Over-fishing is a massive environmental and economic challenge. Fortunately, there are new solutions being trialled – including in a tuna hotspot in the Pacific.
Richard Marles said that whistleblower protection laws still apply when it comes to the Border Force Act.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Despite doctors voicing fears they could be jailed for disclosing abuse of refugees, Richard Marles says whistleblower protection laws would still apply in relation to the Border Force Act. Is he right?
An historian reading the government White Paper on developing northern Australia will realise we’re actually heading all the way back to the 1890s.
andrew matthews/Flickr
The federal government’s recent White Paper on developing northern Australia has disturbing echoes of the 1890s, a time when unbridled capitalism and indentured labour developed the North.
Transfield Services Chief Executive Operations Kate Munnings during the Senate inquiry into recent allegations relating to conditions and circumstances at the regional processing centre in Nauru.
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Australian taxpayers are providing Transfield Services with $1.2 billion over 20 months to operate the detention facility on Nauru.
Monitoring fishing vessels could be a growth industry in the tiny Pacific island nations that govern the world’s largest tuna fishery.
AAP Image/Xavier La Canna
A tiny handful of Pacific island nations control more than 50% of the world’s tuna fishery, and their efforts to monitor international fishing vessels are set to become a major source of jobs.
Nauru’s culture of hospitality once applied to all, including the asylum seekers who arrived in 2001 to a dance of welcome, a tradition depicted on this stamp. Refugee resettlement has changed all that.
Refugees settled on Nauru woke on Monday to find an ominous letter, signed “Youth of Republic of Nauru”, had been delivered overnight. Copies had been left at shops, homes, workplaces employing refugees…
Nauru is anything but a tropical paradise for the resettled refugees who were originally flown in as asylum seekers.
EPA/Rod Henshaw
As the government secretly flew 157 asylum seekers seized at sea to Nauru overnight on Friday, 50 men recognised as refugees and given “temporary protection” to settle on Nauru have issued a statement…
Whichever way you add up the sums, Australians pay far too high a price for the government’s refugee policy.
AAP/DIAC
At a cost of A$826.1 million in the 2014-15 federal budget, the processing and detention of around 2500 asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island is a scandalous waste of taxpayers’ money. The government’s…
Protesters in Brisbane at a rally against the Australian government’s asylum seekers policy on April 12, 2014.
AAP/Andrew Stevenson
A report on the refugee detention centre in Nauru by five independent clinical experts posted online by The Guardian on Friday paints a bleak picture of life on the island, particularly for children. But…
Nauru is too small to be able to cope with a significant number of resettled asylum seekers – hence the mooted proposals to resettle genuine refugees in Cambodia.
AAP/Department of Immigration
In recent weeks, Abbott government ministers have been spruiking a plan for Cambodia to resettle some or all asylum seekers on Nauru who are found to be genuine refugees. While the Australian and Cambodian…
Australia has a duty to ensure asylum seekers who are facing trial after being sent to Nauru are not denied their rights to proper legal process.
AAP
Australia should respond to the extraordinary actions of the government of Nauru in deporting and terminating the employment of its only magistrate, Peter Law, and denying its Chief Justice, Geoffrey Eames…
Both major political parties are so intent on ‘stopping the boats’ that they have lost sight of their obligations to protect people.
ROSSBACH/KREPP/AAP IMAGE
Like many other Australians, I am alarmed by the hardening policy positions on asylum seekers of both major political parties. And today, the Royal Australian College of Physicians (RACP), of which I am…
Cameras were secretly taken in to detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru by the ABC to film the living conditions there.
ABCTV
The federal government does not say how it chooses those it sends for offshore processing. It does not explain how it chooses children to go to Manus Island. Australian doctors have told the Department…
Tent accommodation at Australia’s detention centre in Nauru.
AAP/Department of Immigration
Not many people get to see what goes on behind the barbed wired fences of immigration detention centres. Marianne Evers was one of the few who decided to speak out about her work in Nauru. Unsurprisingly…
Governments should be careful to protect human rights when contracting with businesses, such as health services in immigration detention.
Department of Immigration & Citizenship
Last week, the UN held its first-ever business and human rights forum in Geneva. It’s part of a growing awareness that multinationals have a big impact on human rights. Opening the forum, the UN’s human…
Current immigration policies promote uncertainty, fear and disempowerment, which contribute to mental illness.
AAP
The recent overhaul of Australia’s immigration policies aims to protect the lives of asylum seekers by removing any advantage of arriving by boat. Whether this goal will be achieved remains unclear. But…
Sri Lankan asylum seekers arrive in West Sumatra, Indonesia. Many will attempt the onward journey to Australia.
EPA/Stringer
Until recently most “boat people” seeking asylum in Australia have come from wartime situations or from dictatorships. But this is not the case for the increasing numbers coming from Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka…
With immigration detention recommencing in Nauru, we must monitor the welfare of asylum seekers.
AAP image/Department of Immigration and Citizenship
The Houston Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers was set the task of reducing deaths of asylum seekers following the mounting loss of life on the seas between Indonesia and Australia. But it remained blind to…
The stories of real people are often missing from media reports on asylum seeker detention centres.
AAP
Greater transparency and improved access for the media to interview asylum seekers in detention is required say human rights lawyers, after three separate incidents of self-harm at the Nauru processing…