14^th August 2013
The ECAJ has had a policy on refugees and asylum seekers since 2009. We are looking at updating it to take into account the government’s new PNG/Nauru policy. The ECAJ obviously cannot simply announce that it has made a policy change unless it has debated and approved the change intern­ally. The item is on the agenda for the ECAJ’s Committee of Man­age­ment meeting on August 27. If there is agreement by the Committee of Man­age­ment, the policy change could be adopted in advance of the meeting.
Since the Gov­ern­ment first announced the new reset­tle­ment arrange­ments with PNG, much more has been published about the way the policy will operate. It has also since become clear that the pro­pos­i­tion that certain refugees will “never” be resettled in Australia is not accurate. Persons who are found to be refugees and who are resettled in PNG or Nauru can still apply to come to Australia as regular migrants, including by way of other com­pon­ents of Australia’s human­it­ari­an program. In addition, a further reset­tle­ment agreement with Nauru was announced on 3 August 2013.
A draft res­ol­u­tion to amend the ECAJ’s existing policy on refugees and asylum seekers has now been prepared and cir­cu­lated to the ECAJ’s Committee of Man­age­ment. A link to that text appears below. The existing policy can be accessed at http://www.ecaj.org.au/policy-platform/ (Item 7). Gov­ern­ment pub­lic­a­tions con­cern­ing the PNG Agreement (x3) and Nauru Agreement, and a Refugee Policy Review Back­ground Paper prepared by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies can be accessed here on the ECAJ website.
Members of the community are invited to comment on the draft res­ol­u­tion via the ECAJ FaceBook page at https://www.facebook.com/ECAJewry or by Twitter https://twitter.com/ECAJewry or by email [email protected].
Comment will be open for 1 week only from 5:00pm on August 14 to 5:00pm on August 21. Any comment which is abusive in any way (including racist or defam­at­ory comment) will be deleted.
The ECAJ will not regard comments we receive as a de facto poll, and numbers of people express­ing a par­tic­u­lar viewpoint will not be con­sidered in any way to be reflect­ive of the level of community support for that viewpoint. We are seeking con­sidered, evidence-based comment that the ECAJ Committee of Man­age­ment can take into account. The final decision on ECAJ policy will be made by the Committee of Man­age­ment.
Click HERE to read ECAJ proposed Policy change.