US military offer to repatriate women and children blocked by passport refusal
The lawyers’ letter to the government in August suggested several ways this could happen, including having the documents removed from an Australian consular post in Iraq and collected by the Americans, or drawn up in Australia and forwarded to Syria by a lawyer or family representative.
Dabboussy, one of the authors of the letter and the father of a woman brought to Australia in 2022, told this imprint that the government had not responded to his letters.
Kamalle Dabboussy speaks out after her daughter Mariam is brought back by the government in 2022.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
The letter was sent as a follow-up to a meeting between Dabboussy, Tinkler and the minister in June. Notes of the meeting presented to Parliament show that Burke rejected direct requests to help women and children return to their homes.
“The government currently has no plans to move people out of the camps. If people can get out.” [themselves]”There is no obstacle to their return,” he was quoted as saying.
This is a reference to long-standing government policy that if people can pay people smugglers and leave the camps and apply to the Australian embassy, the government will have no choice but to issue passports.
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In September, a group of six women and children managed to do so by escaping from Al Roj camp and finding their way to the Australian embassy in Lebanon. The government is legally obliged to provide passports to validly applying Australian citizens.
The documents reveal another meeting between Burke and the lawyers in August of last year, before the federal election. Again at that meeting, he rejected any aid to women and children.
Handwritten notes of this meeting, which are in some ways cryptic, show that this was politically very difficult.
“Politics is harder at the end of this period,” says a memo attributed to “TB,” or Tony Burke. “Public pressure makes the job difficult. Do not ask for the government” [sic] to rule it out.”
The memo suggests that Burke was personally sympathetic to calls to bring women and children home, but that doing so would be too politically unpopular and would harm their cause if advocates tried to put pressure on the government through public advocacy.
The opposition has claimed that since the six returned to Australia in September, the government has been conspiring to secretly send them back.
On Wednesday, they seized another line of handwritten notes released regarding the predictions: “C’ment to [unreadable] A government source who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter said this could not be read as Burke offering “a commitment to finding a way forward.”
However, opposition home affairs spokesman Jonathon Duniam said: Australian They “openly assert” their promise to help return women and children home.
Burke said in a statement that the memos “confirm what the government has always said.” There was a request from Save the Children for a repatriation operation. Rejected.”
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