Category: asylum seekers

The Future for Refugees in Rural Australia

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Chart by ASRC

Australians who support asylum seekers and refugees have been optimistic of improved policy since the Labor Party won the Federal election on May 24. As you can see by the above chart, there is daylight between the tough policies of the former government and the more compassionate policies of Labor and The Greens.

While we wait for clearer direction from the new government, Australians who care about refugees ramped up their efforts for Refugee Week (June 19-25). In Warwick, we held our first-ever Welcome Walk, when a group of 40 walked the footpaths of Warwick. The 3.5 kms route we took on Sunday was symbolic of the distance from the centre of Kabul in Afghanistan to Kabul Airport. As you’d know, there was a multi-national evacuation response when the Taliban stormed the capital last August.

For Australia’s part, some 4,000 Afghans with Australian visas made it on to evacuation flights and ended up here. But thousands more, who rushed the airport in panic and frustration, were left stranded. It’s been a similar scene in Ukraine, with some 8 million refugees streaming across borders into Poland and other neighbouring countries.

About 70% of refugees seek refuge in neighbouring countries. Nevertheless, there are 38,513 people (August 2021) seeking asylum in Australia, including 4,452 children. Many groups and individuals in Australia actively try to help those who have been granted refugee status. Government policies tend to favour resettlement of refugees in regional and rural areas. But welfare organisations have been critical of the lack of support for refugee resettlement in country Australia.

A study by the University of South Australia found that rural and regional schools can be under-resourced and ill-prepared to support refugees and their families. UniSA researcher Jennifer Brown said policy makers needed to better understand the nuances of regional and rural communities to help them welcome refugees. She said many rural schools felt under-supported and uncertain about how best to help.

“Appropriate resourcing for rural schools is a starting point, but training and opportunities for inter–cultural learning and engagement must also occur within communities if we are really to deliver change.”

As you can see from the chart above, there’s a wide gulf between the Liberal National Party’s policies on refugees and those of Labor and The Greens.

As an example, the Albanese government stood by a pre-election promise and brought the Nadesalingham family back to Biloela. The reason the Tamil family’s case has become so well known is that a grass-roots group much like ours helped get the story out and campaign for the family.

We are members of the Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network, a small group or ordinary people who want to encourage Australians to accept refugees.

Warwick is a country town of some 15,000 people and to date we have no refugees living here. SDRAMN is currently supporting a family in Kabul while they seek visas for neighbouring Iran. We are affiliated with Rural Australians for Refugees, a grass-roots organisation that aims to support settlement of refugees in regional and rural towns.

Toowoomba, Australia’s largest inland city, has been a strong advocate for inviting refugees into their community. Since the mid-1990s, South Sudanese refugees began arriving in Toowoomba, 127 kms west of Brisbane. By 2021, the South Sudanese population had grown to 2,300. Refugees from Darfur and the Congo began arriving in the city, followed by thousands from Chad, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and the Middle East. In an Amnesty International submission to the Federal Government in 2021, Toowoomba Mayor Paul Antonio said that since the city decided in 2013 to become a Refugee Welcome Zone, the numbers of refugees arriving in Toowoomba had grown to a maximum 1,100 per year.

While we wait for the new government to turn its attention to refugee policy, support groups will continue to do what they do best – raising awareness and raising funds.

The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre held its annual Telethon on Monday June 20 and raised $1.650 million to help support asylum seekers and other groups who support refugees.

The ASRC does a lot of unheralded work with asylum seekers, including, since March 2021, finding homes for 138 people in three States after they were released from detention.

While the ASRC has a large budget and generous donors, small grass-roots support groups and individuals can make a difference. Warwick resident Sally Edwards decided to raise funds to bring a Ukranian family to Brisbane, where other family members live. Within weeks she had raised $25,000, aided by local media coverage, a garage sale and donations.

While the spotlight of public attention has switched from Afghanistan to Ukraine, the world refugee problem is huge and complex. The UNHCR says there are “at least” 89.3 million people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 27.1 million refugees, around half of whom are under the age of 18.

In Australia, our number one issue is what the previous government referred to as the “legacy case-load”. Approximately 30,000 asylum seekers arrived in Australia by boat between 13 August 2012 and 1 January 2014. (The legacy case-load also includes babies born in Australia to asylum seekers in this category). They arrived in Australia during the Labor government’s term of office and were barred from making an application for protection for up to four years following their arrival. The succeeding Coalition government introduced exceptional legislative restrictions on their eligibility for protection visas.

The murky history of the legacy cases starts with Julia Gillard’s Labor government, which commissioned a report in 2012 as to how to handle the growing influx of ‘boat people’. Measures taken by Gillard included resuming the controversial offshore processing policy.

Then came the Abbott Government and immigration minister Scott Morrison, who reintroduced Temporary Protection Visas. Morrison stated that the government would not give a permanent visa to anyone who had arrived by boat. In 2014, the Abbott government also denied access to publicly funded legal assistance to all who had arrived in Australia without a valid visa, further delaying processing of refugee claims.

The latest data from the Department of Home Affairs says that 93% of the 31,112 legacy cases have been ‘decided’. Of the 29,012 resolved cases, 5,191 were granted three-year Temporary Protection Visas (TPV) and 13,136 were given five-year Safe Haven Enterprise Visas (SHEV). The department has 2,110 cases that have not been resolved and another 870 that were refused but are seeking merit reviews. People granted a TPV or SHEV can work, get Medicare and receive short-term counselling for torture and trauma. Children under 18 can attend school.

It is important to note that people with these types of visas must re-apply for them on a regular basis. The new government has not elaborated on its plan for permanent resettlement for all refugees

The extensive delays to processing claims has caused some asylum seekers to develop a clinical syndrome different from other trauma-related mental disorders. Psychiatrists have labelled this ‘protracted asylum seeker syndrome’ and pointed to the heightened risk of suicide among this group.

The important step for asylum seekers is to have their application for asylum heard. The sticking point is the Australian Government’s entrenched stance on “Illegal maritime arrivals”. Apart from re-defining the term to “irregular”, the Albanese Government needs to offer this group of people some certainty about their future in Australia. It’s just the decent thing to do.

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Ukraine, refugees and compassion fatigue

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Image of girl with Ukraine flag by Lewin Bormann www.flickr.com

People who feel moved to support refugees in their time of need are prone to a syndrome known as ‘compassion fatigue’. This post-traumatic-stress type condition sets in as events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unfold.

Compassion fatigue is just that – an overwhelming sense of hopelessness as yet another refugee crisis occurs with few answers in sight. It’s not much of a comparison, but consider Queenslanders told to evacuate their homes on Sunday due to flooding. The difference being is they can return to their homes (with buckets and mops), once the crisis is passed and water levels fall.

No such reprieve for the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who last week packed suitcases and set off for the Polish border. It seemed the first and most obvious place to go, as there are already about one million Ukrainians living in Poland. Unlike some governments I could name, the Polish authorities so far have put no obstacles in their way, but the influx will put huge pressure on their social systems and infrastructure.

As Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Haddad reported last Saturday, 120,000 people had already fled Ukraine into Poland and other neighbouring countries, mostly to Poland and Moldova. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said cars were backed up for several kilometres at some border crossings (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Moldova). These countries have mobilised to receive Ukrainians and provide shelter, food and legal help. Global News Canada forecast yesterday that the tally will be 500,000 and rising by the end of the week.

In landlocked Europe, people from Ukraine fleeing tyranny are not the first and certainly won’t be the last to seek safe haven in neighbouring countries. Australia looks on from afar, safe in the knowledge that its tough border policies will maintain the status quo. To misquote John Howard circa 2012: “We will decide how many Ukrainian refugees come here and the manner in which they come.”

For readers aged under 40, Australia did not always have a hard-line attitude to people seeking asylum. Australia has accepted 900,000 refugees since 1947.

The first wave of post war migration from 1947 to 1953 saw 170,000 ‘Displaced Persons’ come to Australia after their countries were destroyed by war. Between 1953 and 1975, the Australian Government assisted a further 127,000 refugees to Australia.

Then followed a controlled system of assisted migration, ‘Ten Pound Poms’ and others who took up the government’s offer of assisted passage on the understanding they would stay in their sponsored employment for two years. That’s my Dad and his brood, escaping Scotland’s rationing, a struggling economy and notoriously cold climate.

Migrants came from all over and initially had to endure prejudice by Australians who disparagingly called them ‘Refos’ or ‘New Australians’.

They copped the abuse, lived in hostels, took on menial jobs Australians wouldn’t do and helped create the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme.

According to the UNHCR, 82.4 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes, the majority of them internally displaced. Among them are over 26 million refugees, the highest population on record. Of those, 68% come from just five countries – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar (the Rohingya) and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Even when Australians recognise that there are as many refugees in the world as there are people on our own continent, it is hard to empathise.

Even with some of the stark images replayed to us by 24/7 media, we remain inured by our remoteness. Trouble, whatever it is, happens ‘over there’. Australia is a vast continent surrounded by oceans, monitored by an over-zealous system set up in 2012 to discourage people from trying to reach our shores by boat.

It’s ironic, as the Norwegian Refugee Council observes, that at a time when a record 82.4 million people are being displaced, wealthy countries (Australia is named, alongside Denmark and others), are engaged in a ‘race to the bottom’. They are tightening their refugee policies, forcing displaced people to make dangerous and difficult choices. Once liberal countries like Sweden and Denmark have wound back their refugee intakes as anti-immigrant sentiment prevails.

The NRC says there are three things wealthy countries can do to bring about change; number one is the need to work together to protect refugees. When the Syrian conflict erupted a decade ago, neighbouring countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Liberia took a disproportionate number of refugees compared to Saudi Arabia. Unlikely countries such as Uganda, Columbia and Lebanon take large numbers of refugees every year. But some of the richest countries in the world do almost nothing. Some, like Denmark, have wound their refugee intakes back to almost nothing.

“Japan has the world’s third largest economy and a population of 126 million. Nevertheless, it has received just 1,394 refugees in the last ten years. South Korea is at a similarly low level.  Saudi Arabia is at a similar level to Japan and the other Gulf countries are not much better.

“For most of the last decade there has been a brutal civil war in Syria, where several of these countries have been indirectly involved. It is therefore particularly inexcusable that they have not given proper protection to more of the victims of the war and taken some of the burden from neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.”

Admittedly, the Gulf countries have taken in a large number of Syrians as labour immigrants, but these people have not been granted refugee status.

Australia’s tough border policies seem overkill when held against the relatively small numbers of people they do allow in.

According to the Red Cross, Australia granted refugee status to 14,993 people in 2019-2020. This was done either through resettlement from other countries or by granting protection to people who had applied for asylum in Australia.

Compare that to Bangladesh, which in 2019 continued to host 854,782 people from Myanmar in a refugee-like situation . Likewise, Turkey granted temporary protection to 397,600 refugees from Syria in 2018. Soon Poland will be on this list for its welcome to people from the Ukraine.

Last Friday, I emailed FOMM reader Peter Willasden, who has travelled extensively in Eastern Europe. I confessed that although I felt moved to write about Ukraine, I lacked knowledge and insight. He did not take the ‘guest blogger’ bait, saying, after some observations about Vladimir Putin’s state of mind and the nuclear threat, “Sorry, I have yet to come up with a useful thought.”

Nonetheless, I did like his ‘big picture’ view:

“Stand back from the Ukraine and it highlights still something quite contrary to the expectations of only a decade ago. The end of the Soviet era, the ubiquity of social media, the economic networking of the globe led to the prediction of the rise of national, democratic movements, such as broke out of the Soviet system or led to the Arab Spring. The real consequence, seen not only in Russia but also the USA, UK, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, China has been the rise and rise of male autocrats, tyrants and dictators. There have always been dictators but these have, uniquely, arisen using the tools of democracy or what could at least be presented as a democratic process. And Australia too is far from immune from it.” 

As Peter says, the world order is now increasingly controlled by “a small number of old white men accumulating more and more unilateral power on very questionable pretexts.”

How did we get to this point he asks, and can anything be done to reverse the situation?

Let’s check back in a year or so, Peter.

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Christmas in Afghanistan

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Photo: ArmyAmber/ pixabay.com

A few days before Christmas, the US announced it was easing aid sanctions against the Taliban, rag-tag rulers of Afghanistan. The hard-line Muslims insurgents over-ran the capital, Kabul, in August. Thousands of citizens were evacuated from Kabul Airport, with tens of thousands left behind. Since then, Afghans have been forced into starvation by a combination of famine and US aid sanctions.

The US has been trying to use aid sanctions as a lever to force the Taliban not to suppress women’s rights, including access to education. The sanctions have now been eased to allow an exemption for aid providers.

The US Treasury has broadened the definition of permitted humanitarian assistance to include education. This includes salary payments to teachers and to permit a broader use of US funds received by aid organisations working inside Afghanistan.

Before the decision to ease aid sanctions, aid groups said, the US was at risk of driving ordinary Afghans towards starvation.

David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, said the humanitarian exception to sanctions on the Taliban will help organisations like the IRC to scale up and deliver lifesaving services without fearing legal repercussions.

“This couldn’t come soon enough as nine million people in Afghanistan are marching toward famine and Afghan families are bracing for an extremely tough winter.”

Miliband said  foreign development aid to Afghanistan previously propped up 75% of all government spending.

“(The suspension of foreign aid) has wiped out the government’s ability to pay public servants and deliver desperately needed public services, including basic healthcare, to millions of Afghans.”

Christmas in Afghanistan might be a cute headline, but it was no fun for anyone, least of all the estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Christians living in this landlocked emirate. Many reporters and diplomats were among those flown out of Kabul on domestic and military flights, so insightful news out of the country has been scarce. What we do know is that Afghans who helped the UN and coalition forces as guides and translators when they were based in Afghanistan, are now in hiding in fear of their lives and desperate to flee the country.

Surely this is when western governments should step up and fast-track intakes of refugees under Humanitarian visas.

At the outset, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia would provide 3,000 humanitarian places for Afghans in 2021-2022. The places will come from the existing annual intake of 13,750, rather than a special allocation, but Afghans will be prioritised.

The move falls far short of commitments made by Canada and Britain. Both countries pledged to take in up to 20,000 Afghan refugees over the next few years. Canada later doubled its commitment to 40,000 places.

Mr Morrison said Australia has “no clear plans” to operate a program of a similar scale.

“Australia is not going into that territory. What we’re focused on is right here and right now,” he said.

By October, there were 32,000 applications for Humanitarian visas to Australia, representing about 150,000 Afghans. Not one has been approved, a Senate Select Committee was told. Parliament has been dissolved for the year, as we know, and MPs, Senators and their families have gone fishing.

Some work was done before the office closed for Christmas. There were meetings between Afghan leaders in Australia and the relevant Ministers to provide an update on a $27 million assistance package announced on October 14. Most of the funds will be directed to help support groups to sponsor Afghan refugees and bring them to Australia. The package includes $8 million in grant funding to support community-led organisations to deliver grass roots and personalised support to the new arrivals. It also includes $6.4 million to increase legal assistance and support subclass 449 visa holders (for those who are forced to flee and for whom there are grave concerns for their safety)  to transition onto permanent visa pathways.  In an update posted on December 9, the Department of Home Affairs said further information on how to access each element of the package will be provided “as soon as it becomes available”.

It’s hard to imagine how hard life is in Kabul, population 4.45 million, particularly for women (who now need a chaperone to go anywhere), the Hazara people and anyone who helped the UN and coalition forces as interpreters or guides. It’s all very well to say why don’t we just fly them out, but they have to get to the airport first, and as can be seen by televised scenes of chaos on the ground, that is no easy task. Australia managed to evacuate 3,500 Australian and Afghan people with Australian visas, 2,500 of them women and children.

The ABC interviewed Afghans who now live in Australia, but at the cost of being separated from their families. Those Afghans are now worried that those left behind after the Taliban invasion will be forgotten. The ABC interviewed ‘Abdul’, who fled Afghanistan in 2011 after the Taliban targeted him for being a journalist.

Two years and three countries later, he boarded a boat from Indonesia and arrived on Christmas Island after a five-day voyage.

He has not seen his wife and five children in a decade — they are still in Afghanistan.

“Australia is a beautiful country. Nice people, lots of opportunities but when you don’t have your family with you … that’s jail for you,” he said.

Abdul is on a temporary protection visa (TPV) which grants temporary residency in Australia. But TPV holders are unable to sponsor family members applying for Australian visas.

Refugee support groups have been lobbying the government for years to grant people like Abdul permanent visas so they can hopefully reunite with their families. But the government’s hard line against resettling people who arrived by boat has left 30,000 people like Abdul stranded in Australia, some for more than 10 years, without permanent residency.

The argument about permanent vs temporary visas dates from Tony Abbott’s stop the boats campaign in 2013, which fed off John Howard’s defining statement in 2001 that no-one who arrived by boat would be permanently settled here. Temporary protection visas give rights to work and some welfare services but prevent permanent residency, family reunions and overseas travel. The Lowy Institute’s long-running series of polls on refugee issues shows that the TPV question sharply divides Australians (48% for, 49% against and 3% on the fence).

After all that is said, the government’s response (3,000 places from an existing quota), is neither admirable nor sustainable. Australia already has a strong connection to Afghanistan with 46,799 Afghans living here according to the 2016 Census. That was a 69% increase on the 2011 Census, so we could assume this figure has jumped to around 60,000 in 2021.

As chair of the Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network (SDRAMN), I’d encourage you write to your local MP, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Tell them that compassionate Australians want to see the Humanitarian intake from Afghanistan raised from 3,000 to 20,000.

Tell them to decide if the government will pay to fly people out of Kabul to Australia (at the moment that question is undetermined).

Above all, encourage the government to prioritise reuniting families divided by civil war and terror.

While you are writing to politicians, remind them about the 30,000 asylum seekers/refugees who have still not been granted permanent residency. Why ‘stick to a principle’ that is causing so much suffering and has no deterrent effect?

That’s a lot to get in one letter, but if you visit Rural Australians for Refugees, you will find some helpful templates.

Happy New Year one and all.

FOMM back pages

Australia’s refugee shame

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Image courtesy of Peter Broelman https://twitter.com/Broelman

It took a little refugee girl to become gravely ill while held in an Australian detention centre to attract the attention this issue deserves.

The plight of refugees and asylum seekers has been somewhat diminished in the public eye over the past 18 months because of Covid-19. But some issues just won’t go away. As cartoonist Peter Broelman observed last week in a two-panel cartoon: an Australian going stir crazy inside four bare walls, while in the right panel are two girls, assumed to represent the Biloela Tamil children confined to the detention centre at Christmas Island.

The Sri Lankan family of four were whisked away from their home in Biloela (central Queensland) in March 2018 after overstaying their visas. After some temporary stays in detention elsewhere, they were flow to Christmas Island, where they are still the only detainees held there.

This week, Tharnicca, three, was flown to Perth for emergency medical attention, She was accompanied by her mother, Priya. News reports claim Tharnicca had been unwell for up to two weeks before being flown to Perth reportedly suffering from a blood infection.

She is now stable and with top quality medical care will hopefully recover.

But what then, given the government’s insistence that the family are not refugees and therefore not entitled to settle in Australia? It’s bad timing for the Federal Government as support groups gear up for Refugee Week (June 20-27). Ahead of the event, refugee support groups are heading to the capital for the ‘Canberra Convergence’. The June 15 event will be held on the lawns of Parliament House. Number one item on the agenda is to call for the controversial indefinite detention Bill to be repealed.

What, you didn’t know about that?

The Migration Amendment Bill 2021 will allow Australia to indefinitely hold refugees in mandatory detention centres in cases where a person’s refugee visa has been cancelled but cannot be deported because they could face persecution in their home country. A person may have their visa cancelled for a range of reasons, including security or character grounds or association with certain groups.

Immigration Minister Alex Hawke said the new bill promotes human rights because it reinforces the nation’s commitment to non-refoulement. This clumsy term means a country is forbidden from deporting refugees or asylum seekers to their country of origin if they are at risk of persecution. So the Morrison government’s solution is to lock them up with no end date in sight.

The law currently applies to 21 refugees in Australian detention,  according to Guardian reporter Ben Doherty. The Bill was tabled on the last sitting day of the March session of parliament. It was voted into law on May 13 after the Senate debate was cut short.

Global outrage about this Bill suggests that Australia is breaching the Human Rights Charter by supporting the amendment.

The influence of refugee support groups cannot be underestimated. In 2018 a coalition of such groups lobbied for the medical evacuation of children from the detention centre on Nauru. This campaign became known as #KidsOffNauru and, as children were medically evacuated to Australia, support groups claimed victory.

Someone known to FOMM readers wrote a song about it.

As Asylum Seeker Resource Centre CEO Kon Karapanagiotidis said this week on the organisation’s 20th anniversary, “It’s a bitter-sweet moment”.

The ASRC was set up on a shoestring in Melbourne 20 years ago with the initial aim of providing free meals for poor families in inner Melbourne. It has grown into an asylum seeker support and advocacy organisation with annual revenue of $27.62 million. In 2019-2020, the ASRC provided shelter, free meals, healthcare and medication and paid work for asylum seekers.

Through lock-down in Melbourne, the ASRC has committed to keep paying ‘social enterprise’ staff in its cleaning and catering businesses, even when there is no work. The organisation is soon to broaden the opportunity to support ASRC Catering. In Melbourne, people can order a meal for pick up or delivery. Those who do not live in Melbourne will soon be able to support via a ‘pay it forward’ meal, providing meals to vulnerable people, such as casuals and workers in hospitality who have lost work.

The ASRC’s annual report (2019-2020) lists outcomes which include supporting 3,039 people who presented at its offices in crisis, securing 146 temporary or protection visas and distributing fresh food valued at $1.73 million to its members. It was all done through donations and the hard work of its many volunteers.

As CEO Kon Karapanagiotidis said in a live video to celebrate the ASRC’s 20th, his hope is that there no need for another 20 years of the ASRC.

“My hope is that one day we don’t need to be here.

“So when people come here seeking protection they find safety, dignity, sanctuary, a safety net, no detention, and safety and freedom”.

In the meantime, the ASRC’s annual telethon fund-raiser will be more important than ever as it continues to support asylum seeker workers through Melbourne’s lock-downs.

On the local front, the Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network held a welcome picnic in Warwick last Sunday to celebrate the inclusion of the Southern Downs as a Refugee Welcome Zone.

The Southern Downs Regional Council approved this initiative after a presentation by SDRAMN members. It becomes the 169th Australian local government to officially welcome refugees.

This brings our region in line with Toowoomba, not only Australia’s biggest inland city (not in the desert, Scotty), but also home to a large number of refugees and migrants. The most commonly spoken language in Toowoomba other than English is Tagalog.

Five years have passed since the last Census established that just over one in four Australians were born somewhere else (26%), a 1% increase on the 2011 Census. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics has found, Australia is now a  diverse society.

More than 300 languages are spoken in our homes; we have over 100 religions and more than 300 different ancestries, This wide variety of backgrounds, together with the many cultures of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, has helped to create a uniquely Australian identity. No doubt the 2021 Census, which will be held in August, will reveal how many more Australians were born somewhere else. As it is, about half of us were born elsewhere or have parents who were born overseas.

Given the diversity of our background, it behoves us to open our hearts and minds to those fleeing religious or political persecution. The so-called Indefinite Detention Bill shows just how far we are from opening our doors to those in crisis. A <change.org> petition calling for the Tamil children to be brought back to Biloela (where townsfolk support them), gathered more than 500,000 signatures this week.

Meantime, The Guardian trolled through the Budget papers to find that Australia will spend almost $3.4 million a year for each of the 239 people held in offshore detention. As one wag on Twitter commented (and it’s not a bad idea), we’d be better off giving them all $1 million each and suggesting they move to the US (or NZ) as business migrants

So yes, Kon, it would be great if we didn’t need an ASRC anymore. But I’m not holding my breath.

 

 

Australia’s flawed human rights record

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Christmas Island immigration detention centre – cc wikimedia

There’s not too much coincidence about the timing of China’s social media campaign, accusing Australia of human rights abuses.

The photo-shopped meme which has outraged all sides of the Australian government targets alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Timely, given that next Thursday (the 10th), is International Human Rights Day.

China, of course, is campaigning from a blood-stained corner, its long record of human rights abuses and accusations thereof, lurking in the shadows. I mention the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the persecution of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities and so-called ‘re-education’ camps as examples of China’s human rights transgressions. The scary website below depicts the world’s human rights record in a series of charts.

The United Nations lists the main tenets of human rights as:

  • the right to life and liberty;
  • freedom from slavery and torture;
  • freedom of opinion and expressionand the right to work and education;

Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.

The Cato Institute ranks countries for their adherence to human rights principles. It will surprise no-one this side of the Tasman that New Zealand is at No 1. However, Australia has a strong human rights records, ranked, in 2018, as fourth in the world behind New Zealand, Switzerland and Hong Kong (the latter has no doubt dropped a few rankings since then).

An important indicator of a country’s attitude to human rights is its intake of refugees. New Zealand lifted its annual refugee quota from 750 (unchanged since the 1950s) to 1,000 then in July this year to 1,500. Australia ranks well in the number of refugees accepted – over 12,700 in 2018 (although Canada, with a population of 10million more than Australia accepted more than double that number).

But the issue that won’t go away is Australia’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers and refugees who have arrived by boat. Australia’s long-held position (set by John Howard in 2012 and upheld by Kevin Rudd), is that no-one who has arrived here by boat will ever be resettled in Australia. The Morrison government would like to set its policy in legislative stone. The Labor Opposition, in weakly supporting this egregious position, said it would only do so if refugees in detention were able to re-settle in New Zealand.

The global scale of the refugee problem understandably allows Australia to sink below the footlights. Our numbers are comparatively tiny, so they warrant little attention on the global stage.

While Australia has re-settled a comparatively high number of refugees, its human rights record is blighted by an offshore detention regime that the International Criminal Court described as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” and “unlawful under international law”. But as The Guardian reported, Independent MP Andrew Wilkie’s campaign to bring Australia to justice on this issue fell short.

The office of the ICC prosecutor said that while the imprisonment of refugees and asylum seekers formed the basis of a crime against humanity, the violations did not rise to the level to warrant further investigation.

The one glaring example which fits all of those criticisms and more is the incarceration of a family of five Sri Lankan refugees.

They are the ‘Bilo’ family, adopted by people in Biloela in 2014, where they lived until forcibly removed by immigration officers in 2018. They have been held in the detention facility at Christmas Island since August 2019. They are reportedly the only detainees on the island. Various articles on this subject have speculated that this is costing between $20m and $40m a year.

This timeline by MP Josh Burns charts this sad tale over the past 20 years.

Meanwhile, 1,534 people are being held in Australian-controlled detention centres. Of these, 615 refugees are in Alternative Places of Detention (APOD) or Immigration Transit Accommodation (ITA). Some have been there a long, long time.

The latest Office of Home Affairs report shows that 502 people had been held for between 92 and 365 days. Another 743 have been held longer than a year and 229 held for longer than two years.

From these damning statistics, refugee support groups derive social media hashtags like #7yearstoolong. The latter is a reference to the 99 people the department admit have been in (domestic) detention for ‘more than 1825 days’ (6.5% of the total).

Since January this year, the Office of Home Affairs has been publishing key statistics on the ‘transitory’ refugee population in Nauru and PNG. As of October 31, there were 146 people held on Nauru and 145 in Papua New Guinea (total 291). The department resettled 212 people in 2020.

These statistics show that an unacceptable number of people have had their lives put on hold, indefinitely.

NZ’s leader Jacinda Ardern has tried to show Australia the proper path for fair treatment of refugees. A year ago, Ms Ardern told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison New Zealand was open to accepting refugees from Nauru and PNG. Along the way, the country offered safe haven to the distinguished writer and refugee martyr, Behrouz Boochani.

You will see a lot of campaigns surface and re-surface next week as refugee support groups roll out their collection of hashtags and petitions. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) has started a campaign to lobby the Australian Government to enshrine a charter of human rights.

As RAR notes, “The ACT, Victoria and Queensland all have Human Rights Charters which cover their States. But because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not Australian law, the Australian Government is not bound by it.”

The RAR has produced a discussion paper for interested groups to lobby for what is only fair and right.

To personalise the issue, just imagine for a minute that there has been a bloody coup in Australia and the White Australia junta has decreed that 7.25 million people born somewhere else must go back to their country of origin. Already there is a vast convoy heading for the backroads of Queensland and NSW, fleeing persecution. As you’d expect, they do so with dogged Aussie determination, flying their Aussie flags, with an attitude best summed up in the words of Darryl Kerrigan in the iconic Aussie film, The Castle: “Tell them they’re dreamin”).

So, dear reader, your mission on next week’s International Human Rights Day (December 10), should you choose to accept it, is to spend a few hours digesting these numbers. If we accept the position that a forcibly removed refugee is the subject of human rights abuses, these statistics from the UNHCR from December 2019 underline the magnitude of the global problem. At that time there were 79.5 million forcibly displaced people, 45.7m of whom were displaced internally. The UNHCR counted 26 million as refugees under its mandate. Comparatively few find a safe haven. Only 100,400 were resettled in other countries in 2019, with 5.4m returned to their country of origin.

And yet we (the Australian Government and others), campaigned strongly to free one of our own citizens being held in detention in Iran.

Given the Season, I’m ending on a lighter note. A reader submitted this, in response to my whimsical piece on ‘shoe trees’.

Speaking of readers, thanks to those who have responded so warmly to my modest subscriber request. Keep those cards and letters coming. Also, if you feel so moved, buy a Christmas card from RAR and send it to your local MP. #hometobilo

Asylum seekers and the seven-year itch

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Asylum seekers and refugee rally – photo by John Englart flickr.com

If Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton ever had a lapse in judgement, it would be thinking that asylum seekers and their supporters have given up. Over a seven-year span, Mr Dutton and his predecessors have exposed asylum seekers to a punitive system (which is outside the UN Convention on Refugees).

As you may hear this weekend, Sunday marks seven years of detention for those who were sent to centres on Manus Island and Nauru. At the time, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that people arriving by boat to seek asylum would be processed offshore and never be allowed to resettle in Australia. #7yearstoolong

Four administrations later (Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison), the unconscionable treatment of people seeking refuge from persecution, torture and ethnic cleansing in their homelands has barely changed.

The now-famous author Behrooz Bouchani chronicled his torturous life on Manus Island in the award-winning book, ‘No friend but the Mountain’. in 2019, Australians became more aware of the effects of despair and mental health issues suffered by asylum seekers in our offshore detention centres. There was a seemingly effective campaign to Get the Kids Off Nauru. All the while, the Australian government continued to be responsible for those much-criticised centres (outsourcing the task to private security firms). Along the way, the government re-opened, closed and then re-opened again the Christmas Island detention centre, Christmas Island being an Australian protectorate.

During the past seven years, the numbers of people who have started or joined an existing asylum seeker support group have grown, to include such organisations as Rural Australians for Refugees.

This national movement started with a campaign by the good folk of Biloela, who took in a Sri Lankan family. You’d know about this saga, where authorities came in the early hours and removed the couple and their two children, taking them into detention. Over time, the family of four ended up being the only detainees in the Christmas Island Detention Centre, at a reported cost to the taxpayer of $27 million a year.

Closer to home, a Kangaroo Point motel has become the focus of the protest movement which wants to see an end to our egregious treatment of people whose only possible mistake was to pay a people smuggler to bring them to Australia – irregular, but not illegal.

Asylum seeker supporters fought long and hard to challenge the government to bring unwell detainees from offshore detention centres. This resulted in a new Act which forced the government’s hand. Even though people needing medical attention were brought to Australia, it seems that few of those brought here under the Medevac Bill have been released from detention. A lot of those people ended up at a motel in the Brisbane inner city suburb of Kangaroo Point.

As Hannah Ryan wrote in The Guardian last month , the Australian government engaged private guards and assigned them to the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel & Apartments, describing it as an “alternative place of detention”. Here, 120 people who had been detained on Manus Island or Nauru and were sent to Australia for medical treatment, are being kept indefinitely. They are not allowed to leave, as Ryan says “not even to visit the KFC across the road”.

Since COVID-19 raised its head in March, they are not allowed visitors either. Over the year or so this has been going on, some detainees took to holding up placards from the motel balconies, when allowed out for fresh air. Support networks got wind of this and a series of rallies began, not without some risks. At a rally on June 29, 40 protesters were arrested for staging a sit-in after the two-hour permit had expired.

Public protests aside, Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton is pressing on with a draft Act designed to crack down on drug dealing and the development of terrorist cells. The draft Act would make it illegal for people in detention to have a mobile phone.

Just think about that for a minute, while realising how crucial your mobile phone has been to you through the COVID-19 lockdown.

Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow made a submission to a Parliamentary committee, saying that the bill should not proceed. Writing in the Canberra Times, Santow said:

“The Commission recommends that risks be considered on a case-by-case basis. If a particular person in detention has used their phone to commit illegal activity or endanger the security of Australia, this would be a reason to prohibit them from having a phone. But it would not justify a ban that applies to other people who haven’t been shown to be a risk.” 

The government said when introducing this Bill that it did not plan to introduce a blanket ban on mobile phones, rather to address risks to health, safety, and security.

Those protesting on Sunday have made it clear what they want – an end to indefinite detention. As stated in Green Left Weekly (where you will find a list of rallies and gatherings and their locations): “Free the refugees and bring those still on Manus Island and Nauru to Australia now.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences have pushed this issue onto the media back-burner. The recent closure of some media outlets and the migration of others to online only has further diluted the message.

So emerged the hashtag #7yearstoolong on social media as volunteer groups try to raise awareness of institutionalised inaction.

While the government continues to take a hard line stance, a survey last year showed that attitudes towards refugees are hardening. Part of a global study on attitudes, it shows that 44% of Australians think borders should be closed, up 5% on the 2017 survey.

Globally, 54% of people doubted whether refugees coming into their country were really genuine and not arriving just for economic reasons. Australians’ doubts about people’s motives rated lower, at 49%. About 42% of Australians agree that refugees successfully integrate (a drop of three points since 2017).

Refugee Council of Australia statistics show that at March 31, 2020, there were 1,373 people held in onshore detention centres. Apart from any other consideration, it is costing Australia an estimated $137.34 million a year to keep refugees in domestic detention, based on figures provided by the Kaldor Centre.

And, did you know that 64,000 foreigners have overstayed their Australian work or tourist visas, with up to 12,000 believed to have been here for 20 years or more?

All of the above, I contend, should be seen in the context of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s plan to allow Hong Kong Chinese safe haven in Australia. (Ed: “Probably because they would be well off financially”

Oh, that’s right, we are still in thrall of the ultimate strong leader (John Howard), who said in 2001 his government had an irrevocable view on border protection: “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

Every leader from Kevin Rudd onwards has toed the same Sovereign Borders line. If you are expecting anything different from the Leader of the Opposition, should he ever win an election, do not hold your breath.

Further reading: This Australian Government policy paper sets out the facts and dispels myths about asylum seekers and refugees.

We are travelling in remote western Queensland, so expect one from the archives next Friday.

*Tom Hanks’ companion in Castaway was a volleyball, not a football as I wrote last week (and the Hug Patrol photo was from 2012, not 2019).