Opposition OUTRAGED by heat

The latest news from Christmas Island:

Christmas Island’s detention facilities reached their capacity of 1,400 regular beds last Thursday, and now about 60 asylum seekers are now being housed in tents..

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison is outraged.

“I think it’s outrageous that we’re in a situation now that we’ve had so many boat arrivals that these people will have to spend these hot summer months under tents” he said. Anger as asylum seekers housed in tents

Firstly, I reckon that someone who has escaped the Taliban, fled using dodgy people smugglers, and sailed to Australia on a ramshackle fishing boat skippered by people who have never sailed that far before is not going to worry too much about being HOT!

Secondly, if Mr Morrison is concerned that the asylum seekers might suffer because they have to sleep in tents, how can he support the return of the Temporary Protection Visa that drove people mad and drove them to suicide with its inhumane conditions? TPV agonyScott Morrison is

Temporary protection: Not a safe haven for Sharman Stone!

I was so taken with Sharman Stone’s crazy ‘logic’ that I almost forgot the sick feeling I had when she began to speak yesterday about reinstating the temporary protection visa.

Ms Stone became strident under Steve Price’s straight questioning on the ABC:

That’s what I’m saying. You will not qualify for welfare!

Steve Price: Yes so that means you don’t, that means you won’t qualify for welfare benefits, you won’t qualify for the dole and you won’t qualify for government housing. Is that what you’re saying?

Sharman Stone: You will not qualify for welfare. If you are not able to work, and some may not, of course, due to ill health or age or whatever, then there would be a government allowance to make sure, of course, that you don’t starve.

You can only laugh. It was so ridiculous that even Andrew Bolt had to speak out:

“So there won’t be welfare, but there will. And, really, does Stone really believe we’d stand by and let even asylum seekers here – including the able bodied – go without a cent to feed themselves or their children? To be forced, if they can’t find work, to live instead by begging or stealing?

She’s insulting our intelligence. And our humanity.

There are ways to be tough, but this is not one of them.” This isn’t tough, but stupid

Ruddock: Pauline Hanson made me do it!

Mischa Schubert of the Age reports a heated Coalition party-room debate over asylum seeker policy Coalition split on asylum seekers

Liberal MPs Petro Georgiou, Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan spoke strongly against the position proposed by the shadow ministry.

Philip Ruddock, former immigration minister at the time of the introduction and enforcement of the egregious asylum seeker laws, charged that changes to immigration laws when Labor was last in office had been part of the catalyst for the rise of Hansonism.

Pauline Hanson, in her maiden speech to federal parliament in 1996, revived the claim that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asians, and later, as leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, summarised her refugee policy as ‘meet (the boats), fuel them, feed them, give medical supplies and send them on their way’.

When she asserted that under her party the entire humanitarian program would be replaced by temporary refuge, the then Minister, Phillip Ruddock, resiled from this proposal, calling it ‘unconscionable’

Hanson’s subsequent electoral success influenced both Labor and the Coalition to increase the severity of their refugee policies.

By 1999 Ruddock had overseen the introduction of the new Temporary Protection regime, amongst other measures modelled on Hanson’s rhetoric. Be alert and alarmed if you remember the TPV

But it wasn’t his fault – Pauline made him do it

Even I can add this up – Don’t be afraid of boat people, Australia!

Numbers: A friend to all boat people

Part 1:Numbers

Number of asylum seekers who arrived last year: 4750

Number who arrived by boat: 179

Asylum seekers found at sea off Australia so far this year: 221

Percentage of asylum seekers who arrive by air: more than 95%

Thanks to Crikey Asylum seekers, the facts in figures

Part 2: Why are the numbers increasing in Australia?

Thanks to Crikey’s Pollytics blogger Why Andrew Bolt should be Sodomised with a Calculator – Part 142 for this graphic representation of the correlation of numbers of asylum applications in Australia and the rest of the industrialised nations – whether or not they have Pacific Solutions or Temporary Protection Visas!

(I am jealous of the figure!!!)

Death, poetry and linguistics

“Most reports on asylum seekers using language analysis are flawed”, says a report published yesterday on ABC Science.

This is a method used by some of the world’s immigration authorities including the Australian Immigration Department to decide whether or not asylum seekers are genuine refugees.

“Dr Diana Eades says the companies often use the judgement of native speakers who don’t have linguistic training and have a narrow view of how the asylum speaker should speak.

“It’s equivalent to saying that because someone used the US term ‘elevator’ instead of ‘lift’, they are not from Australia,” she says. That’s the level that these reports are operating on.”

I have had personal and painful experience watching friends struggle with these ‘tests’. One man I knew was told that he was not from Afghanistan because he used some Pakistani words.

The article quotes the Immigration Department as saying that language analysis is only one test that they use. But the other tests gave conclusions that would be funny if they were not determining life and death.

One man was told that he could not be from Afghanistan because he spoke English too well.

Another, a poet, was told that authorities had found his poetry among his possessions, and that proved he was not from Afghanistan because Afghans did not have enough education to write poetry.

I sat in on interviews where men were ‘tested’ through their knowledge of their local area.

Men were told that because they hadn’t heard of a large town a few hundred kilometres away from their birth place they were lying – while they in fact had not travelled more than 30 kilometres from their village in tire lifetime, and there were no telephones and no mass media and no maps or books to learn of such things.

When asked ‘How long did it take to get to village ‘x’ from your village?’ the answer ‘Four hours’ was ‘proof’ of lies – but while the officer looked at the map and saw that the villages were 12 kilometres apart, the answer came from the memory of  journeys by foot over mountainous terrain.

And on and on, in grim, gallows humour.

And in the end, all the men I knew were accepted as refugees twice over, and are all now Australian citizens. But the pain, the pain.

Temporary bull

Liberal Leader Malcolm Turnbull says that the Rudd government’s decision to give refugees permanent visas instead of three-year Temporary Protection Visas has made Australia more attractive to people smugglers, and that was why more boatloads have started arriving.
After the increase in arrivals of asylum seekers by boat in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Temporary Protection Visa was introduced by the Howard government to deter future arrivals. The TPV did not work. It was not until interdiction was increased and ‘migration zones’ excised from northern Australia that the numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat decreased.
In fact, the decrease in numbers of people seeking asylum everywhere in the world was the main cause of the drop-off in numbers arriving in Australia from 2003 onwards.
Recent international research has shown that policies that try to restrict the rights of refugees after they have arrived (like the TPV) have little or no influence on flows of asylum seekers (Cornelius, Martin and Hollifield 2004, Holzer, Schneider and Widmer 2000, Robinson and Segrott 2002).
Since 2007 numbers of asylum seekers have been increasing again in all countries, and Australia is now beginning to receive its share.