Race to point finger of blame

FORMER immigration minister Amanda Vanstone was keen to promote Australia's efforts to resettle thousands of Sudanese refugees.

FORMER immigration minister Amanda Vanstone was keen to promote Australia's efforts to resettle thousands of Sudanese refugees.

Writing in The Age newspaper in 2004, Vanstone, who has since become Australia's ambassador to Italy, lambasted refugee advocates here for not taking an interest in the plight of those fleeing violence in Darfur. Australia, she boasted, had provided permanent resettlement for "more than 10,000 people from the southern Sudan" since 2001.

Her comments came as Australia's intake of Sudanese refugees reached a historical high.

"People fleeing violence in Darfur urgently need, first, security, then food, shelter and health care," she wrote.

Kevin Andrews, who assumed the role of Immigration Minister on January 30 this year, has turned that sentiment on its head. Within a week of starting in the role, newspapers reported that Andrews planned to seek support from cabinet to drastically reduce the intake of Sudanese refugees because of concerns about a rising tide of Sudanese gangs and related crime.

Over the course of this year, Andrews's concerns about the alleged inability of Sudanese refugees to integrate have become more explicit, culminating on Monday when he made plain that integration was to become one of the key criteria for determining refugee resettlement quotas.

"Some groups don't seem to be settling and adjusting to the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to ... slow down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan," he said.

The comments were intriguing because the policy setting they referred to, decreasing the intake of Sudanese refugees from 50 per cent to 30 per cent, had been resolved two months ago.

The reason given for the cut was because Asia, in particular Burma, had been given priority.

The new element this week, which has pricked the ear of the talkback set and piqued the ire of others, was the belated revelation of another reason Andrews has decided to cut the quota.

Over the course of this week, in no fewer than nine radio interviews and two press conferences, Andrews relayed the new message: African refugees have difficulties settling in Australia because of their experience of conflict, lower education levels and their poor grasp of English.

Community feedback to the Government suggests people are concerned about race-based gangs, race-related violence and crime, and "reports of a developing trend of young African males congregating in parks at night, often to consume alcohol", he said. The shift in policy, which comes after the Government decided to scrap the term multiculturalism from the Immigration Department's title, has concerned the UN High Commission for Refugees.

"Elevating so-called integration factors as a consideration in determining refugee quotas would seem to be at odds with the purpose of a refugee resettlement program," UNHCR spokeswoman Ariane Rummery says.

"UNHCR does not use integration criteria when it refers refugees to Australia or any other resettlement country. Any shift away from Africa in Australia's resettlement quota is not being promoted by UNHCR. Decisions about quota compositions remain within the discretion of the Government."

Australia sets its refugee resettlement mix each year following submissions from groups such as the UNHCR. In 1984, when Labor held government under Bob Hawke, the intake of Sudanese refugees for resettlement was zero. During the ensuing decade just 34 Sudanese refugees were resettled in Australia. The intake jumped to 354 in 1994-95, heralding a rapidly increasing flow of Sudanese every year, rising to 6147 in 2003-2004.

Experts such as Paris Aristotle from the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture say the influx was prompted in part by requests from the UNHCR for Australia to give priority to Africa in refugee resettlement quotas because of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the long-running civil war in Sudan. This was combined with the knock-on effects of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US that resulted in the main resettlement countries of the US, Canada and Australia, shifting their focus from the Middle East to Africa.

"After 9/11 it became much more difficult to fill quotas if you were working out of Middle Eastern countries: security assessments were much harder, there were embassies closing down and there was the build-up to the war," Aristotle says.

In Australia, Sudanese-born humanitarian entrants have topped the offshore grants list every year since 2003.

With a federal election imminent, the case has prompted claims that the Government is using Sudanese refugees to play a race card, a claim Prime Minister John Howard rejects as a "contemptible suggestion".

However, new data from the 2006 census supplied to Inquirer reveals that a swag of marginal electorates also appear in census data as seats with the largest Sudanese communities in each state.

The seats include marginal Liberal electorates that would be certain to fall on present opinion polling -- including Moreton in Queensland -- but also key Labor marginals such as Parramatta in NSW and Isaacs in Victoria that may be vulnerable if a strong campaign is run.

These are the seats that could be the difference between the Coalition retaining government and going into Opposition.

In Moreton, for example, where the sitting Liberal MP, Gary Hardgrave, says the community is "exhausted" by the influx of African refugees and needs a break, the census suggests the Sudanese population is just 0.5 per cent.

However, census figures confirm that the seat has the largest group of Sudanese residents in Queensland.

Other Queensland seats with statistically significant Sudanese communities include Groom -- held by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane -- which takes in Toowoomba.

In Victoria, the Liberal candidate for the seat of Isaacs, held by Labor by a slim margin, is Ross Fox, who was campaigning on public safety in the area this week at the railway station near where 18-year-old Sudanese refugee Liep Gony was bashed to death.

"People don't feel safe using the Noble Park shop centre and train station because of anti-social behaviour, crime and violence," Fox says.

"Sudanese people are involved, but by no means exclusively. There's basically a conspiracy of silence on this.

"I've been campaigning on safety in Noble Park for months. Nobody else will take this up."

But New England independent MP Tony Windsor is not convinced the latest debate does not have an electoral purpose.

"I think there should be a bit more clarity of the reasons why they are doing what they are doing," he says.

"Philip Ruddock for years, when the boatpeople situation was on, used to say, 'We've got to look after the Africans'.

"They seem to have settled in quite well. He's got to explain what the real agenda is.

"Kevin Andrews has got a bit of explaining to do, otherwise people will quite rightly say he's playing the race card."