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Keywords: Indonesia

  • INTERNATIONAL

    Kevin Rudd and Indonesia's Obama

    • Pat Walsh
    • 04 July 2013
    10 Comments

    Rudd's visit to Jakarta this week will be judged on the outcome of asylum seeker discussions. But he needs also to send a clear message about Australia's hopes for next year's presidential elections. Candidates include a former military commander with a dubious human rights record, and a civilian being described as Indonesia's Obama.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Election year open season on refugees

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 03 July 2013
    16 Comments

    For refugees election years are like duck hunting season. Even dragon flies tremble. So it is not surprising that Bob Carr brought out the big guns that the Rudd Government will use. His claim that most asylum seekers are economic migrants, come from majority religious and tribal groups, and are too easily given protection visas, is a political response to an intractable situation and should be seen us such.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Notes from a boat tragedy inquest

    • Tony Kevin
    • 02 July 2013
    4 Comments

    The WA Coroner's inquest into the sinking of SIEV 358 is shaping up to be the most thorough public examination ever of Australian rescue-at-sea protocols and practice in respect of assisting people on Suspected Irregular Entry Vessels. The Counsel Assisting the Coroner suggested that Australian Maritime Safety Authority's major focus for the first 11 hours of the incident had been to transfer the operation to Indonesia.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia and Indonesia's deadly games of pass-the-parcel

    • Tony Kevin
    • 24 June 2013
    15 Comments

    The sinking of the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 358 encapsulates key questions as to why these tragedies too often happen at interfaces between Australia's border protection system and maritime search and rescue system, and the under-resourced Indonesian maritime search and rescue system. Hopefully next week's public inquest by the WA Coroner comes up with some answers.

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  • RELIGION

    Keating’s Timor and Carr’s Papua

    • Frank Brennan
    • 30 November 2012
    17 Comments

    Paul Keating this month reflected on his determination as Prime Minister 'to establish a new and durable' relationship with Indonesia' and lamented the Australian media and his predecessors' preoccupation with human rights abuses in East Timor. It'd be churlish to question these reflections if the current Foreign Minister were not on the cusp of making a similar mistake regarding Papua.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Before and after Bali's searing flash

    • Pat Walsh
    • 12 October 2012
    4 Comments

    The bombing in Bali ten years ago today did not target Balinese directly, but they took the collateral damage to tourism, their bread and butter, very personally. Drawing his finger across his throat in a slitting motion, a smiling Balinese says he is happy the bombers have been executed.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Life in the Ramadan fasting lane

    • Pat Walsh
    • 05 September 2012
    2 Comments

    The fasting rule is interpreted flexibly. You are free not to fast if you have to travel, are pregnant, old, little, sick, or basically have a good excuse. Ironically, Ramadan can also involve an enormous amount of cooking, late night and pre-dawn binges. Households buy up. Restaurants offer discounts. One hotel lobby was decked out like Mecca.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Human lives Australia could have saved

    • Tony Kevin
    • 05 September 2012
    14 Comments

    Australian maritime safety and border protection authorities could have saved the lives of most of the people on the boat that made two distress calls by telephone to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority early last Wednesday. Instead they passed the responsibility to Indonesia, which has none of the sophisticated resources and technologies that Australia uses - when it wants to - to locate and intercept incoming unauthorised boats.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's nebulous borders

    • Brian Toohey
    • 04 September 2012
    3 Comments

    Looking at a map of the Australian coastline gives no clue about how far Australia's territorial claims extend. As a result, Australian policy makers aren't eager to embrace suggestions that Asian countries disputing possession of small islands and rocky outcrops should resolve their differences by assigning ownership to the closest country.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abbott's asylum seeker turn-back policy is a bad joke

    • Tony Kevin
    • 27 July 2012
    15 Comments

    Can Abbott and Morrison be serious about turning back the boats? Do they really want to expose the Navy to the fear, the rage, the encouragement to self-harm and lethal criminality, the emotional damage, the risks to Australian-Indonesian relations that have beset past turn-back policies?

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's ad hoc refugee rescue costs many lives

    • Tony Kevin
    • 09 July 2012
    21 Comments

    When distress calls come from asylum seeker boats, Australia's current policy is to rescue by choice. Many of the calls come from the Indonesian search and rescue region. To its credit, Australia usually responds to these calls. But not always. Sometimes we pass them to the less well equipped Indonesian search and rescue authority BASARNAS and wait to see what happens.

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  • RELIGION

    Australia's 20 year search for the right asylum policy

    • Frank Brennan
    • 26 June 2012
    18 Comments

    Last week’s tragedy of another mass loss of life at sea between Indonesia and Christmas Island focuses our minds yet again on an intractable public policy problem for Australia – our search for a coherent, workable and moral asylum policy.

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