A young Iranian detained on Manus Island has won a prestigious international award for his cartoons reflecting life there. Our government should allow this young man to fly to the US to accept his award.
Successive Australian governments have dehumanised refugees and kept Australians in the dark about what really goes on in the offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island.
The heightened scrutiny of Australia’s immigration policies in recent weeks has shone a light on the long-term problems of indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru.
It has taken more than three months for the Australian and PNG governments to jointly announce the Manus Island detention centre will close. But the detainees’ fate is now even more uncertain.
An angry Malcolm Turnbull has asked CEDA for a ‘please explain’ and the Australian Federal Police for a full incident report about the protest over Nauru and Manus Island.
Reports of abuse on Nauru should provide a flashpoint for the Turnbull government to reassess its asylum-seeker policies before more serious harm is inflicted on Australia’s international standing.
The Sunday Telegraph reported at the weekend that Malcolm Turnbull had visited only seven electorates since the July 2 poll, and contrasted his “hermit-style approach” with Bill Shorten’s “never-ending…
Leaked incident reports from the Nauru detention centre affirm what has been known for a long time: detention is no place for children, and we need alternatives to offshore processing.
The key challenge for the returned Turnbull government is to formulate policies that present Australia as a good global citizen willing to take its fair share of refugees.
History suggests that resettling refugees on Nauru and Manus Island in Australia and New Zealand will not enliven people smuggling between Indonesia and Christmas Island.
Both major parties support offshore processing and boat turnbacks. But public opinion on asylum seekers is not so clear-cut. And nor are the policy alternatives.
If a new High Court claim against Australia’s offshore detention regime succeeds, it will entirely undermine Australia’s inhumane practices in relation to “those who come across the seas”.
It is hard to credit that two asylum seekers in Nauru could set themselves alight on Australia’s watch and the stories receive, compared to much else, so little attention in our hyper media cycle. One…
Geography matters. Whether countries are rich or poor or safe or vulnerable still has more to do with physical geography than we usually acknowledge. Even in age that is routinely described as “global…