Asylum seekers: an update

  The issue of asylum seekers has proven a fraught policy area for successive governments in Australia. While asylum seeker policy falls under the jurisdiction of the Commonwealth, recent changes to Federal policy in relation to asylum seekers who arrive by boat could potentially have implications for NSW, with increasing numbers of asylum seekers being accommodated in the community, rather than in secure immigration detention centres. The NSW Government has responded with concern about the implications of recent policy changes for State infrastructure and resources. This paper outlines developments in national policies relating to asylum seekers between 2008 and 2011, thereby updating a paper published by the NSW Parliamentary Library Research Service in 2008

Medical cannabis - June 2014

Overview: The first half of this Issues Backgrounder considers the key legal issues that arise in relation to medical cannabis, in particular the relationship between Commonwealth and State laws. The second half sets out some of the key background parliamentary, scientific and legal sources

Haunted borders: Temporary migration and the recalibration of racialised belonging in Australia

The shift away from a focus on permanent settlement and towards a temporary migration paradigm is remaking Australia’s borders in the twenty-first century. Through an empirical case study of Indian migrants in Australia this thesis examines the implications of the shift to temporary migration for the racial belonging of migrants in Australia. Adopting an intergenerational approach it examines data from interviews conducted in Sydney with Indian migrants who are long-term settlers in Australia, as well as those who migrated from India from the year 2000 on temporary visas. Interviews with key informants, government officials, and local service providers are also analysed to provide insights into the governmentality of temporary migration. The relative paucity of theorising on race in studies of contemporary migration gives race a spectral quality that is ever-present but barely articulated. This thesis seeks to render speakable the ghost of race in migration. Firstly, I analyse the nation’s border as a space haunted by the ghost of race. I argue that historicising the use of temporary migration in transnational settler colonial contexts, including through a comparative study of temporary migration in Canada, is crucial to illuminating the contemporary function of temporary migration as a racial biopolitical technology of the border. Secondly, I analyse three key ways in which temporary migration functions as a racial biopolitical technology. The biopolitical modality of chronopolitics produces temporary migrants as precarious subjects by conditioning their relation to the present and future. The system of governmentality through which temporary migration is administered further conditions the precarity of temporary migrants, while ensuring their externalisation from national social policy frameworks for migrant integration. The Australian state then regulates the link between temporary and permanent migration using the body of the temporary migrant to draw the racial fault line between the ‘desirable’ settler subject and ‘undesirable’ disposable migrant subject. Finally, I examine how Indian migrants negotiate haunted borderscapes to make their own futures through temporalities of hope that exceed nationalist constructs of belonging

Overseas students: immigration policy changes 1997–May 2010

This paper provides a chronology that draws on ministerial press statements to trace changes in Australia’s immigration policy in relation to overseas students between 1997 and May 2010. Immigration policies introduced under the Howard Coalition Government and the Rudd Labor Government in this 12 to 13 year period have fundamentally changed the nature of migration to Australia. Policy changes in this period were pivotal in facilitating the rapid growth of overseas student education in Australia by forging links between the overseas student program and permanent skilled migration. The paper begins its analysis in 1997 as this appears to be the point at which the Howard Government commenced making announcements about overseas students as an immigration issue

Multiculturalism: a review of Australian policy statements and recent debates in Australia and overseas

Multiculturalism has been a contested policy and concept since its introduction in Australia in the 1970s. While maintaining some core principles, in the three decades since its introduction, federal multicultural policy statements have evolved in response to changing government priorities and responses to the challenges facing Australian society. While Australian multicultural policy has its roots in government responses to the post-settlement issues facing migrants, through the 1980s and 1990s policy was articulated more broadly as an element of Australia\u27s nation building narratives. Today all Australian States and Territories have active policies and programs dealing with multiculturalism. Australia\u27s last federal multicultural policy statement was issued in 2003 and intended to apply until 2006, with no new federal multicultural policy statements being issued since. In the past ten years, at the national level multiculturalism has been subjected to criticism in public and political debate, with some expressions of support for earlier policies of assimilation and integration. Australian public and political debate about multiculturalism in the last decade has been significantly impacted upon by issues that have had international resonance. Chief among these has been concern about the global threat of terrorism and the challenges of ensuring social cohesion in societies characterised by ethno-cultural diversity. While these issues have manifested in different ways in immigrant-receiving countries in Europe, North America and in the United Kingdom in many cases public debates have questioned the limits of multiculturalism and governments have heightened their regulation of integration, citizenship and immigration. As global migration increases in scale and complexity Australia, like many countries in the world, will continue to be faced with the challenges of constructively engaging the policy frameworks it has established in building a multicultural society, while finding innovative approaches to deal with the increasingly complex nature of contemporary diversity

“Let them sing!” The paradoxes of gender mainstreaming in urban policy and urban scholarship

The early twenty first century has been a defining period for urbanization at a global scale. There is an urgent imperative to bring a gender analysis into debates on urbanization in this period of rapid urban growth and change. This article examines the potential of intergovernmental and scholarly spaces for gendering approaches to urbanization. We do so by reflecting on our experience of attending the 9th World Urban Forum (WUF 9), held in Kuala Lumpur in February 2018, as well as a series of academic conference sessions held in Toronto, New Orleans, and Montreal in 2018 on the theme of social reproduction and the development of a feminist urban theory for our time. We ask, to what extent do the discursive and performative strategies used in these different institutional settings serve to substantively center gender in transformative visions of the urban

Seeking asylum: Australia's humanitarian response to a global challenge

  Since 1945 Australia has resettled over 700 000 refugees and displaced persons, including thousands during and immediately after World War II. Today, as part of its planned Humanitarian Program, the government allocates places each year to refugees and others with humanitarian needs. There were 13 750 places allocated under Australia’s Humanitarian Program for 2009–10 (an increase of 250 places on 2008–09 planning levels). This comprised 6000 planned places for the resettlement of refugees under the Refugee category mostly referred to Australia by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and 7750 planned places under the Special Humanitarian Program (SHP). Australia’s focus for the resettlement of refugees in 2009–10 continued to be on those from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While many are aware that Australia accepts a certain number of refugees and other humanitarian entrants each year, there is a great deal of misunderstanding on the details of Australia’s humanitarian responses and the complex visa arrangements for refugees and humanitarian entrants. Often the critical distinction between the places allocated for ‘refugees’ (people subject to persecution) and those allocated for humanitarian entrants (people subject to substantial discrimination) is blurred. This is compounded by the fact that the Humanitarian Program numbers are comprised of both onshore and offshore applicants. This means the 7750 places currently allocated under the SHP are shared between offshore humanitarian applicants and refugees granted onshore Protection visas (including those processed on Christmas Island) and immediate family members of Humanitarian and Protection visa holders already in Australia. Image: Rusty Stewart / flick

Everyday Urbanisms in the Pandemic City: A Feminist Comparative Study of the Gendered Experiences of Covid-19 in Southern Cities

Drawing on GenUrb’s comparative research undertaken in mid-2020 with communities in five cities—Cochabamba, Bolivia, Delhi, India, Georgetown, Guyana, Ibadan, Nigeria, and Shanghai, China—we engage in an intersectional analysis of the gendered impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in women’s everyday lives. Our research employs a variety of context-specific methods, including virtual methods, phone interviews, and socially-distanced interviews to engage women living in neighbourhoods characterized by underdevelopment and economic insecurity. While existing conditions of precarity trouble the before-and-after terminology of Covid-19, across the five cities the narratives of women’s everyday lives reveal shifts in spatial-temporal orders that have deepened gendered and racial exclusions. We find that limited mobilities and the different and changing dimensions of production and social reproduction have led to increased care work, violence, and strained mental health. Finally, we also find that social reproduction solidarities, constituting old and new circuits of care, have been reinforced during the pandemic.Funding This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [895-2017-1011; 1008-2020-0198]. The Delhi study was also supported by the University of Delhi, Faculty Research Programme Grants -IoE 2020