Refugees & migrants

The Refugee Action Coalition released the statement below on March 11. *** Refugee advocates are warning of new dangers of attacks on asylum seekers if local staff are re-introduced into the Manus Island detention centre. Local and national PNG staff and police have been excluded from the detention centre since the night of February 17 when 23-year-old Reza Berati was killed and at least 77 others brutally bashed.

Hip-hop artist Urthboy has hit back at Australia's asylum seeker policy with a free song released online.

The federal Coalition government is set on a path of unprecedented cuts to public services; Medicare is under threat, as are workers' penalty rates. Added to this is the large-scale selling out of action on climate change along with important natural environments, such as forests and the Great Barrier Reef, to make way for destructive mining and logging industries.

Well the fun just never stops, does it, when it comes to the Abbott government’s asylum seeker policies, or as they call it, “border protection”. Because when it comes to needing protection, fleeing war, torture and genocide is one thing, but won’t someone think of all the poor, downtrodden borders?

Two important things were revealed when immigration minister Scott Morrison was finally forced to admit he had been wrong about most of the facts when one man was killed and at least 70 others were injured on Manus Island on February 16.

At quarter to six on the morning of February 6, in a wood on the Moroccan side of the border with the Spanish north African enclave Ceuta, about 300 asylum seekers met to try to cross the six-metre high razor-wire fence seperating the two countries.

“You don't want a wimp running border protection,” Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on February 21. “You want someone who is strong, who is decent, and Scott Morrison is both strong and decent.”

When refugees are being killed and injured by thugs hired by the Australian government to run its offshore refugee detention camp in Manus Island, PNG; when Australia's foreign minister Julie Bishop pressures Cambodia (one of the poorest countries in the world) to take asylum seekers off Australia (one of the world's richest countries) surely it is time to say: NOT IN OUR NAME! And this is what thousands of people did over the weekend of February 22-23 in more than 750 vigils, called by internet campaigning network GetUp.

On February 21, around 2000 rallied in Melbourne against the government's inhumane treatment of asylum seekers follows the death of one asylum seeker and several injuries in violence in an Australian offshore immigration detention camp on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Speakers included Greens MP Adam Brandt; Mohammad Baqiri, a refugee detained on Nauru under John Howard; State Secretary of the Textile Clothing and Footwear Union, Michele O’Neil and Pamela Curr of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

All around the country this week there have been angry snap protests against Abbott Liberal-National Coalition government's cruel policies towards asylum seekers. This follows the death of one asylum seeker and several injuries in violence in an Australian offshore immigration detention camp on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea.

Calls to boycott the Sydney Biennale unless it cuts ties with major sponsor Transfield — which holds government contracts to provide welfare services in immigration detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island — have been gaining momentum. A group of high-profile artists involved in the Biennale have written to the festival’s board of directors, calling on them to withdraw from the funding agreement with Transfield.

You know, unless asylum seekers somehow managed to sneak into this country and made it all the way to Geelong to pose as Alcoa executives to announce yet another plant closure at the cost of nearly a thousand more jobs, then I really think this nation has some bigger goddamn problems than boats carrying refugees asking for help.