Paddling 'Big John PM' Home

Paddling 'Big John PM' Home

David Corlett, author of Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers, will on Tuesday accompany the alter-ego of John Howard, 'Big John PM', home to Kirribilli in a sea kayak across Sydney Harbour.

The event is part of a two and a half month national sea kayaking and road journey with Simon Keenan, founder of Paddling for Refugees and Asylum Seekers, to raise awareness of Australia's excision laws.

Corlett and Keenan have generated a national following and received extensive media coverage as they have travelled across the country.

Big John PM has joined the tour in order to learn first hand about the human implications of Australia's refugee policies, and in particular, the excision of almost 5000 islands from Australia's migration zone in order to prevent asylum seekers from applying for protection within Australia.

Of all the places he has visited, Big John PM was particularly fascinated by the new state of the art detention centre that the Howard government is building on Christmas Island.

Rumours abound that Big John PM was involved in a Certain Maritime Incident in the very same waters that children were said to have been thrown overboard in 2001. Unnamed sources suggest that footage from the incident will be released shortly.

Christmas Island was one of the first Australian territories to have been excised.

'Excision prevents people who fear persecution or other human rights violations from accessing Australian territory and its protection determination process,' Mr Keenan, a 26 year old accountant, said. 'It places asylum seekers in a very precarious position.'

The excision laws, introduced in late 2001, allow asylum seekers who arrive in the excised zone to be forcibly removed to another country – such as Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Such people then have their claims for protection assessed in a system where they have no access to an independent review mechanism or Australian courts. Nor do asylum seekers caught up in this system have adequate access to legal representation.

Dr Corlett, who in 2004 traveled to Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Thailand to research his book on the fate of asylum seekers Australian officials had rejected, has seen first hand the human consequences of excision.

'There is strong evidence from my own work and elsewhere that the flawed system for assessing the protection needs of asylum seekers caught up in excision and offshore processing has led to the return of people to situations where their basic human rights have been violated. Some have been killed,' Corlett said.

Those asylum seekers who are found to be refugees in this process are not guaranteed a resettlement place in Australia or anywhere else. Instead, they can spend long periods of time being 'warehoused' in remote Pacific islands camps while the Australian government negotiates to have them settled anywhere but Australia.

'The human costs of this system are unacceptable,' Corlett said. 'People who already have had their human rights violated in their own countries now are treated terribly at the hands of Australia. They live in a situation of limbo and cannot rebuild lives that have been shattered by war, persecution and other horrors. There is now plenty of evidence that this system undermines the mental health and dignity of those caught within it.'

ENDS

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