Mission & Justice

7/11/07

Sydney Peace Prize winner Patrick Dodson shared his vision for a better world amid a flutter of white doves at Cabramatta High School on Friday. About 2,000 students from 33 schools turned out to hear from the man known as the “father of reconciliation”. Mr Dodson said schools like Cabramatta, which has 1,200 students from 40 different cultural groups, were “the turbo-engine room of the future of global Australia”. “These students are, in my view, the foundation, the crucible and the centre of the future of Australia,” Mr Dodson said. “We search around the world for diversity and difference, and how we’re going to manifest that, but we’ve got it here in Cabramatta.”

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Connie Levett; 6/11/08; (2 Items)

Surprised refugee lawyers have praised the Department of Immigration for moving swiftly and co-operatively to assess the protection claims of 26 Afghan and Iranian asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Initiatives that include tree-planting proposals, tearing down fences and sending the kids to a local school have provided the first snapshot of immigration detention on Christmas Island under the Rudd Government, while the $396 million detention centre sits empty. In the first test of how the Rudd Government would deal with asylum seekers arriving by boat, Steven Glass, a volunteer for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service who spent a week on Christmas Island, said he had never seen anything like the dramatic change in attitude of both Department of Immigration and Citizenship officers and the GSL guards.

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Stephen Lunn & Pia Akerman; 5/11/08; (2 Items)

Refusing German doctor Bernhard Moeller’s application for permanent residence in Australia on the basis of the cost to the taxpayers of his son Lukas’s Down syndrome is “outrageous” and not in the spirit of international disability agreements, law expert Ron McCallum says. Professor McCallum, a former University of Sydney dean of law and an expert on industrial law, made his comments on the case from New York yesterday after being elected to a committee to oversee the new UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The appointment to a handpicked group of 12 worldwide makes the blind academic Australia’s only current representative on a UN treaty body. Australia ratified the convention in July, becoming one of the first Western nations to do so.

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Cynthia Banham; 27/10/08

The Immigration Minister, Chris Evans, has demanded answers to allegations up to 20 Afghan asylum seekers rejected by Australia under the Howard government’s so-called Pacific solution were killed after returning to Afghanistan, and others remain in hiding from the Taliban. The claims are contained in a documentary to be aired on SBS on November 19. The film, A Well-Founded Fear, produced by Anne Delaney, is based on the efforts of Phil Glendenning, the director of social justice agency the Edmund Rice Centre, who has spent the past six years tracing many of these rejected asylum seekers.

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David Dale; 26/10/08

Funny how nobody talks about immigration any more. The hottest topic of five years ago has vanished from the national agenda. That’s probably because Australians think there isn’t much of it happening these days. We assume the immigration program was cut back during the Howard years because both sides of politics feared most Australians were deep-down racists and would vote against any party that brought in more foreigners. It’s time to dispose of some myths. Immigration is at record levels and, if Australians knew what kind of new citizens they are getting, they would be delighted. So let’s tell them.

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Tony Kevin; 25/10/08

The Bitter Shore; By Jacquie Everitt Macmillan

It is, thankfully, a fading memory now but between 1999 and 2005 Australia’s conscience was racked by a cruel detention system that imprisoned thousands of men, women and children in brutal desert camps. In 1998 a people-smuggling route through Indonesia sprang up. Over the next three years, 12,000 mostly Middle Eastern people arrived by boat, seeking admission as refugees. It was a national security nightmare come to life. The sudden appearance and abrupt curtailment of this trade suggests that powerful Indonesian agencies generated it as payback for Australian support for East Timorese independence. Canberra concealed this dangerous truth, peddling the myth that inter-national criminal people-smuggling syndicates had targeted Australia.

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Jumana Al Tamimi; 23/10/08

If Nina Al Ghazali was asked before the 2003 war on Iraq whether she would ever think of living outside her country, her reply would have been “never”. But things have changed after her country was torn by the war and its consequences. She is among millions of Iraqis who escaped the daily cycle of violence, seeking a better life in other countries. According to UN figures, Iraqis in the first half of this year top those seeking asylum in the West.

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21/10/08

East Timorese officials are questioning 16 Sri Lankans and four Indonesians arrested on the country’s south coast while allegedly planning to sail to Australia. The group, who were detained at Betano, have admitted they were planning to sail to Australia to look for work, a senior East Timorese immigration official said yesterday. An East Timorese police officer at Dili Police Headquarters told The Australian last night: “They’re here in Dili, they’ve no papers - we’ve moved them. “All they’ve said is - they want to sail to Australia.”

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Kerry-Anne Walsh; 19/10/08

A report by the Immigration Ombudsman into the cases of 25 long-stay immigration detainees was quietly tabled in Parliament last week with no fanfare and no publicity. No wonder. It’s appalling reading. It should make civilised Australians hang their heads in shame. Take case 479/08 - in detention centres they have no names - a Kenyan who stowed away on a ship. This is a showcase example of callous indifference; indifference that grew over two decades to become the hallmark of the detention system.

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Andrew West; 13/10/08

It has become almost a ritual in itself. A religious community proposes building a place of worship or learning, and encounters the wrath of thousands of residents. There are furious mass meetings, petitions, legal challenges and sometimes even violence. On the face of it, Sydney looks like a city riven by ethnic and cultural hostility. But the protests may be a sign of something much more basic - a competition between recent immigrants and Anglo-Celtic Australians for the dwindling amounts of cheap land. A report from the economic forecaster BIS Schrapnel, compiled late last week, found that “high land costs and affordability remain a challenge for the new housing market”, especially in Sydney.

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