Author: AJDS

We would like to welcome you back to the AJDS newsletter, now named – Just Voices – after a year-long hiatus. We hope this platform can provide you with an informative space for intelligent writing and art on pertinent issues.

A hug, a laugh and so we greet each other. Me, a Jew using the Muslim greeting and Najaf Mazari, a Muslim using the Hebrew greeting. And so it has been on most Saturday afternoons for the past 4 years. We sit in Najaf’s rug shop in Prahran, drinking black Afghan tea and chewing the fat; family, health, religion and politics but as yet not sport.

The suffering of asylum seekers currently in detention on Nauru and Manus Island is unbearable. Imagine it, to be living in tents, in the heat and rain, on isolated islands, with years of waiting ahead, in limbo, and with the knowledge that for many Australians out of sight means out of mind. How has it come to this? There are reasons, but first, before the politics, a few stories – stories that indicate what our political leaders should be saying; stories that provide inclusive vision of who we are.

Since Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the so-called ‘Papua New Guinea solution’ to deter people seeking asylum by boat, I’ve had countless conversations (sometimes heated) with people from a wide range of the political spectrum. I noticed that many of these arguments are mostly committed to dissecting what the morally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thing is to do.

I’m amazed. I’m amazed because I wrote an l article for Galus Australis in October, 2009 looking at the situation in South Africa by way of comparison to what happens to refugees in Australia. I thought I could update it significantly, in light of the current politics of boat refugees, but I find that it is still current as a way of contextualizing the problem in Australia.