By
Mike Head
11 May 2013
The Australian Labor government stepped up its persecution of refugees this week when Prime Minister Julia Gillard endorsed the stripping of all welfare payments from asylum seekers who challenge adverse refugee rulings in the courts. Gillard declared that the refugees should “go home.”
Gillard said people who had their refugee applications rejected by the immigration department and a review tribunal should leave the country. “Obviously that’s what we want people to do,” she told reporters in Brisbane on Thursday. “It’s not a question of (welfare) support for these people, it’s a question of them going back home.”
The government is trying to impoverish, and effectively remove, hundreds of refugees seeking to exercise their basic democratic and legal right to appeal to a court against the government’s refusal to grant them a protection visa.
Under the government’s refugee regime, asylum seekers who are awaiting decisions on their visa applications are compulsorily detained, often for many months. If they pass health tests, and receive a “security” clearance from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), they may then be given temporary “bridging” visas to live in the community, but without any right to work.
Refugees banned from working receive the equivalent of 75 percent of the unemployment benefit, which itself is well below the poverty line. The “asylum seeker assistance” pittance–$30 a day–is impossible to live on, without relying on charities and relatives.
This week, it was revealed in the media that once asylum seekers had their applications rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal, the government cuts them off benefits altogether. Refugees are subjected to outright destitution while they wait for months, sometimes years, for their cases to be determined by courts.
Melanie Noden, chief executive of the Asylum Seekers Centre in Sydney, told the Australian that about 400 of her clients were already living without welfare payments. She warned that within a couple of years, “there are going to be thousands in New South Wales alone desperately seeking support from charities like ours, which are the only agencies keeping them off the streets.”
The Asylum Seekers Centre told the WSWS that most of these clients were being threatened
This article originally appeared on : World Socialist Web Site