Resources
 
Try this quiz In November 2007 on a street stall, RAC ran a quiz to test people's knowledge about the contribution refugees can make to societies which accept them.
 
Deported to Danger 40 asylum seekers rejected and deported by the Australian government were followed to their destinations by Edmund Rice Centre for Justice & Community Education, who, with the School of Education at Australian Catholic University, published their findings in September 2004. In arguments about whether or not Australian immigration processes get it right, and how often, you will find this booklet very useful. (747Kb PDF)
 
Debunking the Myths about Muslims (PDF 128 Kb) 19.12.05 The Edmund Rice Centre publicly released this document to deal with the stereotyping and discrimination which Muslim Australians have had to face in the wake of the "war on terror" and the riots on Sydney beaches. Read Edmund Rice Centre's media release (MS Word doc 33 Kb)
 

The Counter Kit

Former Minister for Immigration in the Howard government, Amanda Vanstone, accused a number of Australian school teachers of political bias for encouraging debate about the Australian government's treatment of people who seek asylum in our country.

She subsequently released an educational pack "Australia says yes to refugees!" which was sent to schools around the country. It portrays Australia as an open, humanitarian country that actively welcomes refugees into the community, but makes no mention of mandatory detention, forced deportations, the Pacific Solution, or TPVs. In fact, no reference is made to any of innumerable injustices to which asylum seekers and refugees in Australia were being subject to at the time, and as of July 2007 are still being subject.

In turn, Refugee Action Collective (Victoria) offers the counter kit linked below, "Australia should say yes to refugees!" We hope to correct the distortion of what we take to be a deliberately misleading and poorly researched document.

All files are in PDF form requiring Adobe Reader which is a free program.

For high speed broadband get the whole kit here in one go (3.02Mb) For slower broadband take it in two separate files: file no.1(1.51Mb) and file no.2(1.67Mb)
For dialup take it in 11 separate pages: page 1 365 Kb page 2 412 Kb page 3 466 Kb
page 4 443 Kb page 5 488 Kb page 6 517 Kb page 7 283 Kb
page 8 582 Kb page 9 230 Kb page 10 374 Kb page 11 361 Kb