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Pedestrian.tv
Pedestrian.tv
National
Aleksandra Bliszczyk

If Aus Has ‘A Lot Of Room’ For Ukrainian Refugees It Better Free Those In Immigration Detention

The Federal Government has pledged to accept Ukrainian refugees fleeing war, despite Australia’s ongoing history of imprisonment of refugees fleeing wars in parts of the world that aren’t Europe.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia was already supporting Ukrainians who had fled to neighbouring countries like Poland but wanted to settle elsewhere by fast-tracking visa applications and on Sunday announced a special refugee intake.

“Australia will be very prepared to take more and more and more as we have with Afghanistan,” he told reporters outside a Sydney Ukrainian Catholic Church on Sunday.

“The ultimate numbers will be determined down the track and that will involve, I have no doubt taking numbers in addition to our normal program.”

So-called “skilled” migrants and students will be given priority, because the economy. 

More than 150,000 Ukrainian refugees have already fled and the United Nations has estimated that number could grow to four million.

Morrison said that due to Australia’s low immigration intake over the past two years during the pandemic — because he closed the borders — there was “quite a lot of room … to take in more places”.

But apparently there’s not enough room for the Muruguppan family and their Australian-born children or the 32 refugees detained indefinitely in Melbourne’s Park Hotel. 

Instead we’ll just continue to spend $361,835 per refugee to lock people up in rooms with no fresh air for committing no crimes.

Human rights leaders were quick to call out Morrison’s blatant double standard and racism.

Asylum Seeker Resource Centre founder Kon Karapanagiotidis tore the PM a new one for not doing his job in protecting refugees that had already arrived in Australia.

He accused Morrison of “doing nothing so far” for refugees from Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Myanmar South Sudan, Yemen and other parts of the world where wars and oppressive regimes put people’s lives at risk.

“All refugee lives deserve protection. All come from civilised nations. All want peace. All want freedom and safety. And Australia could do more to help all of them today,” he said.

Human rights lawyer Sophie Trevitt also went to town on Minister for Defence Peter Dutton, who used to lock refugees up for a living, for pretending he gave a fuck about women and children “huddled in bunkers” and fearing for their lives.

But it’s not just the right-wing fuckwit politicians, Western media coverage of the Ukraine crisis has also been called out for being extremely fucking racist.

News outlets have basically never ever reported the suffering of people of colour with as much urgency or compassion it has offered white European refugees, and this is a stark reminder of that bias.

This crisis has brought out the absolute worst of it as US and British reporters expressed their shock and heartbreak at the situation impacting “civilised” people who don’t live in a third-world country.

The Telegraph in the UK literally published this fkn tepid take: “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking” and got rightly canned online.

Everyone knows bombing and torture is fine until it affects people who look like Boris Johnson.

The post If Aus Has ‘A Lot Of Room’ For Ukrainian Refugees It Better Free Those In Immigration Detention appeared first on Pedestrian TV.

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