Six months on from the Tohoku Earthquake

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Six months on…

Hatsue Yamaguchi says that people have changed since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 11 this year. I don’t know in exactly what way she means but I heard reference to more people getting married now, something about ‘having someone’. Chizuru says she doesn’t detect this subtle change her mum refers to, and I’m not sure. I think I sense a sobriety among the Japanese that wasn’t there before. Perhaps the memory is still fresh enough of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake, of the suffering wreaked by the tsunami, the multiple magnitude 7plus quakes that followed, and the ongoing anxiety about what that radiation emanating from Fukushima really means.

The first physical sign I saw of the big quake was during a visit to Tokyo Disney. The pavement outside Maihama Station is up and down all over the place and the surface is a patchwork of temporary bitumen and the concrete paving tiles that once covered the area. The ground has dipped away heavily in between pylons and climbs upward around the foundations on which the pylons sit. The overall structure of large buildings and elevated train lines remained sound while the earth fell away around them.

Six months after the quake the television news still runs fresh stories about homes that have been shifted as the ground beneath them opened up. Again, homes themselves may be whole and intact, quite a contrast from the photos I saw out of Christchurch where like Australia brick-veneer is the norm and earthquakes bust them apart.

I watched a television programme the other day in which a guy climbed to various elevations on a Tohoku mountainside. He pointed out rock strata that had formed hundreds of millions of years ago and where they’d crumbled during the quake. In Australia after the Queensland floods this year, as tragic and heartbreaking as they were, insurance companies quibbled over the term “once in a hundred year event”, but such a distinction would sound absurd alongside “once in the history of the Earth” events – rock that was formed at the beginning of the Earth suddenly cracked into pieces.

Each day he Japan Times publishes a map on which concentric circles signify recorded radiation levels at intervals of distance around Fukushima. At the Iwate village office 40km Northwest of Fukushima radiation levels fluctuate around 2.040 to 2.090 microsieverts per hour while down in Tokyo readings are around 0.053 to 0.058. I’ve tried to compare this to normal Sydney levels but the information I’ve found doesn’t add up. In Sydney we’re apparently exposed to 2 millisieverts or 2,000 microsieverts per year. A quick calculation puts that at 0.228 microsieverts per hour or four times as much as currently experienced in Tokyo.

Last Friday controversially the exclusion zone outside the 20km radius of Fukushima was lifted. The five local municipal governments in the area are not supportive, not so much out of concern for the ongoing radiation levels out of the Fukushima plant but due to the complications this creates for their decontamination planning. Radioactive topsoil and vegetation measuring 28,790,000 cubic metres for example needs to be removed. Exactly what’s to be done with this radioactive soil is unclear.

Every day brings new reports about TEPCO’s ongoing struggle. The compensation bill is expected to be in the region of ¥4 trillion or about A$53.5 billion. The company hopes to be able to re-open its Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata prefecture to avoid slipping into negative net worth. However it appears much of the compensation bill will be underwritten by an already financially beleaguered Japanese government. Cancelling the company’s debt had been mooted and rejected. The company itself is talking about taking measures such as trimming an apparently top-heavy personnel structure and reducing the company pensions of both current and former employees. There’s talk of executives heads rolling but it’s hard to imagine what that will achieve when the problem is probably the result of engineering decisions made almost half a century ago.

Chizuru related to me a story from a local women’s magazine about differing views on the radiation risk. In a number of households mother and children have moved to the deep South of the country, in particular Okinawa, while dad remains in Tokyo or in the North for work. There are those apparently who think separating the family in such a way is an over-reaction, and there are those who can’t believe that others would put their children at such risk being so close to the radioactivity.

Today I read that 130 children from the Fukushima prefecture evacuation zone had been screened and 10 of them found to have irregular thyroids.

We also noticed the air-conditioning is turned down on trains and in other locations compared to how it once was. Fukushima is not the only power plant non-operational after the quake so electricity consumption has been curtailed.

In general people are sceptical about the Government’s and the Company’s reassurances. Since March I’ve found particularly striking the mistrust toward the authorities on the matter.

Kamakura Beach sign

Sign on the beach at Kamakura

Stories about alternative and renewable energy sources figure more prominently in the Japanese media than back home in Australia. Wind power is complicated by the fact the best locations sit on the West coast. The national electricity grid developed along the higher populated Eastern seaboard and on the basis of fossil fuel and nuclear power generation, and the companies involved in those industries have been protective. In order to take advantage of the better areas for wind generation substantial expensive reconfiguration of the grid is required. Also these better locations for wind generation often sit within wilderness areas adding all sorts of considerations, such as the effect on migratory birds. An interesting proposition is to develope technology for offshore wind power generation. Wind generation is set to expand, but even those spruiking it are talking about it supplying no more than 10% of the national requirement by mid century.

Every day there’s a story or more about some renewable energy source or another. Small localised hydro and thermal power generation success stories exist. Bryce went to a museum for the Japanese space programme and he detected sensitivity about their validity as an expensive service in a cash-strapped environment. They were at pains to point out their role in putting satellites in space that provide excellent foresight on weather. No mention of pioneering missions to Mars – the big pitch is the possibility of extraterrestrial solar power generation!

Japan’s largest labour organisation, the Japanese Trade Union Confederation – RENGO, announced a rethink of their previous support for nuclear energy.

Like the announcement by Germany after the Tohoku earthquate and tsunami that they would be abandoning nuclear energy altogether, I find this all somehow heartening. No runs are on the board yet but it means there’s been a fundamental shift where it matters and national resources will be put into the development of newer cleaner energy sources. In nowhere is it more demonstrably needed than in Japan. While the most carbon intensive culture is said to belong to Australia and the US I can’t imagine a place more attuned to consumption than Japan. This country is a striking mixture of the old and the new, and in twenty years of association with the place I’ve come to the conclusion this is an outcome of a culture that has developed over millenia in an environment susceptible to constant destruction through typhoon and earthquake, and thus accustomed to constant renewal. At the same time obviously it is a culture with an extraordinary reverence and continuity with its past – a theme I’m enjoying exploring here currently and will share on this blog in the near future.

Toilet seats are still heated. Umbrellas, pushbikes, mobile phones and even cheap motorcycles are still treated like disposable consumer items in the way that spring water bottles are in Australia. Sobriety maybe, but austerity, no I don’t think so. Hatsue thinks in time things will get back to the way they were. Again, I’m not sure but I’m also not sure I would mind if they didn’t.

 

Tennessee Williams’s Chronicle of a Demise, Nirvana and Kurt Cobain

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Meaninglessness in a Heart Shaped Box

In 1948 Tennessee Williams published a collection of short stories entitled ‘One Arm’. The collection takes its title from one of the stories within it about a one armed hustler (or male prostitute). I think the fact he chose this story to provide the title for his collection is kind of instructive on how Williams saw himself – a fundamentally flawed and incomplete man in popular demand out of people’s perverse curiosity with the imperfect.

The collection has been reprinted a number of times and like much of TW’s work is a staple of undergraduate study in American literature. A few of the stories are repeatedly singled out for their literary worth but the story that most affected me doesn’t seem to get much consideration beyond “the experimentation of a young writer”.

As a piece of entertainment Chronicle of a Demise is not an especially engaging story. It developes into a bit of an anticlimax in fact, but that’s actually the point. Those stories that get particular critical mention are the ones that overtly step outside the social mores of the time, the ones with the perceived capacity to shock or offend the establishment, and on the surface this story doesn’t. For me though Chronicle of a Demise is a poignant commentary on the human need to latch onto an icon on whom to project our ideals, unwilling or incapable as that person might be. In the story it’s manifested in cultism but the idea broadly encompasses the phenomena of fame and celebrity.

The story describes the dieing days of an old woman and the interactions of the people who surround her death-bed – people who consider themselves her followers in a religious sect and who consider her a Saint.

The bedridden old woman hardly seems coherent to you and I the reader but her followers interpret significant meaning in anything she babbles. Under her bed she keeps a heart-shaped box containing what might be considered keepsakes and mementos of a life, only they were (to you and I the reader) insignificant things like gum wrappers and scraps of coloured tin-foil collected off the street, originally by the “Saint” and then later in emulation by her followers. The heart-shaped box is a major preoccupation of the sect’s followers for whom the refuse that makes up its contents are the articles of their faith.

This week I was reminded that it is 20 years since Nirvana released their seminal second album, Nevermind. I was a 22 year old university student back then. My sister gave me the CD as a gift. I liked it very much. I recall the ABC’s youth radio station Triple J (I still qualified back then) broadcasting something like what would become their “hottest 100”, but back then it was more like an “of all time” than a “for this year”. Youth that I was I followed it with some anticipation, though I missed the final countdown. When friends Ivo and Barbara told me ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ was judged number 1 song of all time I was up in arms. “What a joke,” I decried. “But surely that’s just because it’s current,” I complained in earnest. Such things are of supreme importance when you’re 22. I liked the music but I would not be taken in by the hysteria that surrounded Nirvana.

A couple of years later Nirvana released their third record, In Utero, and the single ‘Heart-shaped Box’. Kurt Cobain is reported to have said the song was inspired by a documentary about children with cancer. He is also quoted as saying the line “hey, wait, I’ve got a real complaint…” was about his treatment by the media. The song is also said to be about his wife, Courtney Love. There is no reason why all of those things should not be true.

In 1994 Kurt Cobain put a shot-gun in his mouth and vapourised his own head.

I think part of the reason he did it is because people talked about him too much. He had become the very thing he was lambasting. Idiots were saying rubbish like “the voice of a generation” so he’d go and record utterly meaningless babble, …but it would only get them lathering at the mouth even more. In more than one song he made oblique references to this dilemma. I think he experienced what Bob Dylan did – an intense loathing for his own celebrity and disdain for the mentality and the society that creates such hysteria. So when I see people today displaying their worship by wearing those “Kurt Cobain 1967-1994” t-shirts I think it’s a sad irony, because Cobain himself probably would have thrown up at the sight of them. Add to the mix depressive tendencies that many people know from experience are an outcome of recreational drug use, including alcohol… and crazy things can happen that with another moment’s reflection may not have.

The old woman in Chronicle of a Demise disintegrated and disappeared into the ether. Her heart-shaped box was tossed away and forgotten, everything in it that seemed so significant… it was nothing after all. The cult that had followed her simply disbanded and ceased to exist. As should the hysteria that surrounded Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, because it more than anything is probably responsible for the tragedy of the loss of a young life. For only a handful of people, his family and loved ones, is that tragedy something real.

Yes please, I want to be one of the 5,000 (part 1)

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For the past week I’ve been trying to finish a new post on this blog about what’s really wrong with the public service. As I sailed into it however it just kept getting bigger. Today I came across new information that just takes me deeper into this subject and though at first I was excited I suddenly realise I can’t publish much of it at this point as to do so would breach my conditions of employment. I will therefore have to steer clear of specific and significant examples to support my opinions. For now.

Last week the O’Farrell Government here in New South Wales brought down its first budget. It was pretty tame by most accounts, particularly for a conservative party who’d been out of office so long and who have such a landslide majority. In my own area, the environment, it is interesting to note that programmes appear to have been more or less maintained. In the newspapers the only cut to programmes I saw mentioned was a cut of $400 million in spending on infrastructure. One of the budget’s loudest proclamations was “more police, nurses and teachers…” You’d be hard pressed to find a Government of either stripe in recent decades who didn’t promise that one. From the handful of headline numbers in the budget it quickly becomes clear this Government’s biggest cuts will be in relation to Public Service employees. $8 billion they expect to save over the next 4 years by getting rid of 5,000 public servants. Public service salary increases are pegged at a maximum 2.5% PA or 1.1% below the CPI – effectively lowering real wages (and ironic alongside O’Farrell’s stated aims of “attracting the best people” and making the NSW Public Service the “first employer of choice”).

It’s in keeping with conservative ideology which oversimplifies and personalises the problems within the public service. There is something in the conservative idea that there is a problem with public servants, but the problems amid personnel are minor in comparison to the problems at the top. The public sector’s biggest problems and the cause of most waste are the over-subscription to private consultancies, the way we engage with the private sector in general, and the constant perceived need to restructure. These problems sit with the senior managment, senior executive and Ministerial levels of public administration. On this the O’Farrell Government show no signs of being any less out of touch than their predecessors.

I look forward to the day I can substantiate these claims by sharing with you, dear reader, some specific examples.

Dragons Abreast

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DRAGONS ABREAST DRAGON BOAT RACING FESTIVAL 30th October 2011 Darling Harbour

Dragons Abreast

Recovery from breast cancer is multi-faceted and a little complicated and that’s why people need quite some special support post breast cancer. I’m very proud to be involved in this fundraising event and I hope you can show your support by clicking on the link above and popping us a small donation.

 

Antitheism, marriage and the country music crowd

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There’s something evangelical in the forthrightness with which some atheists disparage Christians. I’m an atheist, but I defend the right to have a religion. Many who call themselves atheists are probably more accurately described as antitheists, a term which suggests a more active aversion to believers. Yes, an evangelical Christian who wants to ram their faith down your throat is a pain in the arse and very likely a bit ditzy, but in reality you come across very few. Yes, those ancient religious texts are littered with outdated ideas, some of them abhorrent today, but literal or extremist followers are the exception, and universally good sentiment can also be found in them. Yes, there are people who identify as Christian who are blinkered and ignorant enough to assume you and I will see as self-evident that Muslims or new age spiritualists, for example, are some sort of problem. Yes religion is often in the mix when intolerance has led to travesty, but intolerance does not exist exclusively within religious paradigms, and to paint religious people or entities as innately intolerant is neither demonstrable nor rational. Intolerant Christians do exist, yet it’s been my observation that intolerance is more commonly expressed against those of faith by antitheists, or by pseudo-intellectual nouveau hippies, which is ironic, considering the proportion of society who identify as Christian. It’s probably due to the prevalence of Christianity in Western society that those who arrive at atheism or new-age spiritualism, have done so from a position of rejecting Christianity, and therefore feel the compulsion to denounce it. Christians are in reality a pretty diverse bunch (64% of Australians identify themselves as Christian) and represent the good and bad that can be found throughout all of humanity. Religiosity of itself is not responsible when individuals or collectives do evil.

Thankfully I can advocate this particular type of tolerance from reasonably solid ground. As far as I know freedom of religion is enshrined in the constitutions of every modern democracy including that of my own country (section 116). These documents are the product of the best minds of their time and while democracies do provide the facility to change them, religious freedom remains codified. That includes the freedom to identify with a majority just as much as any minority.

That said, I think it’s worth mentioning the plight of one of the most celebrated atheists of recent times, Stephen Hawking. The irony is that from everything I’ve read he is not the rabid anti-theist he’s made out to be. He is an atheist but also he’s a media darling and like most celebrities so much of what he says is extremetised by the media. I’m not bright enough or well read enough to comment on his science but with regard to his atheism, of the few quotes I see repeated from The Grand Design (obviously the media are paying more attention to reading each other than the book) the assertion that god is not required to explain the universe is hardly an attack on the faiths of the world as it is over and over portrayed. It’s an assertion of his faith in science, but not a dissing of other faiths. In fact when the media obsession with Hawking’s atheism broke some years back he practically had to be goaded by journalists to comment.

Even enthusiastic antitheists like Laurence Kalnin who do think it necessary to approach the debunking of god with greater than missionary zeal find they have to address the fact these mythologies stretch back into prehistory. It’s religion with a god or gods mostly in their sites but it’s theism in general they know people need to be led away from.

Until European settlement historically recently, indigenous Australians are now understood to have maintained extraordinary social and cultural continuity stretching back several tens of thousands of years – the literal remainder of Neolithic society and it survived in places up until less than a lifetime ago (which is not to say indigenous Australia does not survive to this day). Aboriginal Australia constitutes such cultural and social complexity and nuance that from some angles it makes Western society look underdeveloped. The last remaining Neolithic society had spirituality, mythology, faith and religion to explain the world and humanity’s place in it. In Europe archaeological evidence demonstrates that even older human societies including Neanderthals practiced ritual burial. Despite what anyone believes humanity could or should be, if we consider simply what humanity is – religion is definitive and I would argue demonstrably a fundamental human process. To think you can deny anybody their religion then is to deny their humanity. It simply won’t work. A cat is a cat, a bird is a bird, no matter if you call it a dog.

It’s a point that’s been done to death but in some ways science is not so different from religion. It’s motivated by a yearning to make sense of the world or to answer questions like ‘why are we here?’ or ‘where did we come from?’ I personally place great credence in science, but I’ve never felt compelled to set the others straight, and as far as those particular questions go I’ve never wasted a minute of my life. I am here, that is all.

That’s more than a preamble but I wrote about zealotry among atheists conscious of where this blog is heading next.

Some weeks ago a facebook friend posted a link to a story on same sex marriage which sparked conversation that went sort of like this (including the messy spelling, grammar and punctuation of facebook shorthand):

Fred marriage for me is a religious thing for me and god greated adam and eve not adam and steve this is what hes has said in the bible i,m sorry if there are people out there who are offended by this. god didn,t created same sex marriage and marriage is secreted thing

Wilma the great thing about facebook is that we can all express our opinions!!!!

Fred the last time i checked gay and lesbians were the minority group so why should they be allowed to get married i,m sorry but i don,t support it marriage is for men and women not man and man or women women

Betty W e dont all have to support everything,But I believe that each person has the right to their own choices and to whom they love and wish to spend their lives with,who are we to decide for them.and if they wish to make their choice legal then they should have that right,I also believe we have a loving and understanding God,who said love thy neighbour,he didnt say only if its of the opposite sex.Sorry Fred ,but I do believe this and I married the opposite sex,because I wanted to…

Barney God loves all unconditionally…though I do think that if a particular religion does not what to except gay people getting married…. then thats there choice I suppose…..If 2 people wish to commit to them selves (whether gay or not) by a civil union, then I believe the law should uphold this!

Betty I do agree,

Dino If you’re going to go down the bible path Fred, I trust that you will follow it completely? For instance, did you know that in the Old Testament Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos. I hope you don’t have any. I also hope you’ve never worked on the Sabbath, because Exodus 35:2 states that you must be put to death. I also trust that if you’ve played a game of football that you’ve made sure you’ve used a synthetic ball, because one made out of pigskin is considered unclean (Leviticus 11:7-8). Oh, and heaven forbid you’ve ever eaten a few prawns – you’re going straight to hell if you have (Leviticus 11:10). Besides Chapter V, section 116 of the Australian constitution says that we’re a secular state and the bible shouldn’t even come into it.

Rockette I think we all miss the point.as well,these loving couples that live together probably most of their lives want the marriage so they havethe same rights as any other married couple.to be next of kin./.and as a christian,we shouldnt be jud…geing any one.if you love the person,you live with the person,you share your worldly goods with the person,then they should be able to have the same rights as any one else.that share their lives,and be your next of kin legally if that is what they choose.does it matter what we want, should it not be what those indiviuals want.its their lives.If your hetrosexual it s not going to affect you anyway.your ok as it is. and how we each embrace christianity,is our own choice,people are they dont choose to be

Rocky When I was young a gay person meant that the person was a happy person. A persons sexuality is their own business so long as it doesn’t impinge on the rights of others, so having had gay people in the band, and having known so many lovely gay people, I don’t see why they should not have the rights of every other human being. I think homophobics have tendencies towards being gay, and lash out to prove the opposite.

Rockette I dont want to know what happens in the privacey of ones bedroom.male or female.but lets let everyone enjoy the same rights,God forbid theres enough things now stopping people from being altogether happy,let us please do something to add to… others happiness and contentment.is it going to hurt anyone,the only people this will really matter to is the people who want to do it.and all us heterosexuals can still marry the opposite sex,

Scribblehead I like your comment Rocky “I think homophobics have tendencies towards being gay, and lash out to prove the opposite.” it can also be out of a paranoia that someone might think they’re gay. if you’re confident in who you are then you don’t feel the need for this over the top demonstration of your ‘straightness’. you just are.

 

There was a lot more discussion but I think this is more than enough to get the drift. Looking past the obvious absence of logic in statements like – ‘gays are a minority so why should they be allowed to get married’, the problem with using Christianity to advocate the exclusion of anybody from marriage is that the state of marriage is not owned by Christianity. The majority of people in the world are not Christians and marriage is practiced by all of the peoples of the world of every faith and by the irreligious like me. Marriage is a universal social phenomenon which has developed in all societies. Though like religion it’s obviously not mandatory, it’s another thing which defines humanity, it’s a fundamental, and to deny people marriage is to deny them their humanity.  In a literal sense it just can’t be done.

One thing I find noteworthy about the conversation is that it occurred between country music musicians and their fans. It’s a reminder of my own susceptibility to prejudice that I was surprised the overwhelming balance of opinion was in support of same sex marriage. Should I have been surprised? I think most would agree that country people are more likely to be socially conservative.  So what should we make of the context? I think at the very least it demonstrates anecdotally that perhaps there is much broader support for same sex marriage across the community than some people imagine.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I was asked what I would write in my blog. Short answer is, whatever I feel like at the time. It’s my hope this is the beginning of something I’ll keep building on the rest of my life. It will be part online journal. My interests will appear here sometimes, people I know, holidays I’m yet to take, funny little daily occurances I might like to share. I will comment sometimes on events and issues of the day, pursue causes I believe in. If I offer opinions you don’t agree with please don’t be turned away, the content will be pretty broad so there will hopefully be something else you’ll like. I’ll publish and publicise some of my writing projects here, share pictures, have some fun, entertain, and if something goes right – win your heart.

Thanks go to my wonderful friend Todd Baker for hosting this blog for me. When my birthday approached I told him you don’t have to worry about my present I already decided what you’re giving me. Poor Todd, months later he must be wondering if I’ll ever actually use the damned thing.

Mention must be made of the first post here that would have been. It was my intention to open this blog with a photo essay on the trail of English sailor and trader William Adams. In April 1600 Adams arrived in Japan with a decrepit vessel and crew and went on to live out his days there, extraordinarily becoming part of the establishment in the place. He lived in Japan during one of its great historical epochs – the transition to the Tokugawa Shogunate. Adams is the historical character who inspired James Clavell’s novel, Shogun. This brings together several of my great interests – history, Japan, fiction, travel and… buying myself a new camera. The dawn of the 17th century is an intoxicating era for a history and storytelling buff like me, Adams’s contemporaries included Shakespeare, Cervantes and Captain John Smith.

Following the terrible events in Japan this year my travel there in April couldn’t really go ahead. While areas I was travelling to were not affected by the worst of it, the nation as a whole was reeling. As desperate as my in-laws are to see their only grandson, in April everyone was still being traumatised by constant heavy aftershocks, and tremendous uncertainty and mistrust of the government about radiation levels as the news from Fukushima just kept getting worse and worse.

I will write more on the Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami and how it’s affecting people, but like my project on William Adams it will have to wait for another time.

Adieu.