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…
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Asylum seekers – Analysis and Comment
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…
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…
Not many people get to see what goes on behind the barbed wired fences of immigration detention centres. Marianne Evers was one of the few who decided to speak out about her work in Nauru. Unsurprisingly…
Passengers aboard the cruise ship Orion, which recently rescued French sailor Alain Delord in the seas southwest of Hobart, were at first upset that they had to detour from their planned route. They were…
ABC’s Life Matters recently treated its listeners to something quite rare: a discussion of the economic assumptions implicit in the discourse surrounding boat people. Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz, who…
Watching the second version of “offshore processing” on Nauru and Manus Island has been frustrating and painful – not least for those of us involved in immigration detention issues for the past decade…
Last week, the UN held its first-ever business and human rights forum in Geneva. It’s part of a growing awareness that multinationals have a big impact on human rights. Opening the forum, the UN’s human…
Labor’s Melissa Parke probably won’t be too popular with rightwing powerbrokers like Paul Howes with her view that the Greens are a fellow progressive party rather than an insidious enemy to be confronted…
With its revamped Pacific Solution, the Australian government has decided to make the choice to take a boat to Australia more horrendous in its implications, by increasing the likelihood of disasters at…
Australia, like all coastal states, is under an absolute obligation to undertake rescue at sea wherever and whenever necessary. It is not, however, immediately apparent that this is the case. A question…
The recent overhaul of Australia’s immigration policies aims to protect the lives of asylum seekers by removing any advantage of arriving by boat. Whether this goal will be achieved remains unclear. But…
The latest announcements about boat-people involved heading further down the wrong track: a track marked out by the Howard government for political reasons, and sold to the public using dishonest rhetoric…
It is clear enough that the Gillard government’s revived Pacific Solution has not stopped the boats: it has not even slowed them. In 2002, the boats stopped, some months after the Pacific Solution was…
In August 2012, the Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers created a new myth in the language of asylum seekers and refugees. That was the idea of “the no advantage principle”. It is a variation…
Until recently most “boat people” seeking asylum in Australia have come from wartime situations or from dictatorships. But this is not the case for the increasing numbers coming from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka…
The Houston Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers was set the task of reducing deaths of asylum seekers following the mounting loss of life on the seas between Indonesia and Australia. But it remained blind to…
The High Court’s decision in the M47 case is likely to be a pyrrhic victory for refugee rights. Last week the High Court ruled that the regulation that allowed the Commonwealth to deny a visa to a refugee…
Wicked problems, so we are told, are everywhere. Climate change, conflict, an ageing population, obesity… the list goes on. The debate over asylum seekers, difficult and important and politically charged…
With 5,459 attempted boat arrivals to Australia in the first half of 2012, an increase of 894 since last year, it is no wonder the prime minister is desperate to demonstrate she is combating people smuggling…
The former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson famously said a week is a long time in politics. If this is the case, then you have to wonder how long it will feel if the current Parliament runs it full…