Mission & Justice

Elisabeth Wynhausen & Natalie O’Brien; 17/5/08

The five women subsequently looped together as the complainants were working in Club 417, a brothel in the Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy that was raided in 2003. The women, then aged between 25 and 35, had been recruited in Thailand to work in the sex industry in Australia. In doing so, they incurred a so-called debt of up to $45,000, including $20,000 owed to the recruiters who had sold them to traffickers. This debt had to be worked off, by having sex with up to 900 customers. This week the case that started with the 2003 raid reached the High Court. The two days of head-spinning legal arguments before the full bench of the High Court seem very far removed from the realities of life for a so-called contract girl, having sex with eight or more customers a day, six days a week, in a dingy brothel with boarded-up windows.

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Paul Kelly; 17/5/08

Immigration Minister Chris Evans wants a major overhaul of the migrant program to boost numbers, promote unskilled as well as skilled applicants and gear Australia to the new global competition for workers.Predicting a “great national debate over the next few years”, Senator Evans said he planned to bring a series of cabinet submissions to reform a “model that is out of date” and too unresponsive to employer needs. He said the debate about temporary migration was over; the coming debate would be about semi-skilled and unskilled migrants to meet labour shortages. Next month, cabinet is expected to approve a pilot program for a guest worker scheme from the South Pacific. Senator Evans called this a “stalking horse” for the larger debate on unskilled migration.

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Linda Hindi; 16/5/08

Although girls are consistently higher achievers at the academic level, they lag far behind as active members of the labour force, according to a recently released report. The report, “Higher Education at a glance in Jordan”, indicates that unemployment rates for women between the ages of 25-29 (seven per cent) are lower than men in the same age group (13 per cent), because of the high percentage of women not seeking employment. Unemployment among women from that same age group who are not enrolled in educational institutions and not seeking employment, which, according to the study excludes them from being part of the labour force, is as high as 77 per cent.

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Kenneth Denby; 16/5/08

The Burmese authorities have sealed off the cyclone disaster zone from the outside world, expelling foreign aid workers and placing multiple checkpoints along roads into the Irrawaddy Delta, to the despair of foreign diplomats and aid workers. The isolation of the delta confirms the growing sense among international organisations that the Burmese junta is never going to allow a wide-ranging foreign-led aid effort of the kind that was mounted in several countries after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Aid groups are trying instead to mount a stealth operation in which Western aid is distributed by government organisations, local aid workers, and international staff from countries that the regime regards as friendly and compliant.

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Natalie O’Brien & Elisabeth Wynhausen; 15/5/08
The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions will pay the legal costs of a High Court appeal for a former brothel owner who was jailed for sexual slavery offences but later had her conviction quashed. In an unusual move, the DPP has promised the High Court to pay the legal bill, which could reach $25,000, so they can appeal the quashing of Wei Tang’s conviction. They are funding the appeal because it is seen as critical to test the nation’s slavery laws and clarify legal issues which have arisen in the prosecution of Ms Tang.

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Ghazanfar Ali Khan, 14/5/08

More than 55 foreign medical workers in Riyadh have not been paid their salaries for several months and are now “on the verge of starvation.” To add to their problems, the local Labor Court has scheduled a hearing into their case for July. “These workers have been sponsored by the Riyadh-based Nukhba House for Medical Services and are on the verge of starvation now,” said Abid Lateef Khan, a Pakistani medical technician who has not been paid his salary for six months. Gagan Kumar Singh, an Indian laboratory technician who has not been paid for seven months, said, “Our requests and pleas fell on deaf ears. We approached the management many times asking them to clear our dues and send us home.”

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Karen Kissane; 14/5/08

Australia’s anti-slavery laws could be interpreted in a way that netted employers who exploit workers, High Court justice Michael Kirby has warned. Speaking from the bench in a sex-slavery case yesterday, he said if the court did not define “slavery” with care, “then a lot of harsh employment contracts are going to slip over into ’slavery’ and are going to be prosecuted with a potential of 25 years’ imprisonment on conviction”. “There are an awful lot of people in this country working in back rooms of restaurants and in the rag trade (whose employers) would be susceptible to … prosecutions for slavery, and that cannot be what Parliament intended,” Justice Kirby said.

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12/5/08

Landowners at Bougainville Copper Ltd’s Panguna mine area have “unanimously” agreed to invite the company to consider re-establishing the big open pit mine. A response from Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) and BCL was not immediately available, but industry sources believe it will cost at least US$1 billion to reopen the mine and it could take three or four years before it is brought back into production. In a brief statement released last Friday, they said the two main landowner groups, the Panguna landowners association and directors of road mining tailing leases “have met with BCL” and unanimously agreed the company should return to Bougainville. The statement was signed by the chairman of PLA and RMTL Michael Pariu, the vice chairman of PLA Chris Damana, director of RTML Severinus Ampaoi and RTML’s director and company secretary Lawrence Daveona.

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Najah Alosaimi, 12/5/08

Several months after the government’s decision to allow women to stay in hotels without guardians, businesswomen and other travelers started taking advantage of this new freedom. But many say that they sometimes feel discriminated against by hotel regulations. Nada, 29, works for a media corporation. She told Arab News that the new regulation has made her life easier, especially since she frequently travels on work-related business. But she added that she often notices people looking at her with an eye of mistrust when she introduces herself as a single woman wanting to book a room. “People don’t look at me with respect because there is no man accompanying me,” she said.

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Eamonn Duff; 11/5/08

A blitz by the Department of Immigration on more than 20 homes and businesses has uncovered “one of the worst cases ever” of foreign worker exploitation and migration agent fraud. The two-day sting across the NSW Riverina region was sparked by a Sun-Herald investigation that exposed an illegal migration racket involving hundreds of Indian tourists. Arriving on holiday visas, the men and women gained bridging visas through a network of crooked migration agents who, for thousands of dollars in cash, lodged “grossly unfounded” asylum claims. The tourists were then sent by a labour hire agency called Primary Contracting Services to Rorato Nominees’ tomato farm in Jerilderie where allegations of sexual assault, exploitation and a series of workplace violations had all surfaced.

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