The independent community campaigning group, GetUp, is canvassing for donations to advertising against the Gillard government returning to the “Pacific solution” of sending boat people offshore for processing.
“The Pacific solution did not break the people smugglers' business model; it broke the will and spirit of asylum seekers,” Immigration Minister Chris Bowen told Parliament on June 15,” GetUp! reminds him and all of us.
After the High Court on Wednesday struck down Gillard’s proposed refugees swapping deal with Malaysia, GetUp! are campaigning to end offshore processing for good.
Here’s their appeal for support:
It was bad policy then, it’s a bad policy now.
Sending asylum-seekers to other countries that don’t have adequate legal or human rights protections was struck down by the High Court on Wednesday. Yet with Labor split over what to do next, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen is openly considering a return to the “Pacific Solution” of the Howard era.
Problem is - “the Pacific solution did not break the people smugglers’ business model; it broke the will and spirit of asylum seekers.” These are Minister Bowen’s own words, spoken to Parliament on June 15 of this year. We need to urgently remind the Minister of his own words -- and make sure he can't back away from them. So we’re launching a new ad immediately. Watch the ad now, and chip in to get it on air starting Sunday:
http://www.getup.org.au/stophistoryrepeating
This is one of the most critical junctures in our country’s refugee debate since the Tampa affair.
Last time, we got it wrong, at a terrible human and financial cost. A report by Oxfam and A Just Australia found that intercepting boats and sending asylum seekers to Nauru and Manus Island cost the Australian taxpayer more than $1 billion, only to have the vast majority eventually resettled here and New Zealand anyway.
But of course, the real tragedy was the human cost: that people who were fleeing war, persecution and violence came to Australia looking for refuge, and instead were sent away for slow, long years of despair in terrible conditions.
One processing centre, Manus Island on Papua New Guinea, was plagued by malaria -- in fact nearly one in six inhabitants of Manus Island were diagnosed with the disease.2
In Nauru, many asylum seekers were found to be at constant risk of suicide and self-harm.3
One of the saddest stories of the Tampa era comes from the Norwegian captain of the freighter, Arne Rinnan, who rescued the asylum seekers: "There was one man from Nauru who sent me a letter that I should have let him die in the ind... the Indian Ocean, instead of picking him up. Because, the conditions on Nauru were terrible. And that is a terrible thing to tell people, that you should have just let them drown.”2
Never again. Fund this urgent ad now.
GetUp is an independent, not-for-profit community campaigning group. We use new technology to empower Australians to have their say on important national issues. We receive no political party or government funding, and every campaign we run is entirely supported by voluntary donations.
1 House of Representatives Official Hansard, No. 8, 2011, Tuesday, 14 June 2011, P.5863, 16:07
2 'Malaria on Manus 'endemic': report' AAP Eoin Blackwell, August 18, 2011
3 'Detainees to cast off from Nauru', The Age Michael Gordon, October 14, 2005