To be fair to the politicians demonising refugees, it does win them votes.
Also, if the leftists hadn’t foolishly guaranteed that precisely no-one in a population of several thousand people would ever commit any kind of crime, well, then we wouldn’t have to do this. Remember the last time an Australian citizen committed a crime and we were all put on watchlists? And we deserved it, too.
Posted in Immigration, Politics
Oh, wait – so we actually are going the deterrent route on refugees? The only one that has a prospect of causing them to give up and live (well, maybe) in danger back home – trying to treat them worse than the places from which they’re fleeing?
Ms Woods fears for the asylum seekers’ mental health. ”They’re saying they will continue this hunger strike until they die because they feel powerless and trapped”. She described shade from soaring temperatures as inadequate, and said some people were unable to contact their families.
At the end of last week 390 detainees had been transferred to the centre, which is fast approaching its capacity of 500. Detainees live in tents with the Immigration Department yet to confirm completion dates for buildings.
As a hunger strike enters its 11th day the Immigration Department confirmed about 30 asylum seekers were treated for dehydration and heat-exhaustion symptoms last week.
Well, treating them with even a small amount more humanity than the worst places in the world is hardly going to work! (And by “work” I mean “bully them into going somewhere else”.)
That’s what I love about Australia – our capacity to abandon all pretense of humanity in order to save ourselves from the minor inconvenience of helping a small number of refugees seeking the kind of assistance we’d demand ourselves if anything ever happened to us here. We’re AWESOME. Best country in the world, mate!
Posted in Immigration
Another day ruined for me by a few hundred people arriving in boats four or five thousand kilometres away and seeking refuge in our enormous and sparsely-populated nation of twenty two million people.
As I drove back from work on a dangerous highway between unrepaired black spots I marvelled that anyone could care about issues other than unannounced maritime arrivals. While I was waiting at an underfunded emergency department to see a doctor there was nothing that could distract me from thinking about how crowded the country would get in twenty thousand years if they kept coming at that rate. When I got home to the tiny flat we’re stuck renting because investors have priced us out of any hope of ever buying a home of our own, I despaired at the notion that do-gooder leftists have bullied the government into not deliberately keeping refugee families apart like in the good old days. As I filled in my credit card details for the unmanageable private school fees we’re forced to pay so that our kids don’t miss out on a decent education at the impoverished local public school, I wondered when the politicians would finally devote some serious energy to protecting the precious national borders I’ve never seen before in my life.
God I can’t wait for Tony Abbott to become PM and spend a huge amount of taxpayer money STOPPING THE BOATS. There are few issues that impact on my daily life more.
Posted in Immigration
The House of Representatives divides on the critical issue of whether there should be any limit on how long we lock up genuine refugees who’ve committed no crime:
Or:
But, voters – it’s not all your fault: the 99% of MPs on the left side of the photograph don’t represent 99% of the population. If the MPs in the House of Representatives matched the way people actually voted in 2010, there’d be 18 people on the right.
Which is still pretty pathetic. Actually, yes – go with that sense of shame.
Posted in Immigration
And this is why Crikey‘s First Dog On The Moon is a national treasure:
POINT MADE. So clearly that you’d think no-one could miss it.
(Posted without permission but hoping that First Dog will be fine with it because I told everyone he’s ace and that Crikey will be fine with it because they’d like the message to get out there – to the countless hordes reading An Onymous Lefty – and also they have some residual guilt from getting rid of us this week.)
Posted in Immigration
Exactly – how exactly is it fair to jail poor Indonesian crew on refugee boats for a mandatory five years? In what way is it just? And, if you’re worried about precious taxpayer money, in what way is it a good use of court time (because there’s no incentive to plead guilty), and of (very expensive) prison resources?
Budi was waiting for a bus in Jakarta when he says a stranger made him an offer that was too good to refuse – 10 million rupiah (about $A1000) to crew a boat that would take a group of people to an unnamed island.
He was 19 years old, uneducated and a long way from his home on the Indonesian island of Ambon. Another man at the bus stop was offered the same deal and, like Budi, agreed without a second’s hesitation. The only catch, they were told, was that they wouldn’t get paid until they came back with the boat.
What neither of them understood was that there was never any chance that the boat would make the return journey, or that they would receive the payment. What neither could envisage, or even vaguely comprehend, was that they would wind up in an Australian jail facing a serious criminal charge with a mandatory five-year jail term.
Budi, not his real name, is an accidental people smuggler, if you accept that cooking noodles and keeping the engine going on an unseaworthy fishing boat for a group of desperate asylum seekers constitutes people smuggling.
So, naturally, there’s no alternative but to punish them more harshly than many Australians who commit violent crimes. I mean, what rational country could do differently? The results speak for themselves:
First, is the impact on the individuals concerned, which has prompted no fewer than 10 judges to describe the mandatory penalty as unnecessarily ”harsh”, ”severe” and out of line with sentencing requirements in all Australian jurisdictions.
Aside from the effect on the 200 Indonesians who have already been sentenced and more than 200 now before the courts, is the impact on their families. Almost invariably, the person in jail is the main breadwinner of his family and, with him out of play for up to five years, the pressure is on siblings or offspring to leave school and help eke out a living. Poverty is compounded…
This raises the second troubling aspect: the question of whether the mandatory terms are, as Attorney-General Nicola Roxon maintains, worthwhile as ”part of our armoury” in deterring boat arrivals.
During a recent inquiry by a Senate committee, several parties argued there was no evidence that locking up impoverished Indonesians had done anything to stop the boats, not least because the supply of young, gullible and desperately poor males like Budi across an Indonesian archipelago with a population of 245 million is unlimited.
It’s the perfect storm of cruelty, injustice, waste and stupidity.
And both big old parties are welded to it. Fortunately there is an alternative.
Posted in Crime and Punishment, Immigration
Liberal Party bullshit merchant Cory Bernadi is back in your email inbox with another serving of smears and lies:
The usual suspects are outraged at the ‘immoral’ determination of Tony Abbott and the Coalition to stop the pernicious trade by people smugglers. Naturally the most vocal critics of the morality of Coalition policy are those whose policies are directly responsible for 14,800 illegal arrivals since 2008 and the deaths of an estimated 600 people.
The most sanctimonious and hypocritical has to be…
The big parties who insist on refusing to allow refugees to arrive by air, who destroy smuggling boats regardless of safety thereby encouraging them to be as disposable as possible, the big parties who would rather waste millions upon millions on mandatory detention than risk a couple of “undeserving” immigrants on Centrelink payments? Tony Abbott who cares so little for refugees drowning that he wants to order the Navy to drag these “leaky” boats back to sea?
No, of course not. It’s the minor party that’s opposed to the present system, whose policies have never been enacted:
The most sanctimonious and hypocritical has to be the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young…
Talking of hypocritical:
…whose rhetoric and clamour for the media spotlight have regularly set new lows in party politics.
On the plus side, being detested by Bernadi is one of the finest testimonies to a person’s character available in Australian politics today. Congratulations Sarah.
Bernadi continues:
For the princely sum (even by Australian standards) of $11,500, a one way trip to Australia is then arranged. This begins with a flight to Malaysia, a quick trip across Indonesia’s porous borders and ultimately, a leaky boat to Australia.
Incredibly, somewhere along this route any legitimate travel and identification documents are lost, leaving little chance of confirming the identity or history of some of the new arrivals.
Presumably if they had legitimate travel and identification documents they’d get on a plane for a fifth of the price. Unless of course we had a system that refused to let people in the country on a plane if they were going to seek asylum here. Which we do.
And if we stopped pretending transporting refugees was a crime and returned the boats that were run safely, then legitimate businesses would enter the market, run safe boats, much cheaper, saving lives and making sure it’s not just those “privileged” desperate refugees who can afford to get on a boat. You know, if you’re serious about all that “what about the poor people who can’t afford a fare” stuff. (Yeah, I know you’re not.)
The demonising and pandering continues:
The advice to the would-be new Australian colonisers is to “have a good story”.
Colonisers?
The entire process is disheartening to anyone that believes our welcoming nation and accepting nature are being taken advantage of.
Welcoming? Accepting? The people paranoid about “colonisers”?
Imagine being the target audience for that article, the sort of person who’d respond not with revulsion directed at Cory, but self-righteous fury at his targets.
ELSEWHERE: And Tim Andrews at Menzies House has turned his fatuous rant against anyone left of John Howard into an email forward. Alienate your family and friends! Send it on! (via R.)
Posted in Immigration
Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Collective is, of course, completely right:
Refugee Action Coalition coordinator Ian Rintoul said Australia’s decision to criminalise people smuggling had played a role in the tragedy.
“Australia’s push for Indonesia to detain asylum seekers and to criminalise people smuggling directly leads to the kind of tragedy we’ve seen yet again,” he said. “If the government is worried about people losing their lives at sea, they should decriminalise people smuggling so that the voyages can be planned in open and seaworthy boats.
“The policy of detaining asylum seekers in Indonesia means [they] risk imprisonment if they contact authorities if they are concerned about the seaworthiness of any boat.”
Very true, and one more reason why those who feign concern for the safety of refugees on boats but whose solution is leaving them in danger in Indonesia and making sure that the system encourages the running of disposable boats and incompetent, disposable crews, are utter liars.
Again:
George Newhouse, of Shine Lawyers, who is acting for the survivors of the SIEV 221 tragedy, said the heavy penalties for people smugglers meant smugglers often hired untrained “stooges”, many of them children, who had no idea what they were doing.
“To make matters worse, the government’s policy of confiscating boats means the vessels which are used to transport asylum seekers are often unseaworthy – with disastrous results,” he said.
“Just a year ago we saw the worst Australian shipping disaster in living memory when the engine broke down on SIEV 221 and the young unskilled crew had no idea what they were doing or where they were going.
There is only one way to save those lives, and treating the refugees who arrive here even more cruelly is clearly not it. The way to save those lives is to make sure the boats are seaworthy, and that means not pretending that “people smuggling” is some kind of crime. It means destroying dangerous boats and prosecuting those who run them, but returning the boats and crews who run safe boats.
There’s precisely no other solution that will save those lives. Leaving people who are so desperate to flee in the dangerous location from which they’re fleeing is certainly not it.
UPDATE: had inadvertently left out link to earlier post on this subject. Fixed.
Posted in human rights, Immigration
That’s some catch, that Catch-22:
NT Legal Aid’s Susan Cox, QC, said the commission was concerned that unaccompanied asylum seeker children were also not being provided with independent legal advice. NT Legal Aid had been blocked by the immigration department from gaining access to three unaccompanied minors in Darwin, she said.
The department replied that the minister for immigration was the guardian of unaccompanied asylum seeker children, so it was up to the department to appoint legal representatives.
The children can’t get a lawyer to look after their interests being ignored by the Department because the Department is the only entity that it will permit to arrange for them to have lawyers.
Check and mate, abused children.
Posted in human rights, Immigration, Prisons
The Labor Party’s proposed changes to the Migration Act give the current Minister, or any future Minister, the power to deport children to, say, North Korea.
198AA(d):
the designation of a country to be an offshore processing country need not be determined by reference to the international obligations or domestic law of that country
198AB:
(1) The Minister may, in writing, designate that a country is an 18
offshore processing country.
(2) The only condition for the exercise of the power under subsection (1) is that the Minister thinks that it is in the public interest to designate the country to be an offshore processing country…
(5) The rules of natural justice do not apply to the exercise of the 28
power under subsection (1) or (4).
And that’s only one of two places in the new legislation where MPs are voting expressly that “the rules of natural justice do not apply”.
Think for a moment about what that means. “The rules of natural justice do not apply”? So… the parliament is happy for it to exercise its power unjustly. It admits that it intends to exercise its power unjustly. It is voting this Minister and any future Minister of Immigration the power to be unjust.
As for children? The new legislation undoes 55 year old protections for children that are part of the existing Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act 1946, neutering it to now say:
(2) Nothing in this Act:
(a) affects the operation of the migration law; or
(b) affects the performance or exercise, or the purported performance or exercise, of any function, duty or power under the migration law; or
(c) imposes any obligation on the Minister to exercise, or to consider exercising, any power conferred on the Minister by or under the migration law.(3) Without limiting subsection (2), nothing in this Act affects the performance or exercise, or the purported performance or exercise, of any function, duty or power relating to:
(a) the removal of a non-citizen child from Australia under section 198 or 199 of the Migration Act 1958; or
(b) the taking of a non-citizen child from Australia to an offshore processing country under section @198AD of that Act; or
(c) the deportation of a non-citizen child under section 200 of that Act; or
(d) the taking of a non-citizen child to a place outside Australia under paragraph 245F(9)(b) of that Act.
Expressly removing the obligations to give even a cursory thought to their safety. The Minister does not even have to consider the safety of a child in the country to which he is sending them. Doesn’t even have to consider it.
Why am I calling this Labor’s “North Korea Solution”? Because it is passing legislation that would enable it – and future governments – to send refugees anywhere. To the most dangerous, brutal places on Earth. Under this legislation, removing any responsibility for the Minister to ensure any basic protections will exist for the people under his care and power, this or a future Minister could deport children to, say, North Korea, if he felt like it and North Korea needed some slave labor or something and said they’d take them.
Any MP who votes for this legislation deserves to be put last at the next election.
UPDATE: Sadly, this old Kudelka cartoon may no longer apply.
Posted in human rights, Immigration
