Human Rights
-
FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Turnbull’s Policy Challenge Wrapped in Turnbull Cant
On Sunday morning, Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton held a joint press conference to announce new legislation in relation to the asylum seekers who have been held on Nauru and Manus Island now for over three years. In this policy area, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the prospect of a Continue reading »
-
JOHN NIEUWENHUYSEN. How Australian Political Leaders Can Abandon and Mistreat Asylum Seekers
Living as a White youth in apartheid South Africa in the 1950’s, I often wondered how it was possible for a small minority to dominate and oppress the large majority of the population who were denied the vote because of the colour of their skins. Much of the answer lay, I believed, in the Continue reading »
-
ROBERT MANNE. How we came to be so cruel to asylum seekers.
This is an edited extract of a talk delivered to the Integrity 20 Conference at Griffith University on October 25, 2016 If you had been told 30 years ago that Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed. In 1992 we introduced a system Continue reading »
-
SPENCER ZIFCAK. Critique of Government’s attacks on civil society.
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders’ Scathing Critique of Government’s Attacks on Civil Society In 1998, after 14 years of haggling, the UN General Assembly finally adopted the landmark UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders. After another 10 years of thinking about it, the Australian government agreed to sign on to the Declaration. Continue reading »
-
MUNGO MacCALLUM. Concealing crimes in Manus and Nauru.
Those eminent jurists Malcolm Turnbull and George Brandis are normally very careful with the words they use; indeed, Brandis did his best to bore a senate committee rigid as he spent many minutes explaining exactly what he meant by the term “consult.” But in spite of their learning and erudition, our latter day Perry Continue reading »
-
SUSAN RYAN. Older women – the new homeless.
It is more than timely that focus on increasing inequality in Australia include recognition of a massive contributing factor: the lack of affordable housing, especially for older women. Several groups have been identified as severely disadvantaged by the lack of affordable housing: unemployed young people, single parent families, and low paid workers who need Continue reading »
-
FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Malcolm Turnbull’s defence of Nauru.
This is Frank Brennan’s most recent post of Facebook. When interviewed by Fran Kelly this morning, Malcolm Turnbull suggested it was a simple binary choice: strong border protection including the cruel, endless warehousing of proven refugees (including children) on places like Nauru OR deaths at sea. It’s not a simple binary choice, and he knows Continue reading »
-
Catholic Bishops – It Is Time To Bring Them Here
Statement in support of offshore detainees By Archbishop Denis Hart, President, Australian Catholic Bishops Conference One of the greatest crises of our day is the plight of people forced from their own countries by war, persecution or poverty and forced to live without a home, without safety and often separated from their families. Pope Francis Continue reading »
-
JIM COOMBS. “CIRCLE” Bail Hostels
One of the common reasons for incarceration of Aboriginal children is failure to appear at court and breach of bail conditions (often a residence condition). One way to overcome this is to establish “bail hostels” like those in the U.K. Too often ignorance of the need to comply, losing court papers, illiteracy, and homelessness Continue reading »
-
ROBERT MANNE. Oh, No Jim, No Jim, No Jim, No
As readers of John Menadue’s blog might be aware, I believe that Australia ought, on the one hand, to find homes in the next months for the 1,700 or so refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Continue reading »
-
FRANK BRENNAN SJ. Being clear eyed and misty eyed about human rights and asylum seekers.
On 5 October 2016, Frank Brennan gave the Fourth Notre Dame Social Justice Lecture. He said “It is time to see if we can design a way of getting the asylum seekers off Nauru and Manus Island in such a way that we don’t restart boats. … The suggestion that those camps need to Continue reading »
-
ROBERT MANNE. Rescuing 1700 marooned people.
At present the chief priority of those concerned about the refugee situation in which Australia is directly implicated is to save the lives of the 1500 or so on Manus Island and Nauru and the 250 or so at present in Australia on medical grounds. When this is achieved the next priority will be Continue reading »
-
HUGH MACKAY. A policy that diminishes us all
Occasionally in a nation’s history, horror over past events triggers a kind of national shame. Germany went through it – is still going through it – in the wake of the Third Reich. South Africa has not yet healed the wounds of apartheid. The US continues to struggle with the evil legacy of white Continue reading »
-
JOHN MENADUE. Cruelty and evil have become banal
Malcolm Turnbull told the UN that our treatment of refugees is world’s best practice. Only a guilty conscience could allow such self deception. In her book ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, published in 1963, Hannah Arendt refers to the ‘banality of evil’. Her thesis was that Eichmann was not a fanatic or sociopath, but an extremely Continue reading »
-
JAMES GERRAND. Cambodia Crackdown. Part 2 of 2.
Part 2 Hun Sen’s Red Brotherhood Hanoi cannot be seen to be interfering in Cambodian affairs but the Vietnamese military has cemented close ties with the Hun Sen regime – none closer than with the Prime Minister’s personal Bodyguard Unit (BHQ), their go-to-man being the Deputy Commander Dieng Sarun. General Sarun’s shadowy Senaneak Youth League Continue reading »
-
JAMES GERRAND. Cambodia Crackdown – part 1 of 2
Part 1 ‘Kill a Chicken to Scare the Monkeys’ Around my regular haunts in Phnom Penh are daily reminders of Cambodia’s enduring capacity for political violence: in Kabko market my favourite street restaurant was the scene where political adviser Om Radsady was shot dead in 2003; in a similarly blatant daylight execution, trade union Continue reading »
-
ALISON BROINOWSKI. Your laptop is watching you: ‘Snowden’ the movie.
Before Snowden comes on, there’s a short film of Oliver Stone, the director, warning cinema audiences that they can be surveilled, so please turn off their devices. Even as a humourless joke for geeks, it sets the sombre tone of the movie to follow. This is a feature version of Linda Poitras’ Citizenfour (2014), that Continue reading »
-
FRANK BRENNAN SJ. The hypocrisy of it all is breath-taking.
As you listen to the self-satisfied, self-congratulatory observations of our Australian representatives at the UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants and at the Obama summit, just ask yourself what Messrs Turnbull and Dutton have done to provide a humane solution for the proven refugees on Nauru (and Manus Island), given that after three years the Continue reading »
-
ELAINE PEARSON. Australia’s harsh refugee policy is no global model.
This week in New York, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said, “Our policy on border protection is the best in the world,” and he’ll be touting the Australian model of offshore refugee detention and resettlement at two refugee summits this week. But Australia’s approach should give world leaders some pause. “I understand the need to protect Continue reading »
-
GRAHAM FREUDENBERG: On the Irish and other undesirables.
Australia sometimes seems to suffer a mysterious case of multiple-amnesia over immigration. We are a nation built on migrants, but we have forgotten that almost every new wave of immigrants has been resented and resisted by those already here, especially those who were migrants themselves. It started around the 1820s when the convicts hated Continue reading »
-
ADELE WEBB. He may have insulted Obama, but Duterte held up a long-hidden looking glass to the US.
This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has taken his “bad manners” – having gained global notoriety with his election campaign insults earlier Continue reading »
-
PATRICK McGORRY. We must settle the refugees before it is too late.
In this article in the SMH, Patrick McGorry, the President of the Society for Mental Health Research, says; The time has come, before it is too late, to re-settle these fellow human beings and not just the children, but all of those who qualify as genuine refugees and who deserve a second chance for life. Continue reading »
-
SPENCER ZIFCAK. Freedom of Speech and the Racial Discrimination Act
Within days of the July election result having finally been announced, forces within the Conservative faction of the Liberal-National party moved to re-open the debate on reform to S.18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). Section 18C makes it a civil offence to insult, offend, humiliate or intimidate a person on the grounds of Continue reading »
-
It’s Time to Close Australia’s Abusive Detention Regime
In the last few years, there have been countless official reports that have exposed abuses and recommended the closure of centres on Nauru and Manus Island. November 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention uncovered numerous reported incidents of assaults, sexual assaults and self-harm involving children; March 2015, Continue reading »
-
MUNGO MacCALLUM. Undermining Malcolm Turnbull.
The baying pack of coalition backbenchers demanding the abolition, or at least the dilution, of the Racial Discrimination Act may be sincere crusaders for free speech. On the other hand they may be motivated by a desire to attack small-l liberals, of whom one is (or at least was) their own leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Continue reading »
-
MEREDITH BURGMANN. ASIO and dirty secrets.
In commenting this week, Meredith Burgmann said that ‘my view is that the stories in my book (Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files. New South Wales Publishing, Sydney 2014) collectively represent ASIO as being improper, incompetent, irrelevant, inappropriate and intrusive.’ The following are extracts from her book. Continue reading »
-
FRANK BRENNAN. Why Turnbull has no option other than a plebiscite on Same Sex Marriage
In The Australian Paul Kelly writing on the same sex marriage plebiscite said (23/8), ‘Lawyer and priest Frank Brennan, who has always argued the issue should properly be decided by parliament, told this column: “Contrary to Justice Kirby I have urged proponents of same-sex marriage to support legislation for a plebiscite because there is Continue reading »
-
‘Racists aren’t welcome here: how we kicked a racist passenger off the bus.
A nice story from The Guardian ‘Our better angels’ . See link below. John Menadue http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/19/racists-arent-welcome-here-how-we-kicked-a-racist-passenger-off-the-bus?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other Continue reading »
-
IAN WEBSTER. Malcolm Turnbull and homelessness – reaching mentally ill people
This week our PM, Malcolm Turnbull, was admonished when he gave $5 to a homeless man in Melbourne. He was sorry if people thought he should not have done this. He said, “I felt sorry for the guy”….”there but for the grace of God go I.” George Orwell wrote after being ‘down and out’ Continue reading »
-
PETER GIBILISCO. Some key ideas for the next generation of disability activists.
1. Meritocracy Meritocracy is a belief that seems to me to still be alive and well in the senior management of disability support. It also seems to drive many aspects of public policy, particularly when appeals are made to “equal opportunity”. Advocates of a meritocratic approach to disability policy are still assuming that the Continue reading »