The federal Coalition government's refugee detention policy is in crisis, and there is a feeling in the refugee-rights movement that we are at last making some headway. That was certainly the mood at this year's World Refugee Day rallies.
The Cornelia Rau and the Vivian Alvarez Solon cases have brought home to a wider layer of the population that this is an indefensible way to treat human beings. People were genuinely shocked that vulnerable missing persons could find themselves imprisoned, and even deported.
Following these scandals came Petro Georgiou's private member's bills. That a Liberal MP would publicly seek legislative changes to the government's policy is symptomatic of a change in the public mood on the treatment of refugees.
Faced with these developments, Prime Minister John Howard has at last offered some concessions. But these are within the existing system, aiming at what Howard describes as "mandatory detention with softer edges".
The refugee-rights movement should welcome any measure that improves the situation of asylum seekers, however minimal. For instance, many detainees may opt for release on the "removal pending" visas. They face the stark choice of this visa or continued imprisonment.
But that should not make this disgraceful visa acceptable to the movement. Instead, we should call for humanitarian visas in these cases.
The Rau and Solon cases are also giving rise to calls for a royal commission, as opposed to the government's whitewash Palmer inquiry. We need a comprehensive investigation of the whole system, not one confined to those cases where non-asylum seekers, such as Rau and Solon, fell victim to its workings.
A full exposure of all the horrors and crimes of the system will strengthen the movement. But a royal commission should not be an excuse for demobilising the movement, the tireless work of which has brought the system to its present crisis point.
There is already enough evidence in the public domain to call for the complete abolition of mandatory detention and temporary protection.
Socialist Alliance members will be among those activists keeping our campaign focussed on the demands that have carried it this far, and that are essential to deliver justice to all asylum seekers.
With World Refugee Day behind us, we are now working on building Tampa Day in August, the next nationally coordinated protest actions. We will also be working at the local level on other rallies and forums that will confront Howard's concessions with demands for real change.
We will campaign around the main points of the Socialist Alliance's policy on refugees — an end to mandatory detention and the replacement of temporary protection visas with real rights to settle in this country, an end to the "Pacific solution", and the creation of "a category of complementary protection for those not found to be refugees under the UNHCR definition, but who face persecution if they were to be returned to the country they fled from". These are the sorts of policies that can destroy the disgraceful mandatory detention system, root and branch.
Tony Dewberry
[The author is a member of the GLW-Socialist Alliance editorial liaison board and a member of the Refugee Action Collective in Victoria.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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