RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: OZschwitz gulag: Take politics out of border protection  Fri Apr 16, 2010 5:13 am | |
| THE political debate over asylum seekers demeans Australia and severely damages our reputation as a compassionate and humane country. Both political parties are at fault. The opposition has unashamedly continued to play a race card as it did over Tampa. It has said time and again that the government has lost control of Australia's border protection knowing that that charge is false.
It is false because the number of asylum seekers - whether it be 4000 or 5000 a year - is not enough to alter the complexion of Australia or to challenge Australia's values. It is false because the number of asylum seekers who come here by air with falsified papers has always outnumbered the number who come by boat.
Those coming by air claim to be students or on a holiday visa and when they get here they say they want to claim asylum. It means they have come on false papers with a false declaration and yet they are not shut up in detention centres, they are not vilified, they wander around the streets of Australia until their claims are judged. And only about 30 per cent have been found to meet the criteria to be granted refugee status.
Those who arrive by air are unseen, they do not represent a political problem and therefore nobody does anything about it. But the boats are visible.
Of those who come by boat, when their claims are judged about 85 per cent and up to 90 per cent have been found to meet refugee criteria. So current policy discriminates heavily against those who have experienced greater hardship and are fleeing terror.
The government, given its due, initially attempted to introduce a more humane policy than that which was applied during the previous Liberal government.
But it has not as a government had the courage to fight the issue on the merits of the case - on the basis of what Australia ought to do to assist people in distress. It has been run off that course by an opposition that, without exception, has played politics with the issue.
I know there are people in the opposition who do not like its approach but who nevertheless go along with it. They believe it will win them votes. Thus the opposition plays upon and expands prejudice in Australia, and the government enters the competition to be tough and exclusive.
The government's response to political pressure has been to set aside the need for compassion, the need to argue the merits of the case under the Refugee Convention which then prime minister Robert Menzies signed more than half a century ago.
The government competes to say that it is as tough as the opposition and imposes a freeze on handling asylum claims from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. The claims that conditions in those two countries have changed substantially are dubious.
The disagreements between the Western governments, which believe they are fighting for democracy in Afghanistan, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have become extreme. It is becoming increasingly difficult to know who is friend and who is foe in Afghanistan itself. To suggest that the country is more settled, that it is more secure, and that therefore claims do not need to be assessed for several months, are spurious and designed to respond to political pressures at home that have been stirred to the maximum by an unethical opposition.
The great postwar migration, which changed the face of Australia and made this a much better country than it once was, could never have occurred if political parties had played politics with race or religion through the late 1940s to the 1970s. The race card began to emerge in the late '80s and '90s and Australia has been diminished as a consequence.
If governments or ministers say that this is not noticed overseas, they are ill-informed. From the late 1980s through the Hanson years, leading to Tampa, the issue has been noticed, it has been heard and people wonder if the old Australia, which pursued a White Australia policy, has ever really changed.
It is common to hear people say in Europe that they have had to deal with hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers a year - Europe had 286,680 asylum applications in 2009 - and they try to do so with a degree of humanity. Australia can't handle 4000 or 5000 a year with compassion and humanity.
If the government were courageous, it would stand up for what is right and what is just and challenge the opposition.
It would take advocacy, it would take fierce debate, but I believe the quality of Australians would shine through and Australians would support a humane policy.
The current debate demeans Australia and diminishes every one of us. Once race or religion emerge as political issues it is very hard to get back to a saner and quieter debate. The only way out of this dilemma for Australia is for border protection to be taken off the political agenda, for the political parties quietly and sensibly to establish a bipartisan, legal and humane policy that both major parties are prepared to support - otherwise Australia will move backwards into a darker age.
There is no sign that either the government or the opposition has been prepared to give that lead, yet in the 1970s and '80s Australia accommodated a very much larger number of refugees from Indochina, and Vietnam in particular. We should ask what has happened to Australia in the years since.
LNK
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