research and development and innovation.

    Transport and infrastructure

    Population/migration/refugees

    Welfare priorities

    Retirement incomes

    Indigenous affairs

    Communications and the Arts

    Environment and climate change

    Inequality

    Role of government including tackling corruption and bad behaviour

    Democratic renewal – the lack of trust in government and the hollowing out of our political parties.

    Terrorism and internal security whilst protecting of our freedoms

     

  • Melanie Noden. The Forgotten Children.

    Earlier this week, a damning report by the Australian Human Rights Commission into children in detention was tabled, alleging extensive human rights violations. The Report clearly spells out the negative physical and psychological impact that policies of indefinite detention have on children and brings to light the concerns that many people already have about the treatment of asylum seeker children in Australia’s care.

    The Report recommends that a royal commission needs to be established to  examine the breach of the Commonwealth’s duty of care, focussing in particular on the use of force against children in detention, and allegations of sexual assault.

    Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission said,“It is troubling that members of the Government and Parliament and Departmental officials are either uninformed, or choose to ignore, the human rights treaties to which Australia is a party”.  

    The Report was issued after 1,129 children in detention were interviewed. It shows there were 233 recorded assaults involving children and 33 incidents of reported sexual assaults.

    The Report alleges human rights violations and says that children being detained indefinitely on Nauru are “suffering from extreme levels of physical, emotional, psychological and developmental distress“.

    Recommendations of the report are as follows:

    • all children to be released from Australian mainland detention and from detention centres on Nauru
    • laws be introduced to make sure children are not detained beyond health, identity and security checks
    • laws be introduced to give effect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child
    • No child to be sent offshore for processing unless it is clear that their human rights will be respected
    • An independent guardian be appointed for unaccompanied children on Christmas Island

    It is Gillian Triggs’ hope that the Report will, “…prompt fair-minded Australians, Members of Parliament and the Federal Government to reconsider our asylum seeker policies and to release all children and their families immediately”

    She also stated that, “It is imperative that Australian governments never again use the lives of children to achieve political or strategic advantage. The aims of stopping people smugglers and deaths at sea do not justify the cruel and illegal means adopted. Australia is better than this.”

    I and my colleagues in the sector welcome the recommendation to establish a royal commission to investigate what has been happening behind the closed gates of the detention centres to ensure clear parameters are established for future policy.

    To this effect, The Asylum Seekers Centre has joined the Refugee Council of Australia and other agencies in signing a joint statement calling for legislative change to ensure that children are not subject to immigration detention in the future.

    Melanie Noden is the CEO of the Asylum Seekers Centre, Sydney.

    The report can be found here:https://humanrights.gov.au/publications/forgotten-children-national-inquiry-children-immigration-detention-2014

     

  • Brian Johnstone. The Right to Freedom of Speech

    During his flights to Sri Lanka and the Philippines, Pope Francis spoke of the massacre of the staff of a French magazine Charlie Hebdo and others at a kosher supermarket, which killed 17 persons. The attack was in reprisal for satirical depictions of the prophet Muhammad.

    “One cannot make war [or] kill in the name of one’s own religion, that is, in the name of God,” Francis said. “To kill in the name of God is an aberration.”   But, the Pope added, freedom of speech does not imply total license to insult or offend another’s faith.  “Every religion has its dignity . . . and I cannot make fun of it.”

    Spokespersons of the Orthodox Churches have also protested against the publication of the cartoons satirising religion.  The World Russian People’s Council chaired by Orthodox Patriarch Kirill stated:  “We call on journalists worldwide to observe a moratorium on publishing caricatures offending Muslims, Christians and followers of other faiths.”  The statement continued:  “Calls to reprint them are irresponsible and unjust–a blow to millions of innocent Muslims, and a show of disrespect for an entire civilisation.”

    Some Muslims reacted strongly and even violently to the republishing of the cartoons.   Muslims are reported to have protested in Niger, Sudan, Somalia, Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, Jordan, Pakistan and the Russian republic of Chechnya.  In Niger there were reports of three deaths in the capital, Niamey, and another five in the second city, Zinder. The BBC reported that some 45 churches were set on fire or looted, and three dead were found in churches.  About 800 Muslims gathered to protest in Lakemba in New South Wales, Australia; a spokesperson rejected the Western value of freedom of speech. The protest was peaceful.

    Not everyone agreed with Pope Francis. As Christopher Lamb reported in the Tablet, on 19 January 2015, when the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, was asked about Pope Francis’s remarks by the American television channel CBS, said: “I think in a free society, there is a right to cause offence about someone’s religion.”  He went on:

    I’m a Christian – if someone says something offensive about Jesus, I might find that offensive, but in a free society I don’t have a right to, sort of, wreak my vengeance on them. We have to accept that newspapers, magazines, can publish things that are offensive to some, as long as it’s within the law. That is what we should defend.

    The UK Catholic Herald on 19 January 2015 interpreted this as contradicting Pope Francis’s comments.  This is not completely correct; the Pope would agree with Cameron on some points, but would disagree on others.

    Cameron said it was wrong to take revenge if someone insulted your faith.  Pope Francis would agree that vengeance in such a case is morally wrong and that the one who is offended does not have a moral right to take such vengeance.  He would also accept that in some countries there is a legal right to cause offence to someone by criticising that person’s religion, in the sense that it is not prohibited by the civil law.  The Pope did not require that that there should be a law prohibiting offensive speech against some people’s religious beliefs.

    There are three issues that emerge from these reports.

    Religion as solely private?

    The first is the meaning of religion itself.  In a modern secular society a typical view of religion might be as follows.  Religion may be a good thing, but it is a purely private matter.  Religious people may form communities such as Churches, but this is a free, personal decision.  Religious faith is a personal matter and it consists of individual convictions that are the expression of religious sentiments; there is no such thing as a ‘Christian culture’ except in the most general sense. The state exists basically to enable individuals to follow their personal projects and to protect them from intrusions from others that might hinder them from this pursuit.

    A right is essentially a claim to be able to act or to speak to express one’s convictions provided one does not harm anyone else.   Because religion is considered to be largely a matter of private sentiment, people generally find it difficult to appreciate that actions and speech that offend the religion of another can cause serious harm to that person.  It is moreover presumed that democracy requires freedom of speech.  Thus, whatever harm may be caused to someone by offensive speech will be outweighed by the benefit of maintaining freedom of speech for the sake of democracy.

    For various reasons, however, society may decide to set limits to the exercise of this freedom, for example by prohibiting “hate speech.”  But where there is no law against it an individual must be presumed to be free to offend others.  Since there are no generally agreed ethical norms governing such speech, one who desires to speak offensively does not need to justify his speech by providing ethical arguments, apart from a general appeal to his ‘democratic rights.’

    For the three groups that have been mentioned, the Catholic Church as represented by Pope Francis, the Orthodox Churches as represented by Patriarch Kirill and Muslim communities in general, religion is not merely an individual matter; it requires community and exists in specific communities.   Further, religious faith is not merely a matter of individual sentiment; it is a deeply personal commitment that expressed a person’s reason for living and constitutes that person’s identity.   An offence to a person’s religion is considered to be an offence to the person himself or herself.

    Religion and the state

    This second issue is the relation between religion and the state and in particular to the law of the state.  There are complex differences between the ways these three groups, Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christian and Muslims, relate to the state.  The Catholic Church has come to recognise a separation between the two; the Orthodox Churches would appear to favor a closer form of positive collaboration; the Muslim religion in principle requires the laws of the state to embody religious teaching. Such laws are called Sharia law.

    However, it does not follow that the members of such groups would require that their religion and its beliefs and practices should be protected by the law of the country in which they reside. In Australia where there are at present over two hundred different religious traditions represented, such a law would not be practically viable. This was the view of the judge in a case brought by the then Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell in 1998. The case concerned the exhibiting of a photograph of Christ entitled “Piss Christ” that the Archbishop claimed was “blasphemous libel.”

    Justice Harper, while he acknowledged that the image was indeed offensive to Christians, found that there was no legal basis for the court to ban it. “A plural society such as contemporary Australia operates best where the law need not bother with blasphemous libel,” said the judge.

    Ethical aspects

    The third issue is that of ethics.  Cameron would seem to presume that, if there is no law against offending the religion of members of a society, such offences are justified.  However, an act may be legally permitted and nevertheless be ethically wrong.  A person who exhibits an image or makes a statement that offends the religion of others is not justified in doing so merely because he wants to express himself.  Nor may he claim a right to the freedom to do so on this basis. Such a right to freedom must be socially justified.

    The justification of the right to freedom of speech is that it is required to enable the relatively powerless to challenge the abuse of power by the more powerful.  For example, when a government official abuses his power to grant favours to his friends, a reporter may claim the right to freedom of speech to investigate and publish the facts of the case.

    But it could happen that a journalist or publisher who has significant power abuses the right to freedom of speech by attacking another who is relatively weak since he or she has fewer financial or political resources.   The effect of such an attack could be the destruction of the other’s reputation and the reduction of the capacity of that other to function effectively in society.  I would argue that this was the case when the journalist Andrew Bolt accused several persons who are light-skinned of claiming Aboriginal identity for motives of personal gain.

    The Australian Racial Discrimination Act (1975) was later amended to include a new Section 18C which prohibits: “Offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin”.  The Act states:  (1) “It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:  (a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and (b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.”

    It is noteworthy that the act prohibits offending, but does not include religion as one of the factors that could be the basis of the offence.  The alternative later proposed by the federal attorney general Brandis stated the following:  “3. Whether an act is reasonably likely to have the effect specified in sub-section (1)(a) is to be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community.”

    This means that the judgment as to whether the act is offending or not is to be made not, for example, by the Aboriginal person who experiences the offence, or by the Aboriginal community, but by the “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community.”

    This is a clear example of imposing the judgment of the more powerful group on the relatively less powerful which is a criterion for an abuse of the right of freedom of speech.  It means that the judgment as to whether the person who experiences offence is really offended is to be made not necessarily by those who might be offended, but by any member of the community.  This criterion is discriminatory; it could include those who may well be engaged in doing the offending.

    What is to be said of the use of violence in response to an offence against religion?   It is clear that Pope Francis would not justify such violence.  The connection between religion and violence was explained some years ago by René Girard, who argued that the strong commitments and even passions that are connected to religion must be channeled in a relationship with transcendence, for example with a transcendent God. When that connection is lost or abandoned the intensity characteristic of religion can be attached to a culture, a way of life, a political system or a race.

    These become invested with absolute importance and violence can readily be justified in their defence; there are incontrovertible examples of this in the history of Christianity, as in the violent suppression of heresy, the wars of religion and the persecution of the Jews.  The history of Islam includes comparable instances.

    The key word is one invoked by Pope Francis, ‘dignity.’  Dignity implies a two-way relationship: it is impossible to preserve one’s own dignity while undermining the dignity of another.  I cannot ask another to recognise my dignity, when I am refusing to recognise the dignity of that other.  This is what one does when one offends another by mocking what he holds most dear: his religion.

     

  • High Court decision on Tamil asylum seekers

    The majority decided that the detention from 1 to 27 July 2014 was lawful at all times and thus there was no claim to damages for the detention.

    (more…)

  • Wendy Sharpe – Asylum seeker portraits and stories

    The Asylum Seekers Centre is presenting an art exhibition – ‘Seeking Humanity’ – by renowned Australian artist, Wendy Sharpe. It opens in Ultimo, Sydney, on 17 February, for four weeks, before moving to Canberra on 20 March, and then Penrith.

    It is not about politics, but puts a human face to those who have fled situations of great danger in their home country in search of safety and freedom in Australia. The video has been very successful, with over 500 people viewing it within the first 24 hours.

    A previous Archibald winner and 2014 finalist, Wendy has drawn portraits of 39 asylum seekers and refugees. Through her art, she shares their lives with us to show that underneath all the troubles and politics around the issue, we are all the same. That we all have the same hopes and dreams.

    More info – http://asylumseekerscentre.org.au/seeking-humanity

  • Allan Patience. Liberty or Narcissism?

    On the Need for a Wider Debate about Charlie Hebdo
     
    No one can justify the recent brutal murders of the French journalists and police in Paris. However, the belief that this act constitutes an attack on free speech and freedom of the press is in grave danger of being over-stated. What is missing in the debate so far is the understanding that there is a particularly fine line between satirizing people’s beliefs and values and insulting them.
     
    When Attorney-General George Brandis asserted that freedom of speech meant people had the right to be bigots, many Australians disagreed with him. They took the view that to taunt or disparage people gratuitously, because of their ethnicity, religion, age, disability, or gender, is unacceptable – even un-Australian. The Brandis defence of bigotry springs from a perverted version of liberalism driven by extremist ideological assumptions that can only lead to a narcissitic and conflict-ridden society.  
     
    Moreover those who rejected Brandis’ view were aware that licensing bigotry all too easily leads to blowback. History shows that people who live under the yolk of unrelenting bigotry, with its associated discriminations and cruelties, have nothing to lose. It is inevitable some at least (especially the alienated young) will turn to irrational and violent actions that are at the very core of extremism. They have no other choice.
     
    In the neo-liberal West there is an increasing insensitivity to the fragile distinction between satirizing peoples and their traditions and being insulting about them. On too many occasions crassness has supplanted subtlety. We hear this almost every day on shock-jock radio and we read it in the splenetic columns of doctrinaire journalists – all claiming to be exercising the freedom of the media as they spread misinformation and inflame prejudice among a gullible public.
     
    This failure to distinguish between satire and insult is symptomatic of cultural arrogance in the West. It is based on moral insecurity and a particularly egocentric form of nihilism. It fosters a corralling of “us” (the “West”) while sneering at “them” (the “Rest”) in ways that can only bring suffering to everyone. The old adage that we shall reap what we sow is as relevant now as it was when it was coined. While witty caricatures of powers-that-be are permissible – even necessary – treating peoples’ cherished beliefs and sacred values with contempt is simply not. It is spiritually wounding to the perpetrators and socially destructive for everyone, especially those at whom it is targeted.
     
    Without doubt there are valuable insights to be gained from intelligent satire – including cartoons – that highlight the foibles, hypocrisy and dishonesty of our own politicians, prelates, public pontificators, pugilists, and anyone else who seeks to exercise authority over us – or bully us. But we should tread sensitively and respectfully when it comes to caricaturing people with whose religio-cultural understandings we are unfamiliar – or perhaps ignorant.
     
    Western liberalism is not the ultimate repository of all human wisdom. Far from it. In a judiciously cosmopolitan world the great and little traditions of humanity’s cultural evolution need to be conversing with each other as never before – with understanding (Max Weber’s Verstehen), mutual respect, frankness, and a genuine desire to explore the common ground they (we) all share. That common ground is broader and more solid than many glibly informed Western liberals understand, or even want to know about. Their positivist certainties wrap them in a dogmatic belief in their own absolutist beliefs that have all the marks of fundamentalism. Their blinkered rationalism and blind faith in scientistic solutions to absolutely everything is a major threat to a humane and cosmopolitan future for our beleaguered planet.    
     
    It’s time to draw breath and ask whether Charlie Hebdo is as liberally innocent and culturally iconic as its outraged Western defenders would have us believe. Those defenders need to acknowledge that among its undoubted wit and sharp insights it has also indulged in levels of cynicism and self-righteousness that are quite as egregious as the bad religion it purports to expose and oppose.
     
     
    Allan Patience is a principal fellow in the Asia Institute in the University of Melbourne. He has held chairs in politics and Asian studies in universities in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Japan:

  • Brian Johnstone. Terrorism and torture – the Catholic tradition.

    In Australia today, we accept that a person who has expressed ideas that justify terrorism may be restrained from acting out those ideas.  But we would not justify torturing a person suspected of harbouring such notions to force him to reveal them or to reject such ideas.   However, surveys in the Western world find that torture to obtain information is sometimes justified. The Prime Minister’s acceptance of torture in the context of the Sri Lankan civil war was as follows: “Obviously the Australian Government deplores any use of torture. We deplore that, wherever it might take place, we deplore that. But we accept that sometimes in difficult circumstances, difficult things happen.”  (http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2013/s3893068.htm, retrieved 15 Jan 2014).

    The Catholic tradition does not have a good record on torture. Pope Nicholas I in 866 condemned both the practice and the judicial institution of torture.  However, later torture came to be accepted by Church authorities and theologians.  Under the influence of Roman law, torture was first permitted legally by Pope Innocent IV in 1253. This pope allowed the infliction of torture on heretics by the civil authorities and torture had a recognized role in the courts of the Inquisition. Torture was also adopted by secular courts.  Pope John Paul II in 1993 condemned physical and mental torture as intrinsically evil. This is a striking example of the development of doctrine; how can we explain it?   The failure of the tradition to consistently reject torture can be attributed, apart from human sin, to three factors: Roman Law; a theory of order in the world and the lack of an adequate notion of dignity.

    Ancient Roman law accepted torture.  When the “barbarians” invaded Europe and the Roman Empire fell, the practice of torture was abandoned.  Trial by ordeal was instituted in its place.  To prove his innocence an accused had to submit to an ordeal, for example he had to walk a set distance over red-hot ploughshares. If he survived and recovered this was taken as a sign from God that he was innocent. In the eleventh century, with the revival of Roman law, the practice of ordeal was abandoned and torture was reinstated.  Judges were instructed to obtain a confession from the accused and to obtain this they could use torture.

    Behind this we can discern a complex legal, philosophical and theological theory.  God’s judgment on the matter was now no longer sought by examining the results of an ordeal. Instead, ecclesiastical and legal officials sought to examine the contents of the mind of the accused.  They no longer looked for blisters on the accused’s feet as indicative of guilt, but for “blisters” or heresies in his mind.

    Drawing on Greek thinking, philosophers and theologians held that there was an order in the world.  This order expresses the wisdom of God. Human beings could participate in this order by knowledge and free will.  This order was called an “ontological” order. An ontological order expresses the way things are.  The order was also considered to be a moral order; that is, it expressed the way things ought to be.  A rational person could thus recognize the truth of things and also discern what ought to be done.  This order was considered to be a template for the social and political order of society.

    Deviant ideas and practices were like a virus attacking the order in the world; moreover, they threatened to corrode the social and political order.  Both the Church and the secular power had a vital interest in preserving this order.  Secular courts and the Church Inquisition sought to discover the deviant ideas or “heresies.”  If individuals who were accused of heresy refused to confess, it was considered legitimate to torture them to obtain a confession.  It was known of course that people will make false confessions to avoid pain.  But those who justified torture were terrified at the prospect of their world falling apart as a consequence of people’s wrong ideas. They ignored the problem of false confessions and continued to practice torture.  When the Inquisition found that persons had deviant ideas and would not change, the Church turned such persons over to the state.  The state would then execute them.

    What was missing in this theory was an adequate idea of the dignity of the person.  In the thinking of the period an individual had dignity on the basis of his being in the right place in the order in the world.   In the case of a person who held heretical thoughts, his intelligence was out of order and by accepting such ideas his free will was out of order. He was not in the right place and so did not have dignity.  Being in the appropriate place in the world was also equated with being in a set place in the social order. An egregious manifestation of this way of thinking was that it could justify the torture of slaves and the lower classes, but not of the nobility or the clergy.

    This confusion was corrected by the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council, especially in the document on religious liberty (1965).  Every person has dignity because every person is created in the image of God. To be created in the image of God means to have received the gifts of intelligence and free will.  Intelligence and free will are received as gifts and we employ these capacities in communicating with other persons who have received the same gifts.

    The notion of order in the world that fits with these notions is not that of a fixed “ontological” order. It is an order that is brought into being through free communication between persons; fundamentally between God and human persons, then between human persons. The most basic form of this communication is the exchange of gifts.  Dignity comes about through the mutual gift of the recognition of dignity.  A primary gift to another is the recognition of the other’s dignity.  It is in recognizing the dignity of another that a person acquires his own dignity.

    It does not follow that only persons with intelligence and freedom are to be recognized as endowed with dignity. Disabled persons, even the severely disabled, may not be denied dignity. One who refuses to recognize the dignity of the disabled fails to acknowledge what is required by his own dignity and so loses that dignity.  A person who tortures another denies the dignity of the other and so denies his own dignity. To allow torture as an exception in “the hard case” is to concede that society, in the final analysis, is founded not on free communication, but on violence.

    Brian Johnstone. is a Catholic Priest who taught moral theology in Rome for nearly 20 years. Currently he teaches at the Catholic University in Washington. 

  • Kerry Murphy. Intra-religious conflict.

    Most violent deaths of Muslims in the world are due to others claiming to be Muslims.  The conflicts in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are all predominantly conflicts within the Islamic community.  This is strongly felt within the communities but not usually reported in the mainstream media.

    This week in Peshawar in north western Pakistan, more than 140 mainly Muslim children are killed by men who claim to follow a version of Islam that requires them to chant ‘God is Great’ whilst they execute unarmed school children.  They claim this is because the military in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has attacked yet another group of people where other civilians are killed.  “We selected the army’s school for the attack because the government is targeting our families and females,” said Taliban spokesman Muhammad Umar Khorasani.  “We want them to feel our pain.”

    Attacks on school children are only too common in Pakistan.  Only a short time before, Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and she continues her campaign to support the education of children.  She has her own experience of violence against women seeking education. Her response was not to give up, but to continue her work and support for education to build a better Pakistan.

    Our own Christmas preparations are confronted in Sydney by an angry, disturbed man with a gun.  He has a history of violence, possibly also mental health issues, but he has a gun.   He was claiming a link to a murderous sect committing war crimes in Syria and Iraq and takes hostages in a Sydney café the week before Christmas.  He has been rejected by his own community for abandoning Shia Islam for the extremist Sunni Salafists of ISIS. Three people are killed; two families will have a very sad Christmas.  Christmas is normally a time when gifts are given, families congregate and a birth is celebrated, not usually a time for reflecting on death.

    How do we respond to this violence and death, confronting us in the week before Christmas?  Do we respond with violence and vengeance, as is likely in Pakistan?  Or is there a lesson in the outpouring of support and reflection that can be seen in Martin Place, Sydney.  Possibly thousands have walked along to offer condolences to people they never knew, and leave flowers which are now filling up parts of the usually busy mall.  Australians and visitors from many diverse backgrounds can be seen looking and reflecting on the violent outburst in our busy commercial centre.

    It lead me to reflect more on how we respond to death, and how different communities commemorate their families and friends. Recently my wife and I, not being Muslims, were invited to attend the memorial ceremony for the death of a respected elder in the Hazara community in Sydney.  Hazaras are ethnically and religiously distinctive in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  We did not see anyone in the large group who was not Hazara, and there were many people there.  We attended the Shia Mosque in Sydney and were welcomed by the Hazara community as we paid our respects during the recitation of the Fatihe – the initial verses of the Quran, commonly recited when someone dies.

    Outside, we met up with many Hazara friends, who we first met in detention and are now Australians with their families helping to contribute to our multicultural society.  I saw a man who was my first Hazara client, back in 1998.  We met in Port Hedland detention centre and have maintained irregular contact since then.  We reflected on the recent changes for new Hazara refugees coming to Australia and how their community is at risk in both Afghanistan and Pakistan by those claiming adherence to the Taliban and their Wahhabist supporters simply because they are Shia. Reports of attacks on Hazaras are all too common.

    We can feel the pain of others, even those we never met, but unlike the Taliban or ISIS, we do not need to respond by inflicting more pain in revenge or retaliation.  Destroying is easy. Building up takes a long time and maybe reflecting on creating, not destroying will be a more uplifting mindset for the Christmas and New Year period.  Is it too much to hope that in 2015 more people will work towards building and creating rather than destroying?  We can but hope for without hope what do we have?

    Kerry Murphy is a Sydney solicitor who specialises in refugee law.

     

  • John Menadue. Temporary Protection Visas and the Senate cross-bench.

    I wish that the Rudd, Gillard and Abbott Governments had done things very differently on refugee policies. But faced with the impasse at the present time, I welcome the compromise arrangement which the government has negotiated with the senate cross benches – two senators from the Palmer Group, Nick Xenophon, Ricky Muir, Bob Day and David Leyonhjelm. But like the curate’s egg it is good and bad in parts.

    As a result a negotiated package has been achieved that will enable the government to get the refugee processing system moving again to assess the claims of over 30,000 asylum seekers who are in detention or in the community with very restricted rights. The package includes

    • The introduction of Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) which will grant three year residency for those found to have a legitimate refugee claim. At the end of that period they will not be guaranteed a permanent visa, but may re apply.
    • The introduction of Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEVs) for five years if the asylum seeker spends that time either working or studying in a designated regional area whilst their claim is being processed.
    • There will be an increase in the humanitarian intake of 7,500 places over several years.
    • Asylum seekers on bridging visas will have the right to work.
    • All children in detention, except those on Nauru, will be released into the community.
    • Medicare will be made more readily available.

    This cannot be the end of the process, but I have no doubt that worthwhile progress has been made. The blockage in the system has been removed and processing will start. This is very important.

    It will be important to hold the government to account for this increase in the humanitarian intake to ensure ‘changed circumstances ‘does not result in a failure to implement the increase.

    In the past I have opposed TPVs for maritime arrivals because they leave the claimants in limbo about their future, they denied family reunion and did not deter asylum seekers as successive governments have suggested. But with 30,000 people already in limbo, some progress through TPVs would materially help their position. In a different political landscape, both in Australia and in countries from which asylum seekers have fled, it is not unreasonable to expect that over 80% of asylum seekers issued with TPVs will become permanent residents or citizens within the next ten years.

    Even with rights to work and some Medicare support, the large number of asylum seekers who will be moving into the community will present a major challenge for NGOs, churches and asylum seeker centres who generously support asylum seekers in their need. The government will need to urgently address this financial burden.

    There are other significant problems which will have to be addressed; the increased powers for defence and customs personnel; refoulment; compatibility with the Refugee Convention and judicial oversight.

    To cover its own failure, the ALP has said that the government was using children in detention as pawns in the negotiations. I understand that view and it is true that the government could have released these children at any time as also the last ALP government could have but didn’t.  But as part of a package the release of children is an excellent outcome, whatever the antecedents or background.

    The purists will not like this package. As a friend of mine said, he would not want to have these purists advocating on his behalf. ‘If I were starving, I expect I would die because these purists would deny me access to bread and water while fighting for my entitlement to a three-course meal’.

    I am surprised that the ALP didn’t take the opportunity to negotiate hard over the package. Instead it ceded asylum policy negotiations to the senate cross benches. What a sad abrogation of responsibility by the ALP to leave the outcome to Ricky Muir and others.

    I have written before about the abject failure of the Greens on both climate policy and refugees. On climate policy the Greens voted with the coalition in the Senate in 2009 to vote down Kevin Rudd’s Climate Pollution Reduction Scheme. Always the purists, the Greens wanted more than was on the table. Legislation was defeated in the Senate and we have gone backwards on climate policy ever since. The policy purity of the Greens and their incessant posturing has caused great damage to Australia on climate change.

    And the same is true on asylum seekers and refugees. Here again the Greens sided with the coalition in theSenate over two years ago to vote down theArrangement with Malaysia which the UNHCR said it could work with. The failure of the Senate to pass the enabling legislation after the High Court decision in 2011 meant that the Malaysian Arrangement failed. That triggered the enormous increase in boat arrivals in 2013. This led to Manus and Nauru. For this the Greens must bear a heavy responsibility. But they still continue to wash their hands of responsibility and parade their policy purity. Their posturing has delivered awful consequences for asylum seekers and refugees.

    It is also time both the ALP and the Greens showed some tactical nous. For the present, they have dealt themselves out of effective participation and negotiation on a very difficult but critical issue – the plight of 30,000 asylum seekers whose claims are waiting assessment.

    These amendments to the Migration Act must be seen as work in progress. There are many important issues that will hopefully be corrected with a change of government. There many important things that need to be done

    • Increase the humanitarian intake to at least 25 000 pa
    • Abolish mandatory detention which is cruel, expensive and does not deter.
    • Establish Orderly Departure Arrangements with Sri Lanka, Iraq and Afghanistan
    • Open more migration pathways, like 457 visas for persons who may be borderline refugees
    • De militarise our refugee policies and programs.

    A lot more must be done. But breaking the deadlock on the 30,000 forgotten people in detention or on bridging visas is an important step.

    As refugee advocates we have some hard thinking ahead.  To date we have failed comprehensively   to win improvements for people in great need. The perfect has become the enemy of the good. Needy asylum seekers are the losers.

    Sometimes harm minimisation is the best course, a course that the ALP and the Greens chose not to take on the Migration Act amendments.

    Aren’t 30,000 strangers in our land in need of help today, not in one or two years’ time!

  • Refugees – some middle ground is opening up.

    See below a speech made in the Senate on 4 December by Senator Xenophon. The Senator was one of six cross-bench senators who negotiated with the government for a compromise on the contentious Migration Bill.

    Senator XENOPHON (South Australia) (12:17): Australia’s migration policies have always had a long and vexed history. They have been, and rightfully so, open to significant scrutiny from international and domestic courts, independent experts, interest groups and the electorate. It has and will continue to be a passionate debate about a wicked and vexed issue. For me it is always important, always, to remember that we are dealing with legislation that relates to people, our fellow human beings. They are not numbers; they are not the myriad of labels that have been applied to them by all sides of the debate; and they are not political inconveniences, punching bags or props. They are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, friends, neighbours and acquaintances. They are, in short, people just like you and me who have found themselves in extraordinarily difficult circumstances—some, unimaginable circumstances. So I would like to approach this debate with respect, with compassion and with dignity.

    This has not been an easy process for me. On one side this bill does contain a number of measures that I am not comfortable with. But on the other side, if we do not act, the 30,000 people currently awaiting processing will continue to be left in limbo. If this bill does not pass there is also the real risk that the government will use a nonstatutory process instead, which will not result in any better outcomes for the people who are currently in Australia. This problem is a true Hobson’s choice: we are left to decide between two potentially negative outcomes.

    Back in 2012 the former government put up a number of proposals, the so-called Malaysia solution, which was rejected by the then opposition and the Australian Greens. I remember at the time—I remember well—I was in hospital and I asked for my vote to be recorded. There is a saying: ‘Not to have the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.’ As imperfect as the former government’s solution was, it was preferable to doing nothing. We saw more and more drownings, more and more people pass away, and more and more people fall victim to people smugglers and the awful consequences of that.

    What is being proposed by the government here is by no means perfect—in fact, it is quite imperfect—but the consequences of not supporting it will mean that asylum seekers will be in a worse position, in my view. It also has to be noted what the immigration minister said a few moments ago. He has agreed, as part of a process of constructive engagement with crossbenchers, to increase the humanitarian intake by 7,500 people—a significant increase. My view is that we should double the humanitarian intake or more. We are a big country with a big heart. But I am trying to deal with the actual political realities here. We have an opportunity to increase significantly the humanitarian and refugee intake by 7,500 people on top of the 13,750 per annum. We have an opportunity to have something like 25,000 people on bridging visas have work rights for the first time. We have an opportunity to significantly improve the lot of those individuals who have been left in limbo. The reality is that under the former government border control, immigration policy, was out of control, and that is something we need to take into account.

    I have met with many interest groups and representatives, including Amnesty International and also Paris Aristotle of Foundation House and the former government’s expert panel. My view on this issue changed when I saw what Angus Houston, what Paris Aristotle, and what Michael L’Estrange said in that expert panel. I congratulate former Prime Minister Gillard for having the foresight to set up that panel—to actually have a circuit breaker to try to look at this in a different way, because to me it meant that we needed to consider the awful moral dilemmas that we had to deal with. I thought the panel headed by Angus Houston came up with a number of sensible proposals.

    In that context, I have approached the government to request changes to the bill and to migration policy to improve the conditions for the men, women and children who are awaiting processing. That doesn’t mean that we cannot still advocate for a significant increase in the humanitarian intake. It does not mean that we stop being critical of the government’s policies, but if we do nothing, if we do not support this bill, then I believe fervently that what will happen is that asylum seekers will be worse off if this bill is not passed, as imperfect as this bill is.

    That is the moral dilemma; that is the wicked problem.

    I want to make it clear that my vote for this bill is conditional on these changes and those circulated by the Palmer United Party. The government has taken my concerns into account and, I understand, will be circulating amendments to that effect. As such, I will not speak to those amendments in detail, but I would like to take this opportunity to outline the changes that I have proposed. I also want to make it very clear that these proposals do not necessarily represent my ideal outcomes. They do not, but they do make important steps forward—and I do not believe they should be rejected because they are only ‘good’ rather than ‘perfect’.

    Firstly, I have proposed changes to allow people holding TPVs or SHEVs to travel outside Australia where the minister is satisfied there are compassionate or compelling circumstances and the minister has approved that travel. That has never occurred before, either under this government or under the previous government, and I think that is an important concession. This would cover circumstances where a TPV or SHEV holder wants to travel to visit family in circumstances such as significant family illness or death. While I would prefer to allow family reunification on these visas, I believe this is an important step in granting these visa holders rights that go some way towards acknowledging the importance of family.

    Secondly, I have proposed changes to ensure that, through the use of a disallowable instrument, the fast-track process only applies to the legacy caseload. This will make sure that the use of this fast-track process will be subject to the scrutiny of the Senate. Thirdly, I have proposed changes to the definition of ‘manifestly unfair’ in relation to the rejection of claims so that it more accurately reflects language used by the UNHCR—and that is important. I think that is a benchmark that we need to look at very carefully.

    Fourthly, I have proposed some changes to the fast-track review process to ensure that it is not only efficient and quick but must meet the natural justice provisions already included in the Migration Act. This will help to ensure that decisions take natural justice into account within the confines of the act and so are more balanced and fair. I have also proposed changes to the requirement for the review to take new information into account. My specific intention in this case is to ensure that information that was not provided for personal reasons, including mental health reasons, can be taken into account. One example that has been put to me are the many cases of sexual or other assault, where the victim may not volunteer that information in the first instance. I think all of us can appreciate the reasons behind not sharing that information—the shame and the trauma that may prevent someone from speaking out. My proposal to the government was that this type of information and these circumstances must be taken into account, and I believe these changes will improve the review process in that regard.

    Fifthly, I have raised concerns relating to the non-refoulement provisions and how we can be sure that a person being returned to a country is not facing persecution. In this case the government has agreed to use phrasing similar to that of the UNHCR to define both when a person is considered to be part of a particular social group and what effective protection measures should be taken into account when considering if that person should be returned. I believe these definitions will bring Australia more in line with UNHCR best practice in terms of defining and applying these clauses.

    Further, I have advocated, as have others, for an increase in Australia’s humanitarian intake and to extend work rights to people on bridging visas. I have always been a strong advocate of increasing our humanitarian intake. I believe the government could go further, but I do acknowledge the increase they have proposed will make a real difference—7½ thousand people. That is 7½ thousand people who can be taken in through that humanitarian and refugee intake and who can be part of our community. I do not want to throw that away. That does not mean that my colleagues in the Australian Greens or the opposition cannot say that we should double it—I think we should—or that we should have a much bigger humanitarian intake, a much bigger refugee intake. It could be an issue at the next election. I do not have an issue with that—it ought to be. But I do not want to throw away this opportunity to have 7½ thousand more people come in to this country through that humanitarian and refugee intake process.

    Extending work rights to those on bridging visas is also vitally important. Participating in the workforce, even in a small way, makes people a part of our community and society. It gives them, quite simply, a reason to get up in the morning—to feel valued and that they are making a contribution. I do not want to pretend that any of these measures is an ideal outcome or that they represent what I would see happen in the perfect world. But they will make a true difference to the people who are here right now, who are in detention right now, who are waiting to be processed right now. This may not be perfect, but it is good. It is also important to remember that this is not the end of the debate. These measures do not mean that I, as many others, will stop pushing for improvements. They are merely the next step, not the final one, and I would urge my colleagues to support this bill.

     

  • Frank Brennan SJ. Making the world safer for children.

    The United Nations has developed an elaborate system of committees to oversee compliance by nation states with a broad range of international human rights instruments. These committee processes are sometimes used by nongovernmental organizations pushing their own particular causes. Of late, a group called SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests — have been making submissions to U.N. committees expressing dissatisfaction with the Vatican’s response to child sexual abuse. SNAP was pleased with the report published last week by the U.N. Committee Against Torture setting out the committee’s concluding observations on Australia’s fourth and fifth periodic reports on its compliance with the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

    In preparation for the committee hearing, Australia had provided a comprehensive 52-page report on compliance issues on July 31, 2013. Australia takes seriously these U.N. procedures. John Quinn, Australia’s permanent representative to the U.N. in Geneva, was accompanied by a five-member high-level delegation of public servants from Canberra in addition to several colleagues from his own permanent mission at the committee hearing in November. Neither the 52-page report nor the eight-page opening statement of the Australians referred to child sexual abuse. That is not surprising. This is a U.N. committee with a very particular mandate. There are other U.N. committees that deal with children’s rights, women’s rights, the rights of those who suffer a disability, racial discrimination, civil and political rights etc. This committee as its name suggests deals principally with state authorized or state tolerated torture.

    Though this U.N. committee is primarily concerned to ensure safeguards against torture, it also has a mandate to oversee state responses to “other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture” but only “when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.” So the committee arguably has a role to play in scrutinizing state action in relation to acts of child sexual abuse committed by state officials or with the acquiescence of state officials. Nation states with inadequate or corrupt prosecution or court processes might be said to be places where child sexual abuse has been occurring “at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

    In comparison with all other members of the United Nations, Australia has been fairly robust in its response to revelations about institutional child sexual abuse. It has set up the most expensive, most far-reaching, and longest-running royal commission or equivalent inquiry in any country to date. The U.N. Committee against Torture welcomed the establishment of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. But it went on to make a couple of gratuitous observations of the type that bring no credit on the U.N. human rights system, especially by those critics who think that such committees should confine themselves to their core mandate, and focus on those countries which are most at fault.

    Usually a fair-minded, non-partisan, under-resourced U.N. committee having welcomed such a commission of inquiry in a country like Australia with a robust rule of law and a free media would have been content to await the findings and the resulting prosecutions from the commission of inquiry, especially given that the issue of child sexual abuse is not a usual agenda item for such a U.N. committee. But this U.N. committee went on to express the gratuitous concern “as to whether the outcome of (the royal commission’s) work will result in criminal investigations, prosecutions and redress and compensation for victims.” That may be the concern of SNAP but this committee had no opportunity or mandate to hear from a range of Australian parties on this issue.

    This verbal volley was clearly just a prelude to the U.N. committee’s main gratuitous concern. Quoting only the SNAP submission which in turn quoted only a newspaper report, the U.N. committee expressed concern at the information provided “regarding the reported reply” that the Holy See submitted to the Australian royal commission that “providing all documents regarding sexual abuse by priests … was ‘unreasonable’ and that they represented the ‘internal working documents of another sovereign state.’” If only it was all that simple. But then again a Geneva-based U.N. Committee against Torture has to take a fairly broad-brush approach to such questions that are on the periphery of their mandate and expertise.

    SNAP and then the U.N. committee were referring to the oral evidence given by Cardinal George Pell at the royal commission in August. The royal commission had already published its exchange of correspondence with the Holy See. The letters and Pell’s evidence reflect a far more complex picture than that provided by the U.N. committee, and indicate a far more cooperative, considered approach by the Holy See. The U.N. committee was not satisfied with Australia’s assurances “that the royal commission is independent and that it has statutory powers to compel the provision of documents.” Where one might ask would this U.N. committee find a government and a commission of inquiry with the independence and power needed to satisfy them? I doubt that it could be in a democracy governed by the rule of law. With a patronizing and moralizing tone both to Australia and the Catholic Church, the U.N. committee reminded Australia “that it has a responsibility to ensure that all reports of breaches of the convention (against torture) are promptly and impartially investigated and that assistance is sought from other state parties when necessary to conduct such investigations.”

    During 2013, the Holy See in response to a specific request provided the Australian royal commission with documents in relation to one priest offender. On April 24, Justice Peter McClellan, chairman of the royal commission wrote to the Vatican secretary of state seeking further assistance with the conduct of his commission. He wanted information about another named priest. He also wanted access to a general range of documents relating to religious congregations so that the commission might “understand the nature and extent of communications between those congregations and the Holy See.” He said the purpose of this general request was “to develop an understanding” of the extent to which Australian clerics accused of abuse had been referred to the Holy See, and “the action taken in each case.” Such a request is usually known as a fishing expedition.

    The Holy See provided all appropriate documents relating to the two named priests. The Holy See indicated that it was still conducting some canonical proceedings in relation to one of the priests and gave the assurance that upon conclusion of the proceedings, they would give consideration to any further request. In relation to the fishing request, the Holy See responded:

    “With regard to cases that are concluded, the ‘action taken’ is communicated to the particular church or congregation inloco. Because the facts and circumstances of each case are already available within the royal commission’s jurisdiction in Australia, the information requested is best sought from individuals and entities in that jurisdiction. If there is further information that is necessary for the commission’s work, but unavailable for the commission in loco, the Holy See will be pleased to receive specific requests for such information and will make every attempt to assist the work of the commission. This secretariat respectfully suggests that requests for all information regarding every case — which include requests for documents reflecting internal ‘deliberations’ — are not appropriate. As is the case with all other sovereign subjects of international law, the Holy See maintains the confidentiality of internal deliberations related to its judicial and administrative proceedings, and indeed depends upon deliberative confidentiality to ensure the integrity and efficacy of its judicial and administrative processes. Finally, the Holy See notes that it has provided information relating to individual requests. However, the royal commission’s request that the Holy See’s dicasteries undertake the substantial burden of locating, reviewing and copying all files regarding every accused Australian cleric appears inconsistent with international practice.”

    When appearing before the royal commission in August, Cardinal Pell was asked if he was aware of the general nature of the request made by the royal commission. He replied: “The extremely general nature of the request, I was aware of it and I thought it unreasonable. I thought the aims could be equally well achieved by asking specific questions about specific cases in a range of different circumstances.” He was then asked: “So you formed the view that the request by the royal commission of the Vatican was unreasonable; is that your evidence?” He replied:

    “I formed the view … aware that the Vatican had provided 5,000 pages of documentation in relation to specific requests, and aware also that the Vatican has said, if there are more specific requests, they will provide such documentation. But in following international convention they will not provide the internal working documents of another sovereign state.”

    Pell gave the royal commission his assurance that the Vatican would continue to honor its undertaking about providing documentation regardless of any personnel changes in Rome. He pointed out:

    “An added relevant point is that overwhelmingly every document that is held in Rome exists here in the archives of religious orders or dioceses. Every letter they have sent to Rome, every response from Rome, nearly every — I’m not aware of exceptions — overwhelmingly they are available in Australia.”

    Pell later told the royal commission: “In my discussions with the Roman authorities I was generally and strongly supportive of the request from the royal commission. I was generally and strongly in support in the terms in which I have described it for specific documents, not for internal working documents and, another point which I hadn’t mentioned, obviously cases which are still going forward, if there are any, in Rome.”

    I have no expectation that a U.N. Committee against Torture peripherally concerned with the question whether Australian state officials have acquiesced in child sexual abuse committed by others would delve into all this detail of dealings between a royal commission and the Holy See. But I do have an expectation that such a committee would keep its nose out of the matter until the royal commission has run its course, until the Vatican has had the opportunity to honor its solemn commitments to assist the inquiry, and until the U.N. committee is in a position to see if its mandate is evenly remotely invoked. This sort of gratuitous reporting by U.N. committees at the urgings of NGOs like SNAP does absolutely nothing to make the world or the Catholic Church safer for children. It just gives the U.N. human rights machinery a bad name. You would think the Committee against Torture would have enough on its plate.

    Fr. Frank Brennan SJ, professor of law at the Australian Catholic University, is presently the visiting Gasson professor at Boston College Law School.

    This article was first published in Global Pulse on Dec. 3  2014

  • Peter Hughes. Reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas -Time to Negotiate

    In the last few days of the 2014 Parliament, the controversial Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014 remains to be considered.

    The Bill contains a wide range of proposed changes to the asylum system reflecting, amongst other things, concern by the government that the current system is too heavily weighted towards approving asylum claims – a concern shared, but not acted on, by the previous government before losing office.

    It is unlikely that all of this complex mix of changes will get through the Senate.

    The most hotly contested part of the Bill, which has been on the government’s agenda since taking office, is the reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas for maritime asylum seekers.

    Temporary Protection Visas are opposed by the opposition parties in the Senate and refugee advocates on the grounds of the uncertainty they create for the future of those found to be refugees, the need for a further assessment of refugee status, the personal stress and mental health effects, inability of refugees to achieve family reunion and the lesser scale of benefits compared to giving permanent residence to refugees.

    These criticisms are undoubtedly justified.

    More broadly, there is no evidence that the existence of Temporary Protection Visas acts in any way to deter asylum seekers from undertaking boat journeys. In public policy terms, Temporary Protection Visas only make sense where there are good reasons to suggest that a particular cohort of refugees might be able to go home relatively soon because of improvements expected in the situation in the country of origin. This does not apply to the main maritime asylum seeker nationalities in Australia.

    On the other hand, there can be no doubt that reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas would place the 30,000 maritime asylum seekers in Australia in a much better position than they are now.

    As long as the impasse persists, the government will keep maritime asylum seekers in detention, on bridging visas without work rights, on Temporary Humanitarian Concern Visas and often without formal decisions on their refugee status.

    It will take years to make decisions on this very large group of people whatever system of case-by-case decision-making is adopted. If Temporary Protection Visas are reintroduced, the system will at least start to move again – asylum seekers will get a formal refugee status determination, refugees will get temporary visas with work rights and a suite of benefits. This will open the way to resolution of the future of this very large group of people. For those found to be refugees, one can expect that some years down the track, when the first Temporary Protection Visas are approaching expiry, in a different political landscape, the question of permanent status will be revisited in a more positive way.

    There is clearly scope for opposition parties to negotiate with the government to seek changes that would improve the operation of the Temporary Protection Visa system set out in the Bill. They should be doing it now.

    There is no reason why they could not agree to the reintroduction under protest, but on the basis that they have achieved some improvements to the working of the system.

    The work of the Palmer United Party in negotiating a commitment to the Safe Haven Enterprise Visa, although at the margins, highlights the possibilities. There are undoubtedly many areas of process and outcome related to Temporary Protection Visas, short of permanent residence, that the government would be willing to consider.

    Defeating the reintroduction of Temporary Protection Visas will be a pyrrhic victory. The main losers will be the asylum seekers. Maritime refugees will be no closer to permanent residence, but a year will have passed by with no improvement in their situation and there will be no prospect of any further movement for many months.

    Time to negotiate.

    Peter Hughes is Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU. He was formerly Deputy Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

     

     

  • Elaine Pearson. Australia should reconsider refugee transfers to Cambodia


    The Australian government should press Cambodian authorities to implement key reforms to improve treatment of refugees in Cambodia before transferring any refugees from Nauru. 

    In new Human Rights Watch interviews, asylum seekers and refugees living in Cambodia described hardships as a result of the Cambodian government’s failure to process regular nationality documents and due to poor economic conditions in the country. These include: difficulties in obtaining employment, denial of access to education, substandard access to health services, extortion and corruption by local authorities, and discrimination by officials and the public. Refugees said fear of mistreatment by the authorities kept them from speaking out or joining organizations to bring complaints.

    In September 2014, Australia and Cambodia signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby refugees will be voluntarily transferred from Nauru to Cambodia. The Australian government will fund temporary accommodation and resettlement services for the refugees for at least one year, and then on a case-by-case basis, and health insurance will be provided for five years. The Australian government also committed to provide an additional A$40 million (US$35 million) over four years in development assistance for other projects in Cambodia as part of the bilateral refugee resettlement agreement. 

    “The Australian government shouldn’t make the refugees in Nauru suffer further by dumping them in a place unable to adequately resettle or reintegrate them,” said Elaine Pearson, Australia director at Human Rights Watch. “Cambodia should fix its faulty refugee protection and support services frameworks before accepting any refugees from Nauru, and the Australian government should insist on that.”

    In November, Human Rights Watch interviewed 10 refugees and asylum seekers currently living in Cambodia, and consulted with refugee and migrant support organizations, human rights groups, and United Nations agencies. Most of these refugees and asylum seekers requested Human Rights Watch to withhold their names and nationalities for fear of retribution.

    Cambodia took over issuing refugee status determinations from UNHCR in 2009, and currently hosts 63 refugees. Under Cambodia’s Sub-Decree No. 224 of 2009 on Procedures for Recognition as a Refugee or Providing Asylum Rights to Foreigners in the Kingdom of Cambodia, the government should issue residency cards and ensure refugees have the same legal rights as legal immigrants.

    “Human Rights Watch has discovered that five years on, not a single refugee has ever received a Cambodian residence card, let alone citizenship,” Pearson said.

    Citizenship in Cambodia requires prior possession of a residence card in order to go through the naturalization process. Instead, refugees are issued a prakas, or proclamation, by the Ministry of Interior that confirms their right to stay in Cambodia, but cannot be used for the many official purposes that require presentation of an ID card or travel document.

    Refugees have not received international travel documents and generally lack other basic personal documentation, such as family books, which officially specify the membership of families with local authorities, and are necessary to live a normal life in Cambodia.

    “This piece of paper [prakas] is absolutely useless,” a refugee told Human Rights Watch. “To get a job, a driver’s license, open a bank account, buy a motorbike, or even receive a wire transfer, you need to show a passport, not this piece of paper.”

    Cambodia’s agreement with Australia also states that refugees will be issued with the prakas as well as refugee resident cards and ID cards in accordance with Sub-Decree No. 224. But so far, current refugees in Cambodian have been denied those documents. The agreement further obliges Cambodia to provide international travel documents, but based on the experience of implementing its own sub-decree, this seems unlikely, Human Rights Watch said.

    “After five years Cambodia can’t even follow its own law on refugees, so Australia is, at best, naive to believe this deal will be any different,” Pearson said. “The Australian government only has to look at Cambodia’s poor human rights record to be wary of its commitments to protect refugees.”

    Elaine Pearson is the Australian Director of Human Rights Watch. 

  • Is capitalism redeemable? Part 9: Restoring a moral voice

    It is easy to allocate blame for our apparent entrapment in bad public policy. Tony Abbott’s truculence, disregard for reason, inflexibility and broken promises all come to mind. As does the blatant partisan stance of the Murdoch media.

    Those who look for more general causes draw attention to dysfunctional party structures, an adversarial parliamentary system and sloppy journalism.

    It is useful to go a little deeper than these specific manifestations, and ask why so many of us are indifferent to such problems. Why have we turned our back on Enlightenment values – those values which a century ago saw Australia take a world lead in female suffrage, decent wages, pensions and good government generally? In a country that has made such strides in mass education, how come tabloid newspapers still command any readership and how come spiteful shock-jock radio hosts hold their audiences?

    Australians have always been a sceptical lot, but scepticism seems to have morphed into cynicism, and more generally a creeping atmosphere of nihilism is stripping all consideration of morality from our public debates.

    One starting point is to look back to the unrest of the 1960s. To shift Wordsworth’s context, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”. It was a revolution against the hypocrisy exhibited by society’s moral guardians, against race and sex discrimination, against colonialism, and against a pointless war. All ideas were up for grabs, all nostrums were up for question.

    Into that space came the philosophy of postmodernism, a philosophy holding that there is no reality, just subjective viewpoints. Your viewpoint, my viewpoint, her viewpoint – all are equally valid. It was an easy philosophy to embrace because it required no moral references, and it dispensed with the need for reason or logic. While the hard thinkers were making the case for tolerance, respect and humility in issues of race and sex discrimination, those who embraced postmodernism took the easy path of adopting the amoral view of cultural relativism – even, in extreme cases, not objecting to practices such as selective abortion of female foetuses and genital mutilation, and considering the Holocaust to be no more than a subjective interpretation of history.

    Although emanating from the “left”, postmodernism has spread its influence across the political spectrum. If there are no moral standards as reference points, then we don’t have to worry too much about what Louise Newman says about children in detention or what Tim Costello says about poker machines: Newman and Costello are entitled to their “opinions”. ABC staff interpret their charter to give balance to contrasting “views” on climate change, and leave unchallenged politicians’ most egregious lies: if government ministers say that Labor left a record deficit, or that no other country has emissions trading (both easily dismissed by reference to authoritative sources) they’re just “opinions”, not to be questioned any more than the minister’s choice of a blue tie over a red one.

    And, as we all know, the quickest way to put down a political argument is to say “there are two sides to every story”, before moving on to less unsettling dinner table discussions, such as comparisons between New Zealand and South Australian Hills Sauvignon Blanc, or the noise levels of BMW and Mercedes Benz cars.

    Also developing from the 1960s has been a general downplaying of the more rigorous academic disciplines, most clearly manifest in the relative fall in enrolments in science and mathematics, and also in an erosion of logical rigour in many other disciplines. Students can get through a whole high school education and university degree without exposure to the basic tools of critical thinking, such as understanding deductive logic or the rules of scientific inquiry.

    When people don’t have recourse to tools of critical thinking, logically empty statements such as “I cannot guarantee there were no terrorists on that refugee boat”, or “Not all Muslims embrace the views of ISIS” come to carry meaning for the casual listener. The use of statements which are correct in logic but misleading in content is known as “sophistry” to philosophers and as “dog whistle” politics in more general parlance. John Howard was a master in sophistry and Abbott, though more gauche, follows his footsteps. Similarly, if people don’t understand the conditionality of hypotheses and the role of attempted refutation in scientific method, they are likely to believe that the question of climate change is one of great uncertainty and disagreement between experts.

    Ironically, the nihilism which arose as a by-product of student radicalism in the 1960s may have made it easier for universities to drift into the world of commerce, where faculties are treated as business units, where students become customers, and where the starting salaries of graduates become the prime measure of success. The enthusiasm with which so many vice chancellors have embraced the Government’s tertiary education “reform” proposals would render C P Snow and John Henry Newman speechless.

    Although the churches condemned some of the movements of the 1960s, in various ways they too have dealt themselves out of the moral debate, paving the way for nihilism.

    A few religious movements, particularly in some of the fundamentalist Protestant churches, have espoused bitterly anti-Enlightenment values in relation to evolution, in literal interpretation of scripture and in reduction of morality to the ten categorical rules that guided Moses to keep his restive tribe in order.

    Throw out the love of learning and reasoning that sit at the core of the Enlightenment, however, and you throw out the tools which allow us to handle complex moral problems – and most moral problems that count are complex. Good public policy is often about finding practical reconciliations of conflicting moral principles.  (By contrast Australian-style politics is more about a supposed Manichean conflict between good and evil.)

    The other moral distortion has come from parts of the Catholic Church and from some other religious groups, and that’s an obsession with sex, allowing concerns with sexual behaviour to crowd out almost all other moral issues. Also, as we uncover the history of political events in Spain, Portugal and Chile, we learn that people with positions of authority in the Catholic Church have been involved in terrible transgressions of human rights. More recently, revelations of sexual abuse have exposed widespread gross hypocrisy. Logically, one should distinguish between the corruption of an institutional church from its moral teachings, but that separation is a big ask for those who feel betrayed by those they have trusted.

    To his credit the present Pope is trying to address wider moral issues, and there are similar movements in other faiths, but they are up against institutional inertia. In spite of separation of church and state in our constitution, the Anglican and Catholic Churches have become intertwined with government, the former through de-facto establishment in colonial times, and the latter through dependence on government support for its schools and hospitals. If we are looking for moral leadership from the church it is worth remembering that Martin Luther King’s effectiveness owed a great deal to his separation from the political establishment.

    The task of confronting lies with truth, and of restoring some moral stance to public life, is a great one. There are voices – in the political sphere Bob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor, John Faulkner, Lindsay Tanner, and John Hewson come easily to mind, and undoubtedly there are many politicians working quietly behind the scenes. These people all need strong support, because their stances have been met with some of the most vile abuse imaginable.

    But we cannot wait around for some messianic “leader” to take us to the promised land of a decent society, like sheep waiting for a drover and his border collie. The task of leadership does not reside solely with the people in positions of authority – indeed, those people often face constraints that limit their capacity to raise hard issues. To take one prominent illustration, it may appear to many people that Malcolm Fraser has gone through some Pauline conversion, but the more likely explanation for what looks like a change of behaviour is that he has been free of the shackles of political office for the last thirty years.

    That’s why the task of moral leadership is one that falls on all of us, in our various modest but collectively effective roles.

     

     

  • Ian McAuley. Is capitalism redeemable? Part 7: Inequality – a shameful waste

    “Australia’s program to increase world growth seems to be to cut social security benefits from the poor.”

    When Geraldine Doogue asked Malcolm Fraser to comment on Abbott’s G20 agenda, that was his summary of the present Government’s economic policy

    Unfortunately, ministers such as Hockey and Cormann may not understand the sarcasm in his comment, because there is an economic philosophy supporting their very line: redistribute income towards the rich while disciplining the poor with hardship.

    Of course that doesn’t get stated so bluntly; it’s padded in spin about a “budget emergency”, “Labor’s waste” and so on. But it shows through in the Government’s budget proposals, not only those directed at the poorest, but also in its rejection of Labor’s measures aimed at reigning in some of the undeserved privileges enjoyed by the already well-off. These reforms included changes in the tax treatment of employer-provided cars, ending the racket of hidden commissions on financial products, and modest taxes on multi-million dollar pension accounts.

    Giving breaks to the already privileged is based in part on a belief that if people are rich they must be clever, and therefore their entrepreneurial virtues should be further rewarded. It’s a belief that conveniently overlooks the role of inheritance, luck, political deals and outright corruption in contributing to many people’s financial prosperity.

    It’s also based on the slightly more respectable economic theory that those with higher incomes tend to save and invest, therefore creating jobs for others.

    As Thomas Piketty points out, the saving and investment theory holds only up to a point. Once a financially wealthy class develops it goes on accumulating more financial wealth, and there is no certainty that its financial wealth will be invested wisely. Even if that financial wealth came about in the first instance through entrepreneurship, there is no guarantee that those entrepreneurial energies will be sustained into subsequent generations, who are likely to lead an indolent lifestyle, spending their fortunes on luxuries rather than on productive investment. And that lavish consumption does little for the local economy – it is more likely to make its way to car manufacturers in Germany, watchmakers in Switzerland and vignerons in France than the more modest consumption patterns of those of more modest means.

    Also, perpetuation of privilege is often based on the well-off having first call on what economists call “positional goods”, where supply is limited – the best surgeons, the best teachers and so on. There is a strong economic case, for example, for allocating the best teachers to where they can do the most good, in endeavours such as helping kids who haven’t had the early childhood breaks enjoyed by rich kids.

    The other end of that philosophy – making it hard for the poor – is so economically dumb that it is hardly worth taking the effort to refute it. When there is no demand for labour herding people into the labour force through punitive social security conditions just doesn’t work. The business cycle is an inescapable economic reality, and in an interconnected world one’s chances of finding a job are as likely to depend on decisions of the US monetary authorities or the sentiment of Chinese investors as on local business conditions or one’s own skills and motivation.

    For those who, through a tough upbringing or educational disadvantage, lack skills, there just aren’t jobs available. Minimum wages would have to be brought down to absurdly low levels to make it worthwhile for business to employ unskilled labour, and if they did, there would be a huge waste of resources, because low wages provide no incentive for employers to use labour productively. The waste would be in that most valuable of all resources, people’s capabilities.

    Good public policy is about investing in people’s capabilities which, through circumstances beyond people’s control, have lain dormant and undeveloped, or have been devalued by life’s experiences. Far better than denying unemployment benefits to out-of-work young people would be programs to support them in gaining new skills, and, of course, programs devoting resources to children at risk – children who are otherwise going to spend their adult lives in and out or poorly paid work, in and out of the criminal justice system, and without any stake in society.

    Instead we have a suite of policies designed to sap the self-confidence and dignity from those who become unemployed, as if subjecting people to the humiliation of job rejections and having to beg from friends and charities has no negative consequences. There are consequences, however, not just for the individual but also for the community as a whole.

    Another waste resulting from punitive conditions on the unemployed is that bad management is rewarded and perpetuated. Besides collective action through unions (which is becoming more difficult), one of the few ways people can knock some sense into bad employers is having the capacity to walk out of a lousy job. A workforce of people held to employment only because the alternative is unbearable is not a productive workforce. Sullen compliance with directions, like an ongoing work-to-rule campaign, is a poor substitute for enthusiasm.

    Those are some of the reasons why high levels of inequality hobble a country’s economic performance: they inevitably involve a waste of resources. When Tim Costello spoke of the need for the G20 to bring up the standards of the poorest through “inclusive growth” he reminded us that good social morality and good economics have a great deal of common ground. That common ground seems to be unknown territory to Abbott and his ministers, hell-bent on replicating George Bush’s so-called “supply side” economics, an experiment that failed in the USA and would be even more likely to fail here because it is so alien to our tradition of the “fair go”.

    This article has focussed on the waste of unchecked inequality and the pointlessness of economic growth that benefits only those who are already well-off. The next will outline how policies which promote inequality (intentionally or otherwise), not only waste resources. They also sap governments of the capacity to prevent widening inequality from dragging down the whole economy.

     

  • Graham Freudenberg. Bjelke Petersen was an innocent.

     

    What is the real meaning of the G20 security farce in Brisbane? It is a massive exercise in political intimidation. It is a demonstration of the power of government to prevent or limit the most basic democratic rights of free speech, protest and assembly. Perhaps the worst thing about it is that, in the atmosphere of these times, this intimidatory assertion of authority is accepted without question as normal, routine and completely justified. There is a long term conditioning process of work here.

    The original target of the G20 security operation was demonstrations that might be organised by protest groups along the lines of Seattle or ‘Occupy Wall Street’. Why should such dissent require any more than ordinary measures of police supervision, backed, for this occasion, by enhanced intelligence work? Why should 900 heavily armed troops be involved in non-violent civilian protest, even if inconvenient to the authorities and unsightly for the visitors? One would have thought that a display of democratic protest would have been salutary to the likes of Putin and the rest.

    But the way this has been done – and spun in an extraordinary mixture of secrecy and selective publicity – has caused Brisbane citizens to believe that it is all about ISIS etc. In a single newscast on 3 November Channel 7 Brisbane had three juxtaposed items: an army rehearsal for a response to a random off-the-street kidnapping; an appeal by Premier Newman to citizens to come into the CBD during G20, lest Brisbane ‘look like a ghost town’; and the serving of a keep-way order on some poor ratbag officially designated as a ‘serial pest’ (shades of ‘The Skull‘ who used to haunt election meetings in Sydney in 1969 and 1972).

    Of course the most innocent explanation is that all this is not about protecting the people or the visiting Heads of Government but to protect the collective backsides of officialdom. But when we link the deification of the Australian soldier in connection with the First World War Centenary with this current involvement of the Australian Army in civilian control, it is not difficult to see the eventual outcome, intended or not: a pervasive and permanent acceptance of the use of the Australian military forces as a routine extension of the police power, against the exercise of the most fundamental democratic rights.

    As Goering said, ‘To control the people you only have to tell them they are being attacked. It works every time in every country.’

  • The Failure of the South Korean National Security State – The Sewol Tragedy.

    Earlier this year, the Sewol ferry sank off Korea’s southern coast with 304 passengers drowned, mainly school children. An article by Jae-Jung Suh draws attention to an abdication of responsibility by the Korean Government and many others. He says ‘The whole tragedy serves as a reminder of how neoliberal deregulation and privatisation puts people’s safety and life at risk through a process of state collusion with business interests and how a powerful national security state may fail to protect its own people from internal dangers it helps create.’

    Jae-Jung Suh has been Head of Korean Studies at John Hopkins University in Washington for over a decade.

    The link to his important and disturbing report can be found below.  John Menadue

    http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jae_Jung-Suh/4195

  • The Italian solution.

    Last night the ABC program, Foreign Correspondent, carried a remarkable and moving account of the work of the Italian Navy in rescuing ‘people fleeing conflict or economic despair in the Middle East and Africa’.

    The Italian Admiral in charge of the operations in the Mediterranean said ‘We have the duty in these cases when we are at sea to intervene to save human life. If we are not at sea, then we can’t see what happens. We can close our eyes, turn off the lights and in that way, there’s no need to “turn back” the boats because they will die. We need to remember that International Rights exist. There are international laws that our countries have ratified’.

    I wonder if the Commander of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, has time to watch this remarkable account of humanity in action.

    The Italian Navy shames our navy.   John Menadue

    See link to program below.

    http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/content/2014/s4106724.htm

  • John Menadue. Asylum seekers – institutionalised cruelty, the banality of evil and immorality.

    You might be interested in this repost.  John Menadue

    The recent statement by the Australian Catholic Bishops on asylum seekers says ‘The current policy has about it a cruelty that does no honour to our nation … Enough of this institutionalised cruelty … We call on the nation as a whole to say no to the dark forces which make these policies possible.’

    In her book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, published in 1963, Hannah Arendt refers to the ‘banality of evil’. Her thesis is that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely stupid person who relied on cliché rather than thinking for himself and was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology.  She says ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil’.

    In his post in this blog on February 17, reposted below, Hugh Mackay speaks of ‘international brutality … why not call our asylum policy what it is – immoral?’

    Our policies towards asylum seekers – cruel, evil and immoral- depend on our first dehumanising and then demonising asylum seekers. They are not like us and do not deserve empathy and protection.  It is an attempt to dull and chloroform our consciences.

    • Asylum seekers are illegals and akin to criminals. We launder our language to hide the cruelty and brutality of our policies. Even the Department of Immigration now uses the term ‘illegals’ which they are not.
    • Asylum seekers are so devoid of humanity that they would even throw their children overboard.
    • Journalists are excluded or deterred from visiting detention centres because we might hear of the hopes and fears of vulnerable people.
    • How can we have sympathy for asylum seekers who buy the services of people smugglers?
    • They are Muslims.
    • They are ungrateful foreigners who riot in detention centres.
    • They commit crimes in the community and should be treated and listed like paedophiles.
    • They bring disease and wads of cash.
    • They throw documents overboard and don’t tell the truth.

    As this day by day process of demonization proceeds the spark of humanity, decency or the divine in each of us is snuffed out. We are made to look foolish and soft if we respond to “our better angels”.

    Our leaders are not just determined to dehumanise asylum seekers but play mind games with us by suggesting government policies are designed to save people drowning at sea. If only there was the smallest bit of truth in this the government would be sending out ships to rescue desperate people at sea and ministers would be waiting hopefully for the UNHCR or the Nobel Prize committee to make a humanitarian award.

    Through political spin and by good people staying silent, we are losing our moral compass on what is right and decent. As Lord Lane, the former UK Lord Chief Justice put it ‘Oppression does not suddenly stand on the doorstep with a toothbrush moustache and a swastika armband. It happens step by step.’

    It is happening despite our asylum “problem “being minor compared with other counties and particularly poor countries like Pakistan.

    In allowing evil and cruelty to win our political terrain we could  recall the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller who was imprisoned by the Nazis ‘First they came for the communists and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Catholic. Then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.’

    We don’t seem to care that perhaps in a decade we will be as ashamed of our present asylum and refugee policies as we are now for what we did  to our ‘stolen generation’.

    Where is our anger and concern?

    I recall a speech some time ago by Bill Moyes, the former host in the United States of the Weekly Public Series on PBS. He said ‘What has happened to our moral indignation. On the heath, King Lear asks Gloucester ‘How do you see the world?’ and Gloucester who is blind answers ‘I see it feelingly.’  I feel it feelingly also.  The news is not good these days. I can tell you though that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel, but also to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair; the cure for cynicism … What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma – the science of the heart – the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.’

    And it does depend on you and me.

    We are acting cruelly and immorally. Evil now has an everyday face. But we pretend it is not us. Yet the opinion polls tell us that it is us – that we want to treat asylum seekers this way. Scott Morrison tells us ‘I get so much encouragement when I walk through Cronulla, go down to the beach or up to Miranda Fair’.

    Hannah Arendt said ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.’  That “sad truth” is happening in Australia today. We are standing by and letting it happen.

     

  • Wooki KIM, Discrimination against Korean school children in Japan today

    On 29 August this year the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which is under the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) made rulings on Korean schools in Japan. It said ‘The committee encourages the state party [Japan] to revise its position and allow Korean schools to benefit, as appropriate, from the High School Tuition Support Fund, as well as to invite local governments to resume or maintain the provision of subsidies to Korean schools.’

    Korean schools in Japan were established after the liberation of Korean people from colonial rule by Japan in 1945. The schools were established to educate Korean children in Japan who had been deprived of their Korean name, language and culture by Japan. It is estimated that at that time there were 525 Korean schools all over Japan and approximately 44,000 Korean children attended those schools. Today there are about 70 schools from kindergarten to university with approximately 8,000 students.

    In April 2010 the government of Japan introduced the Tuition Fee Waiver Program which would waive tuition fees for high school education. It was planned to include not only Japanese public and private schools, but also foreign schools in Japan that are accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ under the School Education Act. It was the first chance for all Korean schools that were accredited as ‘miscellaneous schools’ to be granted subsidies by the central government of Japan.

    However, the government started the program without applying it to Korean schools, because of the abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s by DPRK. This amounted to using Korean children as political pawns between Tokyo and Pyongyang. The Abe Government decided to completely exclude Korean schools from the program by changing the legislative provision of the program in February 2013. As of today five civil suits claiming national compensation have been filed by Korean schools in the district courts of Tokyo, Osaka, Aichi, Hiroshima and Fukuoka.

    Following such discriminatory decisions by the Japanese central government, some local governments also have refused subsidies or cut subsidies that have been granted to Korean schools up to that point. The subsidies have been halted in some prefectures such as Tokyo, Osaka and Hiroshima as of October 2014. This represents about one third of local governments that have granted subsidies to Korean schools. In Osaka a civil suit demanding the Osaka prefectural government reverse the decision to refuse the subsidy for Korean schools was filed in the court in 2013 by the Osaka Korean school.

    Moreover some municipal governments such as Yokohama and Hiroshima have also followed the decisions of the prefectural authorities and withheld payments of the subsidies. As a result some parents have given up sending their children to Korean schools and sent them to Japanese schools which are granted much more subsidies than Korean schools.

    Our Association raised these discriminatory policies against Korean school children with CERD which we believe amounts to racial discrimination and infringes the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination that Japan ratified in 1995. I also visited Geneva in August to raise these issues directly with the members of CERD. As a result of the examination of the government of Japan, CERD ruled as mentioned above concerning Korean schools. This means that in the view of CERD, the exclusion of Korean schools from the Tuition Fee Waiver Program and refusing subsidies at various government levels constitutes racial discrimination.

    The Japanese government has also been directed in the past by several international human rights bodies to revise its policy which infringes on the rights to education in Korean schools.

    The history of discriminatory policy against Korean schools by the Japanese government can be traced back to the Japanese occupation of Korea from 1910-1945. This discrimination was worsened by the compulsory close-down of Korean schools in 1948-49 which has been called ‘4.24 Gyoyug Tujaeng (4.24 교육투쟁)’ which means ‘struggling for education on 24th April’. The Ministry of Education carried out its plan to prohibit Korean children from attending Korean schools in 1948 and over a million Koreans in Japan struggled against that policy. In case of Hyogo prefecture, 10,000 Koreans gathered around a prefectural office and made the governor reverse the decision to close down Korean schools on 24th April 1948. However the 8th US Army, in association with the government of Japan, oppressed those struggles of Koreans by announcing a state of emergency under the anti-communism and cold war structure at the time. As a result, 3,000 Korean were arrested and a 16 year old Korean boy, Kim Tae-il was killed and Korean activist Park Ju-bom was also killed as a result of shooting and torture by the Japanese authorities. These memories of struggle have been handed on to Korean residents in Japan and many of them say the discriminatory policy of the Japanese government against Korean schools has been continued for about 70 years.

    In the recommendations relating to hate speech and hate crimes in Japan, CERD recommended the Japanese government ‘address the root causes of racist hate speech’ and it should combat ‘prejudices which lead to racial discrimination’. This suggests that CERD recognizes that hate speech and hate crimes against Korean residents in Japan has not occurred suddenly. It recognizes that there are deep-seated causes which go back to the time when Korea was colonized by Japan. This colonization by the Japanese government is at the core of the discrimination against Korean school students and the spreading of hate speech and hate crimes across Japanese society.

    Most Korean residents in Japan are descendants of those who were forced to live in Japan because of the colonial rule of Japan in their homeland. The Japanese government has the obligation to ensure justice to Korean residents in Japan who were deprived of their language, name and culture by Japan. The Japanese government must guarantee ethnic education of Korean children. The Japanese government should immediately stop the discriminatory policies against Korean schools and guarantee right to education for Korean children.

    I hope the civil movement both in Japan and elsewhere will support Korean schools in their plea for acceptance and the elimination of discrimination.

     

    Wooki KIM is on the Secretariat staff of Human Rights Association for Korean Residents in Japan.

  • Robert Manne. “When the facts change I change my mind. What do you do, Sir.” JM Keynes

    You might be interested in this repost. John Menadue.

     

    I have been a supporter of refugee rights since the mid-1970s, when with others I formed the Indo-China Refugee Association. During the period of the Howard government I wrote tens of thousands of words in defence of the asylum seekers fleeing from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. This interest arose from family history. Not only was I the child of refugees from Nazism. I very recently discovered that not long after my father was accepted by this country he wrote passionate articles in The Jewish News expressing, on the one hand, gratitude to Australia, and, on the other, radical astonishment that the most anti-fascist element in the community, Jewish refugees, were subject to petty forms of discrimination as enemy aliens. I mention all this to make it clear that what I am going to say this afternoon is delivered with a heavy heart.

    The asylum seeker issue, or more accurately, the issue of those asylum seekers who arrive by boat, has been near the centre of Australian politics for the past fifteen years. Opinion has generally fallen into two broad camps—the friends of the asylum seekers and their enemies. These camps have now become very rigid. Thought has become frozen. As happens when thought is frozen, dishonesty abounds.

    The dishonesty of the enemies of the asylum seekers is familiar. They deny or diminish the human cruelty of their deterrent policies—mandatory indefinite detention; temporary protection visas; offshore processing; tow-back to Indonesia. They close their eyes to the damage these deterrent policies inflict upon the reputation of this country, especially in the Asia-Pacific region where the White Australia Policy is remembered. Their attitudes moreover reek of hypocrisy. The enemies of the asylum seekers opposed the idea of deterring boat arrivals by sending eight hundred to Malaysia on the grounds that it was not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention. They simultaneously advocated towing boats back to Indonesia, itself not a signatory to the Convention. In public, they shed crocodile tears about the hundreds of drownings that occurred under the policies of Rudd and Gillard. In private despite the mass drownings they were delighted with the political advantages the accelerated arrivals offered to the Abbott Opposition, as a WikiLeaks cable revealed.

    Of more interest to me however is the dishonesty that I have witnessed among my former allies—the friends of the asylum seekers.  From late August 2001 the Howard government introduced the policies of offshore processing on Nauru and Manus Island and occasional tow-back to Indonesia, known as the Pacific Solution. Between 2002 and 2007 virtually no asylum seekers arrived by boat. And yet throughout these years, almost without exception, the friends of the asylum seekers refused to admit that in its deterrent objective the policy had worked.

    In 2008 the Rudd government dismantled the Pacific Solution. Shortly after, the asylum seeker boats returned, eventually in much larger numbers than during the Howard period. Under Howard there were approximately 13,000 boat asylum seekers; in just the final year of the Gillard government some 25,000. And yet the friends of the asylum seekers rarely admitted that it was the dismantling of the Howard policies that was primarily responsible. Frequently the friends of the asylum seekers claimed that with firm political leadership the anti-asylum seeker sentiment of the Australian people could be turned. This denied the meaning of hundreds of public opinion surveys and flew in the face of common sense.

    Most troublingly, the friends of the asylum seekers failed to register the moral meaning of the 1100 certain or probable drownings that took place under Rudd and Gillard. There was great anguish at the time of the mass drowning following the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001 for which the Howard government was blamed. There has been even greater anguish following the recent terrible death of Reza Berati on Manus Island for which the policies of the Abbott government have been blamed. But among the friends of the asylum seekers, the mass drownings that took place under Rudd and Gillard barely registered or lingered in collective memory. I frequently read articles by prominent friends of the asylum seekers berating the present policies of offshore processing and tow-back where even the fact of mass death by drowning is not mentioned.

    In their principled opposition to all forms of deterrent policy, many friends of the asylum seekers are wedded to a Kantian absolute—for them it is never permissible to save a greater number of lives by treating certain people, like those presently marooned on offshore processing centres on Nauru and Manus Island, as a means to an end. Others are legal absolutists, for whom, no matter what the consequences, it is never permissible for what they believe is the letter or spirit of international law, in this case the UN Refugee Convention, to be violated by a regime of offshore processing. Yet others are indifferent to the political dimension of the asylum seeker question. For them there is no problem for the Labor Party, the only opposition party that is a serious contender for government, to hand a permanent political advantage to its Coalition opponents. This position implies that in Australia today the asylum seeker issue should trump all other considerations, for example whether or not our country becomes involved in the most vital question of our era—the struggle to combat global warming.  In my view, all these forms of absolutism—moral, legal, anti-political—are wrong-headed. On the asylum seeker issue many moral, legal and political questions have to be balanced and taken into account. The world is complex. Asylum seeker policy is inherently very difficult.

    Because of their commitment to one or another form of absolutism, almost all friends of the asylum seekers now advocate the dismantling of the policy of offshore processing and tow-back, in other words a return to the policy of the Rudd government in 2007-8. Our only reliable guide to what might eventuate if they succeeded in their ambition is what happened in the past. Following Rudd’s abandonment of the Pacific Solution, three things occurred. The issue of asylum seekers helped undermine the government’s popularity and served the interests of the Coalition. Asylum seekers arrived by boat in accelerating numbers—in 2010-11, 5,000; in 2011-12, 8,000 and in 2012-13, 25,000. Most importantly, in these few years, on their way to Australia, some 1100 asylum seekers died at sea. Those who now advocate the end of the current policy of offshore processing and tow-back, a policy that has quite predictably stopped the boats, need to explain why history will not repeat itself.

    There is another consequence of the present position of the friends of the asylum seekers—by campaigning for the dismantling of offshore processing, they have abandoned any prospect of contributing to the formulation of a more humane and politically realistic asylum seeker and refugee policy. One aspect would be to look to conditions in the offshore processing centres and the ultimate fate of those presently there in such a way that suffering was diminished but the deterrent purpose maintained. The other would be to look to the future of the thirty thousand or so recently arrived asylum seekers in Australia who are being treated with great cruelty by the present government. Some of these people are in detention centres. A larger number are on one or another form of bridging visa, waiting for their asylum seeker claims to be assessed. Some with adverse ASIO assessments have been imprisoned without trial for life. Many are living in penury. Many are not allowed to work. These people are promised that even if they are assessed to be genuine refugees they will never be allowed to become permanent citizens.

    Through the combination of these policies, Australia for the first time in its history has a government that is consciously engineering the creation of an immigrant under-class.  As there is now an effective deterrent at the border, older ineffective domestic deterrent policies—like mandatory detention, temporary protection visas, absence of work rights or access to decent welfare services—are not only cruel but entirely purposeless.  They are also quite predictably creating social problems for Australia in the future. All these policies should be abandoned.

    It is, moreover, a misunderstanding to think that Australians are hostile to refugees. Historical experience and almost all opinion polls show that Australians are opposed not to refugees but to those who arrive without visas by boat. It was more politically difficult for the Fraser government to accept the 2,000 Vietnamese spontaneous boat refugee arrivals than the tens of thousands selected by the government from the South-East Asian camps.

    Rather than advocating the dismantling of offshore processing, the friends of the asylum seekers in my opinion could play a far more fruitful role by the advocacy of full human rights for those asylum seekers presently on Australian soil, and an annual refugee intake of 30,000 refugees chosen from among those in most desperate need, like the persecuted Hazaras of Afghanistan or the Rohingyas of Myanmar, the ethno-religious groups most closely experiencing what the Jews of Central Europe experienced in the late 1930s. This is the kind of policy that the Labor Party could realistically take to the next election. It is the policy for which I intend to fight.

     

    This talk was delivered to Limmud Oz in Melbourne on Sunday, June 8 2014. Limmud Oz is a Jewish Festival of Ideas.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Tony Smith. Our dubious talent as jailers

    In 2004 I was a patient in the cardiac unit of RPAH Sydney. I had mysterious heart inflammation which turned out to be due to a rare auto-immune condition known as Churg-Strauss Syndrome, a form of vasculitis that raises the eosinophils in the blood to life threatening levels. In the next bed was an Indigenous man from Dubbo. Because of the way names were written with surname first, the card over the bed read “Lord, Stanley”.

    I teased Lord Stan a little but he was there for a serious procedure – a triple bypass – and soon went nervously into an intensive care room. This week we acquired a new television set. The old one had lasted since 1986, so we reckoned we were just about due and the decision was forced on us by digitisation. So I broke with normal practice and watched some midday news bulletins. And there was Lord Stan. It was good to see him looking well after ten years. Obviously both the surgeons and the post-operative carers had done a good job with Stan and of course, his own attitude to rehabilitation was the main factor in his survival.

    Unfortunately, Stan was on the news because his son, Stanley Lord Junior had died in prison in January. An inquiry into Stanley Junior’s death had recommended that there should be alternatives to imprisonment for non-violent offenders. Stanley had accumulated several driving offences. Stanley senior was understandably heart-broken and grief stricken yet again after these months.

    Decades after a royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, the report’s recommendations should have been implemented across all jurisdictions. The two huge issues are the state’s duty of care and the judicial system’s disproportionate imprisonment of Indigenous people. Lamenting our incarceration of asylum seekers who are innocent of any crime whatsoever, I was beginning to think that Australia had such a talent for locking people up out of sight and out of mind, that we actively looked for victims. I have more than one convict in my ancestry and assumed that we inherited this talent from Britain. The British empire enthusiastically exported its socio-economic problems – and of course Scottish, Irish and Welsh dissenters.

    Recent events suggest however, that we are such appallingly bad jailers that we should really abdicate the field immediately. Apart from the news about Stanley’s death in prison, recently we saw the tragedy of a death of an asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei from an infection acquired while in one of our remote camps. Even had he not acquired the infection in the camp, we assumed duty of care for this man when we placed him in detention.

    It seems amazing that Prime Minister Abbott has not asked for the resignation of his Immigration Minister Scott Morrison. Morrison has direct responsibility for the welfare of asylum seekers and the failure of care stops at his desk. That he did not immediately resign on principle suggests a total lack of principle in both the Minister and in the Abbott Government.

    Worse still perhaps are the implications of these cases for Australians generally. They, and the continual obfuscation around them suggest that compassion and humanity are quickly losing their grip amongst a people made to feel financially insecure for the sake of the rich and powerful. Generosity of spirit is becoming an alien attribute for Australians.

    Both major parties, but especially the Coalition, claim to have a focus on priority on policy outcomes. There has always been some hypocrisy in the way these outcomes are measured, but there is little amiss with the ideal. Governments should be judged according to the results of their policies. This week, at both State and Federal levels, there are serious reasons for ‘outcomes’ focussed politicians to admit their failures. The deaths of Stanley Lord Junior and Hamid Kahazaei are derelictions of duty of the worst kind. Nothing short of ministerial resignations will restore faith in the processes surrounding our incarceration policies.

     

  • John Menadue–We stopped the boats; we will now stop the jihadists

    You may be interested in this repost. John Menadue

     

    By linking boat arrivals and jihadists in the one sentence, a couple of weeks ago, Tony Abbott sounded very much like a dog-whistler that we can expect to hear more from in the future.

    He knows there is widespread, although a mistaken perception, that most boat arrivals were Muslims and that Muslim jihadist are a threat to Australia. A lot of dog-whistlers are going to feed on that perception.

    Scott Morrison has shown us what is likely to be in store. He told Jane Cadzow in the SMH that he had urged the coalition partners ‘to ramp up the questioning … to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment’.

    In my blog of December 31 last year ‘Are most asylum seekers and refugees Muslims?’ I wrote about the refugee settlement figures for two years that were then available – Calendar year 2010 and April 2011 to March 2012. With some qualifications, the figures showed that in the first period 51% of refugees were Christian, 26% Muslim and 23% ‘other’. In the second period, 42% were Muslim, 34% Christian and 24% ‘other’.

    In assessing refugees of course, no religious test is or should be made. Further the figures will vary from year to year on religious background depending on the asylum flows and countries of violence and persecution, e.g. from the Middle East, Myanmar, Africa or Sri Lanka. The Christian outflow from the Middle East is likely to continue as Christian minorities face continuing persecution and death.

    The figures that I mention above do not show that most asylum seekers are Muslim.

    It is also a mistake to suggest in any way that most Muslims are Jihadists. Some will be, but every group has its extremists and hot-heads that must be managed.

    I have not yet seen any figures to suggest that the Jihadists from Australia now fighting in the Middle East were former asylum seekers or refugees. Many of them look to be Australian born converts with very non-Middle Eastern names. Converts often have a habit of being more extreme. Every community has social misfits ,seeking notoriety and looking for excitement.

    It is the responsibility of the Australian government not to act with political opportunism over this problem, but to very forcefully and deliberately deal with extremists who leave this country to fight battles overseas that have got nothing to do with Australia. Where appropriate citizenship should be denied, passports withdrawn and breaches of our laws resolutely pursued. We can’t build a diverse and strong multi-cultural Australia if some of our number is allowed to abuse our hospitality and fight old battles overseas.

    In gathering intelligence on jihadists we will depend on ASIO and ASIS. Although my experience with these two organisations is dated they don’t give me much confidence.  They do attract a lot of odd bods, with little effective review of their performance. My experience was that ministers and senior officials are easily seduced into the unreal world of information and misinformation, facts and untested gossip.

    The Muslim leadership in Australia also has to bear a heavy responsibility in helping to manage the hot-heads in their communities. It may be apocryphal but I heard that during the Balkan War of 1991-99, Paul Keating summoned the Serb and Croat leaders in Australia, and warned them if violence continued between their communities, he would ‘knock your f… head’s off’. It sounds very Keatingesque – blunt and to the point. But to me it highlights the responsibility of leaders of our new communities to their new country.

    I have seen warnings but no evidence that Australians have involved themselves in the Israeli/ Gaza conflict

    I hope we can keep the dog-whistlers at bay, who will want to make the link between boat arrivals, Muslims and Jihadists. It is a sensitive issue and must be handled in a sensitive and resolute way without political opportunism intervening.

    Firmness is required by both the Australian government and its agencies, and the Muslim leadership in Australia.

     

  • Xanthe Emery: Family violence and immigration – is the message getting across?

    Family violence in Australia is at epidemic levels, with some horrific high profile cases dominating the news in 2014. Migrant women in Australia are extremely vulnerable to violence from their partners. Threats to cancel a woman’s visa are used to frighten, intimidate, and coerce her to stay in a violent relationship. More could be done to ensure that migrants are aware you don’t have to remain in a violent relationship to obtain a visa.

    Visas for family members of Australian citizens, permanent residents, and some eligible New Zealand citizens will make up 32% of the migration programme for Australia in the 2014-15 financial year. Partner visas (including spouses, de facto couples and fiancés) make up the vast majority of the visas in the family stream. In the 2014-15 year, the government has planned for 47,825 partner visas.[1] Generally, partner visas are granted first as temporary visas. After approximately two years, temporary partner visa holders can move to a permanent partner visa, once they have satisfied the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (“DIBP”) that the relationship with their sponsoring partner is genuine and continuing.

    However, in certain circumstances, a person can be granted a permanent partner visa, despite the fact that the relationship with their sponsoring partner has ended. One of these exceptions is where a visa applicant can demonstrate that they have experienced family (or domestic) violence at the hands of their sponsoring partner during the relationship. Very specific evidence is required to satisfy DIBP that violence has occurred, and the burden of providing the evidence remains with the visa applicant. These are referred to as the ‘family violence provisions’, and are part of measures to ensure that vulnerable migrants (predominantly women) don’t have to choose between their visa and their safety. 

    A number of recent high profile cases of family violence have caused politicians, the media, and the public to turn their attention to an issue that is a national disgrace. In 2013, there were 27,000 domestic assaults reported to NSW police.[2] And this only reflects assaults actually reported. An Australian Bureau of Statistic study in 2005 found that 82% of women who experienced violence from a current partner did not report it to police. Globally, intimate partner violence is one of the leading causes of death for women.[3]

    For migrant women in Australia, social isolation, lack of English language skills, unfamiliarity with Australian law, or dependence on sponsors, means they may be particularly vulnerable to domestic violence, and less able to take steps to leave a violent relationship. One of the most powerful tools partners use to suppress and control migrant women is the threat to have her visa cancelled or have her “kicked out” of Australia. Many women disclose a fear of immigration officials appearing at their front door and escorting them straight to the airport. Coupled with this, is the fear many women have for their futures if they return to their home country, separated and shamed. Additionally, the fear of losing access to children influences women to remain in violent relationships.

    In the 2012-13 financial year, there were 867 family violence claims made to DIBP. This is a small proportion of the number of partner visas but likely doesn’t reflect the true number of women at risk because many women do not report violence to police, let alone to Immigration.

    Family violence is not unique to particular ethnic groups or people from low socio-economic backgrounds. Migrant women from a variety of countries, ethnicities, religious affiliations and economic standing experience family violence from their sponsoring partner.

    So are we doing enough to ensure that migrant women are aware they can access protection in Australia and don’t need to choose between an abusive relationship and being forced to leave Australia? Many victims do not know that their partner has no power to cancel their visa and are unaware of the existence of the family violence provisions.

    The challenge for DIBP and Australian policy makers is to protect the family violence provisions from fraud, whilst ensuring that migrant communities are aware of the existence of the provisions and the help that is available. Abuse and misuse of the family violence provisions will have the biggest impact on genuine family violence victims. If the family violence provisions are viewed as a loophole for gaining residency, genuine family violence victims are likely to be viewed with suspicion. Seeking and then accessing help, as well as speaking up about their experiences, can be an extremely difficult ask for migrant women. Adding to this a sense that they must prove what they have been through is real, can be too much for some to cope with.

    Additionally, many women are unable to access legal assistance during this most difficult time. Financial vulnerability, and limited community legal services, means many women must try to fumble through complex immigration regulations unguided. For example, providing a letter instead of a statutory declaration, or a social worker failing to name the perpetrator of the violence in their evidence, can mean a person’s visa is refused. The consequences for mistakes here are serious. What is also important to remember is that while negotiating their immigration status and dealing with DIBP, many migrant women are also suffering from the trauma of their experiences, homelessness, and abject poverty.

    Funding has been cut to women’s refuges in NSW and a number of refuges are closing down. This is a big problem because many women are referred via the refuge for further help, including legal assistance. Often, a victim’s first point of call is the Domestic Violence Crisis Line and/or the police. Victims who are then homeless are usually assisted to find accommodation in a women’s refuge. The refuges have great staff and social workers who then assist their clients to sort out their various issues. There are serious concerns that without refuges, many women will become homeless, but also this vital referral ‘hub’ will be lost. This will mean more women are unaware of what to do about their immigration situation if their relationship ends with their sponsor.

    Australia’s migrant community, particularly women at risk of social and cultural isolation, would benefit from a targeted campaign that makes clear what their rights are once they arrive in Australia, and that violence need not be tolerated in order to hold on to a visa.

    Xanthe Emery is a solicitor at the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre, a community legal centre in Sydney.

    [1] Migration Programme statistics from the Department of Immigration an Border Protection: https://www.immi.gov.au/media/statistics/statistical-info/visa-grants/migrant.htm

    [2] ‘Time to act on domestic violence’, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 March 2014: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/time-to-act-on-domestic-violence-20140307-34cqt.html

    [3] K.M. Devries et al, ‘The global prevalence of intimate partner violence against women’, June 2013: http://www.cugmhp.org/gamma/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TheoVos2013-article3WomenViolence.pdf

  • Secrecy and Propaganda.

    Yesterday Richard Ackland in theGuardian.com highlighted the way that the media cooperated with the government in the propaganda about raids on potential Muslim terrorists in Sydney and Melbourne. Both the NSW and Commonwealth Governments spared no effort to highlight the raids. What a contrast this is to the secrecy of ‘on water matters’ in Operation Sovereign Borders.

    Richard Ackland’s article can be found on the following link

    John Menadue.

     

    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/19/sydney-dawn-counter-terrorism-raids-why-now-and-why-so-few-answers

  • David Isaacs and Ian Kerridge. Asylum seeker’s ‘brain death’ shows failure of care and of democracy.

    The news that Hamid Kehazaei, a 24-year-old Iranian asylum seeker detained on Manus Island, has been diagnosed as brain dead following his transfer to the Mater Hospital in Brisbane is a tragedy. That it is a tragedy for this young man and his family is unquestionable The news – but the extent of this tragedy may be much more pervasive than we realise.

    If the emerging details of his case are correct, Kehazaei developed septicaemia as a complication of cellulitis (skin and soft-tissue infection) arising from a cut in his foot. This, in itself, is disturbing.

    Severe infection can result in brain death – either from infection of the brain itself (meningitis, encephalitis or brain abscess), or from brain injury due to a lack of oxygen resulting from cardiac arrest (as appears to be the case here), or from reduced blood supply to the brain. Yet it is very uncommon, especially in a young, previously healthy man.

    Such a case could occur in Australia and has been described in 2012 in young Indigenous adults in Central Australia. Nevertheless, severe sepsis resulting from a foot infection is preventable. And a case like this occurring in an Australian national would raise serious questions about the appropriateness of the antibiotics used and the timeliness of care.

    Most cases of brain death result from traumatic brain injury, stroke or lack of oxygen to the brain following asphyxia, near-drowning, or prolonged cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

    What happened to Hamid Kehazaei raises concerns about the adequacy of care provided to him during initial treatment, including wound care and antibiotics, and how soon he was transferred to expert medical care, first to Port Moresby and subsequently to Brisbane.

    If this young man became ill and had his brain die while seeking asylum in Australia and while in our care, then we must examine the details of his case and ask ourselves not only whether it was preventable but whether our policies and processes actually contributed to his death.

    But how can we even begin to ask these types of questions when we know so little about the circumstances in which he became ill, and his subsequent care?

    Protestations that this is due to the necessity of respecting privacy and confidentiality, ethical principles that are core to the health professional-patient relationship, are to some extent correct. But they also obscure important features of this case.

    The government is simply wrong to claim that this issue should not be “politicised”. What is ultimately at issue here is the way in which domestic politics and border policy impose norms (rules of behaviour) that are antithetical to medicine and health care and, fundamentally, to democracy.

    Medicine, like biomedical science, requires transparency and honesty to be clinically and ethically sound. Peer review, clinical audit, root-cause analysis, family conferences, conflict-resolution strategies, case consultation, multidisciplinary team meetings, mortality and morbidity meetings, open disclosure policies: all rest on the importance of transparency and respect.

    In contrast, we know very little about the people who seek asylum in Australia. Everything is secret – their arrival, their situation, their medical need, their illnesses, and their death.

    This requirement for secrecy has largely overwhelmed efforts by many good people – legislators, human rights lawyers, refugee advocates, health workers, politicians and ordinary citizens – to shine a light on what is happening to people in detention.

    The Immigration Health Advisory Group has been disbanded, restricting the degree to which the health professions can critique the care available to asylum seekers. And even those tasked with providing medical care to asylum-seekers struggle to advocate for the people under their care.

    Policies restrict the degree to which they can care for their patients or refer them for specialist care not available in the detention centres. Contracts bind them to secrecy and many, often shocked by what they have seen, are prevented from speaking out by legal threats and intimidation long after they’ve returned to the mainland.

    The language of “border control” has been used to excuse political secrecy. But such secrecy is what we usually associate with autocratic governments and is the antithesis of democratic ideals.

    What this case illustrates, yet again, is that the asylum seekers detained on Manus and Christmas Islands and Nauru have been excised not only from the laws that determine access to Australia but from the care we should provide any vulnerable person for whom we are responsible. And from the ethical principles upon which medicine and our health system are based.

    If we care about these people, and if we truly believe in the humane values that ground medicine and the moral principles that ground democracy, then we need to do two things. The first is to hold a truly independent inquiry into the care of people in detention. And the second is to end off-shore processing.

    David Isaacs is Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at University of Sydney.

    Ian Kerridge is Associate Professor in Bioethics & Director, Centre for Values and Ethics and the Law in Medicine at University of Sydney. 

    This article was first published in ‘The Conversation’. 

  • Ben Lewis. The false advertising of mandatory detention and “Stopping the Boats”

    Spend any amount of time listening to Australian policy makers or reading Australian media and you’re certain to hear a familiar phrase: “Stop the Boats”. It has become such a political imperative within the Australian asylum seeker debate that “Stop the Boats” is rarely even challenged.  But putting aside the question of whether Australia should (or even can) “Stop the Boats”, there is a fundamental flaw in the logic . . . the key policy which underpins the “Stop the Boats” thinking—namely mandatory detention—has been shown to be false advertising.

    The truth is that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that harsh immigration policies such as mandatory detention deter irregular migration. That’s because, when it comes to human migration, countries by and large don’t have control over who leaves a territory or to where they are headed. Empirical research for decades has shown that immigration policies are predominantly responsive to, not determinative of human movement.

    According to a 2011 study conducted by UNHCR’s chief detention researcher, Alice Edwards:

    “Pragmatically, there is no empirical evidence that the prospect of being detained deters irregular migration, or discourages persons from seeking asylum. In fact, as the detention of migrants and asylum-seekers has increased in a number of countries, the number of individuals seeking to enter such territories has also risen, or has remained constant.” 

    For example, over the past three decades, many Europe countries have significantly expanded their use of detention in response to irregular asylum seeker and migrant arrivals.  The result?  European migration figures have increased from an estimated 49 million in 1990 to 58 million in 2000 to 70 million in 2010. The same can be shown in the United States. Despite decades of “tough on immigration” policies, including annual detention figures approaching half a million, and a Congressional “bed mandate” requiring 34,000 migrants to be in detention every single day, the period from 2000-2010 was “a record setting decade of immigration” in the United States.

    Detention policies don’t deter. So why then do Australian policy makers stubbornly cling to the assertion that mandatory detention of asylum seekers and irregular migrants isn’t simply good policy, but is actually necessary to curb irregular migration when it’s clear the facts don’t support it?

    Part of the blame undoubtedly lies with the Australian public. The Australian policy of mandatory detention—roundly criticized outside of Australia—remains overwhelmingly popular within. Even as recently as last week, Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison defended the practice of detaining asylum seeking children using the staid “stop the boats” rhetoric, and with the legitimacy of broad public support for the country’s mandatory detention policy.

    Part of the blame also lies with Australian policy makers for continuing to use anecdotal rather than empirical evidence to justify the mandatory detention policy. As the editor of this blog has rightly pointed out, this is “sloppy policy evaluation” at best. Experts are in agreement that mandatory detention policies have no measurable impact on the number of irregularly arriving asylum seekers and migrants. There are a number of common sense—and empirically established—reasons for this.  According to Robyn Sampson, a leading researcher from Swinburne University:

    “Several studies have been undertaken to establish which factors most impact the choice of destination of asylum seekers and refugees and irregular migrants.  According to this body of research, the principal aim of asylum seekers and irregular migrants is to reach a place of safety. Asylum seekers and irregular migrants often have very limited understanding of the migration policies of destination countries before arrival and rely on people smugglers to choose their destination. Rather than being influenced primarily by immigration policies such as detention, most refugees and irregular migrants choose destinations where they will be reunited with family or friends; where they believe they will be in a safe, tolerant and democratic society; where there are historical links between their country and the destination country; where they can already speak the language of the destination country; or where they believe they will be able to find secure work quickly due to a perception of the country as one of wealth and prosperity.” 

    So to recap—the principle determinants of the choice of destination country for asylum seekers and irregular migrants are:

    1. Safety;
    2. Family;
    3. Perceptions of democracy;
    4. Historical links;
    5. Common language; and
    6. Perceptions of wealth/prosperity. 

    Most migrants, it turns out, are just the same as you and I.  They want to go to the nearest safe place where they can be together with their families and not be persecuted—bonus points for a common language, culture, or job opportunities. A policy of mandatory detention fails to address any of these; it merely punishes those who arrive in the false belief that if asylum seekers and irregular migrants are punished badly enough, they’ll simply stop coming.

    To an outsider, the irrationality of the mandatory detention policy would be comical if not for all of the pain and suffering it is causing. You may be able to “Stop the Boats” by physically restraining asylum seeking children and families before they reach you, but you certainly won’t deter future arrivals by punishing them once they get here. And why would you want to—especially when the overwhelming majority have been shown to be legitimate refugees, fleeing for their lives? (By the government’s own statistics, since 2008, 92% of all asylum seekers arriving by boat have been granted refugee status.)

    What are needed are not more “tough” immigration policies, but comprehensive regional solutions that attempt to address the root causes of insecurity that prompt human movement. The good news is that better policies do exist; policies that can be supported by empirical evidence and that respect international human rights obligations. But one thing is clear: better policy making won’t be built on the continued justification of mandatory detention as a deterrent. Detention as a deterrent is just false advertising.

    Ben Lewis is the Advocacy Coordinator of the International Detention Coalition (IDC). He is an international human rights lawyer with extensive advocacy experience working with irregular migrant populations in the US and Latin America. The views in this blog are his own.

  • John Menadue. Scott Morrison at the Human Rights Commission.

    Minister Morrison, assisted by the Secretary of his department, continued his aggressive ways at the hearing on August 22.

    He said that his policies discouraged asylum seekers risking their lives at sea. He described himself as the champion of the voiceless, ‘the ones that are at the bottom of the ocean’.  He clearly wants to occupy the high moral ground.

    But was it really concern about deaths at sea which motivated his campaign against asylum seekers arriving by boat? Wikileaks reported that ‘a key Liberal strategist told the US Embassy in November 2009 that the boats issue was “fantastic” for the Coalition and ‘the more that came the better’ (SMH 10 December 2010).

    In Opposition the Coalition did not want the boats to stop. It did its best to ensure that the Labor Government did not stop the boats. That is why the Coalition sided with the Greens to block the agreement with Malaysia. The collapse of that agreement set in motion a dramatic increase in boat arrivals that ultimately led to Manus and Nauru.

    Scott Morrison’s concern for deaths at sea was not reflected in numerous comments he made in opposition to demonise asylum seekers. He told us that asylum seekers bring ‘disease’, everything from TB and hepatitis C to chlamydia and syphilis. He told 2GB that boat arrivals bring ‘wads of cash’ and large displays of jewellery. He urged his parliamentary colleagues to ‘ramp up the question to … capitalise on the anti-Muslim sentiment’. He described as a ‘government-funded junket’ Commonwealth government assistance for an 8-year old boy whose parents had been drowned off Christmas Island. He complained about the cost of holding funerals in Sydney for asylum seekers who had died off Christmas Island.

    That was not the moral high ground. But If Scott Morrison now feels a sense of moral responsibility that is to be welcomed.

    At the Human Rights Commission Scott Morrison avoided answering the question whether detention of children, or adults for that matter, deterred boat arrivals. He should have said, but didn’t, that there is no evidence that mandatory detention deters boat arrivals. We now know very clearly that what has deterred boat arrivals was not mandatory detention but government policies denying resettlement in Australia for any person who come by boat. It was the Rudd Government that started taking us down this path. That is why boat arrivals stopped and not because of mandatory detention.

    Both Scott Morrison and the Secretary of his department took exception to the President of the Commission, Gillian Triggs characterising the detention centres as prisons. The detention centres may not have armed guards, but they are worse than prisons. First, the detainees are not convicted criminals and they are not illegals. They are overwhelmingly vulnerable people seeking freedom from persecution. Over 80% of boat arrivals have been found to be genuine refugees. But not being criminals or illegals, we put them in hell-holes where many of them go out of their minds.  For innocent people the result is worse than being in prison.

    Second, we locate these detention centres in remote places with the clear intention of making it very difficult for detainees to have contact with friends, family or advisers. We are frightened that if the community hears their true story, we will show more concern and compassion. So we lock them up in remote places where we cannot hear their cries. Inmates at Long Bay are treated better than that.

    There is a major problem when the Minister for Immigration is both gaoler and guardian of children. A sensible start to winding back this appalling situation in the detention of children is for the minister to separate his roles.

    More importantly we need to quickly wind back mandatory detention for almost all asylum seekers. It punishes but does not deter. The evidence is quite clear on that. Unfortunately a succession of Immigration Ministers have pretended they are political tough guys by locking up both adults and children.

    What is more there are large savings to be achieved in winding back mandatory detention. Immigration detention costs over $3b per annum. Over $2b could be saved instead of filling the pockets of Serco, Transfield, the Salvation Army and others. The Commission of Audit pointed to the enormous differences in the costs of detention. For offshore detention it was $440,000 per head in 2013-14.; for on shore detention it was $ 239,000 and for community detention it was$ 90,000.  The most cost effective and the most humane is release into the community on bridging visas which cost $22,000 per head. In 2013-14

    Humanity and cost saving points to ending mandatory detention. Few comparable countries mistreat asylum seekers the way we do.

    Just as we now have a Royal Commission on sexual abuse I am sure that down the track we will have a Royal Commission on our treatment of asylum seekers.