Rural Australians for Refugees Report

Roadside demonstration report

Last Thursday’s demo started well, with lots of support from passing motorists, but sadly, the skies became blacker by the minute and after three quarters of an hour, the heavens opened! Being fair-weather demonstrators, we had to beat a hasty retreat. However, that was not before a delightful young person came running from the Big Banana cafe carrying bottles of water for each of us. She just wanted to say thank you to us for our efforts and to express her solidarity with our cause, before rushing back to her work. How wonderful is that?

Our next roadside demonstration will take place on Thursday 18th May from 3.00 pm until 4.30 pm in Nambucca Heads. You will find us in the usual spot beside the Pacific Highway, adjacent to the Plaza shopping centre. Let’s hope that the sun shines!

Next  market stall: Bellingen market, Saturday 20th May

Please note that our next market stall will be at Bellingen market on Saturday 20th May from 9.00 am until 1.30 pm. The markets present a great opportunity for us to remind people about the cruelty and inhumanity of offshore detention. It would be great to welcome supporters old and new to join us, either for a chat or to help out for an hour or two. If you can spare some time to help out, then please let Mike know by emailing him at: mandm.griffin2@bigpond.com.  If you remembered to print off the petition sheet which was attached to last week’s newsletter, then you might have signed petitions to bring along to the market to add to the growing number that we have already received. We now have approximately 3500 signatures from RAR supporters around Australia.

25 years of mandatory detention, and counting 

On 5th May 1992, legislation was rushed through parliament to prevent a group of Cambodian asylum seekers from claiming refugee status in Australia. The immigration minister of the time, Gerry Hand, assured parliament that the new law was “only intended to be an interim measure”. The law provided that  “boat people” must be detained  and that  a court was not to order their release. All this, in the “national interest”, a political claim which seemed to require no elaboration.

As we know, the effects of this “interim measure” have been catastrophic for thousands of asylum seekers who have sought safety on our shores over the past 25 years. Today, more than 2,000 refugees and asylum seekers languish on Nauru and Manus island, many of them since 2013. As at 28th February 2017, a further 1,300 individuals are mandatorily detained in Australia, many of them for more than four years.

At the time that the legislation was passed, Gerry Hand insisted that the government had no wish to “keep people in custody indefinitely”. Indeed, he said that he “could not expect parliament to support such a suggestion”.

Yet here we are, 25 years later, and the system is more draconian than ever, with the Minister possessing  unprecedented powers to decide on the fate of individual asylum seekers.  It is worth reminding ourselves that Minister Dutton wields sweeping and unchecked powers that are beyond the review of the courts. A recent report, released last week, calls for the minister’s current powers to be reined in and for bills to expand them even further be halted. A Fraser-era  minister for immigration, Ian Macphee, says in the report that he is “disgusted by the power accorded to current ministers regarding the lives of people fleeing persecution”.It is surely more important than ever to maintain our rage about the injustice, the cruelty and inhumanity of our government’s deliberately punitive system of indefinite detention.

Printed from the May RAR newsletter