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

[luciusmalfoy.livejournal.com]

And this is awesome. You rock.

[narrelle.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for your hard work in taking a lead on this over the years. It's so good to feel both proud of my country and proud of my party again.

[thebaronmk1.livejournal.com]

Well done :-)

You have no idea how pleases I am that we have finally gotten this far. I remember getting a lovely reply email from Petro Georgiou, whom I had written to when he was lobbying to improve the situation, telling me that he would carry on the fight, and today he has written a pretty decent piece in the Age on the subject.

[the-shadow298.livejournal.com]

congrats and well done to everyone involved in the campaign. ^_^

[splodgenoodles.livejournal.com]

Go you and everyone else that worked on this.

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[angel80.livejournal.com]

Yes, well done! I have been reading though, that there's still a road to hoe before we have a really decent immigration policy. But this is a good step.

NEVER give up...

[khrysha.livejournal.com]

I was also involved in English programs for Afghan Hazara refugees.

It's about time this has ended. Thank goodness!!

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Yay and good riddance.

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

Thank God! The whole Tampa business made me sick to my stomach and left me disappointed in Australia. Getting rid of mandatory detention puts them back in a place of respect where they can hopefully inspire at least shame the US into something like that direction.

[grailchaser.livejournal.com]

That's great to hear, Lev. But I'm still not out of a job just yet. :)

Whilst I was always sceptical of the whole "Refugees Overboard" scenario and would still like to see Howard do time for his deception, many of the Refugees we had at Woomera during the early noughties did very, very desperate things whilst in detention - including endangering the lives of their own children.

[cluebyfour.livejournal.com]

Good work. I wish I could be as optimistic about our own political system.

(Then again, our immigration problems in the U. S. are perhaps of a different nature than those of Australia's. But the principles of liberty remain the same.)

[iosef.livejournal.com]

It's a good win, no matter how you look at it.

[mtdesing.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on seeing your hard work pay off. It has to be incredibly gratifying to see concrete changes based on your efforts.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Congratulations and well done!

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

6 years is little more than a blink of the eye in terms of most real political change timelines.

Congratulations.

[ironed_orchid]

That is very good news, and a long time coming.