sprinkledwords:

I strongly recommend that everybody watch this. It was a tearjerker. It’s so rare to see detention centres from inside. Rarer still to see a politician cry.

You should especially watch it if you watched this bullshit.

thingswedidntseecoming:

YES. Also, did you know that social workers were responsible for alerting the public to the disgusting, inhumane treatment that goes on in these centres? The Australian Council of Heads of Schools of Social Work got together and (eventually) produced the first report of the People’s Inquiry into Detention. Social workers were responsible for telling these horrific stories to the public!

Makes me proud to be part of this profession. It repulses me that this shit is still going on, five years later after the report was published.

As you should be. I was highly unimpressed that social workers, who should know more than anyone about the well being of their clients, were not allowed to speak to the media - correct me if I’m wrong but it smacks of a cover up.

thingswedidntseecoming, I hope you’re one of the fuzzy faces on the ABC every opportunity you get.

(via lizisbored)

In order to find a starting point for my research into how Australian-Indonesian relations are affected by people smuggling for my unauthorised arrivals essay, I watched the Four Corners episode in the above link, from August 2010.

I had first watched Dateline’s The Smugglers’ Trail, which had a very different approach to the issue.

What first surprised me was how the Four Corners report immediately took a very firm stance against people smugglers, with the only explanation being that people on both sides of the asylum seeker debate agree that they are evil.

The report then follows an official refugee who repeatedly states that they are bad people. He states that twice he has been conned by people smugglers, and that people on boats take the “place” of people like himself and his family, who have waited six years to be processed and accepted by Australia.

He then decides that he’s going to have another shot at coming to Australia by boat.

How has the program not bothered to explore the flaws in logic and false premises presented here?

1. This refugee believes that he was doing the right thing by waiting, but decides to try to leave by boat since the waiting is getting him nowhere. The UNHCR representative points out that there are 500,000 refugees in Indonesia awaiting resettlement per year, and only 100,000 places available for them, worldwide. Australia takes far fewer refugees than it ought to, given the strength of its economy and its population to refugee intake ratio in comparison to other Refugee Convention signatories. So whose fault is it that people have to resort to boats?
   
   
2. “People smugglers are evil” is the accepted view. But why? The man in the video was ripped off by two of them. That’s wrong. But if people smugglers didn’t exist, this man would not have had the slightest hope of coming to Australia - at least without waiting many years without permission to work nor study in Indonesia. And if boatloads of refugees were not landing on Australian shores, isn’t it logical that the Australian government would have a greater incentive to ignore the refugee problem, and take far fewer refugees than it ought?
   
   
3. People smuggling is not a crime in Indonesia. But Indonesia co-operates with Australian Federal Police in trying to stop the trade for diplomatic reasons.
   
   
4. People smugglers may carry people in terrible conditions and charge exploitative prices, but by the sounds of the enormous bribes they have to pay the Indonesian authorities to get away with what they’re doing, the high prices and overcrowding are, in some ways, necessary. My understanding is that if they were travel by a more legitimate method, for instance by plane, they would be deported (but I will be researching this further in the next few weeks).
   
   
5. If they are exploiting refugees, the refugees seem to know more or less what they’re getting into. They know they’re not getting on a cruise ship. They know that there are simply no safe alternatives that don’t involve wasting years and years of their lives and their family’s lives in an Indonesian camp, or being returned to the country from which they had fled for their lives.
    
   
6. If the smugglers are, as this program so controversially reveals, refugees themselves, doesn’t people smuggling make perfect sense? Are they not helping people like themselves to find a better life? And how on earth does that make them bad people?

It makes very little sense to vilify people smugglers without vilifying refugees, which, as I’ve said time and time again, is needless and wrong. A person does not get into these situations unless they are truly desperate. Has anyone really thought about why a terrorist would choose to wait in a processing camp for ten years, or risk their lives on a sea voyage only to be detained at Christmas Island for six years, only to bomb our country? It’d be far easier to do that on a tourist visa.

We have been taught to distrust them because it was politically convenient to Howard.

And if processing in Indonesian camps was timely and humane, there would be absolutely no need for people smugglers in the first place.

So who is really evil in this scenario?

(I’ll give you a hint: The highly censored Dateline video, shown slightly less censored here, shows that while in Indonesia, Hadi Ahmadi was propositioned to spy on people smugglers for the Australian Federal Police. When he refused, he was extradited to Australia for being a middle-man in a people smuggling operation himself. Of the 900 people he was alleged to have helped, 866 were found to be genuine refugees.)

thingswedidntseecoming replied to your link: For the procrastinators amongst us: the latest Four Corners on iView.

I’m already so far behind on iView…

It’s worth jumping the queue for.

sockpoppet replied to your post: Is it weird that I reblog things about injustice…

Since you asked - I’d love to read more about Australian news (and other countries FTM). Despite me being American and stuff.

This is awesome. :)

nighttimemilk replied to your link: Stop demonising refugees, says UN

People don’t care. They want to see swarthy queer-tounged foreigners coming to get them, so they do.

I agree with the first statement, but it only applies to some people. I disagree with the second statement. It might apply to some people, but not most.

I think people don’t want to know. They want to think that it’s all happening in the name of their security and due process. They want to be able to trust that the government has things more or less under control, and if they’re being too harsh, that’s the cost of being too careful.

But I think that lately (in the past year or so), there’s a trend towards greater sympathy for refugees that isn’t consistent with the way the government (and the opposition) continues to want to treat them.

Having said that, someone told me the other day that the fact that these people would light themselves on fire is proof that they shouldn’t be allowed to come here. I couldn’t even find the words to respond to that.

Mandatory detention does not protect our nation. It is child abuse.

And it’s not just me saying it, it’s the Australian Medical Association. It’s anyone with any knowledge or rumour of what goes on in there, and why.

People do not light themselves on fire for no reason.

Ok?

It is too nice a day to be sitting in bed, working on my ‘unauthorised arrivals’ essay, making myself catatonic with rage - almost as catatonic as the 6 year old boy named Shayan in Woomera and Villawood in 2001 who witnessed detainees so traumatised that they cut themselves and protested at their treatment by setting themselves on fire, a 6 year old boy who was sent to hospital time and time again because he wouldn’t sleep, eat or talk, where he improved until sent back to the detention centre, and the media knew but not much happened, and the Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock knew but he referred to the child as ‘it’ and stood by his policies on the grounds that it deterred future asylum seekers.

This country justifies child abuse on the basis that it deters people from trying to come here.

And before you say ‘but that was 2001’, Gillard wants to send unaccompanied children to detention centres in Malaysia, a country that does not recognise the refugee convention nor human rights. And the Opposition (where Ruddock is still a Shadow Cabinet Secretary) wants to send them to Nauru.

What was I talking about again?

Booyah.

(Source: alanasinpyjamas, via puremoaning)

“Boat people” and why they’re not queue-jumping criminals.

For politics this semester, I’ll be writing an essay about whether unauthorised arrivals should be Australia’s biggest foreign policy issue. Luckily enough, my tutor has spent a fair bit of time talking to me about how I’ll be framing my topic. Even better, today he decided to further clarify our discussion by consulting the lecturer.

In the course of our chat with the lecturer, it became apparent that the tutor felt that the asylum seekers who arrive by boat were a foreign policy issue because they were “queue jumpers”.

I glanced at the lecturer and was relieved to find that his expression matched mine.

“There is no queue,” we both said.

I added that there were processing camps in some countries - but only if you were prepared to wait for ten years in inhumane conditions.

“People can spend their whole lives, are born and die in those camps,” the lecturer added.

The tutor is a phD candidate in International Relations, and he doesn’t know the refugee story behind the manipulative government and media rhetoric and misinformation?

I asked him if he’d seen ‘Go Back to Where You Came From’, a three-part miniseries demonstrating the refugee seekers through the eyes of a group of normal Australians with strong opinions on the issue. Unbelievably, he said he hadn’t, desite the fact that it was headed by a graduate from our university, in our department, just this year.

When I talk to the average person about asylum seekers, I usually hear the catchphrases fed into them by Howard circa the Tampa crisis parrotted back at me. Illegals, national security, terrorists, a threat to our way of life, queue jumpers. This isn’t ok, but it’s understandable. The threat to national security that is asylum seekers on boats has screamed from the front pages of newspapers and both sides of politics for the past 10 years. But when I talk to people at uni, they’re usually far more informed and sympathetic. In the past I’ve had tutors in Legal Studies and Politics explain in no uncertain terms that the Tampa crisis was manipulated by Howard, that it was a response to the popularity of One Nation and racist paranoia post-9/11, and that asylum seekers are not the threat to security that we are led to believe they are.

For anyone who actually reads this far, I am probably preaching to the choir. But should you, like my tutor, be missing a few details:

There is no queue. There is no jumping.

Most illegal immigrants in Australia are American and British people who overstay their visas. This is undoubtably illegal, but nobody makes the slightest fuss about it.

The second largest group of asylum seekers in Australia comes from China. These asylum seekers come not by boat, but by plane. They have that luxury. My understanding is that Chinese asylum seekers don’t usually have to be detained because they retain their documents and passports. They can meet the financial and other criteria for an Australian tourist visa, and can simply apply for refugee status when they get to Australia. There is no law saying that you can’t come to Australia and then apply for asylum; it’s one of the two legitimate ways of gaining refugee status in Australia, and the process is clearly set out on the Australian Government’s Immigration Department website.

The few asylum seekers who arrive by boat do so because there is either no “queue” or UN camp in countries neighbouring their own, or because placing themselves in these camps means anywhere from 10 years in inhumane conditions, facing food shortages and corruption, where in many cases they are little better off than they would be in their home country. Instead they travel across numerous countries, usually culminating in paying people smugglers in Indonesia to take them to Australia. These people don’t lose their documents to make things difficult; the documents are taken from them by people smugglers, who say that they will kill them if they don’t comply.

It is necessary and reasonable that when the boat arrives in Australia, a period of detention needs to occur for the purpose of security, health and identity checks. What is not necessary nor reasonable is that they be treated as punitive measures. Asylum seekers are not breaking the law by coming here. Australia is a signatory to the UNHCR Refugee Convention, and this is reflected in the fact that onshore processing is part of our domestic law not as punishment but as procedure.

Onshore processing and offshore resettlement are two different but equally legitimate processes for migrating to Australia on humanitarian grounds. A person arriving by boat is no more a queue jumper than a person who arrives by plane on a tourist visa and makes an application for asylum.

Once the adequate checks have been performed on boat arrivals (which should take no longer than 90 days), there is no reason to treat these people as criminals. They are no more a risk to society than a person on a tourist visa. That is why I believe that they should not be kept in detention centres, but at the very least, in community detention.

For those who believe that detention is an important deterrent, it is a fact that harsh asylum seeker policies do not deter boats. Despite praise given to Howard for reducing boat arrivals, and criticism for the increase we saw under Rudd, despite ridiculous claims that the recent High Court decision against a Malaysia solution would see boats arriving the next day, politicians’ policies have little to do with the boat numbers. They coincided with changing numbers of asylum seekers around the world, and are misconstrued to parties’ advantage or disadvantage.

There is no queue. There is no jumping.

There’s certainly no line of people smuggling boats just waiting for Australia’s asylum seeker policies to slacken.

I will be writing this essay for the next month, so heads up: asylum seeker policies might be the focus of my outrage on this blog until it’s done.