Painting Fakes

So, over the past two weeks two Nauru-based asylum seekers have set themselves on fire.  The first, a young Iranian man called Omid Masoumali, died of his burns in a Brisbane hospital.  The second, a 21-year-old Somali woman named Hodan Yasin, set herself alight yesterday and is now in a critical condition.  Reports suggest at least one other man has been prevented from doing the same. As far as I understand this is the tip of the iceberg.  Depression, anger and self-harm are widespread amongst the asylum seekers on Nauru, Manus, Christmas Island and the various detention centres on the Australian mainland. Who is responsible for this shocking self-harm, these acts of desperation, these signs of hopelessness and despair? Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Peter Dutton wants us to believe it's the fault of human rights advocates, says the Brisbane Times  (which, by the way, is the source of the photo). He expressed anger at advocates and others "who are enc

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Paul Watzlawick et al's Change  and the idea of first and second order change.  The idea has kept on being useful since I remembered it, so recently I got my hands on a copy of the book to read it again.  Along with it I also bought a book by Watzlawick called Ultra-Solutions: How to fail most successfully. This little booklet is an exploration of the kind of solution which "not only does away with the problem, but also with just about everything else, somewhat in the vein of the old medical joke - operation successful, patient dead...".  It is a light-hearted romp through the pitfalls of rigid or inadequate thinking, using as its framework the witches and their mistress Hecate who tempted Macbeth, and who continue to tempt us in our day to adopt strategies just as seductive and self-defeating as that followed by Shakespeare's tragic hero. In each short chapter he deals with a mental pitfall. The search for security and

If you've been reading, you'll know that I'm on the hunt for simple diagrams that can explain the entire world at a glance. Here's another one A couple of years ago I did a piece of research for Shelter NSW on the redevelopment of public housing estates.  If you're a real nerd you can read it here , but unless you're especially interested in the literature on public housing renewal you'll find it very tedious. One of the many reports I read involved the researchers interviewing residents who had lived in the midst of a redevelopment project in Minto, Sydney.  They suggested that a large part of the reason for the disconnect between the plans made by the redevelopment authority and its contractors, and the preferences of the tenants, was that they view the neighbourhood very differently. Redevelopment professionals - architects, planners, project managers and so forth - see the suburb as a grid, as if viewed from the air, and for them all parts of the g

I'm sorely tempted to not write about asylum seekers.  I really don't want to.  It's too awful.  But my conscience compels me.  It seems like every time I write an article about this, the story is worse than the last one. The last time I wrote, our government was complaining that while the Human Rights Commission was criticising them for holding children in detention  and the United Nations was highlighting their failure to respect the human rights of asylum seekers in general, no-one was was giving them credit for the amazing human rights achievement of preventing people from drowning at sea.  Mind you, they have never presented a scrap of evidence that they have done this.  They have prevented boatloads of people from arriving in Australia by intercepting them on the way here and sending them back, but there is no evidence that I have seen about where they end up. Now we are seeing just how hollow this claim is.  It is becoming clear that something like 8,000 asy

Sometimes the pleasure I get from being right is far outweighed by the pain of wishing I had been wrong.  This is one of these times. About a month ago I suggested that the media and government assault on Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs over an obscure immigration case was merely a preliminary skirmish before the release of the Commission's report into children in detention.  I'm deeply sorry to have been proved right. On February 11 the government tabled the Commission's report, The Forgotten Children,  which it has been sitting on since November while it engaged in its initial softening up process.  I've only had time so far to read the summary and skim the rest, but it is not pretty reading. Over an eight month period, teams of Commission staff and assistants, including experts in child health, interviewed over 1,000 children and family members in eleven Australian immigration detention centres.  The Commission also received a couple of hundred f

You don't need any special insight to understand what is going on in the Manus Island detention centre.  You don't need inside information or intelligence reports.  You just need a basic level of intelligence. The detention centre on Manus Island is a hell-hole.  It is made up of hot and poorly ventilated tin sheds on a tropical island.  Drinking water is rationed.  It is overcrowded and inmates have little or no privacy.  Residents have to queue for hours at mealtimes in the stifling heat.  There are inadequate health services, not enough toilets and showers, and no soap and water in the smelly latrines.  Don't take my word for it - read Amnesty International's report from their visit in November 2013.  They are still awaiting a response from the Immigration Minister. The inmates in this substandard human-rights free zone are not hardened criminals.  They are ordinary men who have fled persecution and danger in their homelands and tried to reach safety in Austr

Just for something a little different, and a little more pissed off, here's something slightly removed from the Queensland Election.  You may have noticed some headlines recently about Human Rights Commission chairperson Gillian Triggs. If you read the Murdoch press, especially the Australian, they will be hysterical. Gillian Triggs backs Indonesian Wife Killer Detainee Tony Abbott blasts Gillian Triggs over wife killer John Basikbasik Gillian Triggs' advice a 'betrayal' of women The Guardian is more, well, guarded. Abbott attacks Gillian Triggs over call to free convicted refugee John Basikbasik You may notice that even though Triggs is far from a household name the headlines - even in the Guardian - use her name not her title.  I wonder why that would be? A quick summary of the story.  John Basikbasik is a West Papuan refugee who arrived in Australia by boat (actually, by canoe) in 1985.  He was granted a protection visa on the basis of his co

This week the Australian public has had to swallow the news that a violent protest at the Manus Island detention centre resulted in the death of one detainee and serious injury to a number of others.  Depending on who you believe, the death and injuries were the fault of the asylum seekers themselves (who were rioting in frustration over their conditions), of heavy handed response by security guards at the centre, or of local police or residents breaking into the camp and assaulting the protesting detainees.  The various accounts of the event are irreconcilable.  At this point, given that neither staff of the centre nor detainees are allowed to talk to the media and we can't trust anything the government says on the subject, we have no way of knowing what happened. One thing is agreed by all those telling the story.  The detainees were protesting, with some violence, about conditions in the camp.  They had, in fact, been protesting for weeks before their protests became violen

I often ride my bike past the Seventh Day Adventist church on O'Keefe St in Buranda.  This week the sign in front of the church read "Love People. Use Things."  I'd like Scott Morrison and co (including their Labor colleagues who are just as bad) to read this sign. I haven't posted on refugee issues for a while.  I've been too depressed about it to write anything.  Our current government has ratcheted up the deterrent to a point where it has become absurd - a military style intervention whose sole purpose is to repel boatloads of asylum seekers and return them to Indonesia from where they have generally departed or, failing that, send them offshore to detention facilities on Manus Island or Nauru where they can expect to stay indefinitely no matter what their refugee status.  The result has been a growing number of horror stories and embarrassments - pregnant women and newborn children interred in terrible camp conditions or returned there soon after; t

So, after months of deadlock and confusion, the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers has provided Julia Gillard and Chris Evans with the fig-leaf they need to adopt large parts of the Coalition's policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Of course the answer you get from an expert panel will depend very much on the question you ask.  This one was asked a number of questions, but the two pertinent ones were as follows. "....how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat;" and "...the development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to maintain its borders ;"  (with my italics) Their answer is that if you want to stop people coming to Australia by boat, you need to ensure that they get no benefit from doing so.  To acheive this the panel has made 22 recommendations.  The key ones for immediate implementation are: re-opening the detention centres on Nauru and

The management of News Ltd's flagship The Australian assures us that they don't have a political agenda, they just report the news as they see it.  If that's the case, then they see things in a slightly odd way.  Or perhaps it's better to say they see some things, but not others. For the past two Saturdays The Weekend Australian has featured pretty much identical cover stories about the refugee issue.  Yesterday's was entitled Too Poor for a Boat, Family Stuck in Asylum Void , and features the story of Burmese Chin refugee Ngun Tin Tial and her family, stuck in Kuala Lumpur after fleeing persecution in their homeland and living in legal limbo, earning a meagre living in the grey economy.  They would like to come to Australia and have got some way along the application process.  However, the wait is long, and apparently being made longer by the fact that when Australia accepts boat arrivals, these are counted towards our overall refugee and humanitatian quota of