Ruth Halbert
artist, weaver
Paper boat Rud.jpg

Blog: Dear Prime Minister

On July 30 2016 I started writing letters to the Prime Minister of Australia to protest against the imprisonment and torture of the asylum seekers in the offshore detention centres of Manus Island and Nauru. I started with the intention of writing a letter a day for every person in detention until they are all freed. There are more than 1800 asylum seekers in off shore detention. These are those letters and any response from Mr Turnbull.

The third reply from DIBP. No reply yet from Prime Minister Turnbull.

This is the third letter I have received from DIBP. The cursory way in which the case of Mr Faysal Ishak Ahmed is written about is distressing. 

More than half of the content of this letter is identical to parts of the first and second letters I have received. None of the three letters address the questions I have asked the Prime Minister.

This letter, like the previous ones, continues a mixture of 'weasel' words (e.g. 'the Department is not aware of', 'transferees', 'healthcare broadly consistent with Australian public health standards') meaningless generalisations and outright lies. For example, 'Australia assists PNG to provide refugees with settlement support services to assist with integration.' Although PNG has signed the UN Refugee Convention (in 1986) it did so with 7 reservations and has not made changes to its laws to ensure that refugees are treated according to that convention. DIBP knows full well that when it says that refugees are free to settle in PNG it is impossible both for the refugees to do so and be protected by the law, and for the local Papua New Guineans to have the resources and infrastructure to support them to do that. Australia is expecting a small country still in early stages of its own development to do something that we can both afford and have the multicultural history to support.

Another mix of weaselling and lying is in the paragraph about intake of refugees:

“Restoration of Australia’s border integrity has enabled the Government to increase the annual refugee intake. As a result the Humanitarian Programme will increase from 13,750 to 18,750 by 2018-19. ... Australia is also welcoming 12,000 refugees from the Syrian conflict zone.”

We have only taken 6000 of the Syrian refugees so far, and the word 'welcoming' stretches credulity. Australia took in 15,000 asylum seekers in 2015-16 which in a country of 24,000,000 is only 0.06% of the population. In the same period, Sweden took in 150,000 which is 1.5% of their population. To match that we could take in 360,000 refugees. The DIBP correspondent fails to admit that most refugees are only granted Temporary Protection Visas and are in a jobless, insecure limbo. There are still 25,000 people on Bridging Visas waiting for an outcome of their application process which seems to have stalled.

 

lies, rhetoricRuth HalbertDIBP, refugees, illegal detention1 Comment