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The Future for Refugees in Rural Australia

future-refugees-regional — 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

ukraine-refugees-compassion — 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

christmas-afghanistan-burqa — 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.

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Australia’s refugee shame

australia-refugee-shame — 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 20^th 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 169^th 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

australia-human-rights — 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 10^th), 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

asylum-seekers-seven-years — 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).

Non-viral news stories you may have missed

news-viral-fuel — Breaking news – some regional fuel suppliers accused of profiteering (not this one), charging $1.20 or more for a litre of unleaded petrol.

Even when the world is assailed by an invisible foe – a global pandemic – the ordinary news cycle continues. Not that you’d know it, with electronic and print media obsessed 24/7 with the virus and its long-term effect on the global economy. (That is, the economy has been seriously affected – not ‘impacted’, please- the latter referring to something jammed together, e.g. wisdom teeth. SWAG(SheWhoAddsGrammaticalNotes))

The Guardian Weekly has taken to presenting 15-20 news briefs badged “non-covid-19 news”. Unavoidably, about a third of these stories somehow manage to touch on the virus that stopped the world in its tracks. But at least they are trying to maintain perspective.

The mainstream media has not so much ignored standout news stories as relegated them well beneath the repetitive coverage of COVID-19.

For example, did you know that Australia’s Easter road toll was greatly reduced in 2020 compared with the four-day public holiday in 2019? Nationally, six people died on Australian roads, compared with 19 on Easter weekend 2019. The Northern Territory usually has the worst Easter road toll per capita, but this year joined Victoria and the ACT in recording zero deaths.

Over the Tasman, New Zealand reported zero deaths on the roads, compared with four last Easter and a record 17 in Easter 1990. That’s hardly surprising, given that New Zealand has been on Level Four lockdown.

Before the virus, stories about refugees and asylum seekers often led the news, or if not the news as we know it, definitely on social media.

The one news story that penetrated the mainstream news was the latest chapter in the three-year ordeal of a Tamil family seeking a safe haven in Biloela.

The family of four was living in ‘Bilo’ quite happily until March 2018, when the Department of Immigration removed them to detention in Melbourne and subsequently to Christmas Island. There have been numerous (failed) legal challenges to the Department of Home Affairs’ attempts to deport the family. The case came to public attention again last Friday when a last minute Federal Court injunction literally stopped the deportation flight on the tarmac at Darwin. The ABC reports the family will remain in Australia (at a Darwin hotel) until at least today. The Department of Home Affairs has repeatedly said the family does not meet Australia’s protection obligations. It is understood their visas expired in early 2018.

If anything positive came from COVID-19, it delivered a temporary reprieve for the planet, dramatically reducing traffic pollution in major cities.

The Guardian commissioned new data that estimates the global industrial shutdown will cut carbon emissions by 5%. Yes, global carbon emissions from the fossil fuel industry could fall by 2.5 billion tonnes in 2020. That is the biggest drop on record.

Activist groups resisting the spread of coal seam gas and/or coal development in rural Australia have put their direct-action campaigns on hold, instead relying on social media for exposure.

The ‘Stop Adani’ campaign, which aims to thwart development of a major coal mine in Australia by an Indian company, claimed a ‘win’ this week.

Social media posts said engineering group FKG had pulled out of the second stage of the crucial rail link being built between the Carmichael mine and the Abbott Point export terminal. Stop Adani’s main thrust now is to put pressure on contracting companies to distance themselves from the controversial project. The next critical date is May 21, when insurance broker Marsh is set to decide on providing essential insurance coverage to Adani. Toowoomba-based FKG Group declined to comment on the Facebook posts.

Adani Australia said on Tuesday it was awarding the $220 million rail contract to Martinus Group. Adani Mining CEO Lukas Dow said anti-coal activists had failed to stop the project going ahead. “Their recent claims that contractors have pulled out of our project are false and we remain on track to create more than 1,500 direct jobs during the construction.”

Meanwhile, Arrow Energy’s 50/50 owners Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina announced a financial commitment to the first stage of a $2 billion coal seam gas (CSG) project in the Surat Basin. Queensland Premier Anastacia Palaszczuk predictably enough said positive things about the 1,000 jobs this project would create, describing it as “a milestone in Queensland’s economic recovery from covid-19”.

International news stories which did not receive the sort of coverage they did a year ago included the first anniversary of the Notre Dame Cathedral fire.

The anniversary was commemorated on April 15, signalled by a lone bell tolling in locked down central Paris. Despite the chaotic state of the ruined cathedral and COVID-19 restrictions, a mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday and livestreamed to Catholics world-wide.

Work has been halted on the $1 billion cathedral restoration (funds pledged by 340,000 companies and individuals), not only because of COVID-19 but also because of lead contamination.

Also largely missing from the media radar was the first anniversary on March 15 of the Christchurch mosque attacks. Ten days later, the lone gunman charged with killing 51people and injuring more than 40 changed his plea to guilty. The plea saves relatives of those killed and injured from re-living the event through what would have been an international showcase trial.

Unless you subscribe to John Menadue’s blog collective Pearls and Irritations, you probably did not read Judith White’s take on the gutting of the Australia Council’s funding. Cuts announced in early April are the last of savage cuts made in the 2016 Budget and rolled out over four years.

As White reveals, those to lose multi-year funding include the Australian Book Review (Federally-funded for six decades), the Sydney Book Review, Overland magazine and the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Small to medium creatives also affected included Melbourne’s La Mama Theatre and new music company Ensemble Offspring.

Speaking of the arts, Winton’s week-long outback film festival, usually held in June, has been postponed to September 18-26. A source said the Vision Splendid Outback Film Festival would go ahead at that time if the government changes its rules about large gatherings.

You may have started watching the latest in the outback noir series, Mystery Road on ABC TV. The original Mystery Road movie was filmed in Winton, as was the sequel, Goldstone. The latest made-for-TV series, filmed in and around Broome and the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia, has a famous cast member. Swedish actress Sofia Helin, who played homicide detective Saga Norén in the cult series, The Bridge, was one of the first lead actors to portray someone with a form of autism.

In Mystery Road, Helin plays European archaeologist Professor Sondra Elmquist, digging for Aboriginal artefacts in a remote coastal location.

Apart from watching Grey’s Anatomy, we don’t watch 7 very often, but I did catch this snippet, tucked away at the bottom of an online news feed.

Australia’s oldest man, Dexter Kruger, quietly turned 110 on Monday, being characteristically optimistic when speaking to well-wishers at a (virtual) party held in his honour.

“My life has spanned a lot of years and I have touched seven generations of the Kruger family,” he said.

“I don’t know what else (to say), but I will invite you all to my next birthday.”

FOMM Back Pages: https://bobwords.com.au/climate-extremes-polar-vortex-bushfires/

Readers guide to Friday on My Mind

Friday-on-My-MInd-Bob-Wilson — “Retired” journalist Bob Wilson with five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind. Photo by She Who Rarely Gets A Mention

A few weeks ago I promised you an overview of the past five years’ worth of Friday on My Mind missives, but the Federal election got in the way. Sorry about that. Today it’s a mostly politics-free zone.

I started this weekly column (it was supposed to be a one-off) with my theory (and not at all an original idea), about taking refugees and asylum seekers off Nauru and Manus Island and resettling them in small Australian towns.

But ‘The Pittsworth Solution’ wasn’t the first to get a run.

Other topics got in the way, like explaining why Morris dancers dance up the sun on the first of May. That was episode No 1; and not only have I written about this pagan ritual since, I have actually participated.

I write on random topics, often mixing subject material so if you have specific interests (solar energy, travel, politics, refugees, media analysis), use the search function to find stories.

We were travelling the outback in 2014 and on many occasions since, so there are many road travel adventures. In my naivety, I wrote about crossing the Nullarbor as if no-one had ever done it (or written about it) before.

Some of the outback posts were popular, including one about people dumping garbage (Kiljoy was here) and the time we met the Black Dog Ride, a gang of motorcyclists circumnavigating the continent to raise awareness about depression and suicide.

Some 264 episodes (316,884 words) later, I’m still FOMMing (the weekly missive is known among hard-core fans as FOMM).

Thanks to my elder sister who lives in New Zealand, I have five ring binders crammed with hard copies of Friday on My Mind. She does not have a computer so every two months or so I print out the latest and mail them off. I got in the habit of printing two copies so now have a filing cabinet drawer full of fat FOMM folders. (Downsizing, dear, remember the promise about de-cluttering. SWTSO (She who throws stuff out)

Those of you adept in the online arts might scoff to learn it took me a couple of years to discover I could insert a search function into the website. This is a very handy way to check if you are about to repeat yourself, which is not hard to do when you’ve been maintaining a blog for a long time. One of Australia’s longest-serving bloggers, economist John Quiggin, had one solution for this, posting at Christmas 2015:

“Here’s a Christmas post from my blog in 2004. The theme is that nothing about Christmas ever changes” (although he does go on to discuss the “war on Christmas”).

This is billed a readers’ guide to FOMM, as at last two thirds of readers receive the weekly email and have no need to visit the website other than out of curiosity or because I have linked an old (but relevant) article. Tip: Links to other articles are coloured blue.

I had occasion to update my curriculum vitae (CV) the other day and found that, yes, you can teach the old dog new tricks, as 107-year-old Swedish blogger Dagny Carlsson put it, after taking her first computer lesson at 99.

Under ‘other skills and experience’ I can now add webmaster, after designing and maintaining two WordPress websites with little outside help.

When you first visit the <bobwords.com.au> website, click on ‘Bio’ in the header. This is where I talk about myself in the third person, which, as any clinical psychologist would tell you, is not a healthy thing.

Nevertheless, here’s a line from my self-penned bio which has been quoted elsewhere. I said I’d started FOMM mainly from a sense of exasperation with the sins and omissions of the daily media.

“ As Bob (that’s me) told a fan: “not that I want to bite the hand that used to feed me, but I think intelligent readers want more than a picture of Kate Middleton’s bum.”

Amen, brothers and sisters.

My Recommended Reading section keeps evolving. The website statistics manager tells me it has had 199 visits of late, so hopefully some of you will also become fans of writers suggested there.

Some recommended blogs disappeared as they fell victim to blogging deficit syndrome. I’m not aware of anyone who keeps actual track of the world’s 500 million blogs, but it’s a fair guess at least half of them were single-use, short-term or, if they started out with ambitions of longevity, fizzled out after a year or two.

I have written a couple of pieces about blogging, including the one when I stumbled upon Dagny Carlsson and explored the wonders of Wikipedia.

In this one, I discovered how blogging in some countries can be a life-threatening activity.

I started off quietly, emailing the weekly rant to a small email list which grew and grew as people shared with their friends. Then, as the list got larger, I enlisted MailChimp, which somehow evades spam catchers and also schedules delivery if you are not going to be home on the day you would normally send the email. MailChimp also tells me how many of you actually opened the email!

FOMM is neither a blog nor a citizen journalism site as it mixes news, research and whimsy with a fair amount of (small l liberal) opinion.

I had a conversation on election day with a former colleague. We bemoaned the absence of what was once the journalist’s mantra – “tell both sides of the story”. Hard to believe there was a time not so long ago when one would never put personal opinion into a news story, or the news pages for that matter.

I regard Friday in My Mind as a newspaper column without the newspaper. Some columns provoke a torrent of emails; other times there is a lamb-like silence. If I make a mistake and SWTSO misses it too (uncommon), I am certain to find out about it from an alert reader, sometimes within minutes. The beauty of being online is you can correct it right away.

Few people post online comments, but those who do are inevitably adding something relevant to the topic. Despite the relative lack of feedback, my website statistics show a fairly consistent readership. Inexplicably, the most-read column of the past five years is this one about bipolare disorder and gout, where I found research that made the connection between one and the other.

Other popular reads were first-person accounts about adverse reactions to paralysis ticks and at least six items dealing with depression and anxiety.

Readers liked my recent take on the Christchurch tragedy and, going back a while, tributes to David Bowie and Gough Whitlam.

So if you have joined the FOMM flock in the last year or two or more recently, there’s quite a trove of documented journalism and comment to explore.

For example, if you enter ‘David Bowie’ in the search window you will be rewarded with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s celestial performance of Space Oddity.

Depending which boxes you ticked below the line on May 17, you may have to take the ‘leftie rubbish’ with a grain of salt, as a few long-term conservative readers apparently do.

We can thank Pliny the Elder for translating addito salis grano. In the modern context it means to view something with scepticism or not to interpret something literally. A good motto for Friday on My Mind, I reckon.

Refugees settling in despite funding cuts

refugees-Toowoomba-funding — Multiculturalism: Toowoomba’s Mayayali Association (Kerala province south India) participates in the city’s annual Carnival of Flowers parade. Photo by Bob Wilson.

While refugees and migrants have been welcomed into Australia’s rural communities, successive Budget cuts have made life difficult for refugee support services. Although not attracting too many headlines, a $50 million cut in the 2018-19 Budget, and another $77.9 million over four years in the 2019-20 Budget, means that organisations trying to help refugees with the transition to a new country, a new culture and a new language are left scrambling.

The Refugee Council of Australia pointed out that the Budget found $62 million extra for Operation Sovereign Borders, while spending $50 million less on refugee support services.

“The Government has savagely cut its allocation for financial support for people seeking asylum by more than 60% in just two years, from $139.8 million in 2017-18 to $52.6 million in 2019-20”.

The 2018 cuts were particularly bad for organisations like Toowoomba Refugee and Migrants Services (TRAMS), because the government also stopped funding translation services, which means TRAMS and other networks throughout Australia have to fund their own.

Over the past 15 years, more than 4,000 families have settled in Toowoomba,130 kms west of Brisbane. They came from conflict-torn homelands of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan.

TRAMS director Kate Venables told regional ABC that Federal funding was cut from $390,000 to $240,000 in late 2018, taking the organisation by surprise.

“Part of that funding now goes towards an interpreting service that was previously government funded. So really our funding was reduced to $160,000, a massive reduction for us.”

About 400 TRAMS clients are Yazadi, a persecuted religious minority from Iraq. The Yazadi follow their own religion and speak the little-known dialect of Kurdish-Kurmanji.

According to the 2016 Census, 3,657 people living in Toowoomba spoke a language other than English at home. They included Mandarin (934), Arabic (879), Tagalog (482), Dinka (474) and Afrikaans (444). Tagalog is the language of Filipino natives while Dinka is spoken by South Sudanese ethnic groups. Most of the Yazadi refugees arrived after the Census was taken.

Toowoomba’s population has more than doubled from 73,390 in 1986 to 160,799 in 2016. In a provincial city settled mainly by people of Anglo-Saxon or German descent, that is considerable growth and diversity of population. The city also has significant communities of migrants from India and the Philippines.

When we visited last September for the Carnival of Flowers, I was taken with the way the traditional street parade had become a celebration of multiculturalism and diversity. If you want to know how multicultural Toowoomba has become, the weekend we were there, more than 2,000 South Sudanese people attended a funeral for a local Anglican priest. Some of these people came from out of town, but such was the show of support they had to hire a high school hall for the service.

According to a survey of 155 newly arrived adult refugees and 59 children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who settled in suburban Brisbane, Logan and Toowoomba, those who settled in Toowoomba had the easiest time integrating and feeling a part of their local communities.

The survey by Professor Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney and Professor Carol Read, Professor, Western Sydney University, was funded by the Australian Research Council. The findings are the first to emerge from a three-year study of settlement outcomes of recently arrived refugees in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nearly all refugees surveyed in Brisbane and Logan are Christians – a consequence of the Turnbull government favouring mainly Christian refugees from Syria and Iraq. As well as settling Yazidi refugees, Toowoomba also welcomed a smaller number of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.

I recall checking out an Afghan takeaway and grocery shop in Toowoomba’s Margaret Street. We chatted to the young man behind the counter who said that while he liked Toowoomba well enough, he found it very quiet after the constant hubbub of Kabul (population 4.65 million).

One key issue related to immigrant and refugee settlement in regional and rural Australia relates to the warmth of the welcome. Collins and Read said 68% of the refugees in Queensland overall – and 81% in Toowoomba reported that it was “very easy” or “easy” to make friends in Australia. About 60% found it “very easy” or “easy” to talk to their Australian neighbours.

“When we revisit these families in 2019 and 2020, we expect the numbers will even be higher,” the survey authors said.

Syrian refugee Yousef Roumieh, a bi-cultural support worker with TRAMS, helps Yazadi refugees with day-to-day tasks, such as booking appointments and reading mail and text messages.

He learned to speak Kurdish-Kurmanji during a five-year stay in an Iraqi refugee camp.

“There is not enough funding to pay for the supports, this is a big problem,” Mr Roumieh, formerly a pharmacist from Damascus, told the ABC.

The Department of Social Services made it clear the onus was (now) on refugee support services to provide their own interpreting services. The department said the previous arrangement was ‘contrary to the intent of the Free Interpreting Service program’.

You may recall the Australian Story episode Field of Dreams in 2016, which told of the positive outcomes flowing from settling African refugees in the New South Wales border town of Mingaloo. It’s not difficult to find similar stories, particularly in rural Victoria and NSW. The Economist published a story in January about the 400 Yazadi refugees resettled in the NSW regional town of Wagga Wagga. The primary school in the town had to hire interpreters to communicate with families (a fifth of its students are refugees) and the local college is busy with parents learning English and new trades. As the article observed “Few locals seem fussed about the changes and to those fresh from war zones, ‘Wagga’ is an idyll.”

Many grassroots organisations and charities have weighed in to help refugees make the transition to new towns in Australia. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) said resettlements had occurred in Hamilton, Swan Reach, Kerang, Nhill, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Shepparton, Albury/Wodonga, Wagga, Griffith, Leeton, Armidale, Mingoola and Townsville – “to name a few”.

In the tiny Victorian town of Nhill (pop 2,184), 160 refugees from Myanmar helped boost the town’s economy by taking jobs with a local poultry farm.

Funding for refugee support services is often derived from a variety of sources. The Nhill initiative was co-funded by the Federal government, Hindmarsh Shire and the poultry farm, Luv-a-Duck.

A report published by Deloitte Access Economics and settlement agency AMES Australia said the initiative has added more than $40 million and 70 jobs to the local economy between 2010 and 2015.

At its annual conference in December, the Labor Party made a commitment to increase community-sponsored refugee programmes up to 5,000 places per year, and boost funding for regional processing and resettlement. The unequivocal promise of support is in stark contrast to the $50 million cut to refugee services by the Coalition. Coincidentally, this is the exact sum set aside for the redevelopment of the site at Botany Bay where the British explorer and his crew first set foot on Australian soil in 1770.

That’s what elections are all about, really; you vote for the party that spends (or doesn’t spend) money on things you care about.

FOMM back pages:

Errata: Last week I somewhat underestimated the cost of a political bill board, which an informed reader told me was $10,000 a month.

About Nauru your petitioner humbly prays

Nauru-refugee-children — 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