Review of Chasing Asylum (2016) by Alex M — 19 Jun 2016

Out of Date and Out of Touch.

It will come as a surprise to no one who sees this film that filmmaker Eva Orner has been living in the United States since 2004. She has adopted the shrill tone and reckless disregard for facts which are characteristic of long suffering American liberals who have come to believe that the importance of their missions override fair and reasoned discourse. See any liberal documentary like anything Michael Moore has made. I hate guns but my point is, no one was convinced by only an idiot could be convinced by those films- do you really think anyone who supports or opposes gun rights before seeing Bowling for Columbine changed their opinion after?

Australia is not the United States and to convince an aussie audience you need to have the facts on your side and you need to make a good argument- This film has neither.

Most of Orner's insider footage comes from 19 year volunteers who worked in the two offshore detention centres. They are very young and naïve and say things like, "I didn't expect a detention centre to have walls." Their evidence amounts to little more than living in detention is unpleasant.

Orner interviewed the families of two asylum seekers who died and never reckoned with the obvious fact that both were economic migrants. Their families were well off, in large houses in Iran, and they were in no danger. It is tragic that they died but the families appeared to be grieving that their children undertook such a reckless course of action unnecessarily. Their inclusion in the film directly supports the argument for Turning Back the Boats. They had no right under any international treaty to move to Australia. Using their senseless deaths to try and "shame" Australia simply doesn't work.

Orner also shows a group of Afghans living in Indonesia waiting for the chance to migrate to Australia. She estimates the number of migrants waiting for the Australian government to change its policy to be in the tens of thousands. If that's true, then it's a bit cheeky to make the argument that changing the policy wouldn't result in an immediate jump in tens of thousands of new migrants on new boats. She literally shows families and groups of men waiting in a holding pattern, the film has zero self-awareness. Also speaking of zero self awareness, in that segment the film shows the group of afghan men sitting in a circle watching two preteen boys dance together. This is the bacha bazi (Translation -boy play) culture which is paedophilia. Even the Taliban banned it. Orner showed this ostensibly as an example of the diverse culture migrants have to offer. She apparently never questioned whether that aspect of the culture is something that Australians would want to add to their own.

At the screening I attended, Orner did a QA session. In it, she mentioned she mentioned the personal reasons why she made this film. Her parents were holocaust survivors and made a new life in Australia. The international treaties governing refugees has deep personal meaning for her. Her personal stake in the issue, real or imagined, has made her hopelessly biased. At the QA she mentioned the recent baby who remained in Australia, baby Asher. She said, "Nauru is no place for a baby." I think that would be news to the hundreds of babies born on Nauru and by her definition, they should all be eligible for a new life in Australia.

Lastly this film is woefully out of date. In one section it shows that Germany took in 1 million migrants in one year while Australia only took in 16,000. This information is listed with zero analysis of how that's working out for Germany. So it's left for the audience to ask itself: How is that policy working out for Germany, and how is our policy working out for Australia? That leads to the next question an engaged audience member must ask themselves:

Between Germany and Australia, which country is copying the other's asylum seeker policy today?

It is Germany that has adopted Australia's Turn Back The Boats policy. I wonder why.