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.
Taking on the UK’s migration management is of short-term benefit to Rwanda, a country facing considerable economic hardship.
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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.
Asylum seekers stare at media from behind a fence at the Manus Island detention centre, 2014.
Eoin Blackwell/AAP
This verbatim drama presenting the stories of eight Iranian asylum seekers detained on their island prisons delivers uncomfortable home truths.
Crossbenchers Kerryn Phelps, Julia Banks and Rebekah Sharkie celebrate the passing of the “Medivac” law through the House of Representatives.
AAP/Lukas Coch
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.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and other Coalition MPs described Labor as weak on borders after the opposition and the crossbench voted to pass a bill allowing medical transfers from Manus and Nauru.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
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'.
Many asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru are at risk of suicide.
WORLD VISION/NICK RALPH
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?
Shorten has been caught every which way in the last few days.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
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 won the $100,000 Victorian Prize for Literature, and the Prize for Non-Fiction, at the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
Amnesty International/AAP
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?’
Detail from Alex Seton’s A Durable Solution? - a series of memorial plaques naming the 12 men who have died under our ‘care’.
Sullivan & Strumpf
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
If refugee and asylum seekers are not resettled in Australia, the humanitarian crisis will only worsen.
AAP/Jeremy Ng
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.
Asylum seekers protesting on Manus Island last year.
Refugee Action Coalition handout
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.