Immigration to steal ‘agenda’
‘Jobs’ at risk
SYDNEY, May 25, (Agencies): Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s election agenda focusing on jobs and growth is at risk of being hijacked by the country’s harsh immigration policy and controversial network of offshore detention camps for asylum seekers.
Canberra has vowed to stop refugees sailing from Indonesia and Sri Lanka and landing on its shores, instead intercepting boats at sea and holding those on board in camps in far-flung Papua New Guinea and Nauru.
Now Turnbull, who ousted conservative Tony Abbott in a party coup last year promising a more progressive agenda, is facing calls of xenophobia for refusing to condemn his immigration minister’s claims that refugees will steal Australian jobs and strain the social safety network.
Australia goes to the polls on July 2.
Peter Young, former director of Australia’s detention centre network, said this week that police had accessed his phone records, in part over his criticism of the country’s detention policies.
Young accused the government of attempting to cover up deaths in custody, as well as intimidating medical staff and aid workers from revealing the conditions in the camps.
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The immigration and foreign ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Earlier this month Australia said it had agreed to compensate a charity for wrongly accusing it of inciting refugees to self-harm in protest at conditions on Nauru in 2014.
“The thing that the government doesn’t want people to know is that putting people in these situations and exposing people to these health conditions is causing them to die. If that is to be part of their plan then they should be transparent, they should make people aware of them,” Young told Reuters.
“If they don’t speak out, they are not behaving in a way that is ethical.”
In the past month, two asylum seekers have set themselves on fire in protest against their treatment on Nauru where there have been reports of child abuse. One of them, an Iranian man, died.
Papua New Guinea has said it plans to close the Manus centre after its Supreme Court ruled it unlawful, raising questions about where the refugees will be resettled.
Border security and immigration have swayed Australian elections before. The conservative government last year pledged to take 12,000 refugees from Syria on top of its 13,750 annual quota. The centre-left opposition Labor Party says it would double the annual quota to 27,000.
An Australian man who kidnapped, drugged and raped a German backpacker was sentenced to nine years in prison on Wednesday for an attack that has drawn comparisons to the grisly Australian horror film “Wolf Creek.”
Peter Van de Wetering, 48, had previously pleaded guilty to multiple charges including rape and kidnapping for the August 2013 attack of the 19-year-old woman two weeks after she arrived in Australia, a place she had long dreamed of visiting.
“This offending involves an entirely ruthless pursuit of a young and innocent woman for your sexual gratification,” Brisbane District Court Judge Terry Martin told Van de Wetering during the sentencing hearing. Prosecutors said the man spent months planning the attack, seeking out a remote location to carry out the crime and buying a wig, fake beard and moustache to use as a disguise.
Van de Wetering picked the victim up at a bus stop in the rural town of Cottonvale after she responded to an ad seeking a nanny and farmhand. He then took her to a sheep shearing shed, where he bound her with cable ties, force-fed her chocolate laced with a sedative, threatened to kill her and sexually assaulted her. She eventually lost consciousness and awoke early the next morning on the side of a rural road.
The case has attracted a great deal of attention in Australia for its similarities to the film “Wolf Creek,” in which a sexually sadistic serial killer who drugs his victims hunts down a group of backpackers in the Outback.
Despite Van de Wetering’s guilty plea, the judge said he had shown no remorse for the assault, which left the woman with physical and emotional scars. Two years after the attack, she remains afraid of the dark, Martin said.