“Come by boat and get a visa.” That was the headline in an article published in last weekend’s Sunday Telegraph (31 Oct 2010). To reinforce the message is a picture of an intercepted vessel headed for Christmas Island. Accompanied by a couple of uniformed Australian officials are a dozen huddled asylum seekers seated next to
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The third Scanlon Foundation Survey, entitled Mapping Social Cohesion, was released last week. Authored by Professor Andrew Markus of Monash University, the report charts the attitudes of Australians around a number of population issues. The survey’s exploration of Australian attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers makes for interesting reading. The results highlight the gulf in
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When Professor Louise Newman took the unprecedented step of speaking out plainly on Lateline last week about the impending mental health crisis in Immigration detention centres, the reaction was zero. As the antipathy towards asylum seekers grows, carefully nurtured through successive elections by our politicians, Australia is reaching a position which allows any cruelty and
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If the Scherger Air Base becomes an Immigration Detention Centre (IDC), the people most likely to be locked up there are Hazara people from Afghanistan. Hazaras are a minority group in Afghanistan who have been persecuted for centuries but more recently this has degenerated to a form of genocide under the Taliban. Hazaras are readily
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There are around 150 boys aged 14 to 17 currently locked up in the Darwin Airport Motel who have not left the building since April. These boys are almost all Hazaras, a persecuted minority who are being killed and driven out of Afghanistan by the Taliban. Many of these boys have seen their fathers and
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