Australian Refugee Policy : Myths and Realities

Introduction -

    On the weekend of 12-13 October 2002, a series of terrorist bomb blast on the Indonesian island of Bali killed large numbers of Australians, many of them young holidaymakers who had crowded into a popular nightspot, the Sari Club.  As victims of the blasts were repatriated to Australia in emergency airlifts, harrowing accounts of the trauma to which they had been exposed saturated the airwaves, and calls to radio stations were suffused with a very human sympathy for victims and for the families trapped in an agonising uncertainty about the fate of their loved ones.

Sticks and Stones Will Break My Bones - And Words Will Harm Too Australia's provision of education for asylum seekers children in detention

Introduction -

    Australia's determination to prevent people arriving by boat to seek asylum has been a prominent theme in political and popular discourse in recent times.  The events of the Tampa in August 2001, followed by the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the allegations of boat people throwing their children overboard, fuelled a rising climate of fear and prejudice.  The Border Protection Act and 'Pacific Solution,' with a budget commitment of some $2.8 billion for 2002/2003, were rushed through parliament to ensure that boat people would not step foot on Australian territory.  In November 2001, the Howard government was returned to power in a campaign to 'protect Australia's borders' against 'floods' of 'queue jumpers' who paid people smugglers to 'enter Australia illegally.'  A year later, in 2002, a Senate Inquiry into 'the children overboard affair' concluded that members of the government had seriously misled the public on these matters during the election campaign.  However, as was soberly noted in a Sydney Morning Herald editorial (31 October 2002): 'Most Australians believe that unauthorised boats arrivals last year had to be stopped.  They are not greatly troubled by what distortions and deceptions the Government resorted to as it went about this task'

Learning about the 'Other' - Intercultural Learning and Refugees

Introduction -

    The last few years have seen several waves of antipathy towards different ethnic groups in Australia.  Media coverage of criminal incidents linked to offenders from a non-anglo-celtic background had led to a tangible hostility towards certain ethnic groups.  Sometimes, such aversion is only subtle and unspoken.  In the case of the Sydney gang rapists it became quite outspoken and specifically targeted the Lebanese neighbours or anybody with a vaguely 'Middle-Eastern' appearance.  'Middle-Eastern' rapidly grew into the new 'Asian' on the scale of feared foreign appearances, and although the connotations of 'Middle-Eastern' are rather blurry, 11 September 2001 and its terrorist burnt an image into the collective mind of Australia that will forever be linked to 'Middle-Eastern.'

Prisoners of Paradox : Thinking for the Refugee

Introduction -

    Philippa: What I haven't told you is that I no longer believe.

    Filippo: You no longer believe in what?

    Philippa: In sense, in justice, in life...

    Tom Tykwer (Dir.) Heaven, 2002.

    The character who says these words, in the last film ever written by the great Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieslowski, faces a moral impasse.  She has seen and suffered injustice - the injustice of a police-tolerated drug trade that caused her husband's death - and seeks restitution by planting a bomb in the office of the dealer, a wealthy businessman with friends in the police.  The bomb fails to kill him, and instead kills four innocent people.  From then on her guilt, and her anger at the corruption that laid the ground for the tragedy, consumes her - her hope, her belief, her sense of tings being right in the world, of her very being in the world.  Even after she succeeds in murdering the man and goes on the run, her disbelief corrodes her until there seems nothing left, and she has only those words.

A Cautionary Note on UNHCR's Comprehensive Strategy
for Refugees

Introduction -

    When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created in 1950, it was set up as a temporary agency with a budget of USD 3000 000 in its first year of operation.  Its primary task was to deal with refugee flows in Europe.  In 2002, it is the lead international organisation for refugees with a projected budget of over USD 1 billion and operating in 120 countries.

Dehumanising the Boat People

Introduction -

    In this article we analyse the Australian Government's approach to boat people in terms of the concept of 'othering' within a general framework of discourse theory.  The refugee issue has been central to Australian politics in recent years, and systemic analysis in these terms should add to our understanding of it.  We use the term 'boat people' because it includes the word people and differentiates those involved from other asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by plan and are treated quite differently.

'Truly' International Refugee Law? Or Yet Another East/West Divide?

Introduction -

    "Truth are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are"

    F.Nietzsche (cited in Said, 1978, p.203)

    In the recent literature on international refugee law (Martin, 1997; Goodwin-Gill, 1996; Kourula, 1999) there is a predominant assumption that it is indeed international.  However, it is clear that the main possibilities of refugee law come from state adherence and obligation to it.  The will of the Western states to practice international refugee law has been questioned in the last two decades (Feller, 2001; Loescher, 1993; Chowdhury 2001; Chimni, 1998), but very little has been written about the role of Asian and developing states in international refugee law.  In this paper, I present a brief history of the formation of international refugee law.  I argue that 'East' and 'West' (Said, 1978) have taken up very different positions in relation to refugees, and that this has significant implication in the present day.  The possibilities of international refugee law are limited by an East/West divide.

Asylum seekers and the Concept of the Foreigner

Introduction -

    The arrival of the latest wave of asylum seekers has generated, and will no doubt continue to generate, invaluable public and intellectual discussion about the proper extent of Australia's responsibilities to the world's growing number of refugees.  Indeed, there are already many strong publicly advocated moral, legal and political arguments that advance a reasonable position on the narrower question of our responsibilities to asylum seekers who have already arrived in Australia: namely, that we should not subject such people to mandatory detention or issue temporary protection visas to them.  The arguments in support of this position have drawn attention to the breaches of international law; the human rights violations; and to the fact that current policies effectively reinforce a race-based immigration agenda that is supposed to have been long abandoned (HREOC, 1998; Mansouri, 2002; Lock et al, 2002; McMaster, 2002).  Even so, what we might call the force of the better argument has not been effective enough to produce an abandonment of current policies of mandatory detention and temporary protection visas.