Asylum seeker policy showed toughness in one small, but highly visible, part of the system while creating room to loosen policy everywhere else.
Articles on Offshore processing
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The UN Human Rights Committee found 24 young detainees on Nauru experienced “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment”. But are politicians listening?
With the arrival of 39 foreign nationals in Western Australia, debate around boat arrivals has been re-ignited. What happens if you come by plane instead?
Helping our Southeast Asian neighbours make conditions better for refugees there will reduce the need for them to make dangerous journeys elsewhere.
But the fate of thousands of other refugees and asylum seekers in limbo in Australia remains uncertain.
Beyond allowing one family to go ‘home to Bilo’, what else we can expect the new Labor government will do about thousands more asylum seekers and refugees?
Offshore processing is a failed policy that continues to haemorrhage cash, destroy lives and erode the international system for refugee protection.
The mounting urgency about asylum seekers trying to reach the UK by boat does not sweep aside the need for reasoned and rational policymaking.
Nauru is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from Australia annually to house 109 asylum seekers. The real purpose, though, is to ‘stand ready to receive new arrivals’.
That no Australian government in almost a decade has successfully brought this policy to a formal close is astonishing. In fact, Australia ceased transferring new arrivals offshore in 2014.
It has taken more than three months for the Australian and PNG governments to jointly announce the Manus Island detention centre will close. But the detainees’ fate is now even more uncertain.
Leaked incident reports from the Nauru detention centre affirm what has been known for a long time: detention is no place for children, and we need alternatives to offshore processing.
History suggests that resettling refugees on Nauru and Manus Island in Australia and New Zealand will not enliven people smuggling between Indonesia and Christmas Island.
Both major parties support offshore processing and boat turnbacks. But public opinion on asylum seekers is not so clear-cut. And nor are the policy alternatives.
If a new High Court claim against Australia’s offshore detention regime succeeds, it will entirely undermine Australia’s inhumane practices in relation to “those who come across the seas”.
It is hard to credit that two asylum seekers in Nauru could set themselves alight on Australia’s watch and the stories receive, compared to much else, so little attention in our hyper media cycle. One…
It is a shocking truth that, for the most part, the politicians are leaving their humanity at home as they debate the future of the men on Manus Island.
The Australian government must face the uncomfortable truth that it is no longer possible to process or detain asylum seekers and refugees in other countries in our region.
Malcolm Turnbull’s nose was out of joint when Tony Abbott said last month the Turnbull government would be running at the election on the Abbott government’s record. Turnbull insisted that while there…
A PNG Supreme Court judgment is likely to have profound implications for Australia’s offshore processing regime in that country.
Top contributors
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Senior Research Fellow, Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
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Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra
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Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
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Adjunct professor, Adelaide University
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Lecturer, Western Sydney University
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Scientia Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
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Associate Professor, School of Law, Murdoch University
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Professor and Director, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Law & Justice, UNSW
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Associate Professor of Law, Member of Deakin Cyber and the Centre for Law as Protection, Deakin University, Deakin University
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Professor in Human Rights and International Law, University of Newcastle
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Professor of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, University of Sydney
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International refugee lawyer and scholar, UNSW
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Adjunct professor, La Trobe University
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Senior Research Associate, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
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Associate Professor in Law, Adelaide University