McGorry slams refugee policy 'failure'

Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry wants the major parties to show moral
leadership with a bipartisan approach to asylum seekers instead of using them as a
political football.
Professor McGorry was addressing a Melbourne rally, one of several staged across the
country on Sunday to mark World Refugee Day.
He appealed for what he termed "bipartisan morality" on asylum seekers from Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.
"We should just take this whole issue out of the election platform and get behind a
bipartisan approach," he said.
"We need moral leadership on both sides of politics.
"They're both professing to have high moral values, they're both religious people,
let's see those values put into practice."
The Australian Greens suggested the federal government use World Refugee Day to
immediately lift its suspension on the processing of asylum seekers from Afghanistan
and Sri Lanka.
Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young says the government must recognise the harmful
implications of its policies.
"We are now seeing women and children, men, detained indefinitely in desert prisons
and the mental health impact of that is going to be significant into the future,"
she told AAP.
"Ninety-six per cent of people that arrive by boat end up being genuine refugees and
yet these are the very same people we are detaining indefinitely in the middle of
the desert - simply because they are fleeing persecution.
"The government's policy is harming people."
The Australian Human Rights Commission said a spike in asylum seekers was not the
time for Australia to turn its back on them.
"The annual figures released just last week by the UN refugee agency show that more
than 43 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2009, the
highest number of people uprooted by conflict and persecution in the last 15 years,"
Commission president Catherine Branson QC said.
She said recent public debate about asylum seekers had often overlooked the fact
that they make up a very small percentage of Australia's immigration intake -
Australia received less than two per cent of asylum claims made in industrialised
countries in 2009.
At the World Refugee Day rally held in Brisbane, Afghani refugee Chaman Shah said
asylum seekers came to Australia illegally because they didn't have any legal
documents.
He likened the situation to escaping a burning house - you save your skin first
rather than asking permission to leave.
"What if your house is on fire? You just want to get out of there, you don't think
at that instant should you have your proper documents with you," he told AAP.
"All you think is to get out of there, no matter what."