Asylum Seeking

There's been no blog entry for a while. And as always so much has gone on in this our great world. Polish Presidents have fallen to the ground from the sky, a white supremacist has been murdered in South, video from an Apache helicopter leaked. Thai's fighting for a new government. The great movement of life. Six billion stories, ever unfolding.

As I walked to University today, I saw two Sri Lankan flags flying outside the rowing sheds near the University campus. I still do not know why they were, but have come up with three possibilities of why they might have been.

1) Local Sri Lankans had had a party on the river and either forgotten to take them down or had left them up as a symbol of pride.

2) They hung as a celebration/protest/reminder of the elections that had just taken place in Sri Lanka.

3) That they were a protest against the recent decision by the Australian Government to not process Sri Lankan (and Afghani) asylum seeker claims during the next six months.

I am inclined to hypothesize that it was number three and this is what I am going to roll with. Asylum seekers seem to be a divisive issue, both here in Australia and around the world. The outsider. The person searching for a better life. It is an issue that governments tread very carefully around, especially during election periods. They appeal to our humanity and can be quickly condemned, and the complexity of the issue cannot be overstated but Kevin Rudd's government has also been deceptive on the issue, much like the Howard government before.

To state the reason that a suspension in the processing of asylum claims is due to the increasing safety of civilians in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka is simply not true, a distortion of the truth for political purposes. It is about the fact that more than ever people from these countries are trying to make Australia home and that the Australian government is finding it hard what to do about the issue. If this is the case then they should say so, there is no point in lying that the security situation in Afghanistan is getting better when Barack Obama last year pledged an extra 30,000 troops to go fight there.

What a world we live in. Filled with affluence and poverty. A globalised world of haves and have nots. Dreams and nightmares. People living the good life and others trying to find it. The smugglers in the middle. Have you looked at a map and seen how much closer Christmas Island is to Indonesia than Australia?

There is no argument that Australia cannot take all the worlds refugees, or that Australia has not been benevolent to some, or that I myself am a beneficiary of the Australian Immigration system, but what does seem to be evident is that we forget when talking about Asylum seekers we are talking about families, brothers and sisters mothers and fathers who have come from scarred countries in search of something better. Only to be locked up.

We forget that there are humans behind the headlines, behind the fear and scare mongering. In the Saturday Age you could see the faces of the dreaded asylum seekers. An Afghani family, that had just arrived on Christmas island three children, one girl with just the slightest hint of beauty, excitement life in her eyes, only to go into detention a bus ride away.