Australia’s offshore detention policies have helped to produce indifference to the suffering of refugees. Pushing refugees out of sight, and out of mind, has now placed them beyond moral concern.
Richer nations are increasingly looking to offshore their immigration processing and further their own economic and political interests at the same time.
Nauru is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Australia annually to house 109 asylum seekers. The real purpose, though, is to ‘stand ready to receive new arrivals’.
That no Australian government in almost a decade has successfully brought this policy to a formal close is astonishing. In fact, Australia ceased transferring new arrivals offshore in 2014.
If history is any guide, the new US president’s forward-thinking approach toward refugee resettlement could help drive Australia’s commitments to refugee protection, too.
The government would be willing to put a feast on the table to get a win on the medevac repeal, but this is a piece of legislation on which Lambie should not contemplate any deals.
Since the Tampa affair in 2001, successive governments have been anxious to be seen as “hard-line” on asylum seekers, but the cost – to people and the country – has been too high.
A refugee law expert on a week of ‘reckless’ rhetoric and a new way to process asylum seeker claims
The Conversation44 MB(download)
Today on Trust Me, I'm An Expert, a refugee legal expert busts myths about how proposed medical transfer rules would work, and described some of this week's border security rhetoric as 'reckless'.
A bill to allow for asylum seeker on Nauru and Manus Island to be transferred to Australia for medical and psychiatric treatment has passed both Houses. How will it change things for those detained?
After Shorten was briefed by security officials and with enormous political pressure coming from the government, Labor moved back from its support of the bill as it has come out of the Senate.
Behrouz Boochani, an asylum seeker currently detained on Manus Island, has won Australia’s richest literary prize. The win commands the question, ‘what makes an Australian writer?’
Alex Seton’s sculpture A Durable Solution? dominates the protest exhibition at the forthcoming ALP national conference. He has also created an official memorial to Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan
As families are airlifted off Nauru for medical treatment, there is at last a glimmer of hope that a long-standing and cruel policy might finally be put to rest.
Boochani bears witness to the deterioration of the human spirit on Manus Island, where he’s been detained with hundreds of other asylum seekers for the last five years.