Tag: 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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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).

 

 

About Nauru your petitioner humbly prays

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Refugee child ‘Roze’ on Nauru, provided by World Vision Australia

I could count on the toes of my feet the number of petitions I have signed in this life, but I could not refuse the Kids off Nauru campaign. More than 100 human rights groups, churches, charities and organisations, including World Vision, Amnesty International and the Australian Lawyers Alliance are behind Kids off Nauru.

The e-petition to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten leaves no room for negotiation. Children in detention on Nauru, about 40 of who were born on the island, have witnessed lip stitching, self-immolation and other suicide attempts. Many have developed traumatic withdrawal syndrome, characterised by resigning from all activities that support a normal life. The Australian Medical Association has called for immediate action to assure the health and wellbeing of those on Nauru.

As one of the NGOs involved in the campaign, Plan International says, “This can’t continue, not on our watch”.

“We’ve seen report after report of children who are in such despair, for whom life in detention is so miserable, that they have withdrawn socially, stopped eating and even attempted suicide,” Plan International said. “In August a 12-year-old girl tried to set herself on fire.”

The petitioners want all 120* children and their families off Nauru by November 20, 2018. The date is not random – it is Universal Children’s Day.

You all know this shameful story, where the Australian Government re-invented an offshore processing solution for people who’d mostly arrived without permission by boat, seeking refuge in the big open country they had heard was egalitarian and tolerant.

Nauru, a small island north-east of PNG and the Solomon Islands, was once known for extracting and selling phosphate for fertiliser. The resource is exhausted, so the Nauruan government could hardly refuse the lucrative offer from the Australian Government.

It’s difficult to get an accurate count* of children on Nauru, quoted variously as between 106 and 126. Meanwhile the official number from the Australian Government is 22. But wait, the fine print refers only to children in the Nauru Regional Processing Centre (Australia’s responsibility). Other refugee children are accommodated in centres run by the Nauruan Government. The latter is not at all transparent about the welfare of refugee children and their parents. A New Zealand TV reporter was detained briefly when reporting from the Pacific Forum because she went ‘off reservation’ to talk to refugees “without going through proper channels”.

I’d go and see for myself but they want $8,000 for a journalist visa.

Anglican Bishop Phillip Huggins wrote to then Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton seeking clarification of numbers published on the department’s website.

The (eventual) reply from Mr Dutton and Huggins’s interpretation of the answers is worth reading to get a perspective.

Bishop Huggins concluded that the harsh reality is that there were (in August 2018), 120 refugee children in Nauru (some have been resettled in the last month). Some are being assessed for resettlement in America; some may eventually be resettled in New Zealand.

Let’s ask the obvious question: New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern and her coalition partner Winston Peters have offered to take up to 150 refugees from Nauru. Former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull rejected the offer to resettle the Nauru refugees, making the woolly argument that this would only make New Zealand attractive to people smugglers. It may surprise readers to know that the New Zealand offer to resettle refugees goes back to the administration of former PM John Key (2008-2016).

The transfer of asylum seekers to offshore processing centres in the Pacific was first introduced by the Howard (Coalition) Government in 2001.Here’s an edited summary of what followed.

Seven months after Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister in 2008, the last remaining asylum seekers on Nauru were transferred to Australia, ending the Howard Government’s controversial ‘Pacific Solution’.

In July 2010, then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard revealed that the Government had begun having discussions about establishing a regional processing centre for the purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the region. Importantly, only 25 asylum seekers had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum in the 2007–08 financial year. By the time Gillard made her announcement in July 2010, more than 5,000 people had come by boat to Australia to seek asylum.

Gillard acknowledged that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia was ‘very, very minor’ but she identified a number of reasons why the processing of asylum seekers in other countries was considered necessary, including:

  • to remove the financial incentive for the people smugglers to send boats to Australia;
  • to ensure that those arriving by boat do not get an unfair advantage over others;
  • to prevent people embarking on a voyage across dangerous seas with the ever present risk of death;
  • to prevent overcrowding in detention facilities in Australia.

Though it took another two years to secure arrangements, people began to be transferred to Nauru and PNG in the last quarter of 2012.

Two months before the 2013 federal election amidst growing support for the Opposition’s tougher border protection policies, newly appointed Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that Australia had entered into a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with PNG. Under the arrangement, all (not just some) asylum seekers who arrived by boat would be transferred to PNG for processing and settlement in PNG and in any other participating regional State. Mr Rudd subsequently made a similar arrangement with Nauru.

Mr Rudd now says this was meant to be a temporary arrangement.

So he we are with a humanitarian crisis on our back door and as per usual, those clinging to slender majorities do not want to make brave, decent decisions which might cost them their seat at the next election.

Petitions are a form of protest known to exert moral authority; that is, they have no legal force. But the sheer weight of numbers can force social change. One example was the millions of signatures on a petition calling for the release of Nelson Mandela.

Before e-petitions and ‘clicktivism’ became the norm, government clerks charged with the receipt and storage of paper petitions had a job for life.

The Australian government receives on average 120 petitions a year, a large proportion of which are e-petitions. Activist group, change.org, (https://www.change.org), the biggest generator of e-petitions, has 50 million subscribers world-wide.

Nigel Gladstone, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, says 32,728 Australian petitions were started on the change.org website since 2014. More than 3.5 million people signed their name to support campaigns such as reduced parking fees at NSW hospitals and marriage equality.

Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Sydney, Ariadne Vromen and Professor Darren Halpin of ANU collected data from change.org to study online petitions over a four-year period.

“This form of political engagement is both mainstream and important,” Professor Vromen told the SMH. “In Australia Get-up were really the pioneers of using online petitions and that was a bit of a shock to the system, but politicians quickly became cynical.

“Change.org is different because citizens can start their own thing, so it is different to an advocacy group starting something.”

So will the advocacy groups behind Kids off Nauru succeed in their mission to force the government to act by November 20? Let’s revisit this in a couple of months’ time.

#kidsoffnauru

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A few myths about refugees

Sri Lankan and Tamil refugees
Sri Lankan and Tamil Refugees image by climatalk.in https://flic.kr/p/eEQYBg

My conscience would be burdened if anyone went to the polls on July 2 believing some of the persistent myths and misunderstandings about asylum seekers and refugees. First, let’s set out a few facts in the interests of perspective:

  • Asylum seekers are people seeking international protection but whose claims for refugee status have not yet been determined;
  • Australia is the only nation with a policy of indefinite mandatory detention for people it has identified as illegal or irregular arrivals. This policy was introduced by then Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1992 (it had bipartisan support);
  • Refugees receive the same social security benefits as permanent residents, although they are exempt from the standard social security waiting period that applies to migrants;

These facts sit uneasily amidst the seriously heated debate between refugee advocacy groups and supporters of groups like Rise Up Australia, the Australian Liberty Alliance and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Many Australians believe (and resent) the story perpetuated by hoax emails that refugees receive more Social Security payments than permanent residents. You might also hear that refugees are given (free) houses, cars and big screen TVs, the latter one of the first things spotted on A Current Affair’s expose on Nauru. (Gasp. They have microwaves too).

There is also a persistent myth perpetuated by talkback radio jocks and right-wing commentators that our shoreline (all 25,670 kilometres of it), will be over-run if the current border protection policy does not remain in place.

Over-stayers outnumber boat people

In Australia, visa over-stayers greatly outnumber asylum seekers. According to an Immigration Department report, Migration Trends 2012-2013, 44,800 visitors and 10,720 students overstayed their visit, led by people from China (7,690), Malaysia (6,420), the US (5,220) and the UK (3,780).

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s statistical report for April 30, 2016 says there were 1,695 people in immigration detention facilities, including 1,509 in immigration detention on the mainland and 186 in immigration detention on Christmas Island. However, the report also states that there were 469 people, including 56 women and 50 children, at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre and 898 men at the Manus Island RPC. So in sum, the total numbers of people in detention (including on and off shore) at the behest of the Federal Government is 3,062.

Of the 1,695 people in detention on the mainland, 60% (1,025) arrived in Australia lawfully but were subsequently taken into immigration detention either for over staying or breaching their visa conditions. 548, or fewer than 40%, were ‘Irregular Maritime Arrivals’ (some terminology refers to these as ‘Illegals’).

On face value, Labor’s asylum seeker and refugee policies are not that far removed from those of the LNP.  Both remain committed to offshore processing, regional settlement and stopping people smuggling by turning boats away. However, Labor has a plan to provide $450 million over three years to support the UN’s refugee agency. Labor will abolish temporary protection visas, re-instate access to the Refugee Review Tribunal and abolish the Independent Assessment Authority.  Labor states it will also reinstate a statutory requirement for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to report on how many claims were processed within 90 days of a completed application being received. This ‘90 day rule’ was removed by the Abbott Government last year.

Labor also wants to increase Australia’s annual humanitarian intake from the current 13,750 to 27,000 per annum by 2025. The Australian Greens want to ramp this number up to 50,000, while the LNP aims to increase it to 18,000 ‘within a couple of years’.

In September 2015 the Abbott Government responded to the Middle East humanitarian crisis by announcing that Australia would take an additional 12,000 refugees fleeing Syria and Iraq.

In February this year, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Canada’s exceptional response to Syrian refugees, resettling 20,490 in just three months. Labor called on Immigration Minister Peter Dutton to explain why, as revealed in a Senate Estimates hearing, that Australia had resettled only 26 Syrian refugees since the emergency intake was announced. A spokesman for Mr Dutton said the government was conducting rigorous security and other checks that could not be rushed.

Social Services Minister Christian Porter has since told the ABC (on April 6), that 187 refugees had now been resettled in Australia and an additional 1,600 visas had been issued overseas. Meanwhile, Canada’s intake of refugees from Syria topped 26,000.

The indefatigable Refugee Action Collective is staging one last peak hour vigil next Thursday outside Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s office on Gympie Road Strathpine. The aim is to bring the Minister to account and remind people of comments made on Sky News when he criticised Labor and Greens’ proposals to lift the intake to 27,000 or 50,000 respectively.

“For many people, they won’t be numerate or literate in their own language let alone English,” he told Sky News.

“These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that.”

Greens lead refugees reform agenda

The Australian Greens is the only political party with a truly reformist answer to the asylum seeker/refugee question. The Greens say it is a better (economic) proposition to allow refugees to live in the community. The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates the average cost of allowing someone to live in the general community at $35,000, compared to $225,000 on Manus Island or Nauru.

The Greens’ plan to close down offshore detention on Manus Island and Nauru and to close ‘the worst’ Australian detention centres on the mainland and on Christmas Island. They would establish 30-day time limits on detention in Australia, with ‘periodic judicial review’ of any detention thereafter.

A few of the minor parties are less forgiving: The Rise Up Party says it would ‘implement legislation that will send all illegal asylum seekers back to where they came from’.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has a policy of ‘zero net immigration’. By that is meant, if a migrant goes home, you let another one in. Sustainable Australia also has a ‘low immigration’ policy.

The Australian Liberty Alliance is running candidates in the Upper and Lower houses for the first time on a platform which includes stopping the ‘Islamisation of Australia’. You can read about the ALA here and watch their 15-second advertisement which has been banned from television. *

All you need is love (ra-ta-ta-ta-tah)

Sigh. It’s Refugee Week, did you know? I often wonder how this country lost its multicultural way after we welcomed and resettled 57,700 Vietnamese refugees between 1975 and 1982. Of these, only 2,100 or so were unauthorised arrivals by boat, although many more set out by sea and never made it to shore. The 1971 Census revealed there were just 700 Vietnamese in Australia.

Fifteen years later it was 80,000 and at the 2011 Census, the numbers of Vietnamese-born living in Australia rose to 185,039. Despite language barriers and religious differences (the main religion is Mahayana Buddhism), these new migrants were widely accepted.

Imagine an Australia without Luke Nguyen (chef and TV presenter), Anh Do (comedian), Nam Le (author), Caroline Tran (Triple J announcer), Hieu Van Le, (Lieutenant Governor of South Australia) or Vincent Long Van Nguyen (Parramatta’s Catholic Archbishop).

The Beatles were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War, or rather, western involvement in it. At the peak of the conflict, John Lennon wrote a famous song, which in Vietnam is known as Tất cả những gì bạn cần có là tình yêu.

*policy points drawn from the websites of political parties

 

 

 

 

Deeper in debt

books-and-window resized
Freeimages.com/Johanna Llungblom

You’d think that after 42 years’ experience handling credit cards Australians would have wised up to over-using their high interest card/s and getting into debt.

Research by comparison website finder.com.au shows that Aussies are up to their eyebrows in credit card debt.

Finder’s analysis of Reserve Bank of Australia data shows that we have $18 billion more credit card debt than we did a decade ago and we have 16.3 million credit card accounts – equivalent to 90% of the adult population.

Bessie Hassan, finder.com.au’s Consumer Advocate, says Australians amassed $32 billion in credit card debt by December 31, 2015. Crikey, that makes my $188 balance payable by March 31 look kind of paltry.

Notwithstanding, one of my better later-life decisions was to keep my credit card with its modest limit, as it allows me to pay for concert tickets, annual subscriptions, overseas airfares and travel and thus defer payments to hopefully co-ordinate with monthly pay days.   But even at that rate, it is alarming how quickly one comes to owe $1,450 and there’s only $1,369 in the bank account.  And as we all know, if you don’t pay the balance off by the due date, you incur interest as high as 23%. I’m aware that folks who are living beyond their means commonly go card-shopping and pay off one balance by incurring a debt on the second card.

Enter Bankcard, 1974

The great expansion in borrowing goes back to 1974 with the introduction of Bankcard; long before many of you who are having panic attacks right now were even born. Bankcard was the first credit card, but within 18 months it was broadly accepted, with 1.054 million users and 49,000 merchants on board.

Of course my parents’ generation were aghast, they of the ‘never a borrower or a lender be’ class. They saved up for stuff, or put it on lay-by. What – you’ve never heard of lay-by? Let’s say you are in (leading department store), when a fabulous crystal chandelier catches your eye.

You go to the lay-by counter and enter into what the ACCC defines as an agreement to pay for the goods in at least two instalments. You do not receive the goods until the full price has been paid.

The beauty of lay-by is that you get a cooling off period, so if you get home and show the wife pictures of the fabulous chandelier on your IPhone and she spits the dummy, you can cancel the lay-by agreement and the business will refund your deposit and all other amounts (except for the termination fee).

The Australian Payments Clearing Association (APCA) has an intriguing timeline which shows the development of finance and credit in this country. Notable is the emergence of international credit cards in the 1980s (visa, MasterCard) which ushered in a new era of competition. Along with nifty initiatives like awarding frequent flyer points on credit card use, rival credit card providers enticed people away with tempting (introductory) low or no-interest periods. In those days hardly anyone charged annual fees, so some people used their cards to buy groceries.

Hassan says the data shows that 90% of people aged 18 and over have one credit card (on average), an increase of 79% from 2004. In warning that the market appears to be reaching saturation level, Hassan says that while a credit card is a convenient, short-term way to borrow money, you can quickly reach dangerous levels of debt.

Someone is spending my share

Total balances on credit cards hit $52 billion at December 31. The total balance per card is currently $3,192, $1,971 of which is accruing interest.”

There are a range of comparison websites like where you can find a snapshot of credit card provider terms. Consider this a moving target, but a quick perusal of Infochoice showed interest charges ranging from 10.99% to 23.50%. Most providers charge an annual fee ranging from $30 to $399. Virtually all offer an interest-free period of 55 days.

Taking the Extreme case, if your $20,000 limit card is ‘maxed out’ and you are paying 15% interest and an annual fee of $165 (due tomorrow), and you’ve just lost your job, it could be time to sit down with your credit card provider and come to an arrangement.

“Look, I can give you $10 a week, every week. Or I can declare myself bankrupt. Your choice.”

There’s a fair chance after a year or so Mr Extreme’s circumstances will have improved and he can afford to pay back the minimum on a debt which over a year has become much larger, but he’s not bankrupt.  He may even have sought advice from a personal finance counsellor.

Bessie Hassan lists a few things credit card users can do if they think their card usage is getting out of control:

  • Don’t get into the trap of using it as a cash advance when income runs low;
  • Don’t accept a higher credit limit just because a lender offers it to you;
  • Clean up your credit card accounts by paying more than the minimum monthly payment, reducing credit limits and practise responsible spending;
  • Transfer all your debt to a new provider (one offering 0% interest for a limited time) and only pay interest on new card purchases.

Changes to consumer credit laws in March 2014 means it does not take much to get a black mark on your credit rating. Before, it would take a string of missed payments before a default notice appeared on your credit report. Now, a payment missed by 14 days can trigger a default. As anyone who’s been oversea on holidays and thought the payment could wait now realises, it can’t wait.

According to the Australian Retail Credit Association, 59% of Australian consumers do not know credit reporting works and are not aware of these changes.

But what about the third-world?

Ah, but this what we middle-class Aussies call a “first-world problem”. Time for a seemingly unrelated segue. You’ll hear a lot this weekend about asylum seekers being detained offshore at the behest of the government we elected (unhappily, a position supported to by the Federal Opposition).

Asylum seeker and refugee advocacy groups will be holding rallies and marches on Palm Sunday, once again trying to make this a major election issue.

So even if your housekeeping has revealed it will take until Easter next year to pay off those three credit cards that seemed so alluring at the time, what’s one more book, bought new and donated to those poor buggers detained without charge on Manus Island, Nauru, Christmas Island or in mainland detention centres?

As Amnesty International found, there is an insatiable appetite for multi-lingual dictionaries in Australia’s detention centres. Donors have so far given Amnesty 4,200 dictionaries in Farsi, Tamil, Vietnamese and other languages. Each dictionary will be hand-delivered or individually mailed to someone who’s asked for one, along with a message from the donor.

However tempting it might be to buy the Arabic translation of Noam Chomsky’s World Orders – Old and New (yes, there is such a thing), a Hindi dictionary or a set of Beatrix Potter books for the little detainees would be a better choice. Get your card out and start looking at ways to help. #LetThemStay.

Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre; Amnesty International.