I saw on social media the other day a selfie that showed a middle-aged woman in her lounge room holding a sign that read "Is there one sane reason for hand-cuffing refugees being moved between facilities?"
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The answer would have to be no.
Polling shows a majority of Australians are fed up over the waste of money as well as the needless cruelty of immigration detention. Taxpayers lost $18b from 2013-2020 on this futile exercise.
Consider the futility, the cruelty of locking up the family from Biloela on Christmas Island for over 30 months. For over a thousand days in her young life, five-year-old Kopika can't just go outside and play with friends, and they are not allowed to visit. Wherever the family go, they are accompanied by multiple guards.
What is the point?
Imagine how much better off we would all be had claims for asylum been assessed in the community, and if people recognised as refugees were allowed to work and pay taxes. To help us imagine that, look at the extraordinarily beneficial impact the acceptance of people who fled by boat from Vietnam had on Australia.
Many of them settled in Fairfield. In the mid-1970s, the pub was the only place open after 6pm. By the late '70s, the city was blossoming, busy and bustling late into the night.This latest influx of refugees could have been resettled as easily, and for a lot less money.
Instead we have a system of companies, one with a beach shack on Kangaroo Island as their postal address, and a shadowy bureaucratic monolith, the so-called Department of Home Affairs.
Who does this department serve? Not us. It was keen to suppress video evidence of an alleged assault by guards because revealing it would have a "substantial adverse impact" on the operations of their employer. So not home affairs, but in my opinion corporate affairs.
Australians have a right to be fed up with this sort of thing. It's rife. Mining interests trump Indigenous rights. Agribusinesses steal water leaving country towns to die of thirst. It's an ideology of power without any respect. Like cancer, it ravages its prey.
In the past I've pilloried the ALP's "me too" immigration policy. However the ALP now has a chance to differentiate itself and stand up for fairness. "Labor for Refugees" has written a sensible and humane submission for the upcoming ALP national policy forum. It advocates that people seeking protection have the right to have their claims assessed on Australian soil, and following identity checks, to stay in supportive communities.
It aligns well with the #Time For A Home campaign that launches nationally this Thursday evening on Zoom. Its goal is to free people from immigration detention.
There will be a Newcastle #TimeForAHome vigil at Civic Park at 5pm, Wednesday December 2.
I urge the ALP to adopt the amendments proposed by Labor For Refugees. Adopting their policy would lead to a nationwide sigh of relief, that not only have we ended a terrible era of abuse, but also ended a tragic waste of public money. For the global and domestic challenges we are about to face, we will need every single resource that we have - from compassion right through to cash, from cleverness right through to courage, just to survive as a society.
#TimeForAHome reflects a value common to all cultures. An Irish proverb states "it is in the shelter of each other that the people live": or, we all have to make a home for each other. That, is sane.
Adopting a sane policy is realistic. In the immediate future we will see immense waves of people fleeing the devastating effects of climate change. This is not covered by the UN Refugee Convention, but Labor for Refugees Policy provides for them to be given protection if appropriate. If this policy is adopted, then just as it did in 1948 when 'Doc' Evatt presided over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Australia will once again become a world leader in proactively and humanely responding to global challenges.
But If we continue to imprison and torture those less fortunate than us, then when disaster strikes here, it increases the likelihood of us turning on each other.
This latest influx of refugees could have been resettled as easily, and for a lot less money. Instead we have a system of companies, one with a beach shack on Kangaroo Island as their postal address, and a shadowy bureaucratic monolith, the so-called Department of Home Affairs.