Chasing Asylum: A short history of why it is you need to see this film

Over the past fifteen years I've felt at times furious, hopeful, depressed, exhausted, aghast, shocked, mournful, appalled, sorrowful, despairing - and ashamed- at the depths Australia has sunk to. We alone in the world imprison children for indefinite periods of time. We have the harshest and most inhumane policy towards refugees, even those whose countries we're actively militarily involved in. Our politicians are proud of this. Even when they are refugees at risk of persecution, torture or death, because they, or their family member, translated for the Australian army in Afghanistan. We are *that* country. If you are not ashamed of how we treat refugees then you simply are not paying attention.

Fifteen years takes us back the Tampa and children overboard, the Howard government that wanted us to believe, ludicrously, that refugees somehow loved their children less than Australians did. That they were the sort of people who would hurt their own children, people Australia needed to be 'protected from'. But the people harming children aren't refugees. They're employees and contractors, doing it with the Australian government's blessing and the logic of deterrence.

After that, the shame of ALP bipartisanship, Rudd and Gillard falling over themselves to promise that there would be no hope of a better life for anyone who came by boat. The bodies broken on the rocks of Christmas Island. Instead of seeing that if we'd processed their claims and flown them here safely like we've done in the past,we blamed them for the manner in which they fled persecution. Politicians made sport with their corpses to reinforce that stopping the boats with cruelty, with violence, and with torture was somehow the only ethical choice. We had to stop the boats in the name of compassion, never mind that we were only condemning them to a different death on other shores. Never mind that our message to asylum seekers of the world was being spelt out with the bodies of the ones unfortunate enough to have arrived here to ostensible safety.

Then in more recent years, the deaths of Reza Barati, Hamid Kazai, the Moss report - the children being abused and damaged, the sexual assault of women and children in our care, the UN finding us in breach of an international convention against torture - and Abbott saying we're 'tired' of being 'lectured to'. and the self-immolations Dutton wants to lay at the feet of advocates for asylum seekers. I realised tonight I've been fighting this, one way or another, for more than half my life now.

Fighting for human beings to be treated with dignity and respect. It seems absurd that this could be controversial. We get tiny steps forward towards humanity- we feel something when we see little Aylan, who could be a three year old from anywhere, dead on the shore. We feel something when Germany opens up its arms and shows what compassion and humanity looks like. We promise to take 12,000 Syrian refugees.* ) We surround a hospital to save a child from being sent back into hell. But there are massive retrograde steps, too. Australia deals with revelations about the abuse of children by making it a crime to report the abuse. Fifteen years is a dreadfully long time for something like this to have continued and gotten worse.

I know there are people who are sick of hearing about this. I'd very much love to no longer have anything that needed to be said. We need a solution that is humane, that respects human dignity - respecting the humanity of refugees and asylum seekers, and acknowledging the humanity within Australians. I am tired of having to be ashamed of the human rights abuses my country is perpetrating.

If this was TL;DR, then go and see this film.

If you're sick of hearing about this from me, go and see this film.

If you have ever wanted to know what your tax dollars are funding on Manus and Nauru, go and see this film.

It's not didactic, it's not lecturing, it's not going to do anything more than let you see what is being done in your name. What it does to people, children, families, that are not so very different from your friends, families, colleagues - excepting in what they have already had to survive, and what we are putting them through now.

Go and see this film.
http://www.chasingasylum.com.au/




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* although a better part of a year on, we've actually processed about ten per cent of that cohort- slower even than if they'd come through the normal humanitarian intake, like we're punishing them for making us feel something

Zoe's Law: What Cost Extending Personhood Pre-natally?

A potential victim of crime.

Zoe's Law is a bill currently before the New South Wales Parliament to amend the section of the Crimes Act dealing with grievous bodily harm, adding a specific definition of 'unborn child' (being a foetus of twenty weeks or more gestation, or a mass of at least 400g).

Most troubling for pro-choice advocates, it includes this provision:-

(2) For the purposes of an applicable offence:                                         
(a) an unborn child is taken to be a living person despite any rule of law to      
                          the contrary, and                                                           
(b) grievous bodily harm to an unborn child is taken to include the                
                          destruction of the unborn child. 

(full text)

There are savings provisions to the effect that the section does not apply to medical procedures or acts by consent of the woman concerned. These exist to placate women worried about the erosion of their right to decide to legally terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Why we might be worried by this type of reform? We only have to look to Georgia, USA in 2011 - when a representative tried to pass a bill that put the onus on women who miscarried to prove they weren't guilty of murder. NSW Liberal MP Chris Spence, who introduced the bill, should be able to understand why women's advocacy groups are touchy on this subject. Granting personhood to a foetus is traditionally a legal position that has not boded well for a woman's right to choose to take a pregnancy to full term or not.

Mr. Spence has beseeched anyone with doubts about the intent of Crimes Amendment (Zoe's Law) Bill 2 (2013) to go read the second reading speech. Heavily doubt-laden, I did just that. I learned that the bill is a response to a case where a woman (Brodie) was crossing a road when she was hit by a drug and alcohol affected motorist. She was thirty-two weeks pregnant at the time.  The force of the impact caused extensive injury to her - shattering some of her bones. The previously healthy foetus, which she had named Zoe, was stillborn. The driver responsible was charged, and served jail time for the offence of grievous bodily harm of Brodie. Zoe was listed as an injury to Brodie, not a death in and of herself. The core part of this issue seems to be that the parents felt less vindicated in their grief because their unborn child was not treated as a person for the purposes of the Crimes Act.

Mr. Spence refers to a variety of legal mechanisms which apply only to a foetus lost after 20 weeks. The loss must be recorded with Births, Deaths & Marriages and certificates issued. The baby bonus is available. Maternity/grief leave is available. It seems an arbitrary line. In circumstances where a birth is happily anticipated by a mother, if the pregnancy fails at 19 weeks and two days we don't extend the baby bonus or maternity leave, and this feels arbitrary and wrong.  Does a matter of days or weeks make that much difference between the grief felt over a miscarriage? I suspect not. Drawing the line at 20 weeks for the state to include vengeance into criminal statute is similarly arbitrary and insufficient, if the goal is to give grieving parents satisfaction. It is an area which I think must be deeply personal and deeply subjective, and in such fields the law is an indelicate instrument.