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AUSTRALIA

Economic hard times even tougher for refugees

  • 19 June 2012

Refugee Week invites us to see asylum seekers and refugees as faces, not problems. It is also a time for taking stock. 

Internationally, asylum seekers who have had to flee persecution in their own lands have had little to rejoice about this past year. Chronic violence fed by religious and ethnic tensions continue to drive people to seek a safe and peaceful life outside their own lands.  Conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa threaten to displace more refugees. 

The readiness of developed nations to help and receive refugees and asylum seekers has come under greater strain. In Europe xenophobia has been intensified by the effects of the financial crisis. Dysfunctional financial systems create dysfunctional populist attitudes to immigrants and refugees. In Greece, for example, the Golden Dawn party threatened to expel migrants from schools and hospitals if elected. 

Hostility to foreigners and especially to asylum seekers has also led to measures that put people’s lives and security at risk. In England it was recently revealed that asylum seekers returned forcibly from England had been severely tortured on arrival in Sri Lanka. The Home Office judgment that it was safe to return asylum seekers to Sri Lanka had been sharply criticised by those familiar with conditions there. 

In Australia, asylum seekers are now seen entirely through the political lens of a government seen as powerless to stop boats arriving on Australian territory. They are regarded like an infestation that reflects on the competence of the sanitary department. So the focus of public discussion is placed on the unsavoury past of some refugees admitted to Australia and on people smugglers who posed as asylum seekers.  This focus, with its imputation that the government  has been negligent, is unlikely to change as the next election draws near. It will continue to feed xenophobia. 

The Coalition has promised new measures to deal with ‘the problem’.  Discriminatory treatment of those who arrive without identification papers, offshore processing, the return of temporary protection visas, a new level of bureaucracy to limit the number of favourable decisions will not address the existing difficulties.  They will only further weaken the link between policy and reality, and increase the suffering of asylum seekers and the cost to the Australian community. 

The results of the refugee week stocktaking are pretty gloomy. But gloom is not overwhelming. In Australia access to the courts by people who seek asylum in Australia has been vindicated in recent decisions.
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