Michael Green

Journalist, producer and oral historian

Pooling resources for a green future

In Architecture and building, Environment, The Age on

Many of us barely know who lives next door, but could sharing with our neighbours be the green future for our cities? Meets the Melbournians who want to change the way we live.

Giselle Wilkinson is dreaming of giving up her idyllic backyard. She lives on a leafy property in Heidelberg; a big block adorned with veggies, fruit trees, chooks and ducks.

Wilkinson is slim and fit, bearing a healthy glow from regular gardening and bike riding. The 54-year-old co-founder of the Sustainable Living Foundation has been walking the green talk for most of her life.

But now she hopes to take her commitment even further. She is working on a development that will put her land where her mouth is. “I’m only going to give this up for something better. Better for me means as sustainable and affordable as we can possibly make it,” she says.

‘Cohousing’ is a type of a residential development where your home is one of about 16 to 30 clustered around a common house and open space.

Picture this: just home from work, you lock your bike on the racks then walk to your door, chatting pleasantly with Mrs Jones on the way. Then you check on the kids, playing with their friends in the shared recreation room of the common house. A mouth-watering aroma wafts in from the common kitchen nearby. Tonight is shared meal night. Your dinner, cooked by your neighbour, is almost ready. You pour yourself a glass of white and put your feet up.

“I reckon you do it better when you do it together,” Wilkinson says. Cohousing residents own separate, self-contained homes, but regularly share meals and some facilities like a common garden, laundry, workshop and recreation rooms. But there are no hard and fast rules. Each project is different because the residents themselves drive the planning process.

Andrew Partos spent three weeks last year touring cohousing developments in Europe and North America. “These are not communes, gated-communities or religious sects,” he says, mindful of stereotypes.

With close-cropped hair and modern black-rimmed glasses, Partos is no alternative guru. He is a senior urban designer at VicUrban, the Victorian state land development agency and is keen to stress that cohousing can fit into mainstream city life. “In Denmark ten percent of new residential development is cohousing” he says. “People buy, sell or rent like anywhere else. They retain their independence but collaborate in the running of their community.”

Denmark is the cradle of cohousing. The movement began there in the 1970s and spread through Europe and then to the USA by the 1990s, taking root in California. According to Partos, there are 80 completed cohousing communities in the USA and over 100 more under construction.

In the developments he visited, Partos found that the supportive lifestyle attracted particular people. “There is a wide range, but…they are generally well educated, with professional careers ranging from childcare and teaching to engineers, architects, lawyers and doctors.”

Partos is confident the trend will catch on in Australia, pointing to its success in North America, where people also value the privacy and independence of their homes. He says VicUrban is keen to add cohousing to its development projects. “We see it as meeting many of our sustainability objectives. We’re currently researching and finding out where it might get some good support in Melbourne.”

For now, our suburbs look very different. We are building bigger houses for fewer people; half our homes now have only one or two occupants. On the fringes of our cities we have sown rows of costly, energy intensive McMansions. Stocked with appliances and poorly serviced by public transport, our houses are taking a growing toll on the earth’s fragile resources.

But our eco-footprint is not the only concern. We are also reaping a difficult social bounty from our building habits. Our suburbs cannot help but fashion our community life. “We shape our dwellings and afterwards, our dwellings shape us,” Winston Churchill said, wisely, in 1943.

Social researcher Hugh MacKay has tracked Australians’ belief that society is deteriorating. In his latest book, Advance Australia…Where?, MacKay says we tend to blame materialism, selfishness and a lack of connectedness for our social problems. But amongst this anxiety, MacKay senses a desire for change. “Many of the changes to our way of life have had the effect of fragmenting and isolating us and, in response, there’s a new craving for a sense of belonging. We like the idea of a small village, urban or otherwise. We want to reconnect; we want to feel part of an identifiable community.”

Cohousing offers reconnection. Residents usually try to establish a vibrant neighbourhood spirit. “The greatest benefit from a community point of view that you are creating a place where everyone knows each other,” Partos says. “If there is someone sick or elderly there are always people that will look out for them. The same with children, it creates a really safe environment.”

Housing affordability is also a thorny concern across the nation, but building smaller homes and sharing resources, like the laundry, tools and gardening equipment, can significantly cut costs. Crucially, this economisation is also a big plus for the environment. Partos found “universally high” eco-standards across the estates he visited. Typically, they had low energy, water and waste needs and encouraged alternative transport, recycling and homegrown veggies. “When you have a number of houses working together you can actually do things that individually would be very difficult and expensive. You can have very efficient central heating systems, or solar hot water systems, and the cost per dwelling is significantly less,” he says.

Ian Higginbottom, founder of Cascade Cohousing, in South Hobart, knows these benefits first-hand. Begun in 1991, Cascade was the first development of its kind in Australia. Within a short bike ride of downtown Hobart, they used passive solar design techniques to build ecologically sound homes.

But it wasn’t always easy. “We were held together by a common vision to build something,” Higginbottom says. When they finally finished their arduous owner-builder creations, old clashes surfaced from unresolved conflicts years before. “I could have rung people’s necks multiple times over,” he admits. “Any time you get a group of people together, that happens, it’s a part of being human beings.

“We were very lucky that we didn’t self-destruct about five years ago,” he says. Then, about a third of the residents decided to work hard at resolving the accumulated grudges and resentments within the group. The change was overwhelming. “All the tension went out of our meetings,” he says. “People who weren’t talking to each other started talking again.”

Higginbotham is now adamant that learning how to resolve conflict and deal with people is a crucial part of living in the community. “We’ve been through a learning curve and that’s incredibly fulfilling,” he says. “If we can’t make a community work with a set of neighbours, how do we expect our governments to resolve conflict and at a national and international scale?”

Despite Cascade’s success, there are still only two others like it in Australian cities – Cohousing Cooperative in Hobart and Pinakarri in Perth. With a red-hot real estate market, financing is usually the showstopper for new developments.

Adam Tiller, from Merri Cohousing in Melbourne’s inner north, says his group has been trying to secure land for six years. “We can get the money we need, but not quickly enough.” Despite its setbacks, they still have over 300 people on their mailing list and Tiller hopes that interest from Partos and VicUrban will boost their chances of success.

Back in Heidelberg, Giselle Wilkinson surveys her flourishing veggie patch, knowing it will soon disappear – albeit temporarily – to make way for the 16 units in the plans. With the backing of the not-for-profit organisation Common Equity Housing, she and a team of friends and volunteers have secured the two blocks adjoining her house.

They hope to begin the development within six months and she understands it won’t be all smiles and group hugs. “Sometimes even living with yourself can be hard. But this is about building our community and the resilience we need to face a very uncertain future.” She dreams that her blocks will become a “little haven on the planet” with links stretching far out into the community.

One thing for certain is that Wilkinson will build a future surrounded by people. She recently heard a story from another cohousing development. “Someone said it once took them 40 minutes to get to their front door from their push bike, just saying hello to everybody. I like that, because I think slowing down is a difficult thing to do these days.”

Having your own community, and independence too

Each cohousing development is different, but the blueprint looks like this: 16 to 30 self-contained houses are clustered around a common house and garden. Residents are independent. They own their own homes and buy and sell like anywhere else, but work together to run their small community.

Sharing – things like tools, a laundry and regular common meals – cuts costs, eco footprints and the isolation of suburban living.

Cohousing kicked off in Denmark in 1972, when the doors opened at Saettedammen, the first development of its kind. For the 27 families who built it, the goal was to create a greater sense of community than they found in normal subdivisions or apartment complexes. From then on, bofaellesskaber (literally, “living communities”) sprung up throughout the country.

Inspired by what they saw in Denmark, American architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett coined the term ‘cohousing’. Their 1988 book, Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves, spawned communities across North America. Now, there are 80 completed projects in the USA and over 100 more under construction.

In Australia, although cohousing organisations exist in almost every state, only a few developments are up and running. But that is set to change.

Around the world … and closer to home

Pinakarri Community – Perth

The first residents moved into Pinakarri in 1999 and now there are almost 40 people across 12 passive solar designed houses in Hamilton Hill, a suburb just south of Fremantle. They eat three shared meals a week in the common house and work together to care for their permaculture garden. If you want to know more, why not front up for some food? They host open community dinners on the first Friday of every month. Bring a plate.

N Street Cohousing – Davis, California

Think cohousing couldn’t happen in your street? N Street is a suburban street like any other. But over the last two decades, 17 houses have knocked down their fences and begun to share their gardens and meals – they call it ‘retrofit’ cohousing. Someone even donated their home for the group to use as a common house.

Cohousing is coming to Melbourne

The Heidelberg team is on the lookout for people interested in their cohousing community. Plans are well advanced for a ‘dark green’ development: there will be 16 units ranging between two and four bedrooms, as well as a common house and veggie garden. www.slf.org.au/communities

VicUrban

The state land agency wants to put a cohousing development on one of its sites. For more information – or to say you might be interested – contact VicUrban.

 

Distance education

In Environment, The Age on

Food miles has become an eco buzz term, but what does it really mean for consumers and the environment?

Here’s some food for thought: your beef has itchy feet and your white bread has the wanderlust. According to new research by Melbourne environmental organisation CERES, your pantry has seen far more of Australia, and the world, than you have.

On the way to your waistline, a typical Australian food basket pounds the highway for over 21 000 kilometres, the equivalent of nearly twice around our coast. And that’s just road transport. Including travel by sea and air, your dinner covers over 70 000 clicks: almost twice around the globe.

We’re talking about food miles, a concept that has become entrenched in the minds of environmentally conscious consumers in Europe, North America, and increasingly, Australia.

The argument goes like this: if you eat food grown closer to where you live, it needs less transportation and therefore, causes fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The twin threats of climate change and peak oil are looming large on our horizon, but buying low-energy local food can help stave off the disaster. Sounds straight forward, right?

Unfortunately not. Even Sophie Gaballa, the co-author of the CERES research, isn’t sold on the idea. “Food miles is only one part of the full life cycle assessment of food. It isn’t everything; there’s also lot of energy going into production”, she says.

But Gaballa believes that despite this criticism, being aware of the food we buy is an important part of an environmentally friendly lifestyle. “Waste, water and energy issues are pretty well established [in the public mindset] and food miles is linked with all those things. It’s a good next step in looking at sustainability.”

Among the products she surveyed, the worst offender was Danish pork sausages clocking in at over 25 000 kilometres. Chocoholics despair, your guilty pleasure weighs in at a chunky 14 500 kilometres. In the fresh fruit and veggie aisle, lettuces were the best at only 54 kilometres and bananas the worst, notching up 2746 long kilometres in the journey south from North Queensland.

If you’re looking for a low carbon diet, there’s now even a restaurant that can help you shed those excess kilos – kilometres, that is. The 100 Mile Café, in Melbourne Central, sources nine out of ten products from within 100 miles (160 kilometres) of the CBD. Ballarat is in but Ararat is out, Euroa yes but Echuca no.

The café’s ingredients list makes quirky reading: blueberries from Foster, rabbit from Lara, horseradish from Alexandra, eel from Skipton and walnuts from Bannockburn, just to name a few. According to restaurateur Paul Mathis, the closest product they source right now is spinach from Werribee South, just 30 kilometres away.

The ‘Locavores’, four women from San Francisco, coined the 100-mile slogan when they brought food miles issues to the table in 2005. They attracted media coverage in spades by challenging their bay-area neighbours to only eat food from within a 100-mile radius for the whole month of August that year. The movement’s popularity has grown and last year’s challenge, held in September, had thousands of participants from all over the USA.

For the Locavores, eating locally is not just about reducing our impact on the environment; it’s also about “our health, our communities and our tastebuds”. They believe local food tastes better and contains more nutrients. Your local dollar will also help revive the sagging fortunes of smaller farms and stimulate a sense of connectedness with your surroundings.

Across the Atlantic, UK retailers are leading the food miles race. Supermarket chain Tesco has begun work on a product labelling system to inform customers about the carbon footprint of each purchase. In March last year, the department store Marks and Spencer began special labelling for food imported by air. The company has also committed itself to sourcing as much food as possible from within the UK and Ireland.

This is when things start to get a little tricky. Australia is a significant agricultural producer: grain, beef and wine are our top three agricultural exports. In the year ending July 2007, these exports were worth a staggering $12.7 billion – more than triple our international aid contribution. Our farmers and our economy have a lot to lose if the Brits take exclusively to local fare.

Chief executive of the Winemakers’ Federation of Australia, Stephen Strachan, says that although there hasn’t been any impact on Australian wine exports to the UK just yet, “it’s pretty obvious it’s coming”. Strachan says he completely supports people’s desire to purchase eco-friendly products, but he argues that while carbon emissions are important, “so are issues like water use, efficiency and biodiversity…yet food miles doesn’t recognise the initiatives we’ve undertaken in those areas”.

For now, the Australian retailers are not pushing the same barrow as their UK counterparts. Coles spokesman, Jim Cooper, says that the supermarket chain is aware of the debate and also conscious of the “differing views of food miles as an environmental impact measure”. He says that “food labelling issues such as food miles are best addressed at an industry and government level, with representatives from all interested parties”. As it stands, Australian consumers are unlikely to see the miles on our aisles any time soon.

According to Steve Dowrick, Head of Economics at the Australian National University, our economy and the environment are not the only things to consider. “The other issue, which I think this type of debate seems to forget about, is what the impact would be on the producers of foodstuffs in developing countries,” he says.

“I’m concerned about carbon emissions, but I’m also concerned about the hundreds of millions of people in the world living in absolute abject poverty and with very low life expectancy and very high rates of illness and infant mortality”.  Dowrick says that while trade isn’t a panacea for global poverty, it is a key part of the solution.  “To cut down trade with the people who are already in hopelessly miserable poverty would make them even worse off”, he argues.

Dowrick is not saying it is wrong to buy local food, but suggests that if you are concerned about poverty as well as the environment you should consider the impact of not buying products from the third world. “People have to make their own minds up”, he says. “We would like them to have adequate information so they can come to the right judgement about what is most important to them.”

With such complex and conflicting priorities, finding the right information is a hard road to hoe. So what’s an eco-friendly consumer to do?

Tim Grant is working on the answers. He’s the manager of life cycle assessment at RMIT University’s Centre for Design. His team looks at the environmental impact of products all the way from the paddock to the plate. They don’t just assess transport emissions, but also the effects of production, processing and packaging.

Grant doesn’t think consumers should ignore the food miles debate altogether. “Food miles are a great way to begin a conversation,” he says. “We find out transport is maybe five or ten percent of the environmental impact. Then what’s all the other stuff? In food, it’s the use of land and fertilizer. Well, what are those things connected to? How can we reduce those?” he asks.

Grant says we need to compare the energy used to transport fresh produce against the energy eaten up by packaged goods and products grown products locally in unsuitable climates. His advice is that “your first priority would be to eat seasonal foods and then to work down from there. It’s a really ripe area for some research, excuse the pun.”

Gaballa also has some tips for the consumer who wants to make a difference. “Perhaps try to buy local food, eat in season or grow food in your own backyard if can. You could look at joining a food-co-op or visiting farmers markets. If there are organic options available and it’s affordable then that is ideal.”

Community education is a major goal at CERES; every year, over 60 000 students visit its site on the Merri Creek in East Brunswick. Gaballa has now added food miles issues to its education programmes. She hopes that her research will prompt people to consider where their food is coming from. “How is it grown? Is it something you want to know more about?” she says.

“I was teaching about organic farming and a student was looking at our carrot beds quite intently and said ‘How long before you start to see the carrots hanging off the branches?’ And it just hit me that we don’t know what food looks like when it grows”, Gaballa says. “But how would you know how a carrot grows? Because as far as the kids are concerned, carrots come from the supermarket.”

Seasonal fruit and veggies in Melbourne

Spring: asparagus, broad beans, chives, broccoli, parsnip, rhubarb, shallots, strawberries.

Summer: apricots, beans, beetroot, capsicum, cherries, chives, chillies, corn, cucumbers, eggplants, garlic, grapes, leeks, melons, peaches, plums, potatoes, raspberries, rhubarbs, shallots, squash, strawberries, tomatoes, zucchinis, basil.

Autumn: beetroot, cauliflower, grapes, garlic, leeks, parsnip, peas, pears, potato, pumpkin, spinach, sweet potato, chestnuts, walnuts.

Winter: broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbages, cauliflower, leeks, mandarins, oranges, parsnip, peas, spinach, chestnuts.

All year round: apples, carrots celery, grapefruit, lemons, lettuce, spring onion, onion, radish, silver beet, parsley.

Globe trotter

In Environment, The Age on

A Melbourne inventor’s illuminating idea could dramatically reduce lighting energy use all over the world. But he wasn’t even trying.

“The prospects are bright,” Graeme Huon says, and the pun is intended. The 58-year-old Mt Waverley man is the inventor of an energy efficient light globe that promises to revolutionise the way we light, well, pretty much everything. “This could be the next generation of lighting,” he says.

The technology, which he calls ‘controlled plasma’, will be a godsend for the environment. “Not only is it lower energy consumption, but it’s a much longer life product,” Huon says. His globes use one tenth of the energy of a standard 50-watt downlight and with a life of 15,000 hours, they last about ten times longer than the next best offering.

Huon rattles off features with pride. The globes are very small and will come in a range of colours, including the warm white of standard bulbs. They can be individually dimmed, are fully compatible with existing wiring, and over their lifetime will cost about half what we are used to paying.

And there’s more. The lights have in-built sensors that can be set to follow you around the house and can regulate their output according to the level of natural light at any given time.

But that’s not all, “Now for the steak knives,” Huon says. Each socket has a unique code, which means that if you want, you can control any light in the house from one switch – without any rewiring. “When I show people this, they just go ahh! and suddenly they say ‘But that means I can control the front when the visitors are coming’,” he says, smiling.

How is all this possible? Right now, our standard incandescent globes, halogen downlights and fluorescent tubes all need filaments and generate heat as well as light. Even low energy compact fluorescent globes need mini-heaters in the base to make them work.

In contrast, Huon’s globe is a “totally cold operating light”. The technology is a combination of three existing lights that don’t use filaments – neon, cold cathode and high intensity discharge – along with a new controller to regulate the way it works. “You can grab hold of it and not burn yourself and that indicates that it’s very efficient,” Huon says.

In time, the technology could be used in the whole range of lighting applications, from reading lamps to night-lights on sporting fields. But for the moment, Huon and his team have fashioned his invention into a product that will directly replace the current halogen downlights. They’re the little globes that sit flush with your ceiling and usually appear in rows, especially in newer houses or renovations.

“The halogen light is one of the worst wasters of energy. It has a short life and it gets extremely hot, which means you have to use expensive materials instead of plastic fittings,” Huon says. “In countries where it’s hot, you need air conditioning just to extract the heat generated by the lights. And yet they are ubiquitous.”

Getting rid of these greenhouse guzzlers could make a significant dent in our national energy use. “If we were to replace 75% of lights in homes with these globes in the next five years, we could save building one new power station,” Huon says.

Ever since Edison saw the light, new ideas have been shown as a glowing overhead bulb. But Huon, a world-leading inventor in acoustic technology, didn’t even set out to develop an efficient light. “We weren’t in lighting, we came at it from doing a lighting package for home cinema. I just said, well we need to make a better light. And we did and somebody told Canberra and all hell broke loose.”

That’s no surprise, because this technology may be a key to Australia phasing out inefficient bulbs by 2009-10 under targets announced earlier this year by Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Huon first developed the technology three years ago and now, his business CP Envirotech is moving quickly towards full commercialisation. “We began production in January this year and we’ll be shipping to customers in April,” Huon says. “They’re coming to a lounge room near you.” And after your house, next stop the world.

With his controlled plasma globes lighting the way, Huon is upbeat about our capacity to overcome just about any hurdle. “If you clearly identify what the problem is and then have no preconceptions about what the solution is, I reckon you can solve it every time.”

Kicking the footy habit

In The Age on

First published in The Age

THERE’S a culture of abuse in AFL football. OK, so some players have white-line fever on and off the field, but that’s not what I mean. My problem’s different.

I’m a Sherrin addict. That’s it. I’ve finally said it. I just can’t stop watching my team boot that ball.

In a writing class earlier this year, our lecturer began a weekly segment in which two students would interview each other, in front of the class, on a subject of their choice. The topic, he said, should be a hobby or interest of ours. Something we were passionate about.

That was when I first realised I had the habit. It finally twigged, much to my dismay, that I have no hobbies and know nothing about anything in particular. Nothing, that is, other than the Richmond Football Club.

My fellow students are mature-age writers in an esteemed creative writing course. I couldn’t very well admit such lowbrow tastes.

Football, after all, is the very antithesis of intellect. Through an ever-expanding winter, we are subjected to pages of print and hours of meaningless monosyllabic footy banter. Commentators ceaselessly construct mountains from molehills.

Now, at the end of the regular season, the September king tide of football-fuelled folly is upon us. Waves of cross-dressing misogynistic ex-players will soon flood our screens. This is the month when our addiction really takes its toll and, with Victorian teams in the hunt for the flag, there may be no other news to report.

Imagine, for a moment, that the national football wisdom, with all its detail, nuance and historical perspective, was instead turned to art. Or better yet, to science. Imagine all the fervent debates on tactics and all the hours spent watching game upon game were turned instead to the betterment of humanity. To a cure for cancer perhaps, or the development of renewable energies. Such a civilisation we would be.

Yet every home game in this dismal black and yellow season I walked to the ground with the ceremonial beat of culture in my chest. I felt connected to the others striding through the park today and to those from years and decades gone by. I walked with the hope for a close game, or at least a flash of brilliance from a new young player.

I stood in the same place and I knew that my Tiger friends would be there. We don’t need to plan. We just front up and launch into debate about the team for the week. When the game starts we growl and gesticulate in time with the play. This season, lose, lose or lose, I walked home with my earpiece while ignorant talkback callers bagged Richo.

My weekly football ritual, like family, gives me my place. It binds me to this town, to this year and last year, and to the hope of the year to come.

In a time where the same junk food is found in every big city and where media is merging the western world into one, footy is something distinctly Australian. Like us, the game was born of the meeting of cultures, from the indigenous game Marn Grook and from Gaelic football too.

Despite the futile expansionist policy of the AFL, Aussie Rules isn’t going anywhere. The Japanese and South Africans just aren’t interested. It’s our sporting oddity, stranger even than cricket, and that’s no easy beat.

Don’t get me wrong. Following the game isn’t a citizenship test, nor a call to dreaded nationalism. No one has to like it and it’s a good thing that not everyone does.

As the finals begin, we junkies should reflect on the possibility that the advance of civilisation might be hampered by our collective Sherrin addiction. Then we’ll head off to the game, thump our bellies and revel in the eccentric passion all of our own.

The writer’s triumphant endnote: A few months into semester I came clean to one classmate about my weekly habit. My bold move paid off: he was a diehard Demon fan and the very next week the Tigers flogged them. The first win of the season.

No work and no play

In Social justice on

First published on New Matilda

Unemployment is the lowest it’s been since the mid-70s, but there are people living in our community with no right to work. Michael Green investigates the realities of life for asylum seekers on Bridging Visa E

Paul (not his real name) wants to work. ‘Any sort of work.’ Although he is skilled, he doesn’t mind what he does. ‘Even the cleaning,’ he says. But Paul is an asylum seeker on Bridging Visa E  and the Federal Government doesn’t allow him to work, not even voluntarily.

‘I like to work, but nowadays someone said I can’t work. I’m at home, thinking too much on my problems, on my family and everything,’ he says.

Paul is also refused access to Medicare, or any other Government support services. ‘Surviving is a little bit hard,’ he says stoically. Paul is legally residing in the community, but Government policy has rendered him destitute; he must rely on private charity for the bare essentials of life.

The Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) doesn’t release the figures, but charities estimate that there are between 2000-4000 people across the country in the same situation, often for years.

‘The consequences for those people are extreme,’ says Tamara Domicelj, Director of the Asylum Seekers Centre (ASC) in Sydney. ‘We are talking about people that are lawfully residing in the community while they wait for a final decision. If you’re not allowed to work and you can’t access mainstream welfare entitlements, it literally is enforced destitution.’

It’s Refugee Week and community groups around the country have held barbeques, concerts, fairs and forums. From Sale to Darwin to Fremantle, there have been over 100 different events  reflecting public goodwill and support for the refugees who are a part of our community.

But for those few thousand asylum seekers like Paul, community support can only go so far to make up for a Government policy that takes away their ability to fend for themselves.

Asylum seekers arrive in Australia in one of two ways by boat or by air. Despite the media attention boat arrivals receive, those who come by plane constitute the majority. Most arrive on another type of visa, such as a student or tourist visa, and lodge their application for a protection visa once here. They are then put on a bridging visa, which allows them to stay legally in Australia while they wait for a decision in their case.

Usually, asylum seekers are granted Bridging Visa A,   which permits them to work and access Medicare. Many are eligible for welfare through the Government-funded Asylum Seeker Assistance Scheme administered by the Red Cross. But under three kinds of circumstances, asylum seekers are granted Bridging Visa E with conditions that deny them right to work or receive Medicare and welfare.

First, there are those who lodge their claim for a Protection Visa more than 45 days after their arrival. Secondly, are asylum seekers in detention who are released into the community due to health problems or other special circumstances, before their case is finalised.   And finally, there are asylum seekers who have had their application denied by both DIAC and the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), and are seeking either judicial review or Ministerial intervention.

These conditions are designed to act as a deterrent for lodging protection claims and subsequent appeals. According to DIAC, ‘The 45-day rule was introduced in 1997 as part of a package of measures aimed at minimising incentives for misuse of Australia’s onshore protection process by applicants in the community.’ The Department asserted that some people with no claims to refugee status had been submitting frivolous Protection Visa applications to obtain work rights and delay their departure from Australia.

Pamela Curr, campaign co-ordinator for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC) in Melbourne, argues that there has been no evidence of widespread abuse of the system. ‘I would like to see some figures showing that a large number of people were seeking asylum illegitimately,’ she says. ‘None of the community-based agencies who offer legal support, are going to help people who patently have no claim. We don’t have the resources.’

That punishment has serious human consequences, according to the ASC’s Domicelj: ‘Over the years we have seen a lot of severe depression, malnutrition, homelessness. We see situations of quite serious physical and psychological conditions that are going untreated. We have never had a huge influx of onshore asylum seekers . It makes no sense to have a set up where people are permitted to live in Australia but are denied the means to self-support. Over the last 18 months, DIAC has taken a number of positive steps but the fact remains there are still people out there who are completely reliant on charity.’

But the pursuit of asylum seeker rights by these advocacy groups has been criticised for undermining the Government’s ability to process claims efficiently. In Monash University’s People and Place journal last year, Adrienne Millbank argued that, ‘If asylum seekers are provided with a full set of social benefits, it will be difficult to persuade them to leave should their applications fail.’

Amy Camilleri, casework co-ordinator at Hotham Mission, which runs the Asylum Seeker Project in Melbourne, disagrees. She says they have found a substantial level of voluntary repatriation amongst the asylum seekers they assist through their casework program. ‘That means people don’t have to be forcibly removed by the Department.’ For the advocacy groups, the objective is not that all asylum claims be granted, but that people are permitted to support themselves while the decisions are being made.

Granting work rights may not just help these people to survive, but also add to the economy. During its time in office, the Coalition has consistently encouraged people to get into the labour force. The latest unemployment rate showed a 32-year low of 4.2 per cent, and Prime Minister John Howard commented, as he has before, that ‘the greatest human dividend out of good economic management is jobs.’ During his weekly radio message in early April, Howard stated, ‘The human value of having a job, the sense of self-worth and esteem it brings is incalculable.’

Melbourne University PhD candidate Gwilym Croucher undertook research on behalf of the Network of Asylum Seeker Agencies Victoria and the ASC in Sydney on the economic impact of allowing asylum seekers to work.

His paper, to be published this month in the Victorian Council of Social Services journal, Just Policy, finds that even taking into account costs of English classes, re-skilling and a higher than average unemployment rate, granting work rights to asylum seekers could add millions of dollars to the Australian economy.

Politically, there appears to be some pressure for change. In March 2006, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee recommended that Bridging Visa E holders be granted work rights. In relation to the current rules, it stated, ‘A policy which renders a person destitute is morally indefensible and an abrogation of responsibility by the Commonwealth.’  The Government Senators on the Committee produced a dissenting report.

At the same time, DIAC was conducting a comprehensive review of the whole bridging visa regime, consulting a wide range of stakeholders and presenting the findings and recommendations to the then Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone. Many months on, the Government is yet to release the report or a response.

A spokesperson for the new Minister, Kevin Andrews, says ‘We are considering the report and as such it would be inappropriate to make comments on the visa at this time.’

Labor is promising reform. At its National Conference earlier this year, it moved to abolish the 45-day rule and may go further to ensure work rights for all asylum seekers.

While reports are considered and discussions continue, Paul is languishing with nothing to do. But during the last two weeks he has taken a risk that could jeopardise his bridging visa. The ASRC has moved offices and Paul has spent his days volunteering to help them relocate painting the walls, steam cleaning the carpets and even demolishing a partition.

‘If they ask me to volunteer work everyday for somewhere, I like to go and do, it’s a good feeling for me. I’m not thinking about the money or anything, just I want to go on the life, I mean just not sitting at home, just go and do something. It should be benefit for someone, for me also, a good relief for my mind if I do something better for the public’.