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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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5 comments

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  1. New England Cocky

    Malcolm 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??

  2. paul walter

    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.

  3. Andrew Smith

    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…..

  4. Cool Pete

    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.

  5. leefe

    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

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