Page 5120 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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healthcare access for asylum seekers, have been a significant move forward. In fact, the Refugee Council of Australia has noted that these policy shifts have demonstrated that supporting vulnerable visa applicants to live in the community was a more constructive and cost-effective strategy than leaving them indefinitely in immigration detention. However, the question then still remains: why do we continue to adopt arbitrary measures when processing offshore asylum seekers?
I am aware that there are people in the community who believe that Australia appears to be laying out the welcome mat, as some people say, to anyone seeking to enter the country. There is a belief that by allowing so-called queue jumpers to enter Australia this will hamper claims from refugees who are waiting in immigration centres overseas.
The grave reality is that for people escaping situations such as that in Sri Lanka, and in the past Burma and Afghanistan and before that Vietnam, there is no queue as there is nowhere for them to go to or places to apply if they want to leave their country. In fact, in the majority of cases where people are escaping some form of persecution no such processes exist. In debating this issue today, it is important that that factor is recognised.
Noting the current Oceanic Viking debate, I would now like to address some of the issues facing Tamils in Sri Lanka in particular, as we need to understand what these people have gone through before they even reach the ACT and how this can better inform policies we implement.
On 9 September I attended a forum at Parliament House on human rights in Sri Lanka. I have previously spoken about this in this place, but it is important, I think, to restate some of that information. It dealt with what is occurring with the treatment of Tamils held in camps and also the role of Australia, including governments and the community, in protecting human rights in Sri Lanka.
The event was attended by both federal and ACT parliamentarians. This forum discussed the situation of over 300,000 Tamils being held in camps in Sri Lanka and the calls which have been made by groups including the United Nations and Amnesty International to allow people to leave if they choose, for the camps not to be under Sri Lankan military guard and for aid agencies and the media to be allowed into camps.
The forum reported recent actions by the Sri Lankan government to restrict anyone reporting on or speaking out against what is occurring in the camps. Most recently, a key representative and worker for UNICEF was expelled from Sri Lanka for speaking out against the conditions in the camps and a journalist was sentenced to a 20-year jail term for supposedly unbalanced reporting on the situation.
The Tamil community in Australia are asking that the Sri Lankan government be treated as other countries such as Fiji are being treated by the Australian government—that is, to recognise where human rights violations are occurring and apply appropriate sanctions. They are also asking for the Australian government to assist Australian citizens who have family in camps, or are themselves being held in
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