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Outside, a Martian-red haze kisses the windows. An ode to the future perhaps. Most of the people present are already aware of the Medevac repeal decision. The room is heavy with silence, the mood is sombre, but far from resigned. We want change, and are willing to have a crack at demanding it.
Whiteness — some days it's like a light mist constantly hanging around yet going mainly unnoticed as it stealthily seeps into one's pores. Other days, it hits you like a cascade, or a tsunami of whiteness. Tuesday, observing the news, felt more like one of the latter.
Two Aboriginal men are currently being held in immigration detention under threat of deportation because they are not Australian citizens. The case raises far-reaching implications concerning the status of the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the state.
'Refugees/not refugees — here it is all the same,' a man tells me with a shrug. There seems to be both recognition of the impossibility of the situation for all who have been left here — but also an attitude that no one should be left behind.
I recently visited Port Moresby as part of a delegation of Catholic leaders. I have worked with refugees and migrants for more than 20 years in different countries. I have been part of many serious and confronting human rights struggles. Nonetheless, I was not expecting what I saw and heard in PNG, and it deeply touched me.
Anyone interested in social justice knows that structures and systems can bolster the worst tendencies of human nature, can incubate 'social sin'. Korean friends, when asked if they live in fear of North Korea, almost always tell me 'we fear America more'. To me that seemed a bit of an overstatement. Now I understand their response.
If we wish to persuade the public that a group of people is being treated unjustly, we portray them as innocent victims. We represent them as a class and as virtuous in order to change public opinion. Stories of violent behaviour by members of the group, however, reveal the reality that no group is uniformly composed of the virtuous and innocent.
The Medevac law was needed because there was no sensible process to arrange for urgent medical treatment for the people we are punishing as a deterrent. The system is working according to the medical practitioners involved in it. It would be a tragedy if the Medevac laws were repealed, just to prove how tough and immovable we are.
The Pope's speech was newsworthy because in Australia sentences to a lifetime in prison without parole are becoming less contentious and more used. His approach to prisoners and their criminal behaviour is in such strong contrast to strands of Australian culture in which exclusion and the denial of hope are an instinctive response.
Last week the Federal Court granted an interim injunction to a child born in Australia preventing her removal from Australia. The case raises complex issues regarding the statutory bars preventing asylum seekers from even making any application at all, and the exercise of the ministerial discretion to lift that bar.
97-108 out of 200 results.