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Many refugees in Australia live in conditions that the rest of the population would find unacceptable. Most of the 192 refugees who were transferred to Australia under the Medevac legislation between February and December 2019 are currently held at hotels in Melbourne and Brisbane, known as ‘alternative places of detention’ (APOD), where they have had no access to the outdoors or fresh air for more than 12 months.
It’s usually January that white blindfold think pieces around Invasion Day start, but this year they’re getting in early. I cannot help but think this has a lot to do with the right in Victoria feeling completely dishevelled and disempowered at this point in time and lashing out.
With all the congratulations that have been going around following Melbourne achieving zero COVID-19 cases there is one group that has been entirely overlooked. These particular people remain in a prolonged form of hotel quarantine, unable to mix with the general public. They are refugees and asylum seekers brought to Australia under the now defunct Medevac legislation from Nauru and Manus Island.
There’s not a spare parking spot to be had in the NSW central west town of Orange. Patrons spill from cafes onto pavements and queues trail in orderly ribbons from the gelato shop’s doorway. There’s no room at any inn, and restaurants are bursting at their (COVID-compliant) seams; forget about scoring a table if you haven’t booked ahead of time. Travel is back, and regional Australia is the big winner.
Reading the government controlled Senate Committee recommendations regarding the current Social Security (Administration) Amendment (Continuation of Cashless Welfare) Bill 2020 and then the dissenting reports is like reading about two parallel universes.
The Australian community and its government are struggling to come to terms with the extremely serious allegations against members of the SAS for their alleged criminal misconduct during the war in Afghanistan. At the same time, we Catholics are experiencing a bad case of déjà as there are many echoes of how we felt when the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RC) began in 2013.
This past weekend, I visited my grandparents in their residential aged care home. As usual, it was both lovely and utterly heartbreaking. Lovely, because I feel so lucky to be able to spend time with them, that they are still alive, their home is accepting visitors, and they still remember who I am. But, also, heartbreaking, because aging is tough, and living in residential aged care is tougher still, and this year, well, this year has made it all so much harder.
The discussion in Australia as to how such atrocities are to be approached is telling. The call for responsibility has varied by degrees. Most tend to some variant of the rotten apple theory: a few particularly fruits that may be isolated and extruded from the barrel. Culpability can thereby be confined, preserving the integrity of other military personnel and, importantly, political decision makers.
Bosses give any number of reasons, often focused on some vaguely defined notion of productivity, why they do or don’t support remote working, but ultimately it comes down to a single, fundamental question: what is the ideal balance between reducing expenditure and surveilling workers?
Despite the heavy focus on 'hard-hat' professions in our political discourse, Australia’s economy is dominated by its service sectors. If this is Australia’s first service sector recession, why is this not reflected in the focus of our recovery and job creation programs?
If society were a mine, refugees would be the canaries in it. Their condition reveals whether the currents of public air are pure or toxic. By that standard the present currents in Australia are noxious. They mark a change from the first generous response to the coronavirus to the meaner reconstruction of the economy.
It would be really easy to ‘both-sides’ these debates, but that would present a false equivalence. Surely, if we have learned anything from this year’s lockdowns, we should have gained a far greater appreciation of the importance of community access to outdoor space — and, therefore, of spatial justice?
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