OK, I finally got time to draft a letter to the senators, Ill post it here for edit comments today, post it tonight: Dear Senator I refer you to the Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment (Resolving the Asylum Legacy Caseload) Bill 2014, which you will be voting on soon. Some politicians and some voices in the media tell us that asylum seekers are ‘illegal’. They even want us to believe there is a ‘queue’. More recently, opportunist politicians have suggested that they pose a potential threat to our national security. Several years ago, Immigration Minister Morrison proposed to his party that they should exploit anti-Muslim sentiments in our communities to win votes. Of course most asylum seekers are not Muslim but to the kind of voter Morrison is attracting, theyre all the same anyway. smh.au/.../morrison-sees-votes-in... There is also a strong argument that is is necessary to deter asylum seekers from endangering their lives on risky boat journeys to Australia. (You know, the sheer evil of using the tragedy of those who have died at sea escaping the horrors in their homeland is perhaps the greatest hypocrisy of government policy. If we were committed to stopping the drownings wed have a rescue initiative similar to the Italian navy which has a flotilla of five naval vessels, formed to conduct rescues, and has saved more than 10,000 asylum seekers. The cruelties we inflict on refugees have nothing to do with deterring the boats, it is a bloodsport, it is circus et panem, to win votes from the misininformed masses.) The problem for Australia is that these ideas are based on widespread misunderstandings and deliberate misinformation about why and how people seek asylum, and what Australia’s international legal obligations are. As Senator Palmer discovered recently, a deal with Mr Morrison might contain a lot more than was bargained for. The proposed changes to this legislation would give the minister unprecedented powers and I suspect that in the long run, ALL asylum seekers; those in detention as well as the 30,000+ awaiting bridging visas in Australia, would be forced home, or elsewhere regardless of their safety. Im old enough to remember the reception of Vietnamese boat people under Whitlam and the wonderful asset they have become to our culture. I wonder when we became such a small, bigoted and pusillanimous people that we are now? If we chose to respond in a tolerant and hospitable way to asylum seekers, we would increase our humanitarian intake to 30,000 and urgently resettle 10,000 from within the region. Wed restore Australia’s migration zone. Wed expedite processing in the camps because desperate people who arent allowed to work in the transit countries cant simply wait there for years at Morrisons pleasure. We should boost the United Nations resources in Indonesia and Malaysia to speed up processing and resettlement. We would provide an additional $70 million in annual emergency funding for safe assessment centres in Indonesia. And wed close the subhuman camps, abolish offshore processing, and bring all the detainees to Australia to assess all claims. The 14,000 refugees a year for settlement in Australia represents 0.06 per cent of our population of 23.7 million. Its little more than 7 per cent of our total permanent settler intake of 190,000 a year. In a speech Professor Graeme Hugo, a demographer from the University of Adelaide, delivered to the annual conference of the Kaldor centre for international refugee law, he argued that humanitarian settlers eventually make a significant economic contribution. Further the proportion willing to settle in regional areas – almost 18 per cent – is high and rising. I urge you to reject all the following proposals of this Bill: • Remove references to the UN Refugee Convention from the Migration Act effectively rewriting Australias interpretation of international law • Disable the High Court from legal challenge of refugee policy and operations • Exempt Customs/ Navy/ Border Force boats from maritime law to allow actions such as removing safety devices, food, water and fuel from asylum-seeking boats. • Allow the Government to send boats or individuals anywhere it chooses. The bill removes the need for Australia to have a Memorandum of Understanding in place with countries in the region, or for the country to be a signatory to the Refugee Convention. It also allows boats to be towed to a place that is not another country. It would allow boats to be towed beyond Australian waters and just left there without regard for safety. • Establish a fast track assessment process which removes access to the Refugee Review Tribunal and provides very limited review processes. Fast turnaround processing was ruled illegal in the United Kingdom in July 2014 as it carried an “unacceptable risk of unfairness”. • Classify children born in Australia, to asylum seekers who arrived by boat, as “transitory persons, giving them no access to permanent residency or citizenship. • Change the definition of ‘refugee’ to allow the government to deny a claim for refugee status if it decides that there is a ‘safe area’ in the country of origin, or that the nation’s police force is ‘reasonably effective’. • Allow the Australian government to return / remove people regardless of non-refoulement obligations.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:02:55 +0000