Seeking a policy, somewhere, anywhere

I have been too angry, shocked, frustrated, sad and a million other things to have written a blog about the latest announcements on how Australia's leaders intend to address the human rights issue of seeking asylum.

And in my delay - Julia has been doing a nice job of self-destructing on this issue. Her plans for East Timor seem to be without foundation, Tony's alternate plans for the Defence Force to play decision maker on which boats stay and which boats go also seems to without foundation. Key point for both politicians (in case they were looking here for advice) -  If you are making an announcement that involves 2 parties, get the ok from the other group before you make that announcement!!

So... the facts:

• Australia receives less than 1% of the world's refugees
• In total we are talking about around 3,000 people in one year at most by boat
• of those who arrive by boat, in recent years -  more than 90% were found to be genuine refugees
• There is no queue to jump and there are usually no papers to be thrown over board. Many people in the world never receive a birth certificate, and you try going to a Government office  asking staff there for a passport because you'd like to leave the country - the office is run by the people who killed your mother, or that office is a 200km walk from your home over a hill, past the football field, past a few hundred landmines and through a few groups of rebel fighters keen top recruit you. 

The Government is trying to convince us that a processing centre (I'll call it a detention centre) in East Timor will stop the potentially fatal boat trips that people are making. Ummm.... a bit of geography here, East Timor is an island!! To get there you need a boat, asylum seekers don't pass by the coast of East Timor, decide not to stop and then head on to Australia -  check out a map. They leave Indonesia and head down the Indian Ocean towards Australia's West Coast - not for fun, because that is a navigational route.  

I am all for a regional processing centre -  one where people are detained for the shortest possible time, where they can live in the community, work and have their health and education needs met whilst awaiting assessment. But is a developing nation such as East Timor the best place for this?? Or is it one that needs the money and one where Australia has some influence? The asylum seekers would either continue down the Indian Ocean, be picked up and transferred back across the top of Australia and through the Timor Sea. OR -  they would be taken straight from hiding in Indonesian ports to East Timor.  Indonesia and East Timor are not exactly best friends, I can't see how this plan actually work. This doesn't seem like complex political or logistical information to me, why has our adept, intelligent PM not thought about it or even chatted it through with oh, i don't know, East Timor's PM for one?? No, not Jose, he's the Pres and that's great, but you gotta talk to the PM too Goolia!

Julia says she didn't want a race to the bottom. She says that the debate should be honest and calm. ok... go for it. 

I have just noticed that in my first par of this blog I called these politicians 'leaders'. They are not, they are following an ill-informed, racist and therefore fearful public. Leadership would be to take a stand, announce the facts and state that Australia will uphold its international obligations and be a humane country. That'd get my vote. 

Just for fun, check out this clip, it has no point but i love it.

Temporary Insanity

I have been putting off writing this blog because i really don't want to give Abbott and his shit ideas any more volume. But people have been asking me about temporary protection visas (TPVs), what it all means and why the fuss...

well, essentially its crap and has been proven to cause mental anguish, exacerbate trauma and most people who were given TPVs in the past were eventually granted full protection to remain in Australia permanently. It involves assessing an asylum seeker, finding that they meet the criteria of being a refugee but then suggesting, just in case things get better in your country of origin we will only give you a 3 year visa and at that point, we'll re-assess to check whether you are still a refugee WTF ?!?!?!

TPVs were introduced in 1999 under Howard. Psychologists, doctors, experts, refugees and Australians who cared campaigned hard and they were abolished in 2008 by the Rudd Government.

The people I knew on TPVs told me they couldn't enrol in a degree as they may not be around to finish it, they were hard to employ because they couldn't guarantee how long they would be in the country, they found it very hard to start relationships because there was every possibility they would be removed from Australia. They were living their lives in limbo, feeling insecure, unsafe, finding it hard to have hope and not trusting of Australian authorities. 

Frighteningly these people were trapped -  many were men who had made the dangerous journey here by sea -  they were not entitled to apply for their family to be reunited with them in Australia and they had no rights to re-enter Australia if they left. So we saw young children and wives commonly separated from their father / husband. And now Abbott, who is apparently a man of faith, of family values, who believes in the "Aussie spirit" is suggesting this is a good way to treat people. ABSURD

more info

Check out a fantastic film, Molly and Mabarek - set in Young when the abbatoir there was open and when Afghan refugees found a real home. 

Its a floodgate... of votes

So, we voted Howard out. The Herd warned we could be wearing rose coloured glasses -  it seems the tint has worn off and someone has handed out those aeroplane eye masks that don't quite fit and have a slightly odd smell.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans has announced that Sri Lanka and Afghanistan are safe countries to live and that Australia will no longer be processing asylum seekers from these countries. Umm... is that the same Afghanistan where  DFAT says don't go  and where Australian troops are presently 'keeping the peace'? And is that the same Sri Lanka where DFAT says to reconsider travel due to political tension?

And what the hell happened to assessing asylum seekers as individuals? That is Australian law, that is international law? Have all the Government's legal advisers taken leave at once or has this Government re-employed Howard's team.

Almost 100% of recent asylum seekers to Australia from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka have been found by our already rigorous system to be genuine refugees -  but to Evans this does not matter.

What benefit is there is grouping asylum seekers together in regional bundles. Just ask talk-back radio and tabloid press: fear. It's "them", "they" are illegal. Call them all one big unlawful group and you remove the mother, the teenager, the father trying to protect his family in the only way left  - it's simple, remove the human and its much easier to have inhumane policy.

I am appalled to be living in a country that has reverted to racism, that lacks compassion, that has complete disregard for international law and where the Government can get away with using people's trauma and despair to gain votes from a public who don't bother to think about the reality.
Getting on a boat and trying to seek aslyum in a country so foreign to your own is not a choice -  its a matter of survival.