Speeches and articles

AJA interview on SkyNews Agenda

Immigration Minister at Refugee Council Meeting

AJA at Detention Inquiry

AJA national Coordinator Kate Gauthier at the Joint Standing Committee on Migration

I have visited all the onshore detention centres. What I have seen has left me shocked and ashamed, as it has for many thousands of Australians. I ask this committee today to start to renew our faith in Australia as a humane country that does not punish those who come to us for our protection.

ASRC at Detention inquiry

Kon Karapanagiotidis from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre made a passionate plea against mandatory detention:

If you wonder what the future of a policy of mandatory detention in

any form will look like, all you have to do is look at its history and what is happening right now. The reason that we have this human cost is that mandatory detention is unworkable, unnecessary and unjustifiable. There is an alternative. Detaining in any form people who are seeking asylum will damage them; it will traumatise them.

Joint letter to Minister Evans on Christmas Island

'New Directions in Detention, Restoring Integrity to Australia's Immigration System'

Speech by Senator Chris Evans, Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, given at the Centre for International and Public Law, Australian National University, Tuesday 29 July 2008

Tony Kevin - Keynote address at Hope premiere

'Uncharted Waters' - article by David Manne

Courier Mail’s fictional 'dole payments plan for illegal migrants' articles

'The refugee system is still badly broken'

This article by David Manne was published in The Age, 21 June 2008

"Basic safeguards considered essential prerequisites for fair decision-making remain absent from many areas of refugee policy. The policy must be restored to the mainframe of our legal system, while also reflecting our international commitments to respect human rights."

‘The new Australian citizenship test – a template for national identity’

March 2008

Petro Georgiou, MP for Kooyong delivered this speech on the citizenship test.

" The fact is that the aim of the new test is not simply to better assess whether newcomers are fit to become Australian citizens. What the new test seeks to achieve is to set out a template for Australianness which impacts on all Australians."

Politics in the Pub - Punishing Refugees

There are many ways in which current govt policies or actions are punishing refugees. The most significant is excision and offshore processing, so I will discuss those policies

But also important to note is the public discourse. The current immigration Minister Kevin Andrews repeatedly refers to asylum seekers as “illegals.” It’s shameful that Minister Andrews, once a practising lawyer himself, is either uninformed about the laws he is responsible for, or is deliberately misleading the Australian public by slandering vulnerable people.

Read the transcript.

Deportee's fate shows there's no solution in the Pacific

October 2006

Advocates of justice for asylum-seekers and refugees were justifiably relieved when the Government was forced to withdraw its proposed amendments to the Migration Act - amendments that would have seen any asylum-seeker arriving by boat in Australia being deported to Nauru to be processed. However, few people realise that the win was only partial.

Article published in New Matilda

AJA presentation to Senate Inquiry - DUA Bill

July 2006

We challenge each of you, our elected representatives to explain in your report how this law supports the values by which this government wants all Australian to live. The simple fact is that you cannot. This law offends basic Australian values and will leave those who support it with no claim to integrity. It will render Australian values empty, and will leave our Parliament and our nation diminished. 

AJA opening statement to People's Inquiry

July 2005

Much of the Migration Act is not just ineffective legislation or inadvertent policy failure; it is about how we as a nation legally responded to vulnerable people who came to us seeking help. That response so far has been at best inadequate and at worst inhumane. Until we achieve a fundamental shift in the thinking with which we as a nation approach this issue, we will continue to fail.

Open letter to the Prime Minister from prominent Australians on Pacific Solution

July 2006

We, the undersigned, are alarmed at the prospect of asylum seekers being removed from Australia, sent to offshore centres and being held there until a 'third country' provides refuge. We are also deeply concerned over the proposal that the Australian Navy may forcibly return boats of asylum seekers to the very places they fled.

Nauru is no place for asylum-seekers

May 2006

LAST Thursday the Howard Government introduced in parliament a bill about refugees that is without precedent in Australia or in any other country. For the first time, we are proposing to deny asylum-seekers arriving in mainland Australia access to refugee protection procedures in this country even if they have come directly from a state in which they face persecution.

Article by Mary Crock and Jane McAdam

Boatloads of Extinguishment?

May 2006

Speech by David Mann - The optimism that many Australians felt following significant reforms to asylum and refugee policy in 2005 has been cruelly dashed by the government’s wretched response to Indonesia’s displeasure at the granting of protection visas to 42 West Papuans in March.

Justice Marcus Einfeld at Immigration Detention Inquiry

May 2006

It is wholly appropriate and desirable for a country to establish policies and programs designed to ensure that it consists of only the numbers it can reasonably absorb, comprising good people who want to contribute to our national effort. But we should never allow ourselves to be so paralysed by stereotypes and prejudices as to throw out our liberalism with overblown apprehensions and crude politically motivated ideologies.

Closed Hearts, Closed Borders - by Sister Susan Connelly

May 2006

I can never relegate the asylum seeker  issue to the  merely political in-tray.  For me, they are deeply religious questions which affect my morality, your morality and the morality of this nation.

Read the transcript.

Desperate to Please Jakata

April 2006

CAN Australia always decide who comes to this country and conditions under which they come? The announcement on Friday that the Howard Government is considering adjusting the processes by which asylum claims of West Papuans are considered so as to take into account the views of the Indonesian Government is a significant policy shift.

Opinion piece by Donald Rothwell

Letter - Be Australian? Not at the expense of integrity

Letter from Lombok Asylum Seekers

11 November 2005

We are a group of Iraqi people, who are seeking asylum in Australia.  We are living in Lombok, an Indonesian island under the protection of the IOM Organization and under a temporary protection of the United Nations in Indonesia. 

Statement by Chinese hunger strikers in Villawood

4 November 2005   

We are six hunger strikers from Villawood Immigration Detention Centre (VIDC) in Sydney, Australia.  In order to protest against the compulsory detention policy and mental and physical impairment caused by the long-term detention in VIDC, during which many people have suffered from long-term insomnia, dysphoria, and even mental breakdown, six of us detainees started the hunger strike on 19th October, 2005.

AJA Statement to Senate Inquiry into Migration Act

28 September 2005

I would like to start off with a question for the committee. Are there any of you, faced with threats to your safety, dangers to the safety of your family, your children, with no queues to join in your country to seek protection, would you let a visa – a little piece of paper stand in the way of you and the safety of your children? There is not one person among us who would not think of the safety of their family first and foremost. We would all save ourselves no matter what we had to do.

Jen Harrison's Visit to Nauru

September 2005

Jen Harrison, a social worker from the University of Sydney, reports back on his visit to Nauru with Senator Andrew Bartlett. This is an updated version taking into account changes between June and September 2005. 

Palmer Report Speech

9 September 2005

Politics in the Pub. Speech by Kate Gauthier, A Just Australia National Coordinator.

The Palmer report was a very significant one, although it did not gain a lot of media attention, or get widespread support from the anti-detention lobby. Why? Because it focused on administrative processes rather than conditions of detention.

A Report on the Food Incident and Riot at Baxter IDF

Australia needs the addition of a Bill of Rights to ensure the correct weighting of Mick Palmer's "checks and balances."

It’s time for Beazley to act on detention

Given the continuing controversies surrounding detention of asylum-seekers and the Government’s half-hearted attempt to deal with long-term detainees, it concerns me as a Labor supporter that the very principle of mandatory detention was first introduced by a Labor Government.

Canberra Times opinion piece by Jerzy Zubrzycki, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University and AJA Patron.

Australia is still abusing children’s human rights with impunity

A year ago today, Australia’s human rights watchdog released the report of its National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention.  At the time Tony Abbott tabled the report in Parliament on 13 May, successfully burying its findings in Budget week, there were 173 children in immigration detention.

Article by Alanna Sherry

Ruth Graham's Visits to Baxter

October 2004

A series of three stories from Ruth Graham's visits to Baxter detention centre between September 2003 and October 2004.

A Just Australia speech to the United Nations

April 2004

See below for the full text of Howard Glenn's speech to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.  An edited version of this speech was published in The Australian on 5 April 2004.

Speech by Julian Burnside

16 February 2004

Open Letter to Mark Latham

13 January 2004

Tampering with Asylum: Fr Frank Brennan

5 November 2003

Ranjan Abayasekara visits Baxter

21 September 2003

Story of a trip to Baxter and the relationships that have formed there.

Claudia Karvan's speech to the NSW Teachers Federation

12 March 2003

Here is the text of a speech delivered by Claudia on behalf of A Just Australia to more than 100 members of the NSW Teachers Federation and their students.