Australia’s refugee policy – reforms needed to reflect humane approach and national spirit of welcome
Media Release
International and national refugee sector experts and advocates have identified four urgent areas of reform needed to address ongoing disadvantage and exclusion caused by Australia’s policies towards refugees and people seeking asylum.
Two hundred delegates gathered in Kyneton, Victoria (11-13 October) for the two-yearly Rural Australians for Refugees conference which brings 75 groups together from around the country.
Delegates agreed that Australia’s policies need to be urgently reviewed to comply with our responsibilities under international law and to prevent further damage to people seeking protection.
Behrouz Boochani, Benham Satah, Gillian Triggs, David Manne, Anthea Vogl, Zaki Haidari and Caroline Fleay were among the human rights speakers who compared Australia’s current framework with international practices. They identified that:
- Australia’s current deterrence-based and exclusionary policy framework causes ongoing harm and disadvantage for refugees and people seeking asylum
- Urgent reform is needed to address values of just and humane protection for all refugees and people seeking asylum – no matter their country, faith, ethnicity or other factors
- Prioritising of solutions that work with the global community in solving the challenges of dealing with 120 million people who are displaced by conflict, environmental disaster or need for protection
- Looking to the past to also ensure that our policies are not perpetuating exclusionary and race-based legacies.
Delegates acknowledged important reforms, such as the resolution of status visa for 19,000 people on TPVs and SHEVs announced in 2023. However, they pointed to the extremely restrictive nature of current policies which continue to cause harm and disadvantage to people once they reach Australia, whilst they are in transit locations such as Indonesia, and to family still in origin countries.
David Manne, Refugee Legal, spoke of the deterrence driving the policy approach which belies the generosity of spirit and welcome for refugees which lies deep in the Australian nation’s character and history:
“Research consistently reveals sustained and very strong public support for our refugee resettlement program. This support has consistently reached 80%. We realise that the resettlement program – bringing people in – is based on need and we’re proud of it.”
“But the truth is that harm and inhumanity still pervade our refugee policies.”
“We’re just at the start of the road to fundamental reform so crucial to the rights and lives of people seeking asylum and refugees. While we’ve seen some progress, it doesn’t come close to meeting international obligations and the values which underpin them: humanity, compassion, fairness and justice.”
Zaki Haidari (Amnesty International), speaking as part of the Australian Hazara Advocacy Network:
“The Australian government needs to also take accountability and provide more support for people, like myself and other Hazaras who continue to be targeted in genocide that has been continuing for over 100 years. We have been targeted for our faith, our ethnicity, our striving for democracy. Right now, our people are being killed in mass numbers by the Taliban – just last week a group of 19 men was killed. We need the Australian government to widen its definition of family so that adult children are also recognised as part of the family unit so that vulnerable young women are not left behind. We also need the prioritisation of support for Hazaras who are being actively targeted in ongoing genocide.”
Conference delegates, including regional Australians who are part of 75 RAR groups around the country, identified four priorities for urgent reform:
- Removing the temporary nature of Australia’s current policies which work to exclude people from society and cause ongoing disadvantage. This causes extreme distress and the risk of destitution for refugees who have been living here for more than a decade – but also to refugees in transit and to their extended families in countries of origin
- Providing more equitable and immediate humanitarian support for refugees displaced by war and civil conflict, regardless of their countries of origin, faith and political ideologies
- Taking decisive action to support communities experiencing genocide and sanction governments committing genocide
- Removing offshore detention and finding immediate pathways to permanency for people already impacted by the system, including bringing people stranded in PNG to Australia for urgent attention
- Widening definitions of family so that families are not having to make traumatic decisions about leaving an adult child behind in extremely vulnerable circumstances
Rural Australians for Refugees President, Reverend Dr Paul Dalzell, emphasised that this is a vital opportunity for Australia to reframe its refugee policy:
“For the past 24 years, our groups in regional communities around Australia have been actively advocating for refugees and people seeking asylum and working to help bring people to safety through community sponsorship and employment programs.
Communities have been transformed as everyday Australians welcome hard-working, talented and caring people who have fled danger. As the world grapples with widespread conflict and war and environmental disasters, Australia needs to be able to respond quickly with policies based on welcome and safe settlement for people who are displaced.”
It is time that we turned our back on approaches that punish and demonise – and recognise the fundamental support and welcome that underpins this nation. We can and should be developing frameworks that provide hope and security for people fleeing danger.”
Human rights warriors Zaki Haidari, David Manne of Refugee Legal and Behrouz Boochani at the RAR Conference
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New England Cocky -
paul walter -
Andrew Smith -
Cool Pete -
leefe
Return to home pageMalcolm Fraser did very few things that I consider were in the best interests of Australia, but one stand out success was his approach to the thousands of Vietnamese persons fleeing at the end of the USA (United States of Apartheid) imperialist war in Vietnam.
Certainly there were many problems once the refugees arrived in Australia, thanks to congenital unthinking by the COALition misgovernment, but over time many of the refugees saw the opportunities, worked very hard and rightly became very successful.
Roll on to the Gillard LABOR years and everything changed. Suddenly there was a ”shut the gate” policy resulting in too many refugee deaths after exploitation by human traffickers and the horrors of the Scummo ”Operations on the Water” policy, only the first of his many policy failures.
Why was that?? Were the LIARBRAL$ afraid that their overfunding of private schools may be revoked in favour of persons keen to work, make a good life for their families and take away their self-given privileges of management?
Perhaps the bankers feared the entry of competent competition from outside the Anglosphere and that would never do ….. or was it a fear that fresh multi-cultural faces would improve the available gene pool out-competing their own spoilt off-spring?
Or was the LABOR Party scared of the political power of the Murdoch Media Monopoly that they had helped create to the detriment of all Australian residents??
An interesting parallel to events in the mid-east likely guaranteeing a new diaspora of Palestinians and Lebanese. These folk will face Dutton, Hanson, Paterson and the like, should they ever try to come to Australia, but given conditions in Palestine and the Levant, what choice will such folk have in the face of an unfolding genocide?
Yes, the ALP has been scared of Murdoch and rightly so, since the overthrow of Whitlam after Whitlam had made the mistake of rejecting Murdoch’s original overtures.
Not to avoid criticism of Gillard, but given the hostility evoked by people like Abbot and Murdoch refugee and concocted Islamophobia policy of any substance became problematic. In fact Labor timidity went back to the Tampa affair when Beazley sided with Howard in a sad example of “bipartisanship” or “bisexuality” as I call it. I confess I was sceptical at first also, I saw it as a Howard move to flood the labour mark. But a darker pathology has occurred since with the visceral sleeping racism stirred from back then reinforced and government reduced to only ineffectual “shopfront” of the sort we see in our time.
It is going to take remarkable people to reduce the dark reinforced tendencies within many aussies, tendencies seen in extremis in Palestine. People seem easily tribalised these days. The likes of Dutton will kick the can down the road for this narrowing of focus within the Australian People for their so-called advantage.
Howard apparently banned the use of the word ‘multiculturalism’ in the PM’s Office and had to persuaded that immigration was beneficial.
Accordingly, the targeting of asylum seekers, refugees and since then presenting dodgy demographic analysis or ‘jazzed up stats’ to inflate immigration &/or population numbers, plus demands for English levels (beyond that of most locals?), conga lines of negative proxy issues happily promoted by the RW MSM & SM; much is provided by Tanton Network outlets or related inc SPA, TAPRI, MB etc. and too many influencers, to nudge the mainstream….
Objective? Need ‘to get people talking about immigrants’ negatively; John Tanton strategy from generation ago, and it has become successfully reinforced when moderate Australians question immigration without any credible support, just talking points…..
Whittle Johnny Howard basically copied the evil hanson’s policies on asylum seekers after she was defeated, in 1998. We need to revert to more humane policies and part of this must be that we ensure that the evil dutton is defeated.
Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough
the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Warsan Shire