A Proud Day for 'Labor for Refugees'

[tcpip]

Some years ago I was quite involved in asylum seeker advocacy. I travelled to the Woomera Detention facility in mid-2001 and raised a modest sum of money from state Labor MPs for the Refugee Action Collective following the screening of The Inside Story on Four Corners. In August 2001, the Merchant Vessel Tampa, entered Australian waters full of asylum seekers. The Australian government sent SAS troops to board the increasingly unseaworthy ship which some noted at the time could be considered an act of war against Norway. The Howard government introduced a retroactive Border Protection Bill, which sought to legislate powers that the government could use force to remove any ship from Australian territorial waters, regardless of international obligations. It was in this environment I started the group, "Labor for Refugees", which grew to become an interstate, non-factional organisation which lobbied within the Party (and outside) for the abolition of mandatory detention and temporary protection visas.

Labor lost the 2001 election as the former Prime Minister John Howard knowingly lied to the Australian population claiming that the asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard in attempt to gain admission to Australia. 'Pragmatists' within the party refused to take the issue up against the lying rodent or admit the Party's culpability in introducing mandatory detention in the first place. Nevertheless the organisation persisted, through the successive leaderships of Beazley, Crean, Beazley again, Latham and Rudd, generated its share of media attention with a sea of prominent gold an black t-shirts at Labor Party national conferences and even publically supporting a federal Liberal MP for his humane stance on asylum seeker rights.

At the 2006 AGM I ended most of involvement with Labor for Refugees. The new Labor spokesperson on immigration, Tony Burke, made it clear that temporary protection visas were going to become a thing of the past. In May this year Temporary Protection Visas were abolished. Two days ago it was announced that mandatory detention would be ended.

It took over six years. But our objectives have been achieved, because we took a principled stand, we argued from the facts, and didn't give up. And that's politics for you.

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It will come to no surprise if I tell you that the Tampa incident was a set up cooked up between the conservative media moguls and the Howard government. In many ways establishing L4R was a means to ensure that they wouldn't be able to make all the mileage they wanted out of wedge politics and to provide the opportunity for Labor party members to work on the issue within the party against the nay-sayers and racists... and yes, the ALP does have its fair share of the latter.

[narrelle.livejournal.com]

While I don't generally buy into conspiracy theories, I'll pay for that one. I am certainly aware that Labor has it's share of the whole spectrum of human madness. Disturbingly, I read your post not long after someone I work with burbled vilely for ten minutes at a colleague about how current immigrants are all murderous HIV+ crazy people who come to this country in order to kill people. Or that's what it boiled down to. Sigh. So your post was a bright spot in an otherwise bleak day.