2015 – A Lament
for the Forgotten
December 30, 2015
I am currently on the Christmas/New Year break and the mandatory doing as little as possible so I have already polished off one long novel, a short novel, a book of poems and the daily newspapers from cover to cover. I have also indulged in the cricket and at least 2-3 films per day.
Maybe I am missing the consistent stimulus of work but happy to fill my time this way. I can fit it all in around cooking doing some long waiting fix jobs and cleaning and generally living in a house I see so little of.
This break has also afforded some time to think and I feel I need to mark the year just past. An intriguing year, a complex year and one I will be happy to see the end of. There is one aspect of the year that stays with me and challenges me.
I spent the first two months, January and February criss-crossing the country delivering a change management program and related training to Red Cross staff in preparation for their start-up of the SRSS Program (Status Resolution Support Services) to support asylum seekers. This represented a major change to the treatment of asylum seekers with a far more stringent contract and one in which support is reduced to light touch and more responsibility is sheeted to community support and volunteers.
This was merely another notch in tightening of the conditions faced by asylum seekers, especially those arriving by boat. The machismo displayed so openly by Immigration Minister and Prime Minister in championing these changes has been without comparison. What is left is a series of dates, each delivering more harshness and greater meanness.
rom 13th August 2012 all asylum seekers are barred by the law from applying for any kind of visa.
Those arriving by boat until 12th August 2012 can lodge applications for permanent humanitarian entrance, can have work rights on their bridging visas and are not subject to regional processing (that is being sent to Manus Island and Nauru for processing).
From 1 July 2013 those arriving by boat are given lowest priority in their access to the Refugee Review Tribunal.
From 19th July 2013 all those arriving by boat are transferred to Nauru and PNG.
From 14th December 2013 an enforceable code of conduct came into effect. This required asylum seekers eligible for a bridging visa to sign a code of conduct. Not signing the code, breaching the code or any criminal activity would bar the person from any further processing of bridging visas and potential detention.
From the 19th December 2013 family reunion applicants who arrived by boat were directed to be processed as lowest priority.
From 31 March 2014 asylum seekers who arrived without proper visas, either by boat or plane, become ineligible for free help under the Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme.
But these measures imagined, planned and implemented under rows of unfurled Australian flags as border protection measures did not ‘stop the boats’. What did stop them was an unprecedented allocation of dollars and human resources to Operation Sovereign Borders including boat turn backs, paying smugglers to turn back, and transfers into government suppled orange dinghies. The on-water behaviour and its secrecy is the reason so few boats have successfully breached the cordon. But they have tried and will continue to try.
The asylum seeker measures chronicled above were not deterrents, they were propaganda. They provided a series of ongoing media messages playing cynically to domestic audiences and diverting attention from a government which moved from crisis to crisis. The ‘stop the boats’ mantra was seen politically and in public opinion as the most notable of the government’s achievements.
I need to repeat, most of these measures were implemented after the boats had been stopped and it was clear that the strength of Sovereign Borders would continue to stop them. These measures were as political as they were cynical yet nothing has been done to redress or reverse them.
I can only image what it was like for the staff of the Red Cross and the other support agencies trying to explain to asylum seekers that if they arrived a day before any of the measures being implemented their lives and the outcomes of their refugee claims would be different. I cannot image how strange and cruel and unfair receiving this information would be.
We still have anything from 28,000 to 29,000 asylum seekers whose status cannot be resolved in the community short of them returning to the countries they are fleeing from. We have a further number just shy of 2,000 who we keep in detention and a further 1,000 in formal community detention. Our asylum seekers are now in their 4th year of limbo, living off some government support but predominantly charity; many without work rights and many more losing hope.
We have given some focus to those in detention, especially children but any attention lasts no more than a few days, the time of another local or international event to take over the front pages of our papers and our news feeds.
What worries me most is both the strength of public support for our border protection regime and the elevation of broader protection into the canon of political orthodoxy, entrenched in the policy platforms of both the major parties. Any discussion or dissent immediately evokes the Western Sydney seat argument, and all internal opposition is quashed. So this has become our new orthodoxy.
How long can we go on playing this game which is already stale mated? Common sense would suggest that the repatriation option is really a non-option, but our orthodoxy bars our politicians from processing these people for permanent protection visas. So we continue to keep people who have not committed a crime in detention for extended periods, further traumatising them and barbed wiring their hope. We continue to keep large numbers in community detention and all the financial and human costs this delivers. Through unbelievably committed workers many of whom I met during the year, we continue to deal with the despair of people and families who cannot get on with their lives and who would so readily commit to Australia and their future here.
The best we can do is support them until a new date emerges; one which this time works in their favour; to grant them rights rather than revoke them.
There will have to be a time when someone with enough political courage says enough is enough, and delivers permanency to those many families and individual asylum seekers living in the margins of our society and communities.
Today’s Age editorial, It is time for Australia to set the refugees free, is timely. It reminds us that during this period in which we reflect and try to live our better selves we should recognise the wrong and the harm that we are doing to people who are innocent. http://m.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-editorial/it-is-time-for-australia-to-set-the-refugees-free-20151227-glvflx.html
Yet it falls short by not mentioning the 1,000s of others whose status is in abeyance and who also need to be in our consciousness and our line of vision.
Leadership Changes
So much has been said about change in leadership and what it means for Australia. Here is my take.
Prime Minister Turnbull has allowed a sense of freedom and has changed both the language and the nomenclature of his administration. Since his take over there have been far fewer Australian flags at press conferences; there has been an abandoning of the dreary, inane and repetitive slogs, ‘debt and deficit disaster’, ‘stops the boats’, ‘death cults’, ‘lifters not leaners’; we have lost the cringe factor in public utterances and international meetings.
So the discourse is more palatable, less polemic and far less weaved with moral panics, but has there been substantial change? The following is my evidence that the change if coming is certainly very slow.
The government’s security measures including the latest changes to citizenship proceeded as intended. I understand the motivation and even the more subdued rhetoric but again I don’t buy it. The hardening of our treatment of people who have access to a second nationality both in their expectations for consular support while overseas and their citizenship rights should they transgress the law has created two levels of citizenship which is I believe unfair and immoral. It also smacks of indirect racial discrimination.
We are maintaining and even furthering temporary migration (the Chinese Free Trade Agreement) through increased numbers of students with work rights, working holiday makers and 457 visa workers. The numbers of temporary entrants in any one day in Australia can reach 1.5 million, yet we are increasingly marginalising family migration which has been the hallmark of our immigrant success for the past 70 years.
We have opened up our hearts to 12,000 Syrian refugees, but have ironically felt nothing for the 13,750 refugees coming to Australia year on year in our permanent refugee program.
We still have children in overseas and local immigration detention.
We have now added ex criminals awaiting deportation to these centres such as Christmas Island.
We still have asylum seekers without a future and our asylum seeker policy that reeks of hope rather than strategy.
Our uniformed Border Force continues to display our fortress Australia mentality and our willingness to shut the back door at any cost.
Leadership may have changed but the plight of asylum seekers has not.
So these thoughts stay with me and play on my mind. There are too many questions without resolution on the asylum seeker issue but we need to make a start.
Perhaps our collective New Year’s resolution should indeed be to deliver just that, resolution to the many thousands whose migration status is not resolved; now that would be something to celebrate come next Christmas.