Search

Aim: The aims of this paper are to quantify the impact of parental education on the five-year incidence of mental health conditions (MHC) in Pacific young people and to investigate the influence of other factors. Method: The analyses in this paper used data extracted from Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). Data relating to 383,595 young people (48,768 Pacific), identified in the 2013 Census, aged 12-24 years, and their parents’ were used. Logistic regression models were used to investigate the incidence of children with MHC from 2013-2018. Results: Mental health conditions were identified in one of five Pacific young people. Irrespective of ethincity, increased parental education was associated with decreased MHC. However, the association was only significant for those in specialist mental health care (OR=0. 897, 95%CI:0.881-0.913) but not for those seen in other health settings (OR=0. 989, 95%CI:0.974-1.004). The association, for specialist settings, was not mediated by the contribution of other factors (OR=0.941, 95%CI:0.926-0.958). However, increased parents education with the addition of social, cultural and economic advantages the number of Pacific children seen in the specialist mental health setting could be nearly halved. Conclusion: The findings show that a parental educational advantage exists for children who access specialist mental health care. However, there are more complex but far greater opportunities for the health of Pacific families if a coordinated education, housing, employment and health solution were possible. The gains from a multi-disciplinary Pacific solution exist in terms of reduced severity for and level of care to Pacific children with MHC.

As one of the countries which is ratifying the 1951 Refugeee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, Australia has an obligation to protect refugees and guarantee their rights as stated in the provisions. With the issuance of the Pacific Solution Policy by the Australian Government to restrict refugees who come to Australia, Australia has reneged on international treaties on the protection of refugees that have been ratified. Based on the results of normative juridical research which is used in this paper, it can be seen that the state sovereignty principle which is used as the legal basis for implementing the policy cannot necessarily erase the obligations that have been imposed on it, especially with the development of the current understanding of the state sovereignty principle that links human rights protection. In addition, the attachment to international agreements that have been agreed based on the principle of Pacta Sunt Servanda becomes the basis for strengthening legitimacy that the Australian Government can be held responsibility in connection with the implementation of the Pacific Solution Policy in the handling of refugees in Australia.

Gail Jones’s fiction has received major critical attention due to its engagement with trauma, memory, modernity, the visual arts, and the Australian process of Reconciliation. This article seeks to...

This article analyses Australian audiovisual treatments of contemporary refugee experiences of the Australian government’s “Pacific Solution”, which was introduced after the Tampa affair in 2001. I call into question the conventional premise of much documentary filmmaking, that the moving photographic image can reveal the reality of that experience (indexicality). That approach is exemplified, I argue, by Eva Orner’s award-winning film, Chasing Asylum (2014), which aspired to reveal the truth about conditions in the Regional Processing Centre on Nauru and thereby to shock Australian audiences into demanding a change in government policy. The problem with the film is that its reliance on the norms of documentary has the unintended consequence of silencing the detainees and reducing them to the status of vulnerable and victimised objects. The article concludes by comparing Chasing Asylum with an installation by Dennis Del Favero, Tampa 2001 (2015), which exemplifies a nonrepresentational, affect-based aesthetic that says less in order to achieve more in evoking complex refugee stories of dispossession or disappearance.

Australian Governments’ Stance on Illegal Immigration in 1996–2018 Australia is well known for its strict immigration policy. It results from the country’s constant struggle with the flow of illegal migrants, brought to Australian shores through human smuggling. The author analyses immigration policies of five Prime Ministers representing two major Australian parties: the Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Labor Party. Starting with the premiership of John Howard (1996–2007), and ending with Malcolm Turnbull’s era (2015– –2018), the author examines the situation of illegal immigrants in Australia and changes in immigration and asylum policies.

The Australian Government has issued various policies to deal with refugees. One of the policies is the Pacific Solution and it is considered as a manifestation of national security principles. On one hand, the policy against the non-refoulement principle, which is the central principle of the refugee convention and Australia is one of the states that ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. Obviously, Australia should not violate the non-refoulement principle. On the other hand, Australia has experienced a dilemma between prioritizing its interests and fulfilling international obligation to protect refugees who entering its territory. This article discusses whether the national security principle is contrary to the non-refoulement principle; and how Australia can accommodate both principles without neglecting the rights of refugees and still be able to maintain their interests. This article also reviews how Australia can implement policies based on national security principle when it has to face international obligations–in this case, the non-refoulement principle. This research concludes that the national security and the non-refoulement principle are basically contradictory. However, Australia can accommodate these two principles by counterbalancing actions, such as the establishment of national laws that still highly consider humanitarian standards contained in the non-refoulement principle. Australia has the right to implement number of policies based on its national law, while that the same time Australia cannot ignore their international obligation to protect refugees in accordance with the 1951 Refugee Convention that they have ratified. Reflecting on some previous policies, this study concludes that Australia has not been able to accommodate both principles.

This article examines offshore processing arrangements of four different time-periods and geo-political regions&mdash, the Safe Havens of the United States with Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos Islands, the 2001 and 2012 Pacific Solutions of Australia with Nauru and Papua New Guinea, and the EU&ndash, Turkey deal. In examining these arrangements, the article attempts to ascertain whether each of these arrangements had an impact on the ratification of refugee and human rights-related treaties by the states receiving the asylum seekers and refugees for processing and/or settlement. It does so by first assessing the contents of the offshore processing agreements for refugee and human rights clauses and obligations. The article then looks at the general patterns of treaty ratification of each receiving state, prior to its entering into offshore processing arrangements. After the general patterns of treaty ratifications of each state are established, the article goes on to investigate whether offshore processing arrangements had any effect on these patterns. This is based on the analysis of the contents of the agreements, together with an examination of the timing of the refugee and the human rights treaty ratifications of the receiving state, at the time of the arrangements. The article finds that the effect, although minimal, is quite nuanced.

Ben Eltham’s The Pacific Solution (2013) deals with several issues such as nationalism, political intimidation, racism and stereotyping of Muslims. It critiques the Howard government’s hard-line policy with Asylum seekers and its amendment of the migration act, known as the ‘Pacific Solution’, which excludes offshore islands from Australia’s migration zone and undermines thereby refugees’ attempts to seek better chances of life. This is portrayed on stage through the reaction of three white Australian housemates to the arrival at their front door of an Iraqi refugee to apply for asylum. In this paper, I investigate the representation of cultural diversity in the play and argue that it is a critique of dysfunctional models of inclusion where persons from minor cultures are marginalised in the Australian national and social spaces. In so doing, I consider some of the concepts discussed in Ghassan Hage’s White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (2000), namely those of managerial capacity, tolerance, and the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. In addition to critiquing the dysfunctional models of including Muslim refugees, the play examines their representation in the mainstream media and their treatment by the legal process in Australia. To explore the impact of this on Muslim refugees’ alienation and marginalisation, I investigate studies of the representation of Muslims in the Australian mass media and their relevance to the stereotyping of Muslims as terrorists in the play. Drawing on the above, I argue that, through this play, Eltham criticised the Howard government’s inhumane treatment of Asylum seekers and its dissemination of Australian norms as aligning with its premises.

Prime Minister John Howard’s behaviour often considered conservative and “Anti- Asian”, no exception to Indonesia. John Howard viewed Indonesia did not have a strategic position for Australia’s national interests. This study answered the question on “how did the dynamic of Australia-Indonesia bilateral relations at Prime Minister John Howard’s era in 1996-2007?”. At his administration, John Howard issued numbers of policy towards Indonesia, which are the policy related to East Timor issue, counterterrorism cooperation, the policy of Pacific Solution, assistance for tsunami disaster in Aceh that happened in 2004. These policies apparently made impacts to Australia- Indonesia bilateral relations. During eleven years administration of Prime Minister John Howard, the bilateral relations between Australia-Indonesia has experienced its dynamics of ebb and flow. These dynamics primarily caused by policies that Prime Minister John Howard issued, which gave more benefit to the Australian Government and created imbalance relations between two countries. Therefore, it became more interesting to be discussed for further study regarding which policies that gave more benefit for the Australian Government and in a contrary gave less benefit to Indonesian Government, thus the position of two countries became an imbalance in bilateral relations context. This research is expected to be a reference for other researchers who will examine the bilateral relations between Australia-Indonesia in John Howard’s era because there are still many aspects between the two countries relations that have not been elaborated by the researcher, namely economic, education and socio-cultural.

This thesis examines the important role that humanitarian arguments played in influencing the trajectory of Australia’s asylum seeker policy during the Prime Ministerships of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard (2007 – 2013). In the leadup to the 2007 Federal Election, Rudd declared that Australia had a moral obligation to treat asylum seekers with compassion because the ‘biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear.’ During his first year in office, Rudd largely fulfilled his promise to comply with the ‘letter and the spirit’ of the Refugee Convention by ending offshore detention on Nauru and Manus Island, abolishing Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs), and declaring that mandatory detention would only be used as a ‘last resort.’ However, by 2013, Labor’s humanitarian platform on Irregular Maritime Arrivals (IMAs) had been largely abandoned. Faced with a significant increase in boat arrivals, an overburdened immigration detention system and an increasingly hostile public, both Rudd and his successor Gillard responded by gradually reintroducing the punitive measures that had comprised the Howard Government’s Pacific Solution. In order to ascertain why Rudd’s attempt to take Australia’s asylum seeker policy in a more humanitarian direction was unable to be sustained, I will undertake a normative analysis of the language that both Labor and the Coalition used in order to legitimate their respective asylum seeker policies during the Rudd/Gillard era. I argue that while the abovementioned factors did play a crucial part in prompting Labor to repudiate its humanitarian stance on IMAs, it was the Coalition’s strategic use of compassion rhetoric that enabled Opposition leader Tony Abbott to de-legitimise both pillars of Rudd’s ‘hardline and humane’ policy. In particular, the so-called ‘drownings argument,’ which drew direct parallels between rising numbers of IMA deaths at sea and the Rudd government’s policy changes, fortified the Coalition’s argument that stronger border protection measures were necessary in order to ‘save lives’ by preventing IMAs from undertaking the perilous sea voyage to Australia. In order to provide a comprehensive response to the research question, I developed a discourseanalytical conceptual framework that incorporates insights from the constructivist literature on Critical Norm Research (CNR). One of the key findings is that the domestic ‘meaning-in-use’ of international asylum seeker norms has not remained constant, but has rather evolved in response to agent-driven, structural and context-specific changes in Australia’s socio-political environment. By demonstrating that Labor’s humanitarian platform on IMAs significantly altered the discursive parameters of the asylum seeker debate during this period, this thesis therefore aims to make an original contribution to both the empirical literature on Australia’s political response to boat arrivals and the theoretical literature on norm contestation.

Climate change and related sea-level rise has caused fears that many people in the Pacific Islands might become homeless. However it is difficult to say who is more afraid: politicians of countries that are potential destinations of environmental refugees or affected people, who realize that it is not at all a pleasure to lose the home, and that it might be even a bigger nightmare to become a refugee. While in low-lying Pacific Island countries (PICs) debates and discourses about people's future flare up the fear of becoming homeless and refugees is worrying many. It seems that governments whose countries could become preferred destinations of climate change refugees are concerned how to keep them away from reaching safe harbors. In 2001 the Australian Government started its Pacific Solution, a policy that should prevent aliens arriving by boat in Australia to seek the status of refugees. The Australian Government has established detention centers on the Pacific Islands of Manus (PNG) and Nauru to process asylum seekers outside Australian territory. In 2013 a new element was added to the Pacific Solution: refugees arriving on boats will be processed and settled in PNG or Nauru (or countries other than Australia), if found to be genuine refugees. Others can be detained for unspecified time. Migrants' well-being is not only based on material conditions, but also reflects on emotional ones. The inhumane treatment of refugees increases angst amongst those who are threatened to lose their homes as a result of climate change and depend on support from other countries.

From Mexico to the Bahamas, Mauritania to Lebanon, Turkey to Saudi Arabia, South Africa to Indonesia, Malaysia to Thailand, immigration-related detention has become an established policy apparatus that counts on dedicated facilities and burgeoning institutional bureaucracies. Until relatively recently, however, detention appears to have been largely an ad hoc tool, employed mainly by wealthy states in exigent circumstances. This paper uses concepts from diffusion theory to detail the history of key policy events in several important immigration destination countries that led to the spreading of detention practices during the last 30 years and assesses some of the motives that appear to have encouraged this phenomenon. The paper also endeavors to place the United States at the center of this story because its policy decisions appear to have played an important role in encouraging the process of policy innovation, imitation, and imposition that has helped give rise to today's global immigration detention phenomenon. Nevertheless, many US offshore practices have not received nearly the same attention as those of other important destination countries. More broadly, in telling this story, this paper seeks to flesh out some of the larger policy implications of the externalization of immigration control regimes. Just as offshore interdiction and detention schemes raise important questions about custody, accountability, and sovereignty, they should also spur questions over where responsibility for the wellbeing of migrants begins and ends.

In 2013, the Rudd Labor Government introduced a new version of the ‘Pacific Solution’ to Australia's ‘problem’ with increasing numbers of asylum‐seekers arriving by boat. The new version not only included the transfer of asylum‐seekers to Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, it crucially involved the resettlement in these Pacific Island countries of those found to be refugees and introduces long‐term detention for those who are not successful and who do not decide to return to their original countries. Following the 2013 election, the Abbott Coalition Government fully embraced the new ‘Pacific Solution’. This deeper level of incorporation of Papua New Guinea and Nauru in Australia's asylum‐seeker policy raises a range of issues not only for these two Pacific Island countries but also for the broader Pacific islands region whose name is invoked in the ‘Pacific Solution’.

As part of its efforts to deter the arrival of asylum-seekers by boat to Australia in 2001, Prime Minister John Howard’s Coalition Government established the offshore processing of refugee claims. Known as the Pacific Solution, this policy included an agreement with Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for asylum-seekers arriving to Australia by boat to be transported to either of these islands where they would wait in camps while their refugee claims were processed. The majority of the asylum-seekers subjected to offshore processing at this time were held on Nauru, and most had fled Afghanistan. Governmentality, as introduced by Michel Foucault and developed by later scholars, provides insight into the institutions, methods, techniques, strategies, and tactics used by governments to achieve its ends. This article explores Australian Government policy and the experience of Afghan asylum-seekers held on Nauru from 2001 using a governmentality approach. Given that people seeking asylum in Australia are once again being transported to Nauru and Papua New Guinea, this time initiated by a Labor Government and continued by the current Coalition Government, this article’s findings are pertinent for insight into under- standing current Australian policy.

The Australian government policy of mandatory immigration detention has been the subject of critique by human rights bodies and civil society. With many immigration detention facilities being located in remote sites, distance and expense means that few people get to observe detention practices in Australia directly. Through direct observations and through the voices of three men detained in the Curtin Immigration Detention Centre outside of the remote Western Australian town of Derby, the human costs of mandatory detention are presented and discussed. This is done through positioning this discussion as part of the process of bearing witness to mandatory detention in Australia.