In recent weeks there has been a lot of words written and spoken about racism but little to remind us that racism landed here with the First Fleet. It is very deeply imbedded in our culture.
The author of this article Barbara Wertheim OAM was a former Commissioner for Equal Opportunity, Victoria.
Racism arrived with the First Fleet. By Barbara Wertheim, Pearls & Irritations
The leader of the house, Tony Burke, and the education minister, Jason Clare, are among the Labor MPs considered to be vulnerable to campaigns run by new groups known as The Muslim Vote and Muslim Votes Matter.
The groups have said it is wrong to characterise them as political parties, but that they are grassroots campaigns to mobilise voters of the Islamic faith who they say have been taken for granted for too long. They are pressing the government to take a stronger line against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The Muslim Vote’s website says the movement is “powerful enough to sway the outcome of the next federal election (2024). The showdown will be in Southwest Sydney and Melbourne where there is a high density of Muslims in key areas. Watch this space.”
In November, Guardian Australia revealed that of the 93 people initially affected by the high court ruling, 21 were already living in the community, including 16 let out by the Albanese government and five apparently by the former Coalition government.
Despite at least 16 people having been released by Labor, the home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, has said on several occasions since November “if it were up to [her]” the entire NZYQ cohort would “still be in detention” or would never have been released.
A group of 44 men attempting to reach Australia from Java in June were intercepted by an Australian Border Force (ABF) vessel and sent back on two boats after being held onboard for up to 18 days, according to Indonesian authorities.
The men are mostly from Bangladesh, but also include eight ethnic Rohingyas. They were discovered on Indonesia's southernmost island of Rote by local police on Monday.
Border Force holds suspected asylum seeker group for over two weeks before sending back to Indonesia, authorities say. By Bill Birtles & Ari Wu, ABC News
Australian-based athlete Kimia Yousofi says she is grateful to all who have stood by her, after she was named in the Afghanistan Olympic team.
Yousofi fled Afghanistan in 2021 after the takeover by the Taliban and received safe passage to Australia from Iran.
The Afghanistan Olympic Committee operates outside the country and will send three female athletes to the Olympics for the first time.
Aneeta* was already living in fear of her violent and controlling husband when she discovered her abuse was part of a dark pattern.
A call from the Department of Home Affairs alerted her to his past. Her husband, who had sponsored her to migrate to Australia from South Asia, had previously been charged with domestic violence offences from his prior marriages, which he had also kept secret.
Aneeta is among those who have used a safety net for visa applicants, which can provide a pathway to permanent residency without staying with their abuser.
Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed the Rwanda deportation scheme is "dead and buried", on his first full day as prime minister.
The Labour leader said he would end the "gimmick" of deporting migrants arriving in the UK illegally to Rwanda, which was established by the previous Conservative government.
UK's new Prime Minister Starmer confirms Rwanda deportation plan 'dead'. By Sam Francis, BBC
In 2013, UNSW established the world’s first centre dedicated to the study of international refugee law, the Kaldor Centre, with Jane McAdam at the helm.
Under her guidance, the Kaldor Centre has evolved into a global powerhouse – shaping debates, influencing policies, and, above all, producing ground-breaking research.
In this podcast episode, McAdam reflects on the origins of the Centre, how it came to be so impactful during a period of great challenge for refugees, and her aspirations for the decade ahead.
Podcast: Professor Jane McAdam on 10 years as Director of the Kaldor Centre. UNSW, Sydney
Justine Nolan, director of the Australian Human Rights Institute, says that Australia's approach to human rights has historically been "very ad hoc", making it difficult for people to understand what their human rights are and seek recourse if those rights have been abused.
"There's no holistic approach to it in Australia and sometimes rights, like rights to housing and laws around that, differ from state to state, so it becomes very difficult to follow," Nolan said.
"What a human rights act does is try to basically say, 'Here is the global standard which we've agreed to and which we've put into effect.'"
Four in five Australians want a bill of rights — what could it look like? By Elfy Scott, SBS News
The Albanese government will strike a new funding deal with Papua New Guinea (PNG) to support asylum seekers after the country threatened to send them back to Australia unless a fresh agreement was signed.
The Greens’ immigration spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said the secrecy behind the deal was “staggering”, with Labor “providing an undisclosed amount of public funds to PNG to hold refugees that sought asylum here over a decade ago”.
“Let’s make this very clear, the only reason the government provided this funding is because PNG rightfully sees this whole arrangement as condescending and unfair … and refugees are in a life-or-death situation,” he told Guardian Australia.
“The obvious response is to bring those refugees here and give them the care they need.”
In December 2023, the federal government announced a raft of changes to visas in its new Migration Strategy, which will affect people currently studying and working in Australia, and those who wish to apply.
The government says the strategy will streamline the system, target labour and skills shortages in Australia and help tackle the exploitation of migrant workers and 'permanent temporariness' among visa holders.
Some changes have already come into effect, but many new measures begin on 1 July 2024.
This is what we know.
Your guide to Australian visa changes for 2024-25. By Ruth McHugh-Dillon, SBS News
International students should not exceed a third of any university cohort and it is “damaging to the sector” for foreign students to make up 50% of students at any given institution, RMIT’s vice-chancellor, Prof Alec Cameron, has said.
For the Asia-Pacific, which has experienced most of the world’s disaster-related movements, finding workable solutions is especially urgent. Between 2010 and 2021, there were, on average, 19 million internal displacements each year in the region, nearly 80 percent of the global total.
Expanding refugee protection for a changing climate. By Jane McAdam, P&I
Mohammad Zaki Rezayi fled Afghanistan with the hope of finding a pathway for his family to join him in Australia 12 years ago.
VIDEO: Afghan refugee reunites with family after more than decade. ABC News
Australian policy was to send any underage crew members on asylum seeker boats home to Indonesia, but police instead relied on a deeply flawed and now universally condemned method of wrist X-ray analysis to wrongly deem them adults.
Children as young as 12 were sent to maximum security adult prisons in Western Australia and the Northern Territory on the basis of the flawed evidence.
Michael Sukkar, the Shadow Minister for Housing’s claim is overblown.
In the 15 months for which official data was available at the time of the claim, the number of migrant arrivals minus departures was roughly three times the number of homes built.
However, experts consulted by Fact Check said it made little sense to compare the net arrivals figure — which includes families and children — with building completions, as not every migrant or new addition to the population requires a separate home.
More than 90 per cent of net arrivals were people on temporary visas, and roughly half of the total were temporary students.
University staff have been threatened with deep job cuts because of the federal government’s proposed international student cap, raising concerns the controversial policy is being weaponised as an “excuse” to slash jobs.
The draft bill, introduced to parliament last month, would give the education minister powers to set a maximum number of new international student enrolments. Leading policy experts have described it as a “recipe for chaos”.
Safety and Health after Arrival (or SAHAR, also an Arabic woman’s name) is the first Australian study to test universal screening for intimate partner violence and response in settlement services.
This three-year project, led by the University of Wollongong, was funded by the Australian Research Council and SSI, one of Australia’s largest resettlement organisations. We introduced and evaluated culturally tailored screening for intimate partner violence at four settlement support services.
In practice, this meant routine screening for abuse and giving women a wallet-sized information card in their language with key messages and useful contact details, irrespective of whether they had disclosed abuse.
My name is Farhad Bandesh. I am a human being first. Then, I am an artist, a musician and a wine-maker. Lastly, I am a refugee.
I am one of the people who could end up in jail, if the deportation bill became law.
I came to Australia by sea in 2013 seeking safety. I am Kurdish and, while I was raised in Iran, I have no country. Iran does not recognise me as a citizen; I am labelled as stateless. War and persecution against the Kurdish people continue.
The podcast of Refuge: Viet Thanh Nguyen & Shankari Chandran is now available to listen on demand.
"What does it mean to be included in a military industrial complex that wants to be the global hegemon? We as refugees, we come to the United States, we're expected to be grateful for what? To become settler citizens on indigenous land? And to become the alibi for the exercise of an imperial machine?'" – Viet Thanh Nguyen
In recognition of World Refugee Day 2024 go beyond media reports in this discussion of the refugee experience with Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen (A Man of Two Faces), Miles Franklin-winner Shankari Chandran (Safe Haven) and refugee law expert and advocate Daniel Ghezelbash.
NEW PODCAST | Refuge: Viet Thanh Nguyen & Shankari Chandran, UNSW, Sydney Writers Festival
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