Tamworth likely to accept refugees' settlement
PM - Tuesday, 16 January , 2007 18:26:00
Reporter: Emily Bourke
EMMA ALBERICI: Tamworth used to be known almost exclusively for its affinity with country music, but calls to stop a group of Sudanese refugees from settling there has battered the town's reputation.
The issue that's deeply divided the local population is set to culminate tonight with an official vote on whether to accept refugees into the community.
After months of debate, the local council is now expected to approve the resettlement scheme.
Emily Bourke reports.
EMILY BOURKE: The furore over refugees in Tamworth began last year when the local council voted against a resettlement scheme.
The council said the area lacked the necessary services to cope with an influx of Sudanese migrants.
But the decision sparked an angry backlash, with claims the vote was racially motivated.
This morning, the Tamworth Mayor, James Treloar, said he was keen to find a resolution and agreed to meet with Immigration Department officials as soon as possible.
He told ABC Local Radio in Tamworth he was sorry the issue had spiralled into a smear campaign against the local Sudanese community.
JAMES TRELOAR: I have said that I apologise for bringing the Sudanese who are in our community into this debate. I can't say I apologise for one of the print media or one of the electronic media actually publishing a sign which shows the "welcome to Tamworth" sign but says you're not welcome if you're a refugee. We did not say that, we never have said that, but if the media choose to make those statements, I can't apologise on their behalf.
EMILY BOURKE: Tamworth regional council is hoping to put the whole issue to bed tonight.
Councillor Diane Carter says she expects council to vote overwhelmingly in favour of a refugee resettlement program.
DIANE CARTER: I wouldn't call it a back down, it's a compromise, and most of the compromising has basically come from the councillors who oppose Tamworth becoming a resettlement centre and I give them credit. But they acknowledge that this issue has to move forward and have agreed that we will participate in the program.
But we want some guarantees that there'll be the trauma counsellors and those sort of things to assist these people that, let's face it, come from nations where there's been civil war, that we can ensure that those services are provided in our community.
EMILY BOURKE: What are your reservations?
DIANE CARTER: My reservations basically are the damage that has been done to Tamworth in the last month, and I really look forward to moving on from that.
EMILY BOURKE: The Immigration Department says the initial resettlement plan didn't canvas a refugee group specifically from Sudan, but the bulk of the current refugee caseload is from Africa.
Despite the focus on how well Sudanese refugees have integrated, Councillor Diane Carter says it makes no difference where the refugees come from.
DIANE CARTER: I think it's totally immaterial where they come from. I believe Tamworth to be a caring community and no matter where refugees come from they would be welcome in Tamworth.
EMILY BOURKE: The Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, says the families that may be settled in Tamworth are still to be selected.
AMANDA VANSTONE: We've made the offer and I see the Mayor indicates that they may well accept that offer, so we'll follow that up. Then I think it's appropriate to obviously have the meeting and see what the council then decides. If the council then decides to go ahead, well we'll work with them in selecting families that are appropriate. And that might be a function of what kind of people you've already got there.
EMMA ALBERICI: Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone ending Emily Bourke's report.
Now read this ...
Last Update: Wednesday, January 17, 2007. 9:01am (AEDT)
Tamworth rethinks refugee settlement scheme
Tamworth Regional Council in north-west New South Wales has backtracked on its decision not to take part in a trial to settle Sudanese refugees in the district.
The council came under intense scrutiny after it voted against a one year trial to relocate Sudanese refugees to the region.
Last night it voted to accept Commonwealth funding for a resettlement program, but says it wants the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) to increase its level of support for the new arrivals.
Tamworth Mayor James Treloar says the council will also ask the Department to provide more services like trauma counselling for the refugees.
"There have been significant problems identified with the program, very significant problems identified, we believe they need to be addressed. Once those have been addressed we believe we have the capacity to have our communities support," he said.
Councillor Treloar is also looking for local organisations to play a greater role in helping the new arrivals settle in the district.
"Subject to discussions with DIMA and them approving the use of the local community, who have identified them as wanting to support this program, we can proceed with some conditions," he said.
Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has welcomed the news and says the Government and the council will now work out the fine details.
"I think it's fine to start off small, it's been a bit of a rocky start, let's see what the council is happy with," she said.
"It's clear that the community are very happy to give it a go, so I think in the spirit of a positive attitude and moving forward that's what we all ought to do, give it a go and see what we can work out that works for everyone."
Anglicare runs a number of resettlement programs in country areas.
The Reverend Tom Henderson Brooks from Anglicare says it is frustrating Tamworth is taking so long to become a part of the program.
"We now have to wait for a process over the next month as they talk to DIMA and the Federal Government, Amanda Vandstone, I imagine, and they will need to bring all their concerns that they've had previously ample opportunity to express, but haven't," he said.
These refugees mostly have to do with the Lost Boys of Sudan..here's bit about it from the US perspective;
Separated from parents in the chaos of war, thousands of boys walked hundreds of miles across southern Sudan in the late 1980s. They had little food or water. Disease and animals killed many. Aid workers flying over southern Sudan could identify the route from the air by all the bodies of boys who did not make it.
The boys were being led toward the promise of safety in refugee camps in Ethiopia. They stayed about four years. Most learned English and attended Christian church services. Some were trained as child soldiers. The boys were among 250,000 refugees who were forced to leave Ethiopia in 1991. More boys died during several additional months of wandering that ended in a refugee camp in Kenya. Aid workers and journalists called them the Lost Boys after the Peter Pan characters who are cast as children into a world of adults.
The United States opened its door to about 3,800 Lost Boys in 2000 and 2001, resettling them as refugees on the grounds that they would be persecuted in their native Sudan, where war has killed 2 million people since 1983. The Lost Boys arrived in the United States with little knowledge of life in the modern West. Most had never used telephones or seen tall buildings. They had never flicked on electric lights, ridden a bus or cooked on a stove, but the U.S. government gave them four months to get their bearings and support themselves.
The refugees known as the Lost Boys are actually young men now. They are making their way through everyday life in 28 states with the generous help of a committed group of American volunteers. Most have settled into a routine of working and pursing what they want more than anything else – an education.
Here is what an organization devoted to the the Lost Boys said in Austraila;
Orphaned as young boys in one of Africa's cruelest civil wars, many Sudanese refugees survived lion attacks and militia gunfire to reach a refugee camp in Kenya along with thousands of other children. From there, remarkably, they were chosen to come to Australia. Safe at last from physical danger and hunger, a world away from home, they find themselves confronted with a completely different society ..read more here
The critics of this move to settle sudanese refugess in Australia;
note that an offender is to be charged; it is reported he comes from Sunshine. We have enough problems in Greater Dandenong, and the residents in Keysborough South do not need Springers or any other place similar, to be a congregation point for hundreds of Sudanese from all over Melbourne who bring their tribal differences with them erupting into violence.
This is not multiculturalism: it is madness — a madness witnessed in Cronulla early last year, and being repeated in Keysborough by a different ethnic group.
If the Australian Government chooses to ease the ethnic problems of Black Africa by transporting their citizenry to Australia by the jumbo jetload, then the only achievement will be to remove the problems from one continent beset by them to another continent, Australia — and you do not have to be a Rhodes scholar to see that that is happening now in the City of Greater Dandenong.
A council community grant last year to a Sudanese group was halted because of the aggressive opposition to it by a different Sudanese faction. The problems at Noble Park station were not there before the jumbos flew in. And late last year, when I was mayor, I met a delegation of Sudanese, some of whom came from Footscray and who berated our council for insufficient financial and other support and then criticised us by saying "the Vietnamese have had their turn for the money, now it is ours (the Sudanese)".
Australia has a proud history of social justice, understanding and harmony and embracing of multicultural values, but this is now being eroded by a multicultural policy that is growing ever divisive as the result of a blind belief that Australia can be all things to all people and a perception overseas that Australia is an easy touch.
Australia should not be the repository for global social and ethnic problems in the misguided belief that we can solve them, because as the world population increases beyond the already unsustainable levels more pressure will be placed on Australia to be a universal agent of global multicultural support. We will be doomed to failure, and we are taking the first steps along that road now that began with the "Australians of convenience" marching down the main road of Cronulla last year, reaching Keysborough 12 months later.
AUSTRALIA
Ethnic tension erupts in Australia
Lawrence Bartlett
Tue, 16 Jan 2007
Shocked Australians wrestled on Tuesday with fresh signs of simmering tensions in the country's multicultural melting pot after ethnic violence erupted at the glamorous Australian Open tennis tournament.
Unprecedented courtside clashes between Serb, Croat and Greek fans on Monday came just a year after the worst racial violence in the nation's history, when white mobs attacked Lebanese youths at Sydney's Cronulla beach in December 2005.
And they followed an ugly series of ethnic incidents in the first two weeks of 2007, with Aboriginal groups attacking police, Muslims unleashing and receiving insults and a town banning African refugees.
Apart from fewer than half-a-million Aborigines, all 20 million Australians are immigrants or descendants of immigrants and old ethnicities at times override the new national identity, to the despair of critics.
"We're Australians and love our sport — all that political stuff does not belong here in Australia," said Serbian community leader John Pavasovic after the violence on the first day of the Australian Open in Melbourne.
Local Croatian radio producer Nikola Rasic agreed: "It is true there is no love lost between the groups, but it's unfortunate some people have chosen to bring their kids up in this country with this rivalry."
More than 150 fans were ejected from Melbourne Park
More than 150 fans, many draped in national colours, were ejected from Melbourne Park at the first Grand Slam of the year after the outbreak of kicking, punching and hurling of chairs and bottles.
Front page newspaper photographs of the violence recalled the Cronulla riots, which sparked a wave of national soul-searching over racism.
Even before the intra-European tennis violence, incidents involving Muslims, Africans and Aborigines this year had brought the debate on race relations back to the comment pages of Australia's major newspapers.
The country's top Islamic cleric, Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali, last week sparked the latest round of a religious war of words by mocking the convict ancestry of many white Australians.
Egyptian-born Al-Hilali said in an interview on Cairo television that Muslims had a greater claim to Australia because they had paid for their tickets while the first white settlers arrived in shackles.
Writing in Tuesday's Australian newspaper, a senator for Prime Minister John Howard's conservative coalition used Al-Hilali's comments to attack the policy of multiculturalism.
"It looked really good on paper. Immigrants would be encouraged to retain their distinct cultural identities on condition that they subscribed to the tenets of Westminster democracy," wrote Brett Mason.
"But since September 11, multiculturalism has been taking a beating at home and abroad," he said, pointing to what he called the emergence of Islamic extremism in Britain and Australia.
The spotlight has also fallen on the eastern country town of Tamworth, where the town council has been accused of racism for refusing to accept five Sudanese refugee families.
Africans were rejected
Tamworth mayor James Treloar said the Africans (SUDANESE) were rejected because cultural differences could lead to another "Cronulla riot".
Under pressure to reverse the decision, the council was due to vote again on the issue later Tuesday.
In another black-white confrontation, this time involving the country's original inhabitants, anti-police riots erupted in two Aboriginal communities in Queensland state last week.
In an opinion page article headed "Riot sets racial time bomb ticking", the Daily Telegraph linked the violence to the refusal to prosecute a police officer blamed for the death of an Aboriginal prisoner.
After the Cronulla riots, Howard played down charges that racism was rife in Australia, calling it one of the most successful cultural melting pots in the world.
However, an ACNielsen poll at the time found that 75 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: "There is an underlying racism in Australia."
AFP
We're headed for social decay!! ..how do you turn this around??
