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Keywords: Immigration Department

  • FAITH DOING JUSTICE

    Embracing new arrivals helps Australia evolve

    • Vincent Long Van Nguyen
    • 24 June 2021
    15 Comments

    With the average length of detention in Australia now at an historic high, it is timely to review how immigration detention is used. It should be a last resort that is used for the shortest practicable time so that people who pose little risk to the community are not unnecessarily deprived of their liberty, and that they are able to contribute to the community.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate crisis, displacement and solidarity

    • Stephen Minas
    • 13 April 2021
    2 Comments

    On 30 March, the Holy See engaged with an important aspect of displacement with the publication of its ‘Pastoral Orientations on Climate Displaced People’. The intersection between climate change and human displacement is a still emerging area of concern. Nevertheless, we know that climate change is already a factor in various forms of human mobility.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Insecurity in a COVID world

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 28 May 2020
    6 Comments

    But insecurity breeds insecurity. In the face of insecurity we can feel insecure. Our identity as persons can be shaken by the insecurity of our circumstances. This is not inevitable. Nor is it necessarily lasting. Some people will be temporarily or lastingly paralysed by anxiety; others will be more resilient.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Significant Federal Court win for Biloela Tamil family

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 24 April 2020
    7 Comments

    On 17 April 2020, the Federal Court ordered that Immigration had failed to comply with procedural fairness for the family. The case is known by the pseudonym XAD. The XAD case relied on significant legal principles going back to the M61 High Court decision of 2011.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Stateless and the inhumanity of detention

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 18 March 2020
    12 Comments

    I've been watching Stateless, the ABC drama about Australia’s immigration detention system, with some reluctance. Not because it is poor, but because it is so powerful. 

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Indigenous is not alien, High Court decides

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 17 February 2020
    8 Comments

    At its heart, the question was whether an Indigenous Australian who was eligible for citizenship but had never formalised it could be regarded as an alien and therefore subject to removal. In a landmark judgment, a 4:3 majority of the Court found that Indigenous Australians were not aliens, even if they were not citizens.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Migration hardline is selling Australia short

    • Bree Alexander
    • 12 November 2019
    3 Comments

    Due to this stance, immigration is arguably not being leveraged to actually benefit the country, including its flailing economy. This is despite a government report released last year stating that immigrants increase GDP and helped avoid the 2008 financial crisis.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The tweet smell of APS authoritarianism

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 12 August 2019
    5 Comments

    Should a public service have people with political, disagreeable opinions? No, according to the guidelines of employment in the Australian Public Service. The decision of the Australian High Court in the case of Comcare v Banerji is a salient warning to employees in the APS. Obedience, it seems, must be unquestionable and total.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    'Frankenstein' asylum regime turns six

    • Joshua Lourensz
    • 18 July 2019
    17 Comments

    Even during the brief six months I worked on Manus I saw a group of healthy, good-humoured men reduced to shadows. On this anniversary we must protest and mourn not only the toll on human life incurred by six years of offshore processing, but also the Frankenstein mechanisms through which this has all been enacted.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Why it's futile to beg for refugees' human rights

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 June 2019
    13 Comments

    In Boochani's experience, Australians were homogenous and unreflective parts of a machine designed to dehumanise, cow and corrupt the people who sought protection. This report and the departmental response suggest that in on-shore detention the human destruction is not directly intended. It is seen simply as irrelevant.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Medivac: the unneeded bill we sorely needed

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 13 February 2019
    8 Comments

    During the debates about the bill regarding the transfer of people from Nauru or Manus to Australia for medical treatment, the Prime Minister stated it was 'unnecessary and superfluous'. Legally this should have been the case.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Qunun warmed hearts, Araibi still in the cold

    • Erin Cook
    • 11 January 2019
    5 Comments

    The world sat gripped as Rahaf al-Qunun live-tweeted her mad dash to freedom, then cheered when photos of her being escorted from Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport by UN workers emerged. Hakeem al-Araibi has not been so lucky. His current nightmare is emblematic of the bureaucratic mess forced on refugees worldwide.

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