Australian War On Refugees latest: refugee intake capped at 2,773 for this financial year

Thanks to Asher Wolf on Twitter for digging up this piece of latest awfulness in Australia’s War On Refugees:

I, SCOTT MORRISON, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, acting under section 85 of the Migration Act 1958 (‘the Act’) DETERMINE that the maximum number of Protection (Class XA) visas that may be granted in the financial year 1 July 2013 to 30 June 2014 is 2773.

Worse still it’s not the first time the Minister for Operation Sovereign Murders has tried this, on 4th December 2013 he set a limit of 1,650 visas, the number granted up to that date. That instrument was revoked on the 20th December after a legal challenge was mounted to it (see the RACS PDF for more information). So this seems to be another cynical attempt to prevent genuine refugees coming to Australia, by any means at all.

I can only imagine what will happen on Manus Island when the news gets out that nobody will have any chance at all of getting a visa until July at the very earliest.

Australian Government says Australian law doesn’t include a right to seek asylum

In a supplemental answer to a question taken on notice (PDF) in the Senate Estimates Committee regarding the forced repatriation of 12 and 14 year old Sri Lankan refugees the Australian “Department of Immigration and Border Protection” (formerly DIMIA, etc) said (my emphasis):

In relation to question 2, no, the unaccompanied Sri Lankan minors were not advised of their rights to seek asylum. Australian law does not contain a right to seek asylum, and therefore, departmental practice does not involve advising unauthorised arrivals that they have such a right.

In other words, Australia’s own “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, except this time in defiance of international agreements Australia itself helped forge.

Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

You’d have thought the Australian government would have heard of that because their own Human Rights Commission website points out:

Australia was a founding member of the UN and played a prominent role in the negotiation of the UN Charter in 1945. Australia was also one of eight nations involved in drafting the Universal Declaration.

This was largely due to the influential leadership of Dr Herbert Vere Evatt, the head of Australia’s delegation to the UN. In 1948, Dr HV Evatt became President of the UN General Assembly. That same year he oversaw the adoption of the Universal Declaration.

Of course that declaration was not legally binding but Australia was involved in drafting, and we are signatories to, the 1951 Refugee Convention, which in the preamble says it:

recommends Governments to take the necessary measures for the protection of the refugee’s family especially with a view to:
(1) Ensuring that the unity of the refugee’s family is maintained particularly in cases where the head of the family has fulfilled the necessary conditions for admission to a particular country,
(2) The protection of refugees who are minors, in particular unaccompanied children and girls, with special reference to guardianship and adoption.

The Australian Governments own website says that the 1958 Migration Act enshrines into law the Refugee Convention definition of a refugee as one:

owing to well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.

The Australian Government site then goes on to say:

The Migration Act incorporates art 1A(2) into Australian domestic law, and gives effect to Australia’s obligation of non-refoulement—not to return a person in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where the person’s life or freedom would be threatened on account of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. Section 36(2) provides for the grant of a protection visa to a ‘non-citizen in Australia to whom the Minister is satisfied Australia has protection obligations under the Refugees Convention as amended by the Refugees Protocol’.

Now the Migration Act itself doesn’t include a right to ask for “asylum”, but it does include the right to ask for a “protection visa” on grounds of being a refugee. To me that’s exactly what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights means when it talks about asylum, not to mention the fact that the Refugee Convention talks about asylum all the time. For instance when talking about not penalising refugees for their method of arrival it says:

The Convention further stipulates that, subject to specific exceptions, refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay. This recognizes that the seeking of asylum can require refugees to breach immigration rules.

To me this seems to show that the Australian Government itself is either ignorant of its own legislation or just being deliberately misleading. Or both. None of which would surprise me at the moment.

A hat tip to RISE for pointing this out on Twitter:

Refugees: They’re not “transferees”, they’ve become political prisoners of Australia

The Australian Government seems to like calling refugees seeking asylum and protection “transferees” as a euphemism to avoid facing the fact that they are effectively being kept in indefinite detention for committing no crime – article 14 of the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights says:

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

Now detaining someone indefinitely for exercising a recognised human right is not a behaviour you would normally associate with a democratic nation, especially not one that likes to think of itself as being the land of the fair go, of battlers and a nation founded by convicts from Britain (there had been people here for longer than the current continuous occupation of the UK, but that gets forgotten).

If the Australian Government was really interested in reducing deaths at sea of refugees whilst abiding by the international conventions they had voluntarily signed up to they would be investing in ways to let people apply for asylum far closer to their native land so they didn’t need to travel, whilst keeping them safe, and ensuring that applications were processed rapidly, fairly and accurately.

To me the fact that we don’t do that but rather imprison (let’s call it what it really is) the tiny trickle of refugees who do decide to come here means that the Australian Government isn’t interested in their welfare or dealing fairly with people looking from protection from persecution, it’s just interested in stopping people coming here full stop.

They are, therefore, keeping these people in prisons for political purposes, to win votes at home and to stay in power.

So I submit that the Australian Government is now in the de-facto state of keeping political prisoners, even to the extent of defying direct requests from the UNHCR to release some.

Mount Burnett Observatory Second Birthday & Open Day

Just over a week ago it was the Mount Burnett Observatory’s second birthday, celebrating two years since being reopened as a community observatory. Originally it was built by Monash University and used as a research and teaching observatory until becoming surplus to requirements. A group of people made a community association to take up the lease after the Astronomical Society of Victoria passed it over and now it’s the third largest astronomical society in Victoria!

Preparing for the Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014 Mount Burnett Observatory Dome

To celebrate being two years old MBO held an open day running from 10am until 6pm when there was an open barbecue followed by a talk by Prof. Sarah Maddison from Swinburne University. We really didn’t know what to expect in terms of turn out but were amazed to see our first visitors arrive before we opened at 10am! I helped out demonstrating the large 18″ telescope in the dome until 12:30pm when I had to head home, at that stage we’d had 30 people through. I was struck by the number of people who were amazed they had no idea that there was an observatory on their doorstep, let alone one they could join and participate in. One person asked how much it was to join and when told it was just $50 for the year said “I spend more than that on astronomy magazines every year!”. 😉

First visitors arriving for the Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014Vistors and Members Arrive for the Evening Talk at Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014BBQ Underway at the Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014

It was a very successful day with well over 100 non-members visiting the observatory during the day, plus of course many members. It was certainly a packed club house for the talk that night! I donated two bottles of sparkling wine for a door prize, one of which was one by a member (and volunteer for the day) and one was one by a visitor. The only disappointment of the day was that we had cloud that night, so there wasn’t really much to see in the sky.

Prof. Sarah Maddison from Swinburne University talks about what is a planet at Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014 Prof. Sarah Maddison from Swinburne University talks about what is a planet at Mount Burnett Observatory Open Day 2014

It was very good to see that the following Friday we had over 30 people attend the regular Friday night members night and probably about half were new faces.

Mount Burnett Observatory Members observing at Mount Burnett Observatory Member with his own 16" Dobsonian telescope at Mount Burnett Observatory

IBM Finally Leaving the Intel Server Market

After selling off the consumer side of their PC business to Lenovo the other shoe has dropped for IBMs x86 business, they are going to (try and) sell the rest of the x86 offerings (and the BNT network switches they bought recently) to Lenovo as well.

The Lenovo announcement is here here: http://www.lenovo.com/ww/lenovo/pdf/announcement/E_099220140123a.pdf (the IBM website is silent on the matter at the moment) but basically it boils down to:

Subject to the terms and conditions of the Master Asset Purchase Agreement, the Company will acquire certain assets (the “Transferred Assets”) which include, among other things, the following assets at the Initial Closing and Subsequent Closings:

  1. certain enumerated hardware products (including “System x”, “BladeCenter”, “Blade”, “Flex System”, “Pure Flex” products and system networking products including “Blade Network Technology” and certain other related tangible properties);
  2. certain intellectual property rights in connection with the Business;
  3. certain transferred contracts that are related to the Business; and
  4. inventory of the Business consisting of System x products, including the “System x”, “BladeCenter”, “Blade”, “Flex System” and “Pure Flex” products and certain other system networking products including “Blade Network Technology”.

By my reckoning that’s all their Intel related gear (and the network switches they recently bought when they acquired BNT).

So with no more BlueGene series and now no x86 that really leaves IBM with just Power for HPC workloads. I wonder how that will work out for them?

First beta release of Vacation 1.2.8.0

Vacation 1.2.8.0-beta1 is a release that fixes a long standing bug handling wrapped email headers. Many thanks to Zdenek Havranek for the fix!

Richard Keech contributed a chkvacation script to enable/disable and check your vacation status. He also contributed some SELinux information for Vacation that you can find in the INSTALL file.

It also has some minor changes to the build system including the ability to do “make install DESTDIR=/foo/bar” and to also put the German manual page in the correct location.

Please see the ChangeLog for more information.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vacation/files/vacation/1.2.8.0-beta1/

Please test and let me know of any bugs you find!

An Aide Memoir for Debian Upgrades

Documenting this as it’s the process I followed for upgrading Debian on the VM that runs this blog and others, for the purposes of having notes for next time and in case it helps others. Please do not consider it complete, if it breaks your upgrade you get to keep both parts..

  • Ensure all current updates to Debian and installed
  • Firewall the VM from all external access to quiesce activity and prevent email delivery and web access before it’s all tested
  • cd /etc; etckeeper commit "Commit any uncommitted pre-upgrade changes" – Make sure there are no uncommitted changes in /etc
  • Change /etc/apt/sources.list to point to the new Debian version
  • apt-get install debian-archive-keyring – to ensure current PGP keys are in place to verify the archive
  • postconf -e "soft_bounce = yes"Set Postfix to do soft bounces in case of issues bringing things back up
  • Stop all web and email services
  • Comment out all crontab entries for amavis
  • Ensure Maia Mailguard has processed all its outstanding quarrantined items by running the script by hand.
  • Do a full mysqldump, copy it offline
  • Stop MySQL to quiesce it
  • Use the hosting providers web interface to take a snapshot backup of the current state, just in case..
  • script -f upgrade – log everything to a log file
  • Start Postfix only so apt-listchanges can email news to root
  • apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade – do the actual upgrade!
  • Fix all the things. 🙂