The Government has allocated an extra $25 million over four years to prevent people from being smuggled to New Zealand by boat.

It was a surprise new initiative in the 2019 Budget and seemed more in line with what an Australian budget initiative might look like, with its anti-boat people rhetoric. Continue reading

They are Afghan, Pakistani, Rohingyan and Sri Lankan.

The group did not include refugees from Iran or Somalia or any of the Muslim majority countries banned from the US, which account for about half of all refugees on Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and Nauru.

A spokesperson for Australia's Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton says the refugees have made the trip as part of a deal struck between former US president Barack Obama and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Advocate Ian Rintoul said the absence from the group of refugees from the banned countries showed the Australian government had no plan to secure the future of those people.

About 900 refugees remain on Nauru, including about 130 children.

Last week the Guardian reported that a 14-year-old refugee girl who had attempted suicide on Nauru by trying to set herself on fire was to be moved to Australia within days.

She is the eighth child moved from the island following a court order or the threat of legal action.

The Australian Border Force had rejected recommendations from doctors on the island to immediately move the girl to an Australian hospital for acute psychiatric treatment that isn't available on Nauru.

An urgent application brought by the National Justice Project to have the girl moved was set to be heard in the federal court last Friday morning in Sydney.

But just as proceedings commenced, the Australian government agreed to move her and her family to Australia.

About 220 refugees from Nauru have now been moved to the US with about 110 from Manus.

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On Wednesday, speakers addressed a rally of about 900 detainees demonstrating against moves to evict them.

Under PNG law the Australian-run facility must close by November after four years of operation.

The protest was a response to cuts to water and electricity at the Foxtrot compound which is part of the original facility.

In May the Australian government announced the facility would shut down after it was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea.

The Australian authorities want the refugees to move to a new site; the protesters say they are being aggressively relocated to the Transit Centre in nearby Lorengau

The East Lorengau Refugee Transit Centre, the new facility on Manus Island, is intended to temporarily house refugees awaiting resettlement.

"We are not safe outside the fences, and immigration are trying to make life impossible for us inside," said Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist who fled Iran and has been on Manus Island since 2013.

"We are protesting peacefully for our human rights, and to call on Australia to uphold its commitments to offer us protection as refugees," he said.

The detainees, men who sought asylum in Australia, say they are being forced to settle in PNG.

Iranian refugee Amir Taghinia said at yesterday's rally that Australian media was censoring news of the protest.

"Power and water mean nothing. Even if they cut the food we are not going to go to Lorengau, we do not want to be settled in PNG," he said.

The men also marked the first anniversary of the death of Pakistani refugee Kamil Hussain, who Mr Boochani said had drowned while being "held against his will in an Australian concentration camp."

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He said the agreement, to be administered with the United Nations Refugee Agency, is available only to those currently in the processing centres and will not be repeated. Continue reading

A spokesperson for Dutton did not immediately respond for requests for comment on the closure but Dutton said in Melbourne that the Manus detainees could return home or go to another country willing to accept them. Continue reading

The four-year deal, signed in 2014, was designed to resettle hundreds of refugees who have been transferred by Australia to the tiny Pacific nation of Nauru.

Australia's immigration officials have made repeated attempts to persuade the refugees of the merits of moving to Cambodia - one of the world's poorest nations - but only five people agreed to resettle there.

It has now emerged that three of the five - a Burmese man and an Iranian couple - have returned to their homelands. Continue reading

It continues however to refuse entry to refugees on boats from Indonesia.

The head of Australia's Refugee Council says he expects Australia will soon ask New Zealand to help get it out of trouble with the Nauru asylum seekers' centre but New Zealand should break away from Australia and use its own good record to push for change.

Paul Power, the chief executive of the Refugee Council of Australia, spoke to MPs at the Foreign Affairs select committee and urged them to consider how New Zealand could use its influence on the matter rather than working in concert with Australia.

Power is also the chair of the Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Working Group on refugees.

Asked why Syrians currently in detention on Manus Island and Nauru did not deserve the opportunity of resettlement, The Prime Minster of Australia, Tony Abbott said, "We will never ever do anything that encourages the evil trade of people smuggling and all of those who have come to Australia by boat are here as a result of people smuggling."

"The logic is simple and, in isolation, compelling," says Michael Gordon writing in the Sydney Morning Herald. "Australia will not do anything that offers the most tacit, indirect or qualified acceptance that people in desperate situations will do whatever they can to get to safety, including paying third parties for passage."

"Otherwise, the argument goes, the boats will start coming again, along with the deaths at sea. Labour agrees."

"But the problem is twofold. If all other countries adopted the same approach, the humanitarian crisis in Europe would escalate exponentially; and those on Manus and Nauru are left in a perpetual, mind-numbing or mind-destroying limbo," says Gordon.

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• smh.com.au
• nzherald.co.nz
• theguardian.com
• Image: radionz.co.nz

They were heading For New Zealand.

In reply to their request for asylum in New Zealand, they have been advised to contact United Nations officials in Australia.

Since at least 2010 the Prime Minister John Key has been warning that the risk of refugees arriving by boat in his country is increasing.

What will happen when boat people actually reach New Zealand?

This week Key refused to say categoricallymthat New Zealand would not pay people traffickers to take asylum seekers back to another country.

One columnist in the New Zealand Herald says Key had little choice but to put some distance between himself and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's handling of the question of whether Australian authorities paid crew members to return boat people to Indonesia.

Pope Francis has expressed serious concern about the plight of the boat people in the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman sea in Southeast Asia.

Last year Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand made a submission about legislation aimed at the possible arrival of boat people in New Zealand when it was at the select committee stage.

In its submission Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand said, "mandatory detention of refugees in Australia has been an extremely expensive way to ruin human lives."

"It should not be even considered for New Zealand."

"Australia tries to send boats of asylum seekers back from where they came and when it can't, puts their occupants in detention camps."

Key says New Zealand doesn't have a hard-and-fast policy concerning boat migrants.

"There's no guarantee we'd bring them ashore, though."

"That's not absolute guarantee, it's a bit like a decision tree," says Key.

"At varying different points we have decisions ministers have to make."

Immigration minister Michael Woodhouse said should a vessel reach New Zealand they would collect and process asylum seekers at the Mangere refugee centre.

But he said he was not ruling out other options.

Labour Party leader Andrew Little believes the chance of boat people getting to New Zealand is "so remote as to be negligible."

Green Party immigration spokesperson Denise Roche agreed that the Government was inventing a bogeyman.

New Zealand First leader Winston Peters also thought the arrival of asylum seekers improbable.

Peters said New Zealand could look at increasing its refugee quota from 750 people a year to 1000, but said that could not be done while immigration was at its current level.

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• nzherald.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• radionz.co.nz
• 3news.co.nz
• Image: radio.nz.co.nz

"The Australian Border Force Act, supported by the ALP and opposed only by the Greens, effectively turns the Department of Immigration into a secret security organisation with police powers."

Under the Act, it is a criminal offence, punishable by imprisonment of up to two years, for any person working directly or indirectly for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to reveal to the media or any other person or organisation anything that happens in detention centres like the one on Manus Island.

Section 42 of the Act is entitled "Secrecy".

It provides that a person who is an "entrusted person" commits an offence if he or she makes a record of, or discloses, what is termed protected information.

An "entrusted person" is defined in the Act to mean not only government employees, but also a consultant or contractor.

"Protected information" means any information that a person comes across while working for, or in, detention centres.

Barns said the effect of these provisions will be to deter individuals such as doctors, counsellors, and others who have voiced publicly their concerns about the conditions endured by asylum seekers in detention centres from collecting information about those conditions and then raising their concerns in the community via the media.

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• probonoaustralia.com.aus
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It has rejected of the recommendation made by the United Nations Human Rights Council to rule out the transfer of asylum seekers to detention centers in third countries.

This is one of the 34 recommendations that have been rejected, out the total of 121 made by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) after the UN States' Universal Periodic Review's (UPR).

Intelligence supplied to the Government confirms New Zealand is increasingly being talked up by people smugglers as a destination for asylum seekers.

New Zealand's Prime Minister, John Key, recently said said revelations about desperate asylum seekers paying thousands of dollars to reach New Zealand by boat were no surprise.

Listen to interview with John Key.

Last year New Zealand's parliament passed legislation late on a Thursday allowing it to detain groups of more than 30 asylum seekers for up to six months.

At that time Immigration Minister Michael Woodhouse said, "This legislation is about ensuring our system can handle a mass arrival should one occur and sending a clear message to potential people-smuggling ventures that New Zealand is not a soft touch."

When they met in Wellington at the beginning of June, the bishops of Oceania upheld their solidarity "boat people," urging a "more humane approach" to their situation.

Stressing that "boat people are real people," Bishop Eugene Hurley of Darwin, Australia, remarked that "the giving of sanctuary has always been one of the noblest of human endeavors."

He warned of the use of language to dehumanize those seeking asylum, noting that while they are called "queue jumpers," there is no discussion of how to form orderly lines when one is fleeing war-torn Sri Lanka and Syria.

The bishop went on to call the offshore detention centers "factories for mental illness," saying their use is "devoid of logic, fairness, and compassion."

"The UN Human Rights Council adopted the outcome of New Zealand's second review of New Zealand's human rights record on Thursday 19 June in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a relatively new UN mechanism that aims at reviewing a country's human rights performance every 4-5 years. New Zealand was under review for the first time in 2009 and was again reviewed in January 2014.

Source

• The Sunday Times
• Pacific Scoop
• news.24.com
• CNA
• Image: cdn.24.co.za

Mark Isaacs has described his experience in his book, The Undesirables which was due for for publication next month, but has been rushed out by publisher in the wake of the chaotic riot at the Manus Island detention centre last month.

He worked on Nauru between October 2012 and June 2013 and says he found harrowing conditions at the centre with dozens of asylum seekers suffering mental breakdowns while in indefinite detention.

Isaacs was only 24 when, on the strength of a single phone call and with no experience, he was hired by the Salvos and sent to Nauru with less than a week's notice to "provide support" to asylum seekers detained there.

The title of the book is taken from a term Isaacs says a government staffer was overheard using to describe the asylum seekers at the camp.

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• Radio New Zealand International
• Sydney Morning Herald
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The The Catholic Bishops' Conference of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands has consistently spoken against offshore processing in PNG of asylum seekers who are seeking asylum in Australia.

When the Manus detention centre was reopened in the context of a deal with the Australian government the Bishops protested in the strongest terms.

They questioned the legality, in the light of the PNG Constitution's protection of freedom (section 42), of bringing people who have not broken of the nation's laws, into the country and imprisoning them.

"Detaining people against their will in PNG, even if it "works" as a deterrent is not a just solution worthy of a great nation otherwise proud of its human rights record. It clearly places an intolerable strain on the capacity of Papua New Guinea to manage, and might lead to even more deaths, injury and trauma. Close the centre and manage the problem in Australia."

Read Full Statement

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• Supplied: Fr. Victor Roche, SVD, General Secretary Catholic Bishops' Conference of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands
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Advocates from Save the Children, the charity employed to look after the children, say the minors arrived last Sunday morning and will be held in a detention centre that houses family groups.

Save the Children says research shows the longer the children are kept in detention the more it impacts their physical wellbeing and mental health.

The organisation's director of international programs, Scott Gilbert, says the Government should have never sent the the unaccompanied minors into offshore detention.

Australia's immigration Minister Scott Morrison has stood by the Government's policy of placing children in offshore detention, and the way he carries out his responsibilities as the legal guardian of unaccompanied children.

"I do that by ensuring that the facilities are in place in Nauru and when my guardianship responsibilities are transferred to justice minister in Nauru, that's how I do it and that's what I've been doing," he said.

Mr Morrison also reiterated the Government's determination to implement the policy with no exceptions.
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Father Frank Brennan who is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University believes a deterrent is needed in the border protection policy mix but thinks that has to involve Malaysia and Indonesia.

He believes the deal reached with Nauru was clearly designed with the election in mind.

Earlier, commenting on the agreement reached with Papua New Guinea, Brennan said both major parties are trashing regional relationships for electoral gain and that the High Court could overturn the PNG plan.

Speaking on an ABC Panel with the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott, Brennan said the asylum policy was like a nuclear deterrent. "You threaten to do mean and nasty things in the hope that you will never have to do them."

But he doubts such a policy will work because it "would seem that a lot of the work that would be needed for such a proposal to work has not been done."

"For example, it seems now the Indonesians were not even formally notified, let alone consulted and where in the first instance the understanding was that children would not be sent, we're now to be told that children are to be sent to a dreadful malaria infested place like Manus Island. I think that sort of thing is just morally unacceptable."

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• ABC Radio
• Radio Australia
• Image: Screen Shot ABC

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• Sydney Morning Herald

But a former Salvation Army staff member who helped deliver services at the centre says that won't be easy

And she's warned the centre will never be appropriate for the small children Listen to interview

Salvation Army spokesman Paul Moulds says women and children should not be sent yet, because asylum seekers are sleeping in tents while the compound is under construction.

"We certainly would be keen to see more development happen with facilities prior to that happening," he said.

"But at the end of the day, that's not our decision, and I'm sure that the intention is that the facilities are developed far further before that happens."

Major Moulds says asylum seekers have been confined to the compound, but expects they will soon be able to move around the island.

"That's certainly the intention. It's only days since the first arrival has been received," he said.

"We're starting to plan activities, we've started our first English-type classes and that was great, they loved that.

"So at the moment it's basically just looking after people and making them feel as welcome and comfortable as they can in situations which are not the ideal but which will get better."

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• PINA
• Image: The Telegraph

The group arrived by yacht in Darwin late last week while on their way to claim asylum in New Zealand.

They were warned that sailing across the Tasman Sea would be extremely dangerous.

Mr Bowen says he's pleased the group has decided to seek asylum in Australia.

"I obviously think that's a good outcome, as it means they won't be yet again taking another further dangerous boat journey, we'll now process them in the normal way, they'll be processed for their asylum claim, and security checks will begin," he said.

The Chinese asylum seekers had originally declared their intention of heading to New Zealand on their yacht which is at present in Darwin.

On Wednesday the The Refugee Council of New Zealand called for Australian authorities to extend the visas of the Chinese asylum-seekers. Spokesman Gary Poole said the New Zealand Government has been put in a difficult situation by the Australian Government.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said officials cannot stop the group from setting sail to New Zealand after their temporary visas expire on Saturday because their boat is seaworthy and they have not committed any crime.

However, Poole claims there is something she can do.

"One of the things she does have the power to do is grant them extended visas so it can be negotiated between our Government officials and the Australian government officials to reach a solution that is going to provide for their safety," he told TV One's Breakfast on Wednesday.

"It would be completely irresponsible of Julia Gillard to let these women and children particularly to set sail."

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• Radio Australia
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The Vulnerabilities to Trafficking in the Pacific report from the Australian Institute of Criminology warns of an alarming rise in trafficking in this part of the world. The report says that during the past six years, Samoa and nine other countries in the region reported their belief that people had been trafficked into their countries.

Auali'itia says Samoa is not immune. During an interview with the Samoa Observer yesterday, he revealed the latest case on these shores."The most recent case was late last year when a group of people from Bangladesh illegally migrated to Samoa," he says.