Category Archives: International

First thoughts on the Asian Century White Paper

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The ALP hit the airwaves in force this morning to tout the Asian Century White Paper. In typical Labor fashion though they appeared not simply to be putting the cart before the horse, but completely missed the need for a horse in the picture.

A centrepiece of the Government’s white paper is the up-skilling of the Australian community in Asian languages and Asia literacy in general, and education is recognised as key. Peter Garrett was interviewed by ABC TV News Breakfast and, remarkably for an Education Minister, made no reference to and no recognition of the very first, most fundamental and most obvious task in achieving this. There are simply very very few Asian language teachers in the education system. It’s the bottleneck in the sytem. When Julia Gillard was interviewed by Fran Kelly half an hour later it was clear the ALP, characterstically, have simply failed to miss this point. It’s like they skipped class during Policy 101 – don’t just describe what you intend to achieve but offer how you will achieve it. That is in fact what policy is. Without it you’re delivering vacuous platitude and rhetoric. And pretty quickly in Kelly’s interview with Gillard it was clear that was all the ALP had to deliver. When specifically asked about the lack of teachers Gillard waffled, told us as former Education Minister she recognised finding teachers was a challenge, then deflected the question by turning her answer into something about encouraging kids to study Asian languages in school. ?!!

So here’s a bit of concrete action of the type the ALP are incapable of delivering or indeed conceiving. The very first dollar, first million dollars, first $60 million the Government needs to spend in order to achieve some substance out of this rhetoric is in equipping universities and offering generous scholarships and bursaries to Education students who take on an Asian language and Asian studies. This is how you deliver the first prerequisite outcome – the teachers.

There’s an obvious part of our community who are best positioned to take a lead role in engaging Australia in the Asian world – Asian Australians of course. The ALP’s track record on encouraging Australian schoolkids to further studies in the Asian languages of their roots, so that they might one day operate in these languages at a level that can be useful in business or as educators? In New South Wales the former Labor Government implemented a system of handicapping school children with a non English speaking background should they choose to study the languages of their parent or parents. Students are made ineligible to enrol in Beginners or Continuers language courses, instead forced into “Heritage and Background Speakers” courses. There was a perception that students of NESB were unfairly advantaged in the HSC. It has its roots in xenophobic profiling of Asian students in particular. Consider how absurd it would be if in secondary English examinations similar double standards existed for kids coming from an English speaking background. The net result is Australian kids from Asian backgrounds are discouraged from further study in the native language of one or more of their parents. Yes that’s right – the ALP’s track record is to dumb down our capacity for Asian language and literacy.

Anti-Americanism

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This week the US Embassy in Libya was attacked, and among the casualties was US Ambassador, Chris Stevens. It’s one of a number of violent anti-American protests across the Middle-east, and they’ve spread throughout the world, including my own country – one of the US’s oldest allies.

This is not like some youtube video that insults the prophet Muhammad, though that is another manifestation of the same problem smoldering in the background. This piece of youtube profanity is just another tinder of fuel ignited by irrational racial and religious fear and hatred. An innate sense of racial superiority, an unjust distribution of political and economic power, and a long history of shortsighted ill-directed and excessive exercise of military power are the causes of all this anti-Americanism. The only way it would ever end is if everyone, no matter what background, just didn’t feel the way they did about ‘the other’. Nobody’s been more violent, killed and terrorised more people, destroyed homes and communities more than “our” side. These people feel powerless to do anything about all the meddling the US has done in the Middle-east.

The US, like all historical super-powers, will wane one day. Some people think they’re on the decline now. The number of enemies they’ve racked up in their century of power is going to be overwhelming, and brainless, ill-directed violence will probably be exacted more and more against them, just as Americans have done really since their nation’s beginnings. Many in the US sincerely see and portray themselves as the great liberators of the past century and beyond, but the experience for an ever increasing proportion of the world is quite different.

I’m saying nothing original, there are many Americans who see it the same way I do. Nations are big and diverse things and it’s too easy to portray Americans as ‘being like this’, just as it is to see all Muslims through the narrow filter of prejudice.

The cold hard reality is, there is no nation more reviled and yet more loved than the US.

Obama enlists Australia’s help to keep China in check?

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With all our moral superiority surely we are guaranteed to prevail. Remind me again – what are we prevailing against?

During Barrack Obama’s visit to Oz last month, if you could find your way through the standard rhetoric that America has no closer friend and ally than (err… where are we playing tonight?), the ‘close personal relationship’ between the two leaders, and the various stupifying “Barrack can speak Ozzie” and “kangaroo was on the menu”, one actual meaningful theme managed to get some representation by our media, albeit often misrepresented to the point of contradiction.

The US will rotate 2500 marines a year through the Northern Territory and the US Navy will some time soon have a semi-permanent presence out of Western Australia. This is a small presence in comparison to other coutries who enjoy the US military’s favour. The universal media take on this is that we are sending some sort of a message to other nations of the region, specifically China. With reference to China the commentary on our common purpose with the US varies only in degree from the mild ‘to address’, others ‘to counter’, ‘to contain’, ‘target’, ‘take an aggressive stance’… to the most unfriendly ‘to encircle’. Whatever word you use it articulates a paranoia about the growing importance of China’s economy and what it might mean for Chinese influence.

Much was read into Obama’s speech to the Australian Parliament but the message contained in it that was directed to China was inferred, oblique, gentle, and tempered by in fact praise for China. All of the inspiring and positive things Obama had to say on a broad range of subjects were almost completely unreported in the media and subsumed by narrowly focused overblown reporting of some sort of defiance toward China. I’d urge anyone to listen to the man’s own words and completely ignore the headlines in the media which serve no purpose but to heighten mistrust toward China.

http://media.smh.com.au/news/national-news/in-full-obamas-address-to-parliament-2778964.html

The media seem to be stuck in a cold war era imaginary world where we with our friends the US are the good guys and China the bad guys. What makes them bad? Obama made oblique reference to economic protectionism, government which lacks the legitimacy of the will of the people and violation of universal standards of human rights. But anyone who thinks we the West can claim any sort of moral high ground on such things is naively and tragically mistaken.

In the city of Falluja where the US saw its most intense fighting during the Iraq War there’s a stark increase in the number of birth defects among newborn children, most reports putting it at between an 11-15 times increase over the period prior to the US lead invasion. There’s a cemetery dedicated to children born with serious birth defects who survive only a short time. The fallout from US weaponry appears to be (and logically) to blame – US materials such as depleted uranium and pospherous both mooted as either definite or probable cause depending who’s doing the surmising.

To wreak such suffering on small children, many of them as yet unborm, is as sinister and insidious as humanity gets. This is done by Western peoples in our name. And yet the US has done this before. Two generations later the chemicals used as defoliants by US in Vietnam continue to cause birth defects in that country’s children. We simply close our eyes and ears and do not learn from the evil that we do, we ignore it and instead comfort ourselves naively in our imagined virtuosity beside the evil that others do. Human rights? If you were to count up the numbers of people killed, maimed and traumatised by the various nations of the world since the end of WWII and rank the nations in order of the most killing and maiming that has been done you would very quickly arrive at one nation which stands out well ahead of all others.

Government that enjoys the legitimacy of the people? It has been my observation that US elections both Presidential and Congressional are widely believed to be circuses which disempower ordinary people while guaranteeing the hegemony of a media and financial elite, and that they have proved a model for electioneering throughout the Western world. It is only a decade ago that George Bush was able to win an election through a US Supreme Court action which succesfully disenfanchised a poor, mostly African American community and thus tipped the result in Florida.

Level playing field with regard to international trade? For all the increased development and wealth that they can bring, US free trade agreements have often resulted in great travesty for ordinary working people in both the US and in their trading partner nations. The North American Free Trade Agreement is the obvious though not the only case in point. Many US jobs disappeared, contributing to urban decay and the disenfranchisement of American manufacturing workers, while south of the border Mexican workers suffer conditions that would constitute criminal offences just about anywhere in the developed world – workers being locked in factories, forced overtime and unsafe work environments, particularly for a predominantly female workforce, are among the travesties we hear about.

To articulate such things is often misconstrued as ‘anti-Americanism’. The truth is its precisely because of a close sense of fraternity and familiality with the US that I feel it is my place to put the world in such terms. To highlight such wrongs is not to hold them up as the complete or even typical picture of the US. For me they do however mean that to go around pointing the finger at China would be a perverse gesture coming from a US President. The West, and the US in particular have long ago forgone any position of legitimacy in claiming some moral high ground, if one ever existed.

The reality is that, as Barrack Obama really said in his speech to the Australian Parliament – China, like the US, is a very big and multi-faceted thing. Of both these nations there is much to behold in admiration and even wonder, and yet there are times when power is wielded discriminately, unfairly and inhumanely by individuals and institutions within each of these great nations.

I have no objection to US Military involvement in Australia so long as the result is not to signify pre-emptively we are not friendly to other peoples of the region. I don’t believe announcements about comparatively very small numbers of troop rotations through Australia and joint naval exercises that have always existed at any rate are really about sending a belligerent message to China. I certainly hope not. After a decade of futile and costly intervention on the far side of the globe resulting in very unsatisfactory outcomes it is only natural the US should pull its head in and start to reallign its focus closer to home. However as the media keeps playing up this belligerence toward China it is only a matter of time until enough people are convinced of the imperative that it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy, and all of those lingering cold war tensions become a reality once again. With an eye to history it is possible to imagine such things could escalate into conflict. If that does happen the genesis of it will have been in the mass idiocy of the opinion-mongers and not in any real social imperative.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/faulluja-birth-defects-iraq

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/13/falluja-cancer-children-birth-defects

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8548961.stm

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23977

http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/agentorange/chi-agent-orange3-dec08,0,2946008.story

http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/01/15/agent-orange-devastates-generations-of-vietnamese/3625/

http://ussc.e-newsletter.com.au/link/id/zzzz4ecb14823a486422P/page.html

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/obama-enlists-us-on-side-of-the-free-20111117-1njy8.html

http://www.smh.com.au/national/obama-takes-aim-at-china-in-new-asian-world-order-20111117-1nk6j.html

I wouldn’t normally cite Peter Costello, but one point he makes here about the left’s embracement of Obama (despite announcements regarding US military) almost warrants the Costello smirk: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/line-of-left-behind-obama-forget-old-beliefs-20111122-1nspe.html

O.H.M.S. Monday to Friday

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Farewell Elizabeth II, our Queen and Sovereign.

I like to use it now and then, I stick it in the subject field on my email sometimes to lighten the atmosphere. I tell my son Bryce I’m On Her Majesty’s Service, me and James Bond. It’s only a generation or so ago public servants stopped using the acronym O.H.M.S.  Only by convention though – nothing’s actually changed in the position, role and purpose of the British monarch in Australia since Queen Elizabeth II ascended to the throne in 1952. I just skimmed the constitution and can confirm it is indeed a fact that Monday to Friday I am in the service of the Queen.

“Ascended” is a definitive word here. The Queen’s legal status in Australia is ‘monarch’ or ‘sovereign’. Check the words out in the dictionary and you’ll find that Queen Elizabeth II is in fact the person who has supreme rank, power and authority, she is above all others in character, importance and excellence, she is independent of outside authority, the supreme ruler, greatest in degree, superior to all others. The legal dictionary in fact says the sovereign is “possessed of supreme power”.

That is a pretty extraordinary position to be in you’d have to say. In fact in literal terms there is no greater honour. There are many out there who would even say it’s a bit extreme. So it is worthwhile taking a few moments to consider how it is the sovereign came to be the sovereign.

Most obviously the Queen is the Queen because her dad was King George VI. George VI became King because his elder brother Edward VIII was forced to abdicate when he decided to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. It was the doctrine of the Church of England that once divorced a person could not remarry, and the Monarch is also sovereign over the Church of England. It was seen to contravene the laws of succession and therefore by the terms of the Statute of Westminster (1931) required the assent of the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliaments of the Dominions including Australia. When Australia’s Prime Minister along with those of Great Britain, Canada and South Africa opposed a change to the law of succession (the Irish Prime Minister was indifferent and the New Zealand Prime Minister had never heard of Wallis Simpson) Edward VIII rightly pointed out that there were “not many people in Australia” and their opinion didn’t matter.

Deeming such a marriage to be in contravention of the laws of succession was stretching a long bow. What was left unsaid, at least publicly, is that Edward VIII had been bonking Mrs Wallis since long before she became a divorcee and that’s where the real moral imperative had been breached. Also she was an American – simply not of sufficient stock. Edward VIII had no chance.

Both George VI and Edward VIII became King because their dad was King George V. During World War I George V was forced to drop the royal house’s German name ‘House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’ in favour of a newly invented English name ‘House of Windsor’, and also to drop his German titles – partly to distance Britain’s very German royal family from the wartime enemy but also in an endeavour to closer affiliate himself with the British people after his first cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had been overthrown. For this reason he was also unable to offer sanctuary to his first cousin Nicholas II, who less than a year after being forced to abdicate was taken into a basement and summarily executed along with his wife and three daughters, having been separated from his remaining two children whose bodies were only recently identified in the Ural Mountains.

George V became King because his dad was King Edward VII. Edward VII became King because his elder brother Albert Victor died of penumonia in 1892, and also because he himself escaped an assassination attempt in Belgium in 1900 (in protest against the Boer War), and also because his mum was Queen Victoria. Queen Victoria became Queen because her grandfather was King George III, because her dad’s three older brothers all died without legitimate sons, and because her dad Prince Edward died in 1820 when she was an infant also leaving no sons. The term ‘legitimate’ is interesting here. Victoria’s uncle, King William IV had a loving partner Dorothea Bland with whom he had ten children. She was an Irish actress however, and before William IV a single mother. The consummation could never be married.

Queen Victoria survived a number of assassination scares and also a growing Republican movement. She blamed the death of her beloved husband Albert on the burden of worry he carried over her son Prince Edward’s philandering, a conflict which interestingly precipitated over yet another Irish actress.

Queen Victoria was the last British Monarch of the House of Hanover. Hanoverian sovereignty began with King George I upon the death of his second cousin Queen Anne in 1714. Queen Anne had more than 50 closer male relatives who were prohibited from taking the Crown because they were Catholic. Queen Anne was the last sovereign in the line of the House of Stuart. The House of Stuart, initially the royal house of Scotland, took sovereignty over a newly ‘United Kingdom’ in 1603 when James VI (James I of England) succeeded his 3rd cousin Queen Eilizabeth I. Queen Elizabeth had imprisoned James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, and had her beheaded in 1587.

Queens Elizabeth I and II, Victoria, Anne and a handful of others all became sovereign because they had no surviving brother to become King. Since 1980 a number of European royal houses have dropped male primogeniture – the preferential succession of the eldest male over all other siblings, and it appears we’ve decided the British monarchy should get with the times. No issue got more media coverage in relation to last month’s Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting than discussion surrounding the laws of succession. Everyone appears to be in agreement – preferential male succession is outdated, unfair and it’s time for it to change. It excludes half the population of the world after all.  Um… er… hang on a second…

Yes it is unfair when somebody is excluded from something because of their gender. However to hail this as some sort of ‘moment’ in the cause of equality is hollow when by definition monarchy means the rest of us are un-equal. It is not as though half the population of the world are being excluded from becoming the sovereign. Unless you can call the current sovereign your mother or grandmother – everyone is excluded. As a concept ‘monarchy’ on its own is much more exclusive than male promogeniture. What is the point in doing away with the preference for male heirs when monarchy itself is a much more unfair institution? It is a barren conversation and when enacted the gesture will be meaningless for everyone but the Windsors.

We’re not talking about somebody’s life savings or personal property to pass onto our kids when we die. We are talking about sovereignty over you and I, where nothing qualifies the person other than that a succession of distant ancestors raped, pillaged and murdered their way to the top, followed by a further succession of ancestors who continued to intrigue and murder over several hundred years to maintain privilege which had initially been taken by fear and force, followed by a further succession who maintain their position of privilege through no means other than celebrity hysteria. Literally the British Monarch is the assertion that one individual is superior to all others (you and I) because a distant ancestor murdered an Anglo-Saxon king 945 years ago. It’s preposterous in the true sense of the word. It would be laughable if it weren’t so real. Monarchy is a concept thats days have been numbered since the 18th Century and it is a measure of mass simple-mindedness that celebrity hysteria has sustained this institution into the 21st Century.

Edward I is credited with inventing the ritual “hanged, drawn and quartered”. Edward’s treatment of his kin Simon de Montfort in 1265 is depicted here. But they were different times you say? Exactly.

 

 

Asylum seekers and Leaderlessness

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In the lead up to the 2010 election, Malcolm Fraser quit the Liberal Party citing general dissatisfaction with the party’s direction, but making special mention of the party’s attitude toward asylum seekers. He wanted to remind people that when he was Prime Minister there were many more boat people arriving in Australia than today. In Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, war had destroyed people’s lives. From Vietnam alone about 2 million people fled in boats looking for a safe place to live. Fraser reminded Australians that back then our political leaders understood the situation these people were in. Australia had an obligation toward them not only because we had participated in the Vietnam War, but also because we are signatories to the United Nations Convention on Refugees. We were adherents to international law. At the time, Australia took 137,000 refugees from Southeast Asia.

Fraser’s old adversary put it succinctly. “We’re all bloody boat people,” said Hawke.

Recently asylum seekers have come here from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Congo, Somalia and Burma. The news is full of hellish stories about what’s happening to people in those countries.

Last month’s Four Corners story Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is typical of the reporting coming out of these countries. We use the euphemism ‘push’ factors, but when confronted with such graphic imagery the perception that ‘pull’ factors have any bearing on people’s decision to flee their country is just plain dumb. The story showed graphic footage of Sri Lankan government forces performing summary executions and mistreating the dead bodies of people who were clearly civilians, many of them women and showing signs of torture, rape and mutilation. Soldiers were recorded on video boasting of mutilating a young woman’s corpse. The story also explored evidence that Sri Lankan government forces deliberately bombarded the makeshift hospitals established to cater for the many thousands of casualties, overwhelmingly civilian and a large proportion of them children, not once or twice, but specifically following hospitals wherever they were established. The story described how the UN eventually had to suspend its practice of providing the GPS coordinates of hospitals. Traditionally the UN provides combatants with the location of hospitals so that under the terms of the Geneva Convention, a reflection of fundamental codes of decency common to all civilized human beings, they be excluded from military strikes. The UN belatedly realised Sri Lankan Government forces were using the information for the opposite purpose. Too late. The whole idea of hospitals had to be abandoned.

Faced with such evidence it is difficult to form an opinion which doesn’t incorporate the concepts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and a word not to be bandied around – genocide.

In Australia it’s hard to imagine a situation where we would need to run for our lives leaving everything behind. That is the truth for these people. They are not queue jumpers, opportunists, terrorists, illegal immigrants, criminals. They are not coming to take your job or infect your neighbourhood with their foreign languages, foreign religions and foreign food, nor to vandalise the prisons you choose to lock them up in. They are literally running away from their homes and their countries to save themselves and their children from murder. Just like in those movies you and I like to watch, or like some terrifying nightmare, only it’s real. They are running to escape and to save their children. To recognise this is not to succumb to bleeding-heart mumbo-jumbo, to dramatise or exaggerate.

When we treat asylum seekers as though they have no right we are more or less complicit in the crimes being committed against them. This type of injustice pre-dates Nazi Germany but as that is the yardstick we like to fall back on… picture a family fleeing the type of brutality suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Then picture yourself turning that family away or locking them – man woman and child, in detention. Imagine persecuting them, denigrating them, vilifying them. Whose behaviour is closer to the criminal, you or the asylum seeker?

There’s this notion – a naïve nationalistic vanity, that asylum seekers come here due to our level of terrificness and the luckiness of our wonderful country. They want to grab a share of it – the ‘pull’ factors. If that were true then, cripes, we don’t measure up to the rest of the world very well. Compared to other countries Australia doesn’t receive many asylum seekers at all. Australia isn’t among the top ten countries for the number of asylum seekers who arrive. In 2009 for example, Australia received less than 0.6% of the world’s asylum seekers. That year Canada, a country with about one and a half times the population of Australia, received 33,250; Sweden, less than half our population, received 24,190; Austria, about one third our population, received 15,830. Asylum claims in Australia that year were high – 6,170. Only 2,726 of those came by boat. Compared to some countries Australia does have a high proportion of arrivals by boat because we are surrounded by sea, with no land borders. But the preoccupation with boat arrivals is yet another misconception when, at most, little more than a third of all asylum seekers arrive that way.

For those of you who can’t understand why a person would climb aboard a rickety boat and risk their lives on such a perilous journey, those of you who can’t put yourselves in the shoes of an asylum seeker, let me try it for you. As an asylum seeker I’d be thinking I need to get to a place where you won’t terrorise or murder my child, rape my wife and slice the tits of her dead body, then kneel me down and put a bullet through the back of my head. Congratulations Australia, that’s your ‘pull’ factor. But hang on, don’t feel smug and heroic just yet.

Unlike Australia, most countries do not have a policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers. In fact Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention throughout the determination process. Could this in fact be part of our problem? The thing about detention centres is you have to build them and run them, whether they’re onshore or offshore.

In 2001 the number of asylum seekers worldwide was the highest in 20 years. That year 5,516 boat people risked their lives to reach Australia. Australia didn’t have enough detention centres to lock the all up.

John Howard’s government decided to send asylum seekers to pacific island countries to be processed. This was very popular with those Australians who don’t like asylum seekers. In Nauru for example, the Howard government built an $80 million dollar detention centre. It cost $2 million per month to run. Most asylum seekers sent to Nauru were eventually assessed to be a genuine refugees and were resettled in Australia. However most had been detained in prison-like conditions for an extended period, up to three years.

During that time the number of boat people arriving in Australia dropped sharply, but it’s hard to gauge how much to attribute this to the Howard government’s policies because all over the world the number of asylum seekers dropped by 50% in the same period. It’s fair to say though, considering we receive comparatively so few asylum seekers, maybe they did succeed in enhancing our reputation for being inhospitable.

Recently, asylum seeker numbers have increased again worldwide. In 2010 the number of people seeking asylum in Australia was up to 8,250 while in the US, for example, the number reached 55,500.

Australia’s refugee intake in the past decade has averaged about 13,500 refugees per year no matter where they applied for asylum, how they got there, or who was in government. The Gillard government’s agreement with Malaysia to redirect 800 asylum seekers their way in return for 4000 already assessed to be genuine refugees, will have no bearing on the overall number of refugees resettled in Australia. If sending these asylum seekers away was designed to placate the asylum-seeker-hating trash media and those who read and listen to them, it certainly missed the mark. The trash media and their readers and listeners don’t discern between asylum seekers and refugees – they’re all foreigners we don’t want in our neighbourhoods. All they see is 800 undesirable dirt traded for 4000. It didn’t win the Gillard government any friends among refugee advocates either.

Back when John Howard announced the date for the 2001 election he said “more than anything else this election will be about leadership”. Nobody could have anticipated the way in which he was thereafter proved correct. When the MV Tampa sailed over the horizon, Howard stayed true to form and led the Australian people sincerely according to his principles, xenophobic and steeped in a racist past as they were, while Beazley tried to second-guess the polls in a remarkable display of followership. In the face of those first polls coming out of commercial television, Beazley oscillated, wrong-footed and stumbled. Instead of leading according to his conviction and affecting the polls, he tried to be guided by them. Perhaps he allowed his minders to convince him this was his job. It’s the Australian Labor Party after all. Such speculation is seldom if ever directed at the other side of politics. Either way, this is clearly not leadership, it is followership. With the unfortunate exception of Mark Latham, it nicely encapsulates Labor’s electoral approach in the past decade and a half. The same gutless leadership is the reason why the Gillard government doesn’t simply have no mandate to implement their climate change policies, but has a mandate not to implement a price on carbon pollution, no matter how right the policy may be. In 2010 the ALP took the small target strategy to new depths of nothingness, when what was needed was bust through or bust. What was required was simply leadership.

Howard and his senior ministry began articulating myths like ‘sleeper cells’, and rumours such as Philip Ruddock’s one that asylum seekers were spending up to $20,000 to be smuggled to Australia. That particular misrepresentation painted a very unrealistic picture, yet people swallowed it. The same furphy is now being repeated by Labor’s current immigration minister. That’s 25 times Afghanistan’s per capita GDP. They could buy five business class airfares for that amount. Peter Reith’s contribution to the demonization and dehumanisation of the world’s most powerless people is much celebrated – what type of people throw their children overboard, he beseeched us. Not asylum seekers, even on a leaky boat, as it turned out. The Australian Navy’s advice to Reith was that it just wasn’t true. Sorry, not listening was the reply.

The asylum seeker ‘problem’ is not that people come here by boat or plane or go somewhere else first. The problem is we’ve complicated things too much. The problem is an inefficient and unproductive bureaucracy which does not complement the mandatory detention policy at all, rendering it unsustainable in the current global climate. People end up staying in detention absurdly long periods while the bureaucracy processes them, until after months or years of figuratively bashing their heads against the wall they begin to do it literally. Most of us have suffered the dehumanising indignity of dealing with Government departments. Imagine if years in detention were the outcome, after you’d been terrorised by murderers and risked your life crossing perilous seas to escape.

We can expect more asylum seekers. Look at what’s happened in Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria. For every soldier, fighter, gun, warplane, bullet or mortar you see on TV there are dozens of people running from them. What are we going to do, keep building detention centres here and overseas? Keep trading asylum seekers for refugees at a rate of 1 to 5? Our refugee intake is guaranteed to rise over time but that policy’s got to be the dumbest – unless asylum seeker numbers drop a refugee intake of 13,500 would blow out exponentially in a very short space of time. Unsustainable.

There is a clear alternative but it requires… leadership.

 

References:

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/SP/asylum_seekers.htm

http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/pubs/BN/sp/BoatArrivals.htm#_Toc233686294

http://www.immi.gov.au/media/fact-sheets/60refugee.htm

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-06-21/australia-ranks-46th-in-refugee-intake-table/2766300

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/04/17/asylum-seekers-the-facts-in-figures/

http://www.scoa.org.au/FAQRetrieve.aspx?ID=35755&Q=

http://www.ajustaustralia.com/informationandresources_factsandstatistics.php

http://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/docs/news&events/rw/2010/4%20-%20Myths%20and%20facts%20about%20refugees%20and%20asylum%20seekers%202010.pdf

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-18/understanding-the-asylum-seeker-debate/2718820

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3260535.htm

 

Thanks to my son Bryce MacNamara as much of the research and content is borrowed from his speech for the 2011 Wideview Public School public speaking competition.