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A lot of tears were shed in the Federal Parliament last week, without any solution to the asylum seeker issue in sight; Bob Ellis suggests one in 10 simple steps.
By Bob Ellis
A lot of tears were shed, and sincerely shed, on both sides of Parliament last week; to no avail. To no avail.
Yet two things remain clear.
(1) The boats will not stop, as the boats from Peru to Hawaii did not stop, and the boats from Hawaii to Tahiti did not stop, and the boats from Tahiti to Samoa, and the boats from Samoa to Tonga, nor the boats from Tonga to New Zealand, nor the boats from Libya to Lampedusa, however many died on the voyage. Nor was our Third Fleet discouraged by what happened to the Second, nor The Fourth. Nor the Mayflower by the shipwrecks that preceded them in earlier voyages to America; and
(2) It is all about queue jumpers; and if there were no queue, there would be no queue jumpers.
The answer therefore is cheap and simple. It destroys the ‘people smugglers’ business model, and it costs one tenth of what is being currently proposed, and it is this:
(3) Take note not just of who are the back of the queue but who are at the head of the queue. They are Japanese waiters, Hong Kong property developers and anyone bringing in a million dollars from India or South Africa or Hungary, or the former USSR.
(4) Take note as well that we admit 178,000 of these no doubt worthy immigrants a year.
(5) Cut the number of them we take next year by 100,000, and …
(6) Admit the queue.
(7) This is everyone in Malaysia, Indonesia and Africa who have lately applied to come here.
(8) Tell the Japanese waiters to wait six months and come in, say, August, 2013.
(9) Admit the 100,000 asylum seekers now suffering in terrible places and contemplating the whoredom of their twelve-year-old daughters, put some of them on TPVs, put some of them in caravan parks outside of country centres, and see how well they do here. And:
(10) Admit, hereafter, 20,000 refugees a year, as all parties now want.
It is a solution that would add not one more immigrant per year to our present quota. It would stop a thousand people drowning. It would put the people smugglers out of business.
And it would solve the problem.
Solve it outright, in a decision that requires no parliamentary debate, or legislation.
Or am I wrong?
What is there to fear?
Anything?
Discuss.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
13 Comments
Well if we could actually manage to get even one of our prattling journalists to understand that refugee laws cannot be changed arbitrarily by any country they might understand that there was no debate last week about anything other than how to break the law.
But they are across the board cretins with few exceptions.
We cannot shove away anyone who arrives here, we cannot demand they don’t come, we cannot do any of those things we think we can.
The law on Wednesday was that anyone has the right to enter and ask for asylum and the law on Thursday was that anyone has the right to seek asylum.
So they were all lying except the Greens and the likes of Judi Moylan who believe we cannot compromise the law.
None of the media bothered to read what Oakeshott had suggested and the
ALP supported – but it is evil.
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=32044
Independent Rob Oakeshott has introduced to the House of Representatives his own Migration Legislation Amendment (The Bali Process) Bill 2012. If passed, this bill would amend the Migration Act removing the peg on which the High Court was able to hang the Malaysia solution out to dry. Under the unamended law, the Minister for Immigration is required to declare in writing that any country to be used for offshore processing provides access to effective procedures for asylum claims, provides protection for asylum seekers while their claims are processed, and meets relevant human rights standards in providing that protection. In August last year, the High Court of Australia ruled that the Minister could not make a valid declaration in relation to Malaysia as it was not a signatory to the Refugees Convention, and the Arrangement between the two governments was not legally binding.
Oakeshott is proposing that a new peg replace the old one, and that the new one be designed such that Malaysia could pass muster without High Court interference. His bill would permit the Minister to designate Malaysia as an offshore assessment country because it is a party to the Bali Process which at its last meeting a year ago included 32 countries working on a Regional Cooperation Framework. If Oakeshott intended meaningful public decision making by the Executive government and appropriate parliamentary scrutiny, he has failed. Participation in the Bali process could not be reckoned a sufficient precondition for a country to pass muster with human rights protection and appropriate asylum procedures. For example, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran are all participants in the Bali process.
The only other precondition in the Oakeshott bill is that “the Minister thinks it is in the national interest” to designate a country as an offshore assessment country. Anxious to avoid any further High Court scrutiny, his drafters have stipulated that the international obligations and domestic laws of a country are irrelevant to the process of designation. In considering whether designation of another country would be in Australia’s national interest, the Minister is required to have regard to the assurances offered by that country’s government about the assessment of asylum claims and the non-refoulement of asylum seekers whose claims have not yet been decided. These assurances need not be legally binding. The Minister is required to place a statement of reasons before Parliament within 2 sitting days of making a designation. He is also required within 14 days to make a request of UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) seeking a formal statement of their views about the arrangements proposed in the designated country. It would make more sense if the minister were required to make the requests and receive the statements before making his decision to designate a country, and before tabling the decision in Parliament. That way the UNHCR and IOM positions could help to inform both the Minster’s decision and Parliament’s assessment of the decision. The bill provides that “the sole purpose of laying the documents before the Parliament is to inform the Parliament of the matters referred to in the documents and nothing in the documents affects the validity of the designation”. Parliament has no power to disallow the designation and a failure to table the documents would not affect the validity of the designation. So the Oakeshott peg is designed to ensure that neither Parliament nor the High Court could hang a designated country out to dry, ever again. The bill is simply a convoluted means for allowing the Executive government to declare an offshore processing country without any meaningful scrutiny by Parliament or the High Court. It does nothing to advance the cause of public scrutiny of government decisions to provide offshore processing of asylum claims.
A completely toothless tiger, the bill still provides the opportunity for Parliament to agitate again the debate about Nauru, Malaysia and onshore processing.
Maybe this bloke has something to offer to the conversation.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/a-way-to-stop-the-boats-20120630-219gh.html
Bob’s ideas look like a much better solution that the current situation, and the current rising death rate on the boats.
The opinions of some of our army and ex-army guys, and people who have worked in refugee camps would be worth listening to re how, or if, we could manage the selection (for flights to Australia), and the processing, once they are here.
We have a lot of talent in our military, including guys who have managed, and dealt with, large groups of people in camps. It seems smarter to use that talent for good, before people risk their lives on decrepit boats, rather than to just send our navy out to rescue another group of survivors from one more tragedy we helped to create.
Locking people up in prison type conditions is a long way from ideal. Ditto for having refugees managed by companies who run prisons.
With electronic monitoring, (satellites etc) it should not be difficult to keep refugees in certain zones, eg northern Australia, and let them work, and send their kids to school.
We can still sort out the few phonies and crims, without destroying the lives of genuine refugees any further through our “processing” them as if they were all criminals.
Our media need to get over their own racist obsessions. It is not people smuggling to allow refugees transport that they ask for.
If they don’t have transport they die.
And we tried that with Jewish refugees and it worked rather well for everyone but the Jews.
I think any Country that invades another should at the very least be compelled to accommodate those refugees fleeing the conflict.
Libya, Iraqi or Afghanistan has been with out help, bombed back to the dark ages, their resources pilfered by the West. Those fleeing the conflict as refugees arriving on our shores in rickety boats, have a right to expect safe passage to Australia and to every land that was a member of the invading ‘coalition of the dummies’.
Australia protagonist in the Iraq sanctions and invasion. Denied many Iraqi women and children basic subsistence, while -Shock Horror- was colluding with Saddam and cornered 90% of Iraq wheat market.
As long as the ‘coalition’ continues its mad rape and pillage of the 3rd world and bombs the beejezus out of these countries, while later pretending to be offering assistance to rebuild that which they themselves destroyed, then the wars of attrition will never end and the biggest little scam will continue.
What annoys me the most is that we whites think we have some right to order around all those brown people.
For anyone interested You Tube and public interest TV have posted a series about the civil rights movement called I”ll fly away, with Sam Waterston on the sight.
I downloaded, converted with iwisoft the entire series and have spent the last week watching.
The last scene was white people baying for blood because black kids were going to school.
Syria is now over the flames of war, under the shadow of the wings of death. The current and future heroes of Syria are being hunted like animals, black hooded, murdered in the streets and piled into mass graves while the rest of us sit and debate what should be done, and how, and by who. Syrians stream over borders now, as humans, fleeing from unimaginable horrors. They are protected under international law, the international law that ensures human rights. These laws are the product of two world wars. These laws are the only shred of hope that emerged from a word reduced to rubble and bones and born into the third world war, the cold war, and yet, these international laws, they were written and they have survived.
I sit in the early hours of Monday morning, watching the story of the Allied bombing of Germany on SBS, completely absorbed in my own mind. We will sit and debate films, of which Downfall was the greatest, Saving Private Ryan second, Beneath Hill 60 third.
How quick we are to forget, to smooth over, to distance ourselves from modern history. How silly it seems on one hand to accept U.S troops on our soil, and embrace the US defence posture as their outer perimeter while simultaneously, wantonly, abhorrently, recklessly trying to ignore the most important pieces of international law to ever have existed.
But of course, after months and months of the most vacuous political climate in my lifetime, of a bland and strangled media littered with the odd honest diamond shining out of the rough, Australian’s are demanding action, right now, yesterday, real action, we are standing up for it.
The central illusion in all of this is that faith can be restored in a hollowed out democracy that does not represent it’s electorate by subverting the international protections that exist to ensure each human being is treated as such, a human being, it can’t. Now even the staunchest politician right of the Greens are guilty of commodifying asylum seekers to votes, to public approval.
The Australian people are expected to support a policy which infringes on human rights. Never mind the razor wire, the SERCO guards, the sewn lips, the suicides, the roof tiles or the riots. If not for the protection of people from other lands, if not to honour the lives lost, who fought under this flag and who equated the fight, the carnage, the apocalypse of the second world war to some kind of fight for a better world, then oppose offshore processing to ensure that our own people be considered human beings, with human rights in any future conflict.
Let the complexities of the situation in Syria stand as an example to complacent entities who may rest on the assumption that future conflict is an impossibility because Captain Team Police Force America will ride in on a drone and save the day regardless of reality. It won’t.
Once it seemed each person left of Costello was against offshore processing. You want to save lives? Embrace the Ellis plan, take the whole queue, now.
If Australia cannot abide the most important pieces of international law to ever have existed, what is to stop the next nation state closing borders to the Red Cross, dropping cluster bombs, laying land mines or hey, writing people off as subhuman and loading them into ovens?
Stop the boats, take the queue. Otherwise the tears cried by so many, the blood shed, the 60 million people that died in those world wars are all for naught and the tears cried by our current stock of politicians can only be interpreted to be tears cried for the slide of civilisation into a new dark age of inhumane obscenity.
Your last comment, Marilyn, reminds me of the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise carried out by Jane Elliott with her class of eight- and nine-year-olds in the all-white town of Riceville, Iowa, in 1968. I would guess you know of this exercise, but for those who are unacquainted of the blue-eyed/brown-eyed exercise, Jane Elliott, a teacher, had made Martin Luther King, Jr the Hero of the Month for her class in April 1968. But then a few days later he was shot dead. Her students asked why.
She asked them what they knew about black people. Even though few of them had ever met one, they informed her that:
• They’re dirty
• They stink
• They don’t smell good
• They riot, they steal
• You can’t trust them, my dad says they better not try to move in next door to us.
There is no racism gene. I believe racists build up their bigotry either by unintended influence or premeditated manipulation during the nurturing years.
John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, 6 December 2001
“We will decide who comes to this country and the
circumstances in which they come.”
The words “who” and “circumstances” made me uncomfortable then and still do for they continue to resonate in our society today with our politicians acting as the pied pipers – a good example of premeditated manipulation.
Higgs, Howard was not all that original. Bob Hawke, 1977 as Federal President of the ALP at the time Fraser increased our refugee limit to 15,000 (a figure that was evidently never reached in the fallout of Vietnam):
‘Of course we should have compassion, but people who are coming in this way [obviously boats] are not the only people in the world who have rights to our compassion. Any sovereign country has the right to determine how it will excercise its compassion and how it will increase its population’ (The Vietnam Years, Michael Caulfield, p.455).
Our so called national leaders on this matter remind me of a Pogo cartoon I saw years ago that went something like this. ‘There go my men. I must follow them. I am their leader.’
On this issue, in the mid 70s, from all I have read, Fraser had the guts to take on both his own cabinet and the opposition. A rare thing for a leader to do. No wonder he is no longer a member of the Liberal party.
Actually Ken, Fraser had officials in Malaysia sinking boats.
And he set up the first so-called smuggling laws and was letting the Vietnamese be dumped here without any form of services as we saw in the documentary about Parramatta.
I know in Adelaide there were no services for the Vietnamese, we dumped them in Nissan huts near Port Adelaide and left them.
Gillard and Abbott are both lying disgraceful cowards and the ALP and others who think there is some way to compromise away our laws and human rights of others needs to have their arses kicked to Kandahar to see for themselves.
MarilynS, Know this guy who tells me he sincerely is not racist for agreeing with Howard/Abbot refugees/boat people policies. All he wants is that those we take in should look more like WASP even if they are Jewish, Greek or otherwise.
No dark skinned black fellas would be allowed in if he had his way. I guess he would have the Navy board the vessels and take off only those with the right features. Strange I tell him since the Black fellas were here some 40,000Y before the coming of the WASP.
I think it’s in the genes this inability for racist to see themselves as racists. The White Australia policy is so entrenched
in the red necks, they can’t see the forest for the trees.
We have all missed the point of this debate.
It is about Racism and ignorance on the one hand – Stop the boats and compassion on the other side. Let them all in.
Stired up into a furore by Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
It is always instructive to read the first speeches of people like them. (words People like them chosen carefully!)
They are a revelation. Both claim christian values, yet on this issue they seem to have none.
We forget why we have these people coming here. It is because of War. A war in iraq and a war in Afghanistan. Both wars atarted by the West and their meddling in these peoples affairs.
To bring Democracy to these countries. What right have we to do this? Who is to say that our system is the best?
As an example of this I was sitting on a train in Japan and I said to our japanese host (who was reading a book). “I see you read from the back of the book” he replied “No you do.”
A saluatory lesson in clear thinking.
We went to war in Vietnam out of fear of the communists
We went to war in Afghanistan in fear of the Islamists
We made up a reason to go to war in Iraq.
This is why we have boat people. If we minded our own business, we wouldn’t have war or Asylum seekers.
The people who started these wars were conservatives. They benefit in three ways. They cause fear amongst the people to let them believe they are protecting them from a hoard. They make money from the munitions they sell to the government and when the boats come they cause more fear because of the unknown.
And the people who want to help get wedged. The greens have been wedged as nutters and labor as bad administrators who can’t keep to their original policy.
The people laughing all the way to the ballot box are Abbott and Pyne and Morrison. They will get in because they have spun a story about queue jumpers, closet terrorists, border protection etc. What their message is, is that no one can protect you like a liberal national Government.
How much did the war cost in Iraq? How much in Afghanastan?
How much in Vietnam?
How much misery has it caused countless people by the loss of lives, soccial cohesion and dignity? Both the victors and the vanquished.
So I agree with Bob’s thrust, what have we to lose?
And by the way. Tony Abbott’s stance falls down on the signing of Malaysia to the UNHCR. That just proves that he is playing a game to gain power. This is part of the Thomson, Slipper, Asylum seeker triumvirate.
I hope it all unravels for him soon.
I totally agree Cracker. When Abbott becomes PM I think I might just slash my wrists. Otherwise it will be a slow death for me.