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]

I remember being asked sotto voce by some UN workers on a pier in Dili, East Timor the following year about the issue. They were genuinely confused and concerned: "What is happening in Australia?!" I tried my best to explain the situation with a range of political and cultural references, but ultimately it came down to the fact that many people simply either did not care or felt threatened - and most of the latter group were lower-middle class people from the outer suburbs; in other circumstances core Labor voters.

By the same token I don't think it will be shame that shifts US policy in such a direction. It'll take political action from normal, everyday people who are prepared to keep hammering away at the issue.