Mission & Justice

Michelle Grattan; 11/8/08

A campaign to encourage Australian residents to take citizenship and an overhaul of the qualifying test have been proposed in a report to Immigration Minister Chris Evans. About 900,000 permanent residents, most of them British, New Zealanders and South Africans, are eligible to become citizens. The report is understood to call for the Government to promote citizenship, and also to sponsor a national education program on civics and citizenship. The citizenship test, introduced by the Howard government, has been strongly criticised, particularly for disadvantaging refugees and others from a non-English speaking background. In the six months to the end of March, 25,000 people sat the test and 95% passed. But while 99% of skilled migrants passed, only 82% of those from the humanitarian program did so.The number of people seeking citizenship has fallen since the test because people have been deterred by fear of failure.

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Natasha Robinson; 11/8/08

Arnhem Land leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu has called for the abolition of the federal Government’s longstanding Aboriginal employment scheme, labelling it a welfare trap that is “killing Aboriginal people”. Heated debate about the future of the Community Development Employment Projects, currently under review by the Government, dominated the annual indigenous Garma festival which wraps up tomorrow in East Arnhem Land. Mr Yunupingu sparked furious debate among academics and those working in the Aboriginal service industry yesterday when he labelled CDEP a “weapon” that had been used to trample Aboriginal people’s rights and deny them access to the real economy. The employment project — founded in the late 1970s and designed to be a welfare-to-work transition scheme — was premised on the belief that “money spoils blackfellas”, Mr Yunupingu said at an economic development forum at the festival yesterday.

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Sarah-Jane Collins and Miki Perkins; 5/8/08
Riding home from his part-time job at KFC last October, 17-year-old Sudanese refugee Ajang Gor was attacked by a group of youths who shouted racist taunts at him. In an unprovoked assault they called him a “black c–t”, punched him and hit him over the head with a Bacardi Breezer bottle, before leaving the Melton resident unconscious on the road and stealing his mobile phone.

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Penelope Debelle; 5/8/08

The uncle of a former Palestinian asylum seeker, Akram al-Masri, who was deported by the Howard government and killed on the Gaza Strip last week, has asked the Government to save the man’s wife and four sons by bringing them to Australia. Soliman al-Masri, who lives in Adelaide, said yesterday steps were put in train to bring Akram al-Masri back to Australia after an attempt on his life in Gaza in November 2006, in which his brother, 19, was killed.

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Simon Mann; 5/8/08

Iraqi interpreters given asylum in Australia after working alongside Australian troops during the occupation of their country say they feel short-changed by the Federal Government since arriving in Australia two months ago. The interpreters, who faced persecution in Iraq and were branded traitors by many of their countrymen, feel they have been dumped in Australia with little help or prospect of work. They say they were promised jobs, immediate health care and moderately priced housing.

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David Holdcroft; 4/8/08

The changes to Australia’s asylum policy announced last week by the immigration minister, Chris Evans, were as inevitable as they were sensible. They are also incremental: they remove some of the worst aspects of a cruel system but leave intact much of the deterrent apparatus inherited from the former government. The introduction of mandatory detention is generally regarded as the work of Keating Government immigration minister Gerry Hand in 1992, although the policy direction can be traced three years previously to 1989. The Howard Government strengthened it in response to what it saw as a sizeable increase in numbers of boat people making for Australia’s shores in the late 1990s.

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Michelle Grattan; 3/8/08

When Chris Evans, now Immigration Minister and Senate Leader, gave his maiden speech in 1993, he spelled out principles he would bring to issues before the Parliament. One was that “there exist fundamental inalienable human rights that must be paramount in our considerations … those rights must be protected and enhanced by any legislative action we take”. He recalled while studying in London in 1988, seeing a large anti-Australian rally against the treatment of Aborigines. Although that speech didn’t deal with asylum seekers or other illegal immigrants, it gives an indication where Evans, on the left of the Labor party, is coming from in the major change of direction in Australia’s immigration detention policy which he announced a few days ago. He was, of course, implementing a policy on which Labor had gone to the election, but how it has come out also very much reflects his own values.

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Basil Adas; 3/8/08

Some 11,400 displaced families returned to Baghdad last month due to improved security in the city, Abdul Khaliq Zanqana, a deputy in the Iraqi parliament and chairman of the committee for the displaced told Gulf News. He added the number of families displaced from Baghdad had reached nearly 130,000 with people either going to neighbouring countries or other parts of the world. The figure was 132,000 according to Baghdad government statistics and 92,000 according to figures provided by the Iraqi ministry of immigration. The return of thousands of displaced families is considered one of the most positive signs of life returning to normal in Baghdad but this return is still modest compared to the total numbers of displaced people within Iraq and outside it.

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3/8/08

A refugee advocate attacked Australian authorities on Saturday for rejecting the application of a Palestinian asylum seeker who returned to the Gaza Strip and was killed as part of a clan rivalry. Akram Al Masri, who gained a high profile in Australia by challenging a government policy of keeping asylum seekers in prison-like detention camps, was shot Friday in the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, police said. He was slain by a member of a rival clan as he was leaving a courthouse where he had been certifying documents, the official said. The two feuding clans often target members of the other tribe. Masri, 31, arrived in Australia in 2001 and was sent to an Outback detention camp while his claim for asylum was processed. He left in 2002 after the application was rejected, saying he preferred to face the dangers in his homeland than remain in detention.

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Paul Kelly; 1& 2/8/08

Kevin Rudd’s reforms to refugee policy have exceeded election expectations and pledges, with the latest being this week’s softening of mandatory detention as devised and implemented by the Keating and Howard governments. This break from the past is a significant reassessment of Labor values. It constitutes not just a rejection of the Howard cabinet’s punitive approach but shows the Rudd cabinet has rejected the Keating government’s outlook. There is one burning question: Is this new outlook sustainable? The answer is that nobody knows. The reform of detention testifies to the transformed political climate since 2001, with few boat arrivals in recent years. But Immigration Minister Chris Evans knows that more boats will come and this is Australia’s permanent challenge. In an interview with The Australian, he argued the new detention policy is geared to this reality.

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