The Refugee Council of Australia is disappointed to see the Liberal Party seriously considering a policy proposal to allow a future Coalition government to apply blanket visa bans on migrants from regions of the world where there is terrorist activity.
While no fair-minded Australian would ever support issuing visas to people involved in terrorism, applying an indiscriminate ban to everyone living in a region where terrorists are active is an appalling idea straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.
Any person applying to visit or migrate to Australia should have their application considered on its own merits. People who have no links to terrorism and are almost certainly suffering as a result of terrorist acts should not be treated as though they are terrorists themselves.
To apply indiscriminate bans in this way would be little more than blind prejudice, prejudging people based on where they are from rather than who they are. The Opposition cannot maintain that it is promoting Australian values and then promote a policy which denies the most basic level of fairness to innocent people with a valid and lawful reason for wishing to visit Australia, including family members of Australian citizens and residents.
This policy proposal echoes a dark episode in Australian political history from 1938, when the Lyons government’s representative, Thomas White, attended an international conference in France on the fate of Jewish refugees trying to flee Nazi-controlled territory in Europe. Mr White declared that Australia would not help, saying that Australia did not want to import a “racial problem”.
After World War II, the government of Liberal Party founder Robert Menzies supported a positive refugee resettlement program, with more than 200,000 refugees resettled before the change of government in 1972. The Liberal Party should apply the same principles today, judging each person on their merits and realising that people escaping persecution and terrorism understand the value of freedom and democracy more than people who have always been free.
