Moving forward to real action: shaping a research strategy for the next multicultural decade FECCA 8 November 2013

November 5, 2013November 5, 2013 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Available from Australian Scholarly Publisihing

Research: the process of identifying questions, clarifying evidence, reaching conclusions

A shattered landscape: shared realisation in 1980s and early 1990s that knowledge was crucial to addressing social issues was erased by systematic government action after 1996 designed to destroy capacity of society to debate issues on the evidence:

Closure of Bureau of Immigration Multicultural and Population Research 1996/7 ends regular national conferences and support for wide-ranging research

Freezing access to Eureka research on Australian attitudes to cultural diversity removes critical knowledge from public debate 1998: produces uncritical program of Living in Harmony rather than addressing racism. Reports released under FoI 2011/12.

Opposition waste watch committee attacks humanities and social science research, pledges to remove funding from ARC 2013.

Where is research now?: Research on issues of immigration, settlement, racism and community relations

Australian Multicultural Advisory Council: identified need for research development 2010 – nothing happened

Australian Multicultural Council: ALP government stated AMC would oversight development of national research agenda – nothing has happened

Joint Parliamentary Inquiry into Migration and Multiculturalism: Recommended major initiatives on research 2013 – Opposition agreed in principle but reserved position subject to funding – nothing has happened

Access and Equity Inquiry: 2012 That the Australian Government consider adequacy of current provision for research, including national research priorities, on the practical outcomes of the migration program. This assessment should particularly include research on interactions between the Australian Government and Access and Equity target groups and interactions with temporary entrants.
Nothing happened.

Immigration Department research publications: primarily program focussed though increasingly in recent years more broadly spread as governments slowly learn value of social research such as Current and Emerging Drivers for Social Cohesion Division and Conflict. Potentially subject to Government control as Minister approves release. Now split between two portfolios, and possibly due for pruning.

University research centres and programs: eg CCS:UTS, UWS, Macquarie, Deakin, Monash/Scanlon (also Prejudice Mob) struggling under limited resources facing an uncertain future as ARC comes under attack

NGOs: AMF, VicHealth, Brotherhood,

Shaping a Strategy

National research network:
• coordinating hub with many associated nodes building communication between academic, community, government and private organisations
• use of social media and building of accessible research data bases (see MAIS and AUSSA)
• annual conferences to bring policy people, researchers, and NGOs together
• undertake research audit to develop broader national research framework reflecting approach in Canada and Europe

Government acceptance of Parliamentary Report framework to move forward

Recommendation 14

7.31 The Committee recommends increased collection, by the Australian Government, of accurate and up-to-date disaggregated data in order to identify trends in migration and multiculturalism, and to measure and address CALD related disadvantage.

Recommendation 15

7.32 The Committee recommends the establishment of a government funded, independent collaborative institute for excellence in research into multicultural affairs with functions similar to that of the former Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research.

The institute should have a statutory framework articulating key principles of multiculturalism, functions in research and advice to government, and a cross sectoral independent board.

This institute should actively engage with local communities, private business and non-government organisations and provide data for better informed policy.

The qualitative and quantitative research capabilities of the institute must enable up-to-date and easily accessible data and research analysis on social and multicultural trends.

More dedicated research into long-term migration trends occurring within Australia and the social effects of migration—such as the local impacts of migration on cultural diversity and social inclusion within Australian society—should be supported.

The Committee particularly recommends an increased emphasis on qualitative data collection.

Promotion of public debate about Australia’s people based on evidence rather than prejudice

I would like to hear back from people interested in advancing a collaborative research agenda about the future of Australia’s people :

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Andrew Jakubowicz at ECCNSW Macquarie Uni Multiculturalism Forum 1 October 2013

November 5, 2013November 5, 2013 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Andrew speaking at Forum

Multiculturalism Forum on Youtube

Panel 3 – Lessons from the Research: Ways Forward

Chaired by Pino Migliorino, Chair, Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA) with panellists:

Professor Andrew Jakubowicz, Co-director, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre, University of Technology, Sydney
Professor Lucy Taksa, Head of Department of Marketing and Management, Macquarie University
Professor Ingrid Piller, Department of Applied Linguistics, Macquarie University

Below is the video of the closing panel session which discussed “ways forward” at the Multiculturalism, Inclusion & Participation Forum held on 1 October 2013 in Sydney, Australia.

We have also published a webpage summarising key points raised at Agenda for Ways Forward.

About the Panellists

Pino Migliorino photo Pino Migliorino, Chair, Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA)

Pino was born in Bari, Italy in 1959 and migrated to Australia with his family through an assisted passage program in 1964 to reunite with an extended family who had arrived in Australia in the late 1950s. After over 30 years of ethnic community involvement and working in multicultural affairs across three sectors Pino was elected Chairperson on FECCA in October 2009. Pino is passionate about multicultural affairs and social justice and provides an informed and representative voice for FECCA in advocating for the needs and interest of our diverse cultural, linguistic and religious communities. Nineteen years ago Pino founded and still leads Cultural Perspectives and CIRCA Research which are sector leaders in researching and communicating with CALD and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia. Prior to working in the private sector, Pino held important positions in the third sector and in government including Executive Officer of the ECC of NSW, NSW Regional Coordinator for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Senior Conciliator at the HREOC and Principal Policy Officer at the Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW. Pino retains a deep knowledge and strong experience of culturally and linguistically diverse communities in Australia, and is a leading expert in this field.
www.fecca.org.au

Photo Andrew Jakubowicz Professor Andrew Jakubowicz, University of Technology, Sydney

Andrew Jakubowicz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney. He has an Honours degree in Government from Sydney University and a PhD from UNSW. Since the early 1970s he has been involved in action research and race relations, and has been centrally involved in the development of materialist theories of cultural diversity. He has taught at universities in the USA, Europe and Asia, and was the foundation director of the Centre for Multicultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. He has published widely on ethnic diversity issues, disability studies and media studies. In 1994 he led the research team that produced the book, Racism Ethnicity and the Media (Allen and Unwin), and more recently has been involved in multimedia documentaries such as Making Multicultural Australia (1999-2004) and The Menorah of Fang Bang Lu (2001-2002). He was historical adviser to the exhibitions on the Jewish communities of Shanghai, at the Sydney Jewish Museum (2001-2002), the National Maritime Museum (2001-2003) and the national travelling exhibition, Crossroads: Shanghai and the Jews of China (2002-2003). He was foundation chair of the Disability Studies and Research Institute. He was historical advisor on the SBS series, Immigration Nation (2011), and is series advisor on Once Upon a Time in…, a four season project for Northern Pictures and SBS. He chaired the Institute for Cultural Diversity, a national NGO (http://culturaldiversity.net.au) from 2009 to 2012.

Ingrid Piller photo Professor Ingrid Piller, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University

Ingrid Piller (PhD, 1996, Technical University Dresden) is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, where she previously served as Executive Director of the Adult Migrant English Program Research Centre (AMEP RC). Over the course of her international career, she has also held appointments at universities in Germany, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates and USA. Ingrid’s research expertise is in Intercultural Communication, the Sociolinguistics of Language Learning and Multilingualism, and Bilingual Education. She is particularly interested in the ways in which linguistic diversity as it arises in the contexts of globalization and migration intersects with social inclusion and global justice. Ingrid has published, lectured and consulted widely in these areas. She blogs about her research atLanguage on the Move www.languageonthemove.org.

Lucy Taksa photo Professor Lucy Taksa, Head of Department of Marketing and Management, Macquarie University

Professor Lucy Taksa is Head of the Department of Marketing and Management at Macquarie University. Between 1996 and 2007 she was a part-time non-judicial member of the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal Equal Opportunity Division and has been a member of the Diversity Council of Australia’s reference groups for research projects relating to cultural diversity among senior executives and on corporate boards, of the NSW Ministerial Roundtable on Cultural Diversity in the Workplace and the Western Sydney Community Forum’s Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Workers’ Mentoring Initiative. She has published research on Diversity Management, cultural diversity and immigrant workers and multiculturalism. She is currently investigating cultural diversity on Australian corporate boards.

Five things I think about asylum seeking and what we can do and still save souls (ours and theirs)

July 31, 2013 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ 1 Comment

Five big issues – all connected, and you can’t have or deal with one without the other. So first big issue – the boats; actually it’s not the boats, or the numbers, or even the poor souls dying at sea. It’s that every boat that arrives corrodes the authority and legitimacy of the government. Since 1901 Australians have wanted their governments to keep our borders “secure”. We had the first federal parliament spending every ounce of its power to work up a deal that would keep out the boats without alienating the British government. We got White Australia. Then Billy Hughes basically stuffed the whole world in 1921 by demanding the League of Nations refuse to allow a non-racial clause: so he kept the boats out that time too, until the Japanese bombed Darwin twenty years later (about the time period since we first started mandatory detention – and look where that’s got us).

You can’t turn the boats around, slow then or stop them unless you have a real alternative in place that deals with the four other issues. Australia’s the end of the food chain in this part of the world, or you can continue to New Zealand. We need to accept that the start of the chain – places like Afghanistan, Syria, Quetta, and on, are going to hell in a handbasket, and everyone who wants to survive and not be blasted, will be trying to move away from the line of fire. Iran may be somewhat different, but its particular characteristics can be accounted for. Meanwhile, the oceans are rising and we haven’t even begun to see the start of the environmental refugees from Bangladesh and the Pacific that the next decade will produce. So question one, can we stop the push factors? Well, we’ve done incredibly well in Afghanistan, haven’t we? The best possible scenario is that the Afghan National Army will last a few years and won’t roll over for the Taliban; whatever the outcome the Hazaras are not going to get out of it well, and in Quetta they are being blown apart day in and day out by the Pakistani Sunni terrorists/nationalist/sectarianists who don’t want these people in their country. Oh and global warming, we’ve cracked that too. Concluding point one, not much we can do is likely to moderate the pressures at the other end.

So it’s all about the supply chain, if the tap is open at the dam. We now have four big problems.

We have signed up to a commitment to save the lives of people fleeing for safety and we don’t know how to do it anymore.

We have designed an asylum model that guarantees to piss of everyone who is a part of it, from the families be they African, Afghan, Tamil or Iraqi trying to save their relatives, to the people held hopelessly/hopefully in camps, to the Australian workers forced to act as gaolers for people they are supposed to be succouring, to the wider population whose callousness blossoms with every iteration of the get tough rhetoric.

We have no way of managing the legitimate claims to filter the potentially overwhelming demand, among which is maybe 50% of people who are trying it on, often not knowing themselves whether or not they are really eligible, and discovering the only way to find out is to jump on a boat.

We keep rabbiting on about a regional plan but no one seems to know what that might really mean, who’ll pay for it, and why anyone else should stop the richest nation in the region copping it sweet.

Ok so here’s my two bob’s worth (dates me…), and just to set this up, my parents were refugees, most of their families were exterminated, and nobody gave a shit at the time, or much afterwards. They used people smugglers, they used fake documents, and they could have been killed a dozen times or more every week they were on the road. It took them seven years to find refuge in Australia, and the door slammed shut hard behind them, in an epiphany of racist rhetoric from the ALP government and media of the day. And they and I are damned glad they made it.

Recognise we are dealing with a problem for which regularisation, management and least-worst solutions are needed. Recognise the source issue will grow not lessen (in the past we’ve been lucky that the sources have contracted so the flow diminished, so a couple of boats could be turned around).

Firstly, Australia will need to recognise that a figure of 50,000 refugees ultimately settled each year for the next five years at least will be needed – in the context of a 200,000 p.a. or so immigrant intake that’s hard but not impossible. Then disengage the two elements that really stuff it up – self-starters versus sponsored and selected. Start with 20,000 family reunion, UNHCR and humanitarian sponsored refugees and do not allow the places to be consumed by other arrivals. That leaves up to 30,000 to play with. Some of these go to on-shore applicants arriving with valid visas by plane who then apply for protection. For this category, most Chinese applicants (the majority) fail and are returned. Most of the others (a minority) succeed; meanwhile they live in the community on bridging visas and everyone seems comfortable with that, because their identities are “known” as is their whereabouts. That is government still appears to be in control.

Now the critical thing comes in, these off-shore permits to apply for on-shore determination have to be available and used further up the chain in a reasonably accessible way; otherwise Indonesia is inundated with yet more hopefuls, and we don’t want to load up our neighbours with queues they cannot handle. There’s no point in trying to intervene in Jakarta in a process that starts in Quetta; that’s the sunk-cost fallacy that the Government has refused to recognise for years. Once people have invested or borrowed the cash, they’re committed unless you kill them or drive them into madness, or unless they can lose the money and not worry about consequences.

So Australia needs to create something like an off-shore permit that serves as a bridging visa, that requires proof of identity or good evidence that such proof is not available, and some evidence of claim. This is an alternative or parallel to the current UNHCR pathway, which would also need to be extended. Those dodgy Indian papers will not work for this. Successful applicants will then be issued with a short-term visa with certain conditions (like a working holiday visa but with some added elements, notably a commitment to leave Australia if found not to be a refugee, to undertake work or training as directed for pay while in Australia). If deemed a refugee, they will be allocated a location and work or training for two years under a new national settlement plan that encourages economic enterprise, education and integration; or they may be resettled elsewhere depending on the agreements Australia is able to reach around the world.

Unsuccessful applicants will be informed near the start of the supply chain that they don’t fit the criteria. These short term visas would allow them to be processed on-shore but not out of the normal humanitarian intake. Anyone seeking to arrive without such a permit, will be deported or detained. Leaving any neighbouring country without such a permit will place people at the end of the queue, and they may be placed on Nauru or Manus: they can always choose to go back to their last port and apply for a permit. People with a permit will not be placed on Manus, Nauru or anywhere else, though they may be sent to specific work locations around Australia (as occurred under the sponsored migration program for decades after WW2). Essentially it creates a series of queues that all provide better outcomes than jumping on boats, relieve some of the pressures on our neighbours, allow normal procedures of refugee acceptance to proceed without being hijacked by people-smugglers, and engage other countries in a positive process of resettlement.

This basic idea needs careful refinement, yet even so it seems to push back on all five problems, suggesting that we can become less callous, we can cause less harm, we can reduce the numbers of people drowning, we won’t be escalating the war with the smugglers so they try to over-run us like some weird and horrific post-modern version of Verdun and we will gain greater benefit from those who arrive and contribute; it may or may not be cheaper than 5-10,000+ pa people on Manus and supporting them for ever in PNG, or boiling them under tents in the middle of the Nauru dry. Altogether that’s got to be a step ahead of where we are; and we may just surprise ourselves and produce a regional solution out of it that means something.

Rudd and the people smugglers: at the fork – a fatal flaw?

July 22, 2013July 22, 2013 ~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ 2 Comments

How will people smugglers react to the new Rudd asylum plan?
By Andrew Jakubowicz, University of Technology, Sydney

The empirical test of the Australian government’s refugee resettlement agreement with Papua New Guinea will be whether there is a decline in the numbers of small fishing boats overloaded with desperate asylum seekers setting off from Indonesia for Australia.

Whether the plan, the smuggler bounty, and the other as yet unrevealed components alluded to by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd actually end the people smugglers’ business model and in so doing end the loss of life at sea remains a different question. Whether Australia has managed to put in place sturdy parameters for the future of refugee flows, processing and settlement offers raises another, much broader set of questions.

The business plans of people smugglers depend on structures of prohibition erected by target countries, and the lack of effective alternative pathways such structures entail.

When the NSW government finally ordered the police into Cabramatta in the late 1990s to try to end the heroin trade on the streets, there were certain foreseeable and escalating consequences.

In simple terms these consequences included increasing violence and use of firearms, increasing use of vulnerable front people especially minors, the sale of larger amounts of drugs, the hardening of sales points, and the displacement of the heroin trade to other substances (especially ice) and the displacement of the market physically to other locales. We have already seen some analogues of these outcomes in the asylum seeker regimes of detection, deterrence, and detention.

The PNG plan raises the stakes in the game. While the promise is that no-one who uses the boats will ever resettle in Australia, the suggestion from Rudd seemed to be that the unsuccessful applicants may end up in a third country if they cannot be sent back to their homeland or are stateless. Some of the successful might also be re-settled in Canada, New Zealand or the US, or another “regional country”. So, the “no Australia” mantra doesn’t necessarily mean only PNG.

Even were it to mean PNG most of the time, that is not where the story ends. Illicit movement between PNG and northern Australia is not difficult, though presumably an upgraded border watch would be needed for the whole northern Australian coastline. PNG and especially its capital Port Moresby introduce some new factors into the equation.

Leaving aside the fact that Port Moresby is a somewhat more dangerous place than Sydney, the crime bosses – both Indigenous “raskol” gangs and migrant Chinese Triads – are heavily into human trafficking. PNG is also a transhipment point for major drug runs into Australia, so some avenues for onward movement are already there.

If the Cabramatta analogy helps us look forward, then we are likely to see larger boats, more heavily protected, with larger numbers of people leaving from elsewhere in Indonesia (further east) and coming down the Australian east coast and maybe heading for New Zealand, sailing just outside the Australian maritime zone.

Once they are detected they cannot be “turned around” (boarding on the high seas is called piracy), and they are unlikely to disable. They are more likely to make a run towards the coast and try to beach: essentially turning from a strategy of throwing themselves on the mercy of the Australian navy and coast guard, to running the blockade and disappearing into the night.

This strategy would require underground networks to be built in Australia, either communal, familial or criminal, or some combination of all. The more desperate current refugees are to be reunited with their families (and the riots on Nauru are a small scale version of what is possible on Manus Island and elsewhere in the future), the more likely such a strategy would find Australian collaborators. Of course there would also be support and participation through pro-refugee citizen networks.
Essentially, Rudd’s PNG plan will only work if there is a strong, realistic and effective set of opportunities for asylum application introduced in parallel with prompt processing all the way along the line from point of origin. The current government proposal that more places might follow a reduction in boat numbers completely misses the reality of why these moves have to occur in tandem, and could well be its fatal flaw. Many more places, and a separation of the escapee flow from the camp selected, humanitarian and family reunion numbers, will be required.

As Rudd intimated, the ongoing conflict in Syria, the situation in Egypt, Afghanistan after the NATO pullout, anti-Shia mass murder in Pakistan and religious conflict in Myanmar, will contribute to the demand. We are looking at hundreds of thousands fleeing in our direction.

Those numbers give people smugglers a real advantage. As they have already shown, they can overwhelm Australia’s currently concentrated front line very quickly. If they force the line to thin and upgrade the battering rams they are using, people smugglers can afford to “lose” significant numbers of clients (killed or captured) and still deliver enough of an outcome that Australia will be hard pressed to divert. They will also be able to charge a lot more money for the privilege.

All this is without considering the social damage current policy is doing to our own value systems and legal philosophies. As I suggested in previous forays into this very fraught arena, we really do have to take the whole story into account and come up with a best fit, or least worst, way forward. PNG makes some contribution, but it leaves a mess of things undone.

Some of the unintended consequences that have dogged many of the government’s decisions can at least be foreseen in this case. The government’s responses to pre-empt these problems will need to foreground either harm minimisation or “zero tolerance” deterrence. The consequence of that decision will affect the quality of life for all Australians, not just those people making the desperate journey by boat.

Andrew Jakubowicz receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a project on cyber-racism.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.