Today’s Indonesia-Australia Leaders’ Meeting - where Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd will meet with Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - takes place against a backdrop of the asylum seeker…
Throughout the morning of July 3, Australian news media were reporting that the aircraft carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales had been forced to make an unscheduled stopover in Vienna, en route from…
As prime minister Kevin Rudd prepares to visit Indonesia and meet with his Indonesian counterpart Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, he should bear in mind that the asylum seeker problem plaguing the Australian…
“People are coming here, not now as a result of persecution, but because they’re economic refugees who have paid money to people smugglers.” - Foreign minister Bob Carr, Meet the Press, June 9. There is…
In the coming days, prime minister Kevin Rudd will visit Indonesia to discuss asylum seeker policy with Indonesian officials, including Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Rudd’s visit will…
New prime minister Kevin Rudd will visit Indonesia later this week for the third Indonesia-Australia Leaders’ Meeting. Rudd will seek to exchange military - and possibly developmental - aid for Indonesian…
Seventy asylum seekers have been moved from the Manus Island immigration detention facility to Christmas Island following a long overdue decision by the Gillard government. The decision to keep families…
For a nation largely comprised of “boat people”, asylum has generated the most debate, and at times hysteria, of all immigration matters in Australia. Is this due to what multiculturalism academic Ghassan…
There is not much bipartisanship in Australian federal politics these days, but the ALP and the Coalition are in agreement on one matter: the boats must be stopped. They just don’t agree on how to do it…
Sri Lanka is at a crossroads. After the end of a long civil war, the country has an historic opportunity to draw on its strengths and riches to create a unified, prosperous and just society. But it is…
In the debate about Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Australia, one question seems to come up again and again. Why, when the bloody twenty-six-year conflict that caused so many to leave their homes has ended…
The Gillard government is facing another High Court challenge to its indefinite detention of the 55 refugees to have received adverse security assessments from ASIO. These continuing legal troubles, along…
The twists and turns of Australian immigration policy grew even more complicated yesterday with the passage of legislation in parliament to excise the mainland of Australia from the “migration zone”. The…
It is all pretty confusing. Are Sri Lankan boat arrivals – like the 66 who showed up in the port of Geraldton last month – actually refugees? Are they fleeing from a country where the police and the army…
The federal government does not say how it chooses those it sends for offshore processing. It does not explain how it chooses children to go to Manus Island. Australian doctors have told the Department…
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation and Francisca Gallardo, The Conversation
Child and refugee psychiatry experts have raised concerns over reports the government is considering sending refugee families with children to the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre, a remote ex-army…
27 men detained in Broadmeadows’ Melbourne Immigration Transit Centre (MITA) ended their hunger strike on Wednesday evening. This group of 25 Tamils and two Burmese Rohingyas had gone ten days without…
After relying on immigration policies taken from the copy book of John Howard, the Liberal party has turned to defence technology for its latest policy innovation involving drones detecting boats carrying…
Crossing borders is far more dangerous for some. The facts are that women and children are more likely to die crossing borders in environmentally hazardous conditions than men. When boats sink or encounter…
We received news yesterday of the latest fatal capsize of a boat carrying asylum seekers towards Australia – the 20th reported sinking event in four years. The two deaths yesterday brought the confirmed…