Australia’s offshore processing of asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG: a quick guide to the statistics

This guide contains statistics on the number of asylum seekers at Offshore Processing Centres, the number who are children, the number who are found to refugees, and more. Introduction On 8 February 2008, some seven months after Kevin Rudd was sworn in as Prime Minister, the former Labor Government announced that the last remaining asylum seekers on Nauru had been transferred to Australia ending the Howard Government’s controversial so-called ‘Pacific Solution’, which had begun in 2001 in response to rising numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat. However, by July 2010, then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard announced in her first major policy speech that the Government had begun having discussions with regional neighbours about the possibility of establishing a regional processing centre for the purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the region. Whilst only 25 asylum seekers had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum in the 2007–08 financial year by the time Gillard made her announcement in July 2010, more than 5,000 people had travelled by boat to Australia to seek asylum. Whilst Gillard acknowledged that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia was ‘very, very minor’ and that at the current rate of arrival it would take about 20 years to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) with asylum seekers, she identified a number of reasons why the processing of asylum seekers in other countries was again considered necessary: to ensure that people smugglers have no product to sell to remove the financial incentive for the people smugglers to send boats to Australia to ensure that those arriving by boat do not get an unfair advantage over others to secure Australia’s borders and create a fair and orderly migration to prevent people embarking on a voyage across dangerous seas with the ever present risk of death to ensure that everyone is subject to a consistent, fair assessment process to improve the protection outcomes for refugees by establishing a framework for orderly migration within the region to prevent the piling up of unauthorised arrivals in detention in Australia in response to increased numbers of unauthorised people movements in the region and around the world and in acknowledgment that irregular migration is a global challenge that can only be tackled by nations working together. Though it took another two years for her Government to secure the statutory and practical arrangements for asylum seekers to be sent to third countries, people began to be transferred to Nauru on 14 September 2012 and to PNG on 21 November 2012. It was not until two months before the 2013 federal election and in the wake of growing support for the Opposition’s tougher border protection policies, newly appointed Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd made a surprise announcement on 19 July 2013 that Australia had entered into a Regional Resettlement Arrangement with Papua New Guinea (PNG). Under the Arrangement, all (not just some) asylum seekers that arrive by boat would be transferred to PNG for processing and resettlement in PNG and in any other participating regional State. He subsequently made a similar Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Nauru. Notwithstanding Prime Minister Rudd’s announcement, the Australian Labor Party was unable to secure another term in office and on 7 September 2013, the Liberal and National parties were voted in to form a Coalition Government, led by Tony Abbott. The current Coalition Government continues to implement the former Government’s offshore processing arrangements. However, the offshore processing of asylum seekers in Nauru and PNG has in due course proved contentious for a number of reasons, including: the financial cost (see statistics below) ongoing concerns about the safety and security of asylum seekers in the Processing Centres and in the broader community ongoing concerns about the sustainability of involuntary settlement (currently in Nauru, PNG and Cambodia) prolonged duration of detention and harsh living conditions are seen by some as punitive which is said to be causing or exacerbating psychological harm and inadequate independent oversight of the Processing Centres to ensure relevant international standards are being met (see Annex for further information about these concerns). This publication contains statistics provided by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection from commencement in 2012 (where available) until September 2015

Steady state spurious errors in shock-capturing numerical schemes

The behavior of the steady state spurious error modes of the MacCormack scheme and the upwind scheme of Warming and Beam was obtained from a linearized difference equation for the steady state error. It was shown that the spurious errors can exist either as an eigensolution of the homogeneous part of this difference equation or because of excitation from large discretization errors near oblique shocks. It was found that the upwind scheme does not permit spurious oscillations on the upstream side of shocks. Examples are given for the inviscid Burgers' equation and for one and two dimensional gasdynamic flows

Applications of the DFLU flux to systems of conservation laws

The DFLU numerical flux was introduced in order to solve hyperbolic scalar conservation laws with a flux function discontinuous in space. We show how this flux can be used to solve systems of conservation laws. The obtained numerical flux is very close to a Godunov flux. As an example we consider a system modeling polymer flooding in oil reservoir engineering

Acoustic Tweezing and Patterning of Concentration Fields in Microfluidics

We demonstrate theoretically that acoustic forces acting on inhomogeneous fluids can be used to pattern and manipulate solute concentration fields into spatio-temporally controllable configurations stabilized against gravity. A theoretical framework describing the dynamics of concentration fields that weakly perturb the fluid density and speed of sound is presented and applied to study manipulation of concentration fields in rectangular-channel acoustic eigenmodes and in Bessel-function acoustic vortices. In the first example, methods to obtain horizontal and vertical multi-layer stratification of the concentration field at the end of a flow-through channel are presented. In the second example, we demonstrate acoustic tweezing and spatio-temporal manipulation of a local high-concentration region in a lower-concentration medium, thereby extending the realm of acoustic tweezing to include concentration fields.Comment: Revtex, 9 pages, 5 eps figure

The cardiac bidomain model and homogenization

We provide a rather simple proof of a homogenization result for the bidomain model of cardiac electrophysiology. Departing from a microscopic cellular model, we apply the theory of two-scale convergence to derive the bidomain model. To allow for some relevant nonlinear membrane models, we make essential use of the boundary unfolding operator. There are several complications preventing the application of standard homogenization results, including the degenerate temporal structure of the bidomain equations and a nonlinear dynamic boundary condition on an oscillating surface.Comment: To appear in Networks and Heterogeneous Media, Special Issue on Mathematical Methods for Systems Biolog

Forces acting on a small particle in an acoustical field in a thermoviscous fluid

We present a theoretical analysis of the acoustic radiation force on a single small particle, either a thermoviscous fluid droplet or a thermoelastic solid particle, suspended in a viscous and heat-conducting fluid medium. Our analysis places no restrictions on the length scales of the viscous and thermal boundary layer thicknesses $\delta_\mathrm{s}$ and $\delta_\mathrm{t}$ relative to the particle radius $a$, but it assumes the particle to be small in comparison to the acoustic wavelength $\lambda$. This is the limit relevant to scattering of sound and ultrasound waves from micrometer-sized particles. For particles of size comparable to or smaller than the boundary layers, the thermoviscous theory leads to profound consequences for the acoustic radiation force. Not only do we predict forces orders of magnitude larger than expected from ideal-fluid theory, but for certain relevant choices of materials, we also find a sign change in the acoustic radiation force on different-sized but otherwise identical particles. This phenomenon may possibly be exploited in handling of submicrometer-sized particles such as bacteria and vira in lab-on-a-chip systems.Comment: Revtex, 23 pages, 4 eps figure