Opinion Pieces

Eve Lester, ‘Planned Destitution for People Seeking Asylum: An “Act of Grace”?’ Right Now Magazine (online), 20 August 2018

With a new round of cuts slated to take effect as early as this week, a growing number – potentially thousands – of women, children and men seeking asylum in Australia are at risk of experiencing destitution and homelessness (if they aren’t already) because of a longstanding but constantly changing government policy of “planned destitution”. The policy’s effects are to produce avoidable social and economic exclusion, denying extremely vulnerable people, even children, access to the basic necessities of life. Its worst effects risk starving people out of Australia and forcing them to return to the very persecution from which they have fled.

Eve Lester, ‘25 Years of Mandatory Detention – From “Interim Measure” to Immovable Policy’ The Guardian (online), 5 May 2017

Twenty-five years ago, 5 May 1992, seemed to be just another day at the office. I was working at a community legal centre in Melbourne. Our office was a windowless cubbyhole in a Migrant Resource Centre in a back street of Prahran – a space shared with another community legal centre, social workers, English as a second language teachers and countless community groups, their religious gatherings and their (mostly) delicious cooking smells.

Susan Harris Rimmer and Eve Lester, ‘Australia’s Guantanamo dilemma’ The Drum Opinion (online), 5 February 2009

President Obama has made a clear and decisive promise to close Guantanamo Bay. This means solutions will have to be found for the 250 remaining detainees. Should Australia accede to two requests from the Bush administration in its closing weeks for Australia to accept for resettlement a small number of those former Guantanamo Bay prisoners who will not be charged?