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Hamid is stateless, and came to Australia by boat in mid 2012. He will never get permanent residence, because of his age or because the law states that if you ever held a TPV, you can never get the permanent protection visa. When I explained this to him, I thought might cry. He is now unable to see a way of getting a long term solution for himself and his family, all because of the need to punish refugees who arrive in Australia by boat.
The Kosovar solution is not a good one. In 1999, 4000 Kosovars were brought to Australia on a TSHV initially for three months but what turned out being several years. Legislative bars were created to prevent them from applying for any other visa whilst here, including protection visas. If we just hand out temporary visas to the Syrians, they will be in limbo and their ability to resettle and contribute to their new country is diminished.
While we can shake our heads and laugh at last week's farce in Melbourne, we should be more concerned about the many ways this government is punishing refugees in the law, using language to demonise people and and setting up systems geared to rejecting applications. We don't need black uniforms and guns, or any form of militarisation and politicisation of Immigration.
If you want to form government in Australia and if you want to lead the Australian people to be more generous, making more places available for refugees to resettle permanently in Australia, you first have to stop the boats. If you want to restore some equity to the means of choosing only some tens of thousands of refugees per annum for permanent residence in Australia from the tens of millions of people displaced in the world, you need to secure the borders. The untrendy truth is that not all asylum seekers have the right to enter Australia but that those who are in direct flight from persecution whether that be in Sri Lanka or Indonesia do, and that it is possible fairly readily (and even on the high seas) to draw a distinction between those in direct flight and those engaged in secondary movement understandably dissatisfied with the level of protection and the transparency of processing in transit countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia. The popular evil is that political
The politicians have an excuse: they have vested interests. But what about the rest of us? Has the rape and torture of asylum seekers, many of them children, in institutions established at the behest of Canberra, become so commonplace that it no longer shocks? It's not that empathy is an emotion particularly lacking in Australia. But there remains a disconnect between 'us' and asylum seekers.
When refugee advocates criticise harsh policies such as boat turnbacks, they are confronted with claims that the measures are necessary for saving lives at sea. This justification has dominated the debate to the extent that any policy which further restricts refugee rights becomes justifiable on this ground. Imagine a proposal to ban cars because there were too many people killed and injured on the roads.
A poorly-organised ill-resourced minority community often feels it has better things to worried about than 'white' converts who, like converts to any faith or belief system are known for their zeal. If the government really imagines young Muslims and converts are ripe for 'radicalisation', an excellent investment they could make would be in support services for new Muslims. In our lucky country, there is much loneliness in this group and many reasons to feel marginalised.
A belated early April referral to the urologist led to an alarming ultrasound and a blunt instruction to head for the nearby emergency triage. My bladder was a water balloon waiting to go splat. When the kids and their Ma picked me up from emergency, Emily stood guard over her Dad while the others got the car. The kids helped Trude with cleaning and chores as school holidays beckoned and my body needed time to reset before surgery was advisable.
Myanmar is metamorphosing like a vast time-lapse image, sloughing off its old skin and replacing it with a glittering new facade. But decades of military rule cannot be dismissed so easily, and there is much for the traveller to consider. In the first place, is it ethical to visit at all? Travellers have long taken their cue from Myanmar's beloved democracy advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.
'If I'm deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I'm a Tamil.' On the day I hear of Leo's death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo's family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound.
Prime Minister Abbott's National Security Statement quite rightly spoke of threats to Australia and the need to address them. Many of his utterances might seem uncontroversial: 'Those who live here must be as tolerant of others as we are of them'. But in fact they ignore the way people 'who come here' are treated according to 'how' they came here. The language used to describe them reflects an attitude that is far from tolerant.
Just before Christmas last year, the United States Senate Select Intelligence Committee released its report on the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, and its use of torture on detainees between 2002 and 2006. Among the report's key findings was the fact that the brutality of the torture and the harshness of the detention regime went beyond what the CIA. had reported to policy-makers (in other words, the CIA deliberately misled its Senate overseers); that the CIA's claims for the effectiveness of torture to obtain information that was vital for national security were inaccurate and unfounded; that the torture regime had damaged the standing of the United States, and resulted in significant costs, monetary and otherwise; that personnel were rarely reprimanded or held accountable for violations, inappropriate activities, and systematic and individual management failures. Read more
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