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Issue No. 128 | 15 March 2002 |
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Why I'm Marching
Interview: The Wedge Buster History: Fighting for Peace Unions: Rattling the Gates International: Facing Retribution Technology: How Korean Workers Used The Web Industrial: Working Futures Review: Rumble, Young Man, Rumble Satire: GG Survival Doomed: Fox-Lew In Charge Of Rescue Bid Poetry: PSST
The Soapbox The Locker Room Week in Review
 Carr and the Fire FightersOn InequalityHarmony Day
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Interview The Wedge Buster
************** Do you perceive community attitude to have moved on the asylum seeker issue since the Federal election? I don't think community attitudes have necessarily moved on the question of asylum seekers, but I think that there is a deeper scepticism about whether or not the government has got the solutions. The outcome of the "Children Overboard' affair, where we know that no children were thrown overboard but that the Federal Government threw the truth overboard, means that no longer will the Australian community just accept the Government's word on asylum seeker issues. I think it will treat it's word with scepticism and I think that means that we can have a more open debate on the policies that are best in this area that we could have had beforehand. Given that there is a polarised view within the ALP, do you see your role as forging a compromise or actually coming up with a hard policy one way or the other? I actually don't think that the polarisation in the ALP is any where near as bad as some of the media reporting would have you believe. Unfortunately, media reporting tends to stylise things down to slogans and when we exchange slogans it can appear that differences are actually quite largebiased. But when you actually sit down with people and talk the issues through at a level of detail, you find that people aren't as far apart as the sloganising would lead you to believe. So, for example, I've had party members say to me that they support ending mandatory detention and when I ask them what they actually mean, the first thing that they say is- "oh no, I understand that there would need to be mandatory detention for identity checking and security checking and for health issues and there might be people who are at risk of absconding and they'd still have to be detained...". Once you get down to talking about that level of detail it seems to me that people in the Labor Party aren't as far apart as a first glance would have you believe. If I'm right in that view then I see my role initially as informing people, because this is a complex area and people can really only engage in the debate if they are across the factsstamp; secondly, listening to the views that people form having heard those facts and then, thirdly, putting together a proposal which I believe is good public policy for Australia. We've seen the emergence of Labor For Refugees as a cross factional grouping within the Party, what impact has that had on the debate? I've made contact with a number of the Labor For Refugee groups. Obviously I think they have an impact on the debate in the sense that they have established information networks on asylum seeker and refugee questions and I think that's healthy. The more informed people are the better the debate will be. But it's my intention to run an open Party debate where people have the opportunity to come to forums or to make submissions whether they are within Labor For Refugees or outside it.outsiders. The Independent Education Union last week released a report on the whole asylum seeker policy issue, one of their recommendations was to change the language of mandatory detention to something like "compulsory processing" to get the punitive nature out of the language. Do you find that sort of suggesting compelling? I'd have to say I don't find that sort of suggestion compelling. I don't think we need to have a collateral debate about language here. Labor introduced a mandatory detention regime and both Simon Crean and I have said that mandatory detention will continue to be part of Labor's policy in relation to asylum seekers. The interesting question, and the question we need to work through is what form does that detention take? For example, even today under the Howard Government there are 25 women and children in an alternative detention trial where they get to live in ordinary style homes that were formerly used by Defence Force people. Now if you asked Minister Ruddock today are those people still in detention, he would say "Yes they are", but obviously the circumstances in which they live are very different from being behind razor wire in a highly secured compound. So I think the debate we need to have is, bearing in mind that there will continue to be a role for mandatory detention, is about what form detention could take. And I'm interested in hearing what people think of the alternate detention that is currently in trial and what they think of proposals like supervised hostels. All of those thoughts onof alternate forms of detention models I'm interested in feedback on. Have you formed a position on the ongoing justification for temporary protection visas? No, when you look at our policy development framework, the one that the Federal Labor Party Caucus adopted on the 11th February, temporary protection visas is one of the issues on the list and it is an issue about which we would need to form a policy view. However, I have indicated that I believe that the issues we need to expedite out of what are a wide range of issues, are to do with processing and mandatory detention. So we will be looking at those issues first. In terms of why we selected those issues, I think the greatest degree of community and Party concern at the moment is around the mandatory detention question and you can't really look at that without working your way through processing issues. Obviously if we could fundamentally expedite processing then a number of concerns about mandatory detention might fall away as people wouldn't be detained for anywhere near the length of period that people are being detained now. So we need to look at those two questions together and I think we need to look at those two questions as quickly as possible and then we will come back and look at the other policy questions of which obviously the circumstances of temporary protection visa holders is one. Another issue that has been raised within the Union movement is the employment practices at ACM. Do you think that if we do have detention facilities they should be run by private operators? No. Simon Crean has already made a number of policy announcements in the area of asylum seekers. He has made five separate announcements to date, the first of which was that Labor does not believe that children should be in detention, which he made on Australia Day. Then, out of our Caucus meeting on the 11th February, we made fivefour other new announcements. The first of which is that we support the recommendation of the Independent Detention Advisory Group that Womerah should be "moth balled". The second is that we believe that the Australian Protective Service should be put back in control of the detention centres, that is detention centres should be managed within the Public Sector, not by private contractors. The third is that we say there should be a liftinglisting of the shroud of secrecy around detention centres and that subject to an agreed protocol there should be media access to them. Obviously an agreed protocol would be needed; as asylum seekersthey obviously have a right to say that they don't want to be the subject of media attention or identified in media reports. So there are some issues that need to be worked through, but subject to an appropriate protocol we think there should be media access to detention centres. Fourthly, we've called on the Federal Government to extend the Repatriation Package for persons returning to Afghanistan. Not only to those people who are currently in detention but also to the 1400 who are on temporary protection visas. Fifthly, as recently as this week we called on the Federal Government to enter into a proper time limited safe haven arrangement for asylum seekers from Afghanistan, similar to the arrangement Australia entered into for Kosovars. So there's a suitefleet of policies out there already and clearly one of those policies is that we think that the Public Sector should run detention centres. There's a perception that existing refugees have problems with asylum seekers because of the difficulties they have in getting their own families out to Australia under the current policies with the shift in immigration from Family Reunion to the Skilled Migration Program. Is that mix something you're looking at on a broader scale? Absolutely. When Simon Crean structured my Portfolio he deliberately structured it as Population and Immigration and we did that because we think that the broad debate that the Australian community needs to have is around population policy. What do we want this country to look like in 50 or 100 years time? What's our vision for Australia? Obviously the view you take about population numbers and population disbursal is key to that vision. On current trends, we are going to end up as both an ageing society and a declining society in a limited number of sprawling cities. If people aren't comfortable with that vision of Australia in the future, we need to come up with a population policy that supports a different vision. So, we are saying let's start with the really big picture, having worked our way through the really big picture, then of course let's look at the role that immigration plays in that big picture. I think that is one way in which we can rebuild some community consensus around immigration matters because we've seen that consensus lost over the last few years. And in the course of looking at immigration in that context, we would be working our way through what our skills migration stream looked like, what our family reunion stream looked like and all of the associated issues. Obviously the refugee program then falls in as a subset of the immigration program. One of the difficulties about the way Australia is been having the current debate around refugee and asylum seeker questions is that we've started there rather than at the bigger picture and worked our way backwards so that people could understand refugee and asylum seeker policy in it's proper context. And I think the loss of context for that policy has been part of the problem in terms of the loss of community support. So will you be looking to come up with a headline population target for the future? Yes. As Simon Crean indicated at the speech he gave at the Population Summit which was recently hosted by the Victorian Government, that Labor will have a population policy for the next election, including a population target and a plan for disbursal of population. So no-one in the Labor side is talking simplistically about just increasing immigration numbers and allowing there to be more stress and strain on areas like the Sydney Basin. We need a rational population policy that looks both at numbers and at disbursal across the Australian continent. Just to be clear about the way in which these debates are going to be advanced, obviously the population policy debate is the big picture debate. I would have preferred that we had that debate first, then dealt with the immigration issues and then dealt with the refugee and asylum seeker questions in their proper context. Clearly the community concern and Party concern around refugee and asylum seeker issues means that we do need to expedite looking at that and we will in the first instance be looking at processing and detention issues, then over the longer term we will be developing the population and broad immigration policy. And as a Party that championed the White Australia Policy up until the 60's is ethnic mix going to be something you're prepared to tackle as well? Labor supports and, in my view will always support, there being a non-discriminatory immigration policy. Finally, the Palm Sunday March that's being held in a number of cities on March 24, do those sort of community events have any bearing on the policy debates are taking place? All expressions of community opinion inform the debate in the sense that we need to know as decision makers what the community thinks. I think we need to be pretty clear that community opinion is very divided on refugee and asylum seeker questions. There is obviously an activist section of the community that believes that Labor needs to move to a more compassionate position on asylum seeker issues. There are also wide sections of the community that would not have that view. What Labor is saying is that we think that we can come up with policies that are both tough on boarder border protection and more compassionate to asylum seekers and that's what we're going to be working on. I'm interested in expressions of community opinion being a MP who spends a fair bit of time meeting my own constituents. I think I know their views pretty clearly and they probably wouldn't be the same views of the persons who are going to go on the Palm Sunday rally. But you know, that equally is a legitimate expression of community views.
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