What defines a refugee? What gives a person refugee status? According to the United Nations Human Rights Convention a refugee is someone who:

"Owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it."

The reason I am discussing this at the moment is simply because this is what is in the Australian news right now.

On April 16, a boat from the Australian coastguard was sent to pick up 49 Afghan refugees. On its way back to the Australian coastline, the boat exploded. Three refugees died, two are still missing, one far as I know is currently in Fremantle Hospital. At the moment there is an investigation into the matter but they have not found the cause as yet.

For the politicians though and the media, it’s something to talk about. Colin Barnett is the state premier for Western Australia and is the leader of the State Liberal Party. It was for him, a definite case of open mouth and insert foot because he immediately claimed that the Afghan refugees had clearly set off the explosion themselves.

That doesn’t add up though. See, these people are fleeing persecution in one country which means they really don’t want to die. So why would they logically want to blow up the very boat that is taking them to the country they wanted to escape to? It makes no sense.

That’s not where the story ends however. Early Monday morning, The Australian landed on the newsagents’ shelves across the country and one of the articles was written by a journalist called Paul Maley. He spoke to the International Organisation For Migration’s representative for Sri Lanka, Mr. Mohamud.

See, with the Sri Lankan government constantly claiming that war will soon be over, the Sri Lankan diaspora is all up in arms all over the world. I set up an internet test to prove this. All the latest news from Reuters and Associated Press and similar wire services that pertain to Sri Lanka turn up in my email inbox. There are news reports of what Tamil Tigers are saying, what the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora is saying, what the Sri Lankan Sinhala diaspora is saying and so on. The idea that the war might soon be over has galvanised a lot of the diaspora into action, each trying to coerce international organisations and the like into having a certain kind of impact on the situation at home.

I am not telling you all this to pick sides, I want to show you what the general atmosphere here is like so you can understand why this happened next.

The Sri Lankan civil war is really old news to most journalists here. Having never had much contact with the country except for maybe in cricketing terms, they don’t feel a need to report on what’s happening in Sri Lanka that much. However with the refugee crisis and the Sri Lankan government constantly claiming that the war is at an end, which would be newsworthy in the Australian media whenever it does happen, some journalists like Paul Maley are open to hearing from the Sri Lankan diaspora.

Especially since they are now raving away for whatever sort of change they want (seriously, everyone wants something different), and holding demonstrations and rallies outside Victoria’s State Parliament in Melbourne. So Mr. Mohamud got to speak.

This is what he had to say: that the Australian government better start thinking about Sri Lankan refugees because the number of Sri Lankan refugees is going to start increasing as people flee the country from the north and the south. He also said that it would be hard to determine which asylum seekers were genuine refugees fleeing due to persecution and which asylum seekers would be leaving the country due to economic hardship.

Does the man have a point? Yes, he does. People are not stupid. They are going to, if they see no other option, lie to get out of a bad situation into a good one. How does one tell if the person you are interviewing at the border is being truthful about his experiences or not especially when there is the possibility of a language barrier?

There were lots of questions Paul Maley could have asked as a journalist. That very same day (April 20) the Sri Lankan government announced that they had saved 5000 civilians who were now going to have to live in temporary camps in the south, camps that by all reports were not necessarily the best place to be in.

Paul Maley did not contact the Australian Department of Immigration to ask what they intended to do to prepare for a large influx of Sri Lankan refugees or whether they had even anticipated the possibility of it occurring. The best he could do after interviewing Mr. Mohamud at length for the article was to get some figures from the department’s website. He could have contacted UN representatives and other international organisations to find out if their predictions agreed with Mr. Mohamud’s or if they had different statistics.

What about the fact that while Mr. Mohamud has a point, there is a question to be asked as to whether economic hardship can or cannot justify refugee status? If you have no job and no prospects of getting one, if you have no skills or no way of improving them and thereby no way of supporting yourself and there is no welfare route for you to take, is that not economic hardship and is that not then fair cause for being defined as a refugee?

Would you not want to leave a situation like that for one where you can at least get welfare and a job — even a menial one? While I am sure this idea may fall down once you throw a few examples at it, would it still not be worthwhile to explain how and why this might occur? So why did Paul Maley not investigate further? Why did he not go on to interview some of the Sri Lankan diaspora who have turned up here as refugees already?

Instead he wrote a very well written descriptive piece about what Mr. Mohamud had to say and then claimed that "officials" and "experts" all agreed on this perspective. Mr. Mohamud’s viewpoint might be the only one in the article but it does not do him any credit nor give him any credibility. Instead, Paul Maley’s handling of it makes it look as if it was written via a press release. What could have been a great front or main page worthy investigative piece of journalism was instead a four paragraph long fluff piece that got limelight for about 10 minutes on the website and probably got buried with all the wire service notices about Sri Lanka.

With so many people vying for journalism jobs in this country, the people lucky enough to have them in the middle of an economic crisis should probably attempt to do a good job. That being said, perhaps he was busy chasing up other news stories that his editor felt were more newsworthy or had a bigger audience or were more relevant.

Is it disheartening? Slightly, I don’t want one diaspora to be favoured over another but I would like to see more news relevant to the different diasporas in Australia given more air time and more column inches. The people in the diasporas may have turned up here willingly or otherwise but they still feel a connection to where they have come from and they rely on the Australian news to keep them informed.

This is possibly why the media industry in all the formats are finding it hard to prevent bankruptcy. The Chicago Daily Tribune is going bankrupt as I write this. When you do not cater to your audience sufficiently, they go online. They do what I do and spend the five to 10 minutes necessary to understand the free RSS and Google feed reader system and then they get their news about whatever place or subject they want to hear about straight from Reuters, AFP, AP and the other wire services straight into their email inbox. No cost. No need to buy the paper today or tape the news.

It’s not going to tell you things like people in Tamil Nadu reversing their political position or the fact that people are still discussing the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team or for that matter give you the latest updates on the cricket scores from Bangladesh.

Go ahead, by all means buy your local paper — The Sunday Leader, The Australian, The Freo Herald — whatever it is, if it gives you what you want to know. You should support it if it does. But if you know that you are going to spend half an hour looking for anything that’s relevant to you, then why not just save yourself the time and go online?

Besides, while you are online, you can head over to The Australian and tell Paul Maley to get on with doing a better job. Or at least to step aside for me.