Politics

The Best And Worst Things Australia Is Doing On World Refugee Day

Well, today is a mixed bag.

by Chris Woods  20 June 2017

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Happy World Refugee Day, everyone! Today, we celebrate the courage and determination of people who — for reasons ranging from war to ethnic cleansing to institutionalised homophobia — have been forced to abandon everything in the hopes of someday finding safety.

Many of these people have gone on to incredible things in Australia. Others, punished for their method of seeking asylum, have instead been detained for over four years in circumstances defined by leading human rights bodies as tantamount to torture.

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As you might expect, Australia’s commemoration of the day is fairly divided.

The Worst

In a deliberately timed move, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives have today joined forced to try and get Australia out of the UN Refugee Convention. The pair gave notice for their plan yesterday, and are due to speak this afternoon asking the government to “withdraw from the Refugee Convention immediately” and “reflect upon incidents of domestic terror and foreign fighters, and the refugee history of those persons”.

The motion will be discussed immediately after Labor Senator Lisa Singh calls on the Senate to recognise the significance of World Refugee Day. Singh is set to note that “Australia has an obligation under international law to support refugees and to make a fair contribution to the international efforts to aid refugees”, and call for “a reasoned, principled and facts-based approach to the issue of asylum seekers and refugees”.

It is… quite different from the motion it will precede:

Lisa Singh

Good, yes, this seems like stuff elected officials should be saying.

Screen Shot 2017-06-20 at 11.59.46 AM
Bernardi Hanson

OKAY SLIGHT CHANGE OF PACE, NOBODY PANIC!

Pauline Hanson’s claim that refugees lead to terrorism — a sentiment which is heavily implied in the above motion — was recently wholly dismissed by the leader of ASIO. Refugees, for anyone paying attention, are overwhelmingly the people fleeing terrorism, and are subject to a fuckload of security checks at any rate.

Also, Australia is absolutely not holding up the UN Convention anyway. We regularly send refugees back to persecution via boat turn-backs, we’re still punishing people in offshore detention for having the audacity to ask for our help, and former Immigration Minister Scott Morrison even used children in detention as bargaining chips with the Senate to remove most references to the Convention from The Migration Act.

Basically, this call is nothing more than nationalistic grandstanding. Nothing is likely happen from it, other than maybe a little gross sense of pride from Senators Hanson and Bernardi.

The Best!

Luckily, Labor have finally shown a skerrick of integrity on the issue: on top of Singh’s call for the Coalition to increase its refugee intake, Labor have also knocked back Peter Dutton’s ultra-nationalistic citizenship changes.

Shadow Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia Tony Burke called the bill massive overreach, arguing that the national security justification is redundant, the proposed extended delay is pointless, and the harsher English tests are a “bizarre act of snobbery”.

“By definition, everybody who is affected by this is a person who Australia has said should live here and should live here permanently,” Burke said. “If there is a national security problem for these people, then why on earth does the government have them already living here permanently?

“The second challenge with the legislation is the delay,” he said. “At the moment you already have to wait for years before you are able to take on Australian citizenship. The four-year start is already there… How can it be good for Australia to be further delaying whether or not someone takes allegiance to this country?

“The third issue we have to take very direct exception to is the issue of the English language test,” he concluded, arguing that the move to Level Six English requirement is, “not just an argument to potential citizens, [but] an argument to a whole range of Australians who don’t get their personal literacy and English all the way up to university entrance level. And that, in a bizarre act of snobbery, is exactly where Peter Dutton and Malcolm Turnbull have landed.”

In addition to this, the Greens have also called on the government to shut down offshore detention. Immigration spokesperson Senator Nick McKim plans to introduce the following motion immediately after the one from Hanson and Bernardi:

Nick McKim
Nick McKim 2

Yes, that is the good shit.

Finally, if you want to personally fight back against that kind of ignorance and prejudice, why not throw some coin to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre?

The ASRC is hosting a massive telethon today. If you haven’t heard of them before, they do seriously good work both as an advocacy group, and on an individual level in terms of refugee settlement and legal assistance.

There are a bunch of celebrities helping out, and it looks like massive fun. Find out more at their website, or call on 1300 692 772.