Solstice, Unitarians, Asylum Seeker Tragedy

[tcpip]

Seasons greetings to all and best wishes for the great variety of justifications used for this period of the year. For my own part, I've spent the past two days a little under the weather with a chest cold (yes, it's midsummer, bleh). Planning an evening visit to Jenny P's hanukkah, followed by a day visit to Brendan E., some simple fare and our usual tradition of zombies. On topic, txxxpxx must be thanked for hosting their biennial christmas party which was - as always - a sumptuous evening. As another example, the Melbourne Unitarians held a good end-of-year concert with about one hundred people and performers in attendance - and over $1000 raised for Hanover Welfare Services.

It has been a few weeks with a modicum of Unitarian activity, which must include a visit to the home of the good Rev. Dr. Ian Ellis-Jones whilst in Sydney and delighted to discover we share a mutual interest in the philosopher John Anderson. This was followed with a visit to the North Sydney Unitarian congregation, Spirit of Life, the following day where Ian gave an address (PDF) on Buddhism.

On the subject of caring individuals, some 180 people are missing as a boatload of asylum seekers sank off Java on its way to Australia. It is predictable that in the wake of this tragedy not only has the language changed from "illegal immigrants" to "asylum seekers", but also there have been calls to reintroduce offshore processing (Malaysia, Nauru etc). Whilst it is true that offshore processing does act as a deterrent to asylum seekers (the numbers certainly show that), it is quite something to suggest that this be conducted in a place where asylum seekers have no minimum legal rights, although I do note that Nauru is now a signatory to the UN Convention - times have changed. It is particularly frustrating to watch the events reach a political impasse.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Nauru, even as a UNHCR signatory now, still has issues as Burnside points out:

Neither is Nauru the answer. This is so for a number of reasons. First, people do not get to Nauru unless they first get on a boat, to be intercepted by the Australian Navy as they approach Australian territorial waters. This does nothing to protect them from the perils of the boats. The Siev-X, which sank with the loss of 353 lives, sank on 19 October 2001 – weeks after Nauru had been commissioned as a place of detention and the Pacific Solution had begun.

In addition, Nauru is too small to be a place of permanent settlement of asylum seekers who are taken there and are assessed as refugees. It has a population of about 10,000 people; it does not have a local supply of food or water sufficient for its own people; it does not even have a stable electricity supply or telephone service. Asylum seekers taken there and assessed as refugees would have to be resettled somewhere, and quickly. That would almost certainly mean in Australia. All the use of Nauru does is to make the process unbelievably expensive. Tony Abbott’s insistence on using Nauru as a place for offshore processing is simply a way of wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ money.

http://julianburnside.com.au/offshore.htm