PETER Kuek-Kong Lee believes Australians should walk in the shoes of a refugee before passing judgement on their motives or methods of seeking our country’s protection.
Peter, a Vincentian with the Burleigh Heads Parish Infant Saviour Conference, is the instigator of an innovative project with his conference that began providing free migration advice to Gold Coast and Logan refugees this month.
“There has been a lot of publicity in the media about asylum seekers and I like to refer to the quote made by Julian Burnside QC last year that ‘…at the current rate of arrivals it would take about 20 years to fill the MCG with boat people’,” he said.
He believes it is up to Catholics to correct the many misconceptions about refugees and asylum seekers in the public arena and to lobby the government for a genuine humanitarian approach to refugee and asylum issues.
And if anyone should know what they are talking about when it comes to the reasons people ‘take to leaky boats to cross an ocean to Australia’ it is Peter Lee.
Peter was born in Malaysia to staunch Catholic parents and the family ‘moved all over Malaysia’ with his father’s work for the civil service.
“I came to Australia in 1968 as a 19 year old and went to the Christian Brothers College in St Kilda in Melbourne,” he said.
“I wanted to be a journalist but couldn’t get in, then I wanted to do social work but at that time there were only two courses offered Australia-wide so I studied an Arts degree at Australian National University (ANU) Canberra.”
Finishing his degree, Peter joined the public service and after various positions found his niche in life when he took a position with the Immigration department.
“I started with Immigration in 1979 and six months after joining the department I had my first overseas posting to select Vietnamese refugees from Indonesia and Malaysia,” he said.
What followed was a 25-year career with the Department of Immigration and six overseas postings.
Peter said he was sent to Malaysia twice, was posted to Sri Lanka during the interracial riots in 1983, went to China twice and also to San Francisco, USA.
“I don’t think people really understand the definition of a refugee or what Australia’s obligations are in respect of the international treaty it has signed,” he said.
He said when he first joined the Department of Immigration, Australia was a lot more welcoming than it was now.
“I suspect with the hardships in Australia people are saying, ‘why are we helping these people when we have problems of our own’,” he said.
“I think the media is partially to blame and I think there is a little bit of compassion fatigue in the community.
“The (John) Howard years I must say have not helped either, the Howard Government was very hard on refugees in terms of giving them asylum in Australia, they made it extremely hard and in my view unfairly hard.
‘The current government has improved things but they are not without flaws either.”
He said the procedure during those years of giving Temporary Protection Visa’s (TPV) as opposed to giving Protection Visa’s created two classes of refugees.
“And that really didn’t help set the tone for us being compassionate to refugees and indeed being true to our international obligations,” he said.
Peter said Australia had signed the International treaty relating to the status of refugees in 1951 with 147 countries now signatories to the convention.
“When people are fleeing persecution, when they come on leaky boats dying on the high seas they are not doing it for fun, they are doing it because of fear of their lives,” he said.
Peter said Australians faced with similar situations would make similar choices to survive and protect their families.
‘They flee because they are in fear of their lives, they are being persecuted and I don’t think Vietnamese fleeing the Communists regime in 1975 is terribly different to the people fleeing persecution here now,” he said.
After leaving the Department of Immigration, Peter went back to university to complete his law degree and was admitted to the Supreme Court in the ACT in 2004.
After working for several years in Canberra, Peter made the move to the Gold Coast and is now continuing his compassion for refugees and their problems both on the work front and as a volunteer.
He is director of Migration Services for a law firm with offices on the Gold Coast and Brisbane, but the workload leaves him with no time to offer practical volunteer support for his local St Vincent de Paul conference in terms of their home visits and other activities.
That led Peter to think of ways he could utilise his existing skills to help the needy.
He approached Infant Saviour conference president Keith Furniss with the idea for the free Migration Advice service and with the support of other Infant Saviour Vincentians the project is now up and running.
“I’m one of the foot soldiers if you like,” he said.
“There is a committee working with me, but I’ve got the legal and the technical expertise on this so I’m spearheading it but I can’t do it without the others.”
Peter is hoping to swell the legal and technical expertise with volunteers from several migration agent classes he teaches at Griffith University on the Gold Coast and ANU in Canberra and his lecturing to students on immigration and refugee law.
“I always ask my students if they have thought about volunteering in this way,” he said.
While the free advisory service is a first for a St Vincent de Paul conference, Peter is hoping the project will quickly spread to other local conferences.
“I know as night follows day this will have a life of its own,” he said.
He said there was only one real pro bono refugee and immigration legal agency in West End, Queensland, but their funding had been reduced.
“We know there is a need for this service and I think this will grow and from my vision and I perceive the vision of my group initially in Burleigh we will offer one evening a week and in Logan we will offer one half to full day a month,” he said.
Peter said as the community became aware of the service, demands would grow and more volunteers would be needed.
“I would love for us to start this off as the template for other Vinnies, I think they will be interested, but the issue is whether they can get the pro bono accredited migration agents to service it,” he said.
