BOUNDLESS PAIN TO SHARE

Among his long list of reasons that explain why the Abbott government is failing to impress voters, Andrew Bolt yesterday suggested that its “most successful minister, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, has been given not a single new problem to solve since stopping the boats”. In the absence of anything else to do, then, it appears that Morrison has now decided to stop the boats even earlier. Anybody who arrived in Indonesia after 1 July this year and who applies for refugee status will now be ineligible to be resettled in Australia – even if he or she has been assessed as a refugee by the United Nations. Today the UNHCR confirms that Australia is “undertaking an internal review” of its global humanitarian resettlement program.

Morrison continues to claim that his policies are consistent with the Refugees Convention, though such claims should probably be seen as “mere puffery” – a legal term allowing a salesperson to lie about his product if his lie is so obvious as to not be taken seriously by any rational observer. The Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre’s David Manne points out that Morrison’s latest policy change “does nothing to improve the plight of refugees needing protection”, and aids Australia in “failing to shoulder its fair share of the responsibility to protect refugees”. The ABC has spoken to asylum seekers in Indonesia who say the changed rules might actually prompt them to get on a boat.

Morrison wants asylum seekers – including Hazaras fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan – to apply for refugee status in the “country of first asylum”, but the only parties to the Convention between Afghanistan and Australia are Cambodia, where Sarah Hanson-Young is currently learning that refugees “have no real rights”, and the desperately poor Timor-Leste. Presumably Morrison wants the developing world to shoulder even more than the 80 per cent burden it already carries for refugee welfare, but Indonesia has been “briefed”, rather than consulted, on the latest move.

Russell Marks
Politicoz Editor