Mission & Justice

Stephen Lunn; 4/11/08; (3 Items)

Federal Immigration Minister Chris Evans was warned four months ago that migrants were being denied permanent residency in Australia because a family member was disabled. Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes confirmed to The Australian yesterday that he had written to Senator Evans mid-year asking the Government to change the law to ensure immigration decisions did not discriminate against the disabled. Dr Innes’s letter was sent months before the case of Bernhard Moeller came to light last week. The German doctor, who is in Australia on a temporary visa and has practised as a specialist physician in rural Victoria for two years, was rejected for permanent residency by the Immigration Department because of the potential cost to the community of his 13-year-old son Lukas, who has Down syndrome.

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18/10/08

Two Indonesians have been charged with people smuggling after a boat arrived in Australian waters carrying 14 passengers who claimed to be Afghan refugees. There were 17 people, including three crew, aboard the boat when it pulled up alongside an offshore oil production and storage facility in the Timor Sea on October 6. The group was picked up by a Royal Australian Navy vessel and taken to Christmas Island, off the northwest coast of Western Australia.

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Paige Taylor; 2/10/08

The Rudd Government is being warned to take a tough stand against the 14 boatpeople - thought to be from the Middle East - intercepted off Australia’s northwest coast, amid fears they could be the first of a fresh wave of asylum-seekers. Opposition immigration spokesman Sharman Stone said the two Indonesian crew and their 12 passengers could be the first of many asylum-seekers, given Labor’s decision to slash the border protection budget and introduce a policy of granting permanent visas to asylum-seekers regardless of their mode of arrival. The Australian has learned that some in the group, which was believed to include a child, were seasick and dehydrated when intercepted by the navy. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship will try to confirm the nationalities of the group’s members in interviews in coming days, though The Australian understands that preliminary information from onboard HMAS Dubbo has indicated the group includes some Iraqis and Iranians.

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Cathy Carey; 13/9/08

About 10 o’clock one evening in January 2003, Mary Rohde got out of her four-wheel-drive to lock the gate to the visitor carpark at the Baxter immigration detention facility near Port Augusta, where she was a detention officer. She felt a presence but saw no one, and returned to the car to radio the control room. Suddenly an arm was round her neck, a blade at her throat. Terror and incomprehension overwhelmed her. Eventually the arm loosened and she looked round; in the back seat was her boss. It had been a security drill. “That’ll teach her to lock the car door,” a supervisor later remarked. Rhode was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and, five years later, has not recovered, despite psychiatric treatment.

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Elisabeth Wynhause 1/9/08

A red Ferrari 360 Modena tools down the main street of Robinvale on Saturday mornings. A Vietnamese man is at the wheel. The sight of a $260,000 sports car in a small agricultural border town in Victoria’s northwest still makes heads turn. Only six or seven years ago, Van “Nino” Nguyen, the driver, was a labourer picking fruit. Now he is one of the richest men in the town, with a deep-sea fishing boat moored nearby on the Murray, and a BMW with “Nino” on the numberplate that he drives when the Ferrari is in the garage. But behind this remarkable immigrant success story is the bleak reality for many foreign farm workers. Ethnic contractors are supplying gangs of agricultural labourers, whose presence is changing the face of rural Australia. Robinvale has two Asian-owned groceries, an Asian-owned bakery, a shop selling Tongan favourites such as tinned taro, and a hairdresser who employs a Malaysian woman on a 457 visa to translate for customers.

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Patricia Karvelas; 31/7/08

Asylum-seekers will be refused the dole but given greater rights to work and access to Medicare while they wait for their cases to be resolved. In a radical departure from the Howard government’s hardline policy, the Rudd Government will dramatically increase the rights and support granted to asylum-seekers. Under the changes unveiled by Immigration Minister Chris Evans yesterday, detention would be used only if department officials could show a person posed a security risk. If not, they would be released into the community until their status was determined. Senator Evans said he was aware of concerns that the current bridging visa arrangements can leave people in the community “without the capacity to work and earn a living or be in receipt of Medicare”.

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