Sponsors: What If You Could Start Over?

Australia has a refugee problem. More to the point, we have a problem with refugees packed onto overcrowded, unseaworthy boats, leaving Indonesia and making for our northernmost island outposts. While nearly all of those people are eventually found to be genuine refugees with a right to settle in Australia, what happens between their dangerous sea journey and that decision is fraught with controversy. And in the past couple of months, it’s become a sponsorship controversy, as well.

Our Federal Government has decided that the best course of action is “offshore processing”, so these asylum-seekers are transported to detention centres on the Pacific Island nation of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Whether this should happen or not is a deeply divisive topic, and we all have our opinions – including me – but the ethics aren’t up for debate in this blog. The long and short of it is that this is how asylum-seekers are handled in Australia, and it set the stage for a sponsorship-related showdown.

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