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Police personnel watch pro-refugee protesters rally outside the Park Hotel, where Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic is believed to be held while he stays, in Melbourne, Australia on Jan. 10. (Sandra Sanders/Reuters)

Tennis star Novak Djokovic’s detention by Australian border authorities has cast a much-needed spotlight on the Australian immigration system. Djokovic was held in the Park hotel in Melbourne, alongside 32 refugees who had sought asylum in Australia and have been indefinitely detained ever since — some for up to nine years.

If you are only just hearing this story, you may be shocked. But the arbitrary and ongoing detention of people, including children, indefinitely is tolerated and normalized in Australia.

This part of the story begins in July 2013, when the Labor Party announced that anyone who came to Australia by boat seeking asylum would be sent offshore to Manus Island, Papua New Guinea or Nauru, a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.…  Seguir leyendo »

The author, Behrouz Boochani, in 2016 while at Australia’s Manus Island detention center in Papua New Guinea, where he was held for six years. Credit Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times

Growing up in a Kurdish family in the Ilam Province of Iran, I never expected my life to be affected by Australia’s history of white supremacy and settler colonialism. I had little awareness of Australia, a faraway country founded as a penal colony, and built on the massacres of its Indigenous people and on European migration. It was to be decades before I would hear about the White Australia policy, an official state immigration policy, in effect between 1901 and 1973, barring nonwhite people from immigrating to the country and intent on making Australia a white nation.

Yet the xenophobic legacy of the White Australia policy had a significant impact on the trajectory of my life and choked the lives of thousands of asylum-seekers and migrants who were held by Australia in offshore detention centers in its former colony Papua New Guinea and on the island of Nauru, a former protectorate.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘Conditions in our immigration detention centres are harsh, punitive and degrading.’ Photograph: Alamy

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s report on the use of force in immigration detention is the latest chapter in a now familiar story of excessively harsh, punitive and degrading conditions in Australian immigration detention centres.

Once again, we see a disregard for the rights and basic dignity of people who have sought our protection and committed no crime.

The report lays bare the unnecessary handcuffing of women, children, people in wheelchairs, people with mental illness and no history of violent behaviour, and other people needing medical care. It confirms what our clients have been telling us: that handcuffing has become a routine practice for transfers between centres and, alarmingly, for off-site medical appointments.…  Seguir leyendo »

Advocates for refugees who are languishing in camps demand that the asylum-seekers are resettled in Australia.Credit Saeed Khan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As Australia faces the global virus of xenophobia, the country’s early history provides a warning of the social and economic costs of isolation.

Australia was one of the richest settlements on earth when it was a British colony with open borders in the 19th century. But it retreated when it became an independent nation in 1901, and it endured almost half a century of economic stagnation before it opened its doors again to mass immigration after World War II.

The leaders of the main political parties continue to support an expansive immigration program and profess to abhor racism. But this cherished bipartisanship is in danger of fracturing.…  Seguir leyendo »

‘The prediction is that in two decades, half of all car trips in Melbourne at peak times will be congested, up from a third now.’ Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP

I’m a citizen of Melbourne. That’s all. Not an economist, nor a politician, a property developer, a demographer. Just a resident with an affection for the city, with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies.

As a citizen, nobody has been able to explain to me clearly why Melbourne, and Australia for that matter, should be absorbing so many new people every year, at a rate far higher than the OECD average, faster than other developed nations, with no feasible plan to cope with it.

The epicentre of what former New South Wales premier Bob Carr calls Australia’s “weird experiment” is Melbourne, my town.…  Seguir leyendo »

Australia thinks of itself as “the most successful multicultural society in the world” — to quote the oft-repeated phrase by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. But now that claim is being challenged in so many ways, all at once, it seems.

For a start, there’s the current political crisis, based on a half-forgotten section of the constitution forbidding those who have dual citizenship from sitting in Parliament. So far, eight parliamentarians — including the deputy prime minister — have been thrown out of office for no greater crime than having a father who was born in New Zealander, a mother who was Italian, or some other similarly unlikely “allegiance to a foreign power”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, right, at Holsworthy Barracks in Sydney, Australia, last week amid a backdrop of military equipment and soldiers wearing gas masks. Credit Brendan Esposito/European Pressphoto Agency

Every now and then you get the impression that Australia is desperate to be under grave threat.

That’s certainly how it appeared when Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull last week announced the creation of a “super ministry” of Home Affairs, choosing as his backdrop a mix of military equipment and soldiers wearing gas masks. There was a time when his predecessor, Tony Abbott, was lampooned for giving national-security-themed news conferences in front of an ever-growing number of Australian flags. Now Mr. Abbott seems a master of subtlety.

It was a shocking yet predictable moment. Shocking because it seemed like a sudden escalation for Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Condolence messages are written on the pavement in 2014 after a hostage situation in Sydney, Australia, turned deadly. Credit Joosep Martinson/Getty Images

A routine Australian Senate committee hearing last month on security was never going to be normal in the aftermath of the Manchester terrorist attacks. Still, it is no small thing that the hearing led to a former prime minister lecturing the country’s most senior intelligence official on the causes of terrorism.

At least since former Prime Minister John Howard suggested in 2001 that asylum seekers coming to Australia might include terrorists, the two Australian anxieties of refugees and terrorism have been on a collision course. As the terror risk here has grown, and with the politics of refugees becoming more divisive, that course has accelerated in recent years.…  Seguir leyendo »

Governments tend to dislike being called torturers. That’s why the George W. Bush administration went through such legal contortions to exclude waterboarding from the definition of torture. That this relied on a definition too idiosyncratic for anyone outside the Republican Party hardly mattered because it allowed President Bush to say, “the United States does not torture”, with a straight face.

So on one level, when Amnesty International reported last week that Australia’s system of offshore detention — in which asylum seekers heading to Australia by boat are intercepted and sent to camps in Nauru or Papua New Guinea indefinitely — “essentially amounts to torture”, the Australian government’s response was entirely predictable.…  Seguir leyendo »

Australia’s Gulag Archipelago

In 2009, 5,609 people traveled to Australia in tiny cramped boats, seeking refuge. By 2012, it had rocketed to 25,173. Kevin Rudd, the prime minister at the time, vowed that no one who tried to get here by sea would ever be allowed to settle. The opposition party successfully ran on a slogan of “Stop the Boats” in the next election, and by 2014-15, the numbers were down to 158. Now it is virtually zero. And the success of this approach has meant the number of people in detention more generally has plummeted: in 2013 there were almost 2,000 children in onshore and offshore detention; now there is little more than a hundred.…  Seguir leyendo »

A protester from the Refugee Action Coalition at a demonstration outside the offices of the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection in Sydney in April. (David Gray/Reuters)

In recent years, Australia has been condemned for deterring boat people. Brutal, callous, inhumane, racist, xenophobic — all these barbs have been hurled at Canberra for its treatment of refugees. The tough border-protection policies have included turning back boats, mandatory detention and refugee camps in neighboring islands of Nauru and, up until last week, Manus in Papua New Guinea. The measures are indeed severe and allegations of human rights abuse persist.

At first glance, this criticism is not surprising: That Australia, a nation of 23 million built by immigrants, is acting heartlessly toward those who want a better life would seem like the height of hypocrisy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Meanwhile, in Australia: The Other Migration Crisis

Whereas European media is inundated with new policy developments and opinions concerning the recent influx of asylum seekers arriving at Europe’s borders, you rarely read about the controversial immigration policies of Europe’s ally down under. While Australia may be known more for its beaches, barbecues and backpackers, what is happening to asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat should not escape the debate.

Asylum seekers who embark on the ocean journey to Australia, often setting out from Sri Lanka or Indonesia but in some cases coming from as far as Syria, Iran and Afghanistan face one of three fates. None of these three fates involve asylum seekers reaching Australian shores.…  Seguir leyendo »

Australia’s Rigid Immigration Barrier

In April, after the deaths of nearly 900 migrants attempting to reach Europe by boat, Australia’s conservative prime minister, Tony Abbott, urged European governments to adopt his country’s hard-line stance. The sentiment echoed a comment he’d made weeks earlier: that only his administration could resist “the cries of the human rights lawyers.”

The Abbott government’s strategy is to treat asylum-seekers who arrive by boat so terribly that they simply give up. Unconstrained by a bill of rights, Canberra has implemented a suite of harsh policies to this end. And now Parliament is considering two bills that could further toughen the country’s stance.…  Seguir leyendo »

Tony Abbott has declared victory. The three-word slogan “Stop the boats” has become a five-word boast, “We have stopped the boats”. In Jakarta, the prime minister was even bold enough to assert that “the people smuggling issue … will not substantially further trouble” our bilateral relations with Indonesia.

The truth of that claim remains to be tested – particularly once Indonesia has a new president. But for now, at least, Abbott appears to be right. There have been no maritime arrivals for six months. The question is whether this opportunity can be grasped to create a durable, long-term arrangement that provides assistance to refugees and other vulnerable people around the region.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Australian boat people are getting to be a problem. The first few million just got off the boats from Britain, pushed the Aborigines off the good land, and declared themselves the real Australians. This latest lot of boat people, though, don’t even stay in Australia. They’re being settled in Papua New Guinea.

It’s not exactly their own idea, to be fair. The descendants of the earlier boat people, now numbering some 20-odd million, have decided that Australia is full up, so any more boat people have to be sent elsewhere. But where? Well, how about somewhere poor and violent, to deter them from trying to get into Australia in the first place?…  Seguir leyendo »