Email to my Australian MP

[dolorosa_12]

I have just written the following email to my Australian MP. I know there are Australian people (both in Australia and overseas) in my circle here, and I would strongly urge you to write something similar to your own MPs. Australia has in general handled the pandemic really well, but its handling has made collateral damage of Australians overseas, with really disastrous consequences.

Email is below:


Dear Tanya,

I am a voter in your electorate, and am writing to express my deep concern about the situation facing thousands of Australians stranded overseas due to the pandemic. Their plight fills me with horror — not least because I, too, am an Australian living overseas, and but for my own good fortune, I might have shared their fate. I am lucky enough to have dual citizenship for the country in which I live (so there's no risk of me overstaying a visa), and I have a job and stable housing here as well. I miss my family in Australia, but I am happy to wait to see them once international flights are more regular again.

However, thousands of other Australians like me are not so fortunate. Through no fault of their own, they have been forced into situations where they lost their jobs, their income, or have reached the limits on their current visas and now have no legal right to remain in the countries in which they find themselves. Children have missed more than a year of school, and some chronically ill or disabled Australians have been cut off from essential medical care.

I know you have spoken out on this issue in the past, and I am pleased that you have done so. However, the situation has now reached crisis point, with the news that a group of the stranded Australians have taken legal action against the government and filed a complaint with the United Nations on the basis of a breach of their human rights. I urge you to continue to raise awareness of this issue, and hope that you and your Labor Party colleagues will continue to hold the government to account, as they have utterly failed in their responsibility to this group of Australian citizens. Thanks to swift action and good leadership from the state governments, Australia's pandemic response is rightly the envy of much of the world — but this relatively small impact from Covid-19 must not come at the expense of the safety, lives and livelihoods of Australians trapped overseas.

Edited to add that I don't want the comments section of this post to degenerate into vicious arguments about the rights and wrongs of closing the Australian borders. As an immigrant myself, I obviously take it quite personally if someone implies that stranded people are to blame for their own predicament, or that the Australian government is right to ignore their plight and bar them from coming home.

I do not have the emotional energy to respond further to comments along those lines. Nor do I want to spend my Easter holiday monitoring comments to this post. This is an emotive issue, and I posted my letter to the MP in order to encourage others to do the same, and to provide something of a template, should it be helpful.

Comments

[lilysea]

The problem is, hotel quarantine is being so badly managed in Australia:

- people who have returned from overseas illegally leaving hotel quarantine and wandering around the community on public transport [this has happened MULTIPLE times in Western Australia alone]

- hotel quarantine security guards refusing to get vaccinated

- hotel quarantine security guards taking their masks off

- hotel quarantine security guards working second jobs as Uber drivers or at pizza shops

- poor ventilation of hotel rooms with COVID positive people

- quarantine hotels with COVID positive quarantinees still having weddings and 65th birthday parties in their downstairs function centre, which share a lobby/lift with people arriving from the airport from overseas

that Australia CAN'T take more quarantinees with the current system without a severe outbreak [especially as the proportion of returned Australians who have COVID increases every day, and increasingly they have the more-easily-transmitted UK strain]

[we've already had several serious outbreaks that started with Australians returned from overseas in hotel quarantine]

we need to

a) offer Australians who are overseas who are willing and able to stay put overseas in the short term an adequate living allowance that covers their rent, electricity bills, groceries, medical care in exchange for staying put;

b) move away from hotel quarantine in the Central Business District towards more remote and more secure quarantine facilities such as Darwin's Howard Springs quarantine facility or ex-army bases/ex-airforce bases; Fairbridge village [self contained tourist camping village]; Rottnest Island [self contained tourist village]

Quarantine facilities should not be in the central business district - someone should not be able to walk out a fire escape and catch a peak hour train! [This has happened multiple times!]

Quarantine facilities need to be within a 15 min ambulance ride or helicopter ride of a major hospital, but that doesn't mean the heart of the CBD.

The number of Australians who are currently returning is actually too many for the current system - we desperately need to improve how we do quarantine for returning Australians.

Or if we can't do that, we actually need to REDUCE the number of Australians returning each week...

[dolorosa_12]

I'm sorry, as an immigrant, I can't discuss this with you, because the things you are saying are incredibly upsetting to me.

Paying Australians overseas a stipend is not going to help them if they are unable to renew their visas, and therefore become undocumented immigrants. For example, people who were on student visas in the UK cannot remain on those visas once their studies have ended, and there is no automatic transfer from student to work visas (in fact, it's basically impossible for this to happen unless the person has a job offer with a company that is prepared to pay them quite a high salary). Immigrants who cannot prove that they have the legal right to remain in the country they're in will not be able to rent houses, and may therefore find themselves homeless.

I agree with you that the hotel quarantines need to be moved to more remote areas.

There is an unfortunate attitude in Australia that people who live their lives across oceans and borders — perfectly legally, through no fault of their own — are to blame for cases and lockdowns in Australia, that Australian immigrants were stupid for having 'travelled during a pandemic' (even though most of us were already living overseas when the pandemic started), and are to blame for everything that has happened to them.

[merit]

These sort of events seem so alarming because of how fortunate the situation is in Australia. Considering the tens of thousands of people who have abided by the hotel quarantine conditions, 'multiple' is very low indeed.

[shopfront]

I'm sorry to stick my nose in when you don't know me, but I'm another Australian overseas who finds this sort of talk incredibly upsetting and I'm frankly appalled at how widespread and unchallenged it seems to be back home. These are not problems Australians overseas can control or mitigate.

The government could absolutely choose to move quarantine to remote areas. It could similarly prevent any number of the things you've mentioned, if it chose to. None of these issues lack for feasible solutions. The government just doesn't want to pay the true costs or lacks the political will to fix things so higher numbers can safely return.

I can't help wondering what it's going to take to shift focus to where it actually belongs. Will our most vulnerable stranded citizens have to start living or even dying on their local embassy steps? People keep saying Australia can't take more like it's some immutable constant of the universe but it's not, it's an ongoing choice.

[dolorosa_12]

Please note, what I'm saying is not directed at lilysea, who I know has a) been extremely diligent in following public health advice to avoid contracting the virus or spreading it to others and b) has never to my knowledge expressed the views that I'm about to criticise. This is just general frustration about the way Australia has handled this entire issue.

An unfortunate side effect of Australia's competent handling of the pandemic is that there are so few cases (compared to the rest of the world) that when a handful of cases break out in a major city, the Australian public starts dissecting things in minute detail — where did the outbreak originate? what strain of the virus is it? where did the people go when they were infectious? locally transmitted or transmitted via overseas people in hotel quarantine? In countries where the virus has not been well contained, this kind of speculation is impossible — contact-tracing in the UK is basically non-existent, so it's pointless to even try.

While this focus on the details has been great for contact tracing and containing the spread of the virus, it has led to an unhealthy focus among Australians on placing blame on the spread of the disease on individuals and their supposedly 'selfish' choices. While I deplore the (relatively few) instances of people escaping from hotel quarantine and roaming around major cities (or people displaying symptoms and going on what appears to be shopping sprees while they await test results), most of the other instances of the disease spreading seem to be down to either poverty (contract employees having to work multiple jobs, or not being able to take time off due to a lack of paid holiday/sick leave), or a lack of adequate government financial compensation due to loss of business (e.g. the hotels continuing to hold mass events like weddings and conferences because they can't afford not to).

It also seems to have led to a widespread attitude (again, not one held by you, lilysea) that Australians as a whole have made smart, sensible choices, and that's why the country has survived the pandemic relatively unscathed. This often tips into a kind of blaming of those of us elsewhere in the world whose countries have not had such an easy time of it (with an undertone of, basically, 'you stupid Europeans made silly choices and therefore you deserve everything that happened'). It's a kind of magical thinking, as if Australians want to think that they, personally and individually, did something really clever to cause the country's relative good fortune in handling the pandemic response.

This attitude has made collateral damage of many groups of people — overseas Australians stranded and destitute, disabled and chronically ill people who have had to bear the brunt of the harshest restrictions on their own freedom of movement (because cities and states are so reluctant to impose mask mandates in crowded indoor areas), and precariously employed people. These people have been rendered invisible by the desire of Australians in general to revel in their good fortune and live their lives much as they did prior to March 2020.

[merit]

Best of luck. While the story has gained traction a few times, there doesn't seem much momentum to radically change things in the near future.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes, I think I read somewhere that around 65 per cent of surveyed Australians support the border closures staying the same.

It doesn't help that there seems to be an assumption that the stranded Australians were irresponsible and stupidly went on holiday overseas during a pandemic. The vast majority are people who were already overseas — perhaps visiting family, perhaps on a student visa, perhaps on a youth working holiday visa. There seems to be an attitude that everyone still overseas in March last year should have had a crystal ball and magically been able to see into the future and know that the pandemic would still be raging, one year on, still with no international flights. In fact, the rhetoric of the time was that a brief one-month lockdown would solve the pandemic.

From the perspective of e.g. a student doing a one-year Master's degree in the northern hemisphere, whose course would have finished in June/July that year, it would have made no sense to immediately rush home to Australia and abandon their degree. Likewise someone on a time-limited work visa — leaving may have meant they could never come back! I read an article about a family in Egypt (a mother and two teenage kids) who had to go back to Egypt while their husband/father applied for a new spouse visa — something Australia wasn't allowing him to do in country. What were they meant to do? The stranded Australians are not, in the main, selfish idiots who went on holiday during a global pandemic — they are ordinary citizens, trying to get home.

I don't hold out much hope of things changing, but the situation really hit a nerve and the lack of empathy for these people's situation is profoundly upsetting to me, for obvious reasons relating to my own personal circumstances. For a nation of (mostly) immigrants, Australians sure are hostile to immigration, in myriad different ways!

[lokifan]

<3 God, it's so grim. My Aussie housemate has lived in the UK for years, she has ILR and a life here - as you say, the image of people casually going on holiday is nonsense - and she can't get home to see her family even though her mother's been diagnosed with inoperable cancer :( Now luckily her mum probably has a decade, it's a slow-moving thing, but obviously it's still horrendous to be unable to get back during a family crisis like this.

[dolorosa_12]

It really is awful — your poor housemate!

(As an aside, when travel does become possible again, it is worth her — if at all possible — ensuring she has UK citizenship before she goes to Australia. You can lose ILR if you are away for more than six consecutive months in a single year, and from the sound of things that may end up being likely. Citizenship obviously can't be lost in that manner, although it is really expensive to apply for it.)

I was talking to my mother and sister about the whole situation, and they say that to be honest people in Australia don't seem to know this is happening. There are enough other political scandals going on that nobody's focusing on the plight of Australians stuck overseas.