Scott Morrison now has the numbers to reintroduce temporary visas and create a fast-track assessment process that will leave asylum seekers without the right of review, after striking a deal with Clive Palmer.
Morrison’s bill is designed to clear the backlog of asylum seekers being held on Christmas Island and elsewhere in Australia. It doesn’t apply to asylum seekers being “processed” (read: arbitrarily detained) offshore on Manus Island and Nauru, or anyone arriving by boat in future.
The bill also removes most references to the United Nations Refugee Convention from the Migration Act.
“This Parliament should decide what our obligations are under these conventions,” Morrison told Parliament in introducing the bill this morning. “We’re not going to hand that off to advocates and others around the world.”
(Think “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.)
Asylum seekers will have a harder time proving they have a “well-founded fear of persecution” under the new system as the threshold for protection is raised.
In a bizarre press conference explaining his backing of the bill this morning, Palmer said the new deal was a game changer for Australia because it would allow regional employers to source labour more easily, through a new visa known as the Safe Haven Enterprise Visa. “These visa holders will be targeted to regions and encouraged to fill regional vacancies,” he said.
But without the right of review, and with a tighter conditions for what constitutes a refugee, it’s likely that many of the 30,000 people currently eligible for the visa will in fact be sent home — something that Morrison indicated in his own press conference this morning.
Palmer is either playing wilfully ignorant or he’s been sold a pup. No amount of silver lining will make this deal anything other than a rubber stamp to the Coalition’s increasingly arbitrary war on asylum seekers.
Oh, good, now the Bank Robber’s Union can determine what their obligations are under the conventions of the various state government’s?
[Scrott sounds just like Lord Downer when the UN came out about what they thought of his Howard government’s treatment of our Aborigines, not 20 years ago?]
I do hope Palmer is aware of ignorantia legis neminem excusat – for when he comes to try to hide behind it later?
So as part of this new isolationism, is the govt going to renounce its (much maligned in opposition) UN security Council seat? World trade deals? Warmongering coalitions of the corrupt/retarded? Or does Australia’s inalienable sovereignty only extend to refugees and climate change?
Not just a war on asylum seekers. This government seems to have a visceral disregard for international law and the obligations attached thereto. Australia cannot just legislate to select which part of (in this case) the Refugee Convention and Protocol it adheres to. Either it is a party to the Convention and Protocol or it is not.
This is only the latest example. We have the disregard for the Law of the Sea Convention in bullying East Timor (and their Australian lawyer) and overnight joining by association the attack on Syria. Julie Bishop has resurrected the novel defence (not that it will help her in the ICC) of saying that large parts of Syria are “ungoverned territory”.
This government is determinedly marching back to the 19th century and our supine press applauds them all the way.
I am beyond disgust. It is difficult to believe that the PUPmeister has been sold a pup therefore we must assume that he is being utterly evil in anticipating semi-slave labour for his various rapacious enterprises.
As the price of coal falls.
An is Chinese erstwhile partner pursues legal recourse.
And the Oz sheeple wake up. Yeh, I know the last is a forlorne hope.