Opening up access to permanent residence for long stay refugees on temporary visas is right and inevitable. The decision will not set off a major new surge of maritime asylum seekers. The Coalition and their supporters have selective memories. Temporary protection visas were never a deterrent anyway. The government’s decision to allow access to permanent Continue reading »
Immigration, refugees
Six years ago, John Menadue, Robert Manne, Tim Costello and I agreed that Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policy was in a complete mess. The trouble started with the 2013 election campaign when Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott tried to outdo each other, pledging that the boats would be stopped and that anyone headed for Continue reading »
The western sanctions weapon is not new to Syria, but since 2019 it has become a lethal one, destroying entire Syrian sectors and killing its people. First published in The Cradle February 6, 2023 Some 83 years after being employed against Germany in 1940, economic sanctions have become the most widely-used tool in Washington’s arsenal Continue reading »
Overseas students are a key source of export income and a tool of Australia’s soft diplomacy. Whether for good or bad, they have also become a major funding source for university research. But far more importantly, they have since around the year 2000, contributed around 25 percent of the annual migration program – in other Continue reading »
Australia needs a Royal Commission into its heinous, wasteful, privatised immigration detention policy. This is imperative in order to uncover immigration detention’s secrets, racism and appalling costs, to change public attitudes and to explore humane alternatives. Australian immigration detention’s 30-year anniversary largely passed last year without comment. Successive Governments have denied responsibility, facts and wrongdoing, Continue reading »
Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus says the Government will shortly announce a ‘humane resolution’ to the situation of 31,000 legacy boat arrivals who have been living in Australia for over a decade. Like night follows day, Peter Dutton will immediately react with hysteria about re-starting the boats, as he does whenever there is discussion of this. The Continue reading »
Hannah Dickinson, an asylum lawyer from the Asylum Seeker Rights Centre, is reported in The Canberra Times to “have rubbished suggestions people are seizing on huge backlogs of asylum applications to lodge bogus claims for protection”. Yet in the same article, the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) is reported to have said asylum “backlogs (have) Continue reading »
Treasury’s December 2022 Population Statement has received more media attention than any of its previous statements. This is predominantly due to Treasurer Jim Chalmers promoting the statement extensively in contrast to his predecessor who largely treated these statements as business as usual. Chalmers is reported to have said “the news that Australia’s population would be Continue reading »