This year over $80m will be spent on consular assistance for Australians overseas, helping out the likes of beer-mat-mum Annice Smoel.
The cost of such services is constantly increasing. The number of Australians demanding help from Foreign Affairs overseas has doubled since 2003-04.
It’s fair to say that decades ago, Australians who travelled overseas and got into difficulties — especially if they caused the difficulties through their own criminal behaviour — were not automatically regarded as cases deserving of public outcry and assistance. If some Aussie found themselves in self-inflicted trouble overseas then that was their problem.
Somewhere along the way in recent years, the entitlement mentality that pervades Australia’s welfare system has extended to the perception that Australians have a right to be rescued from whatever trouble they get into while travelling overseas.
Most particularly if they get into trouble in a developing country. There doesn’t seem to be quite the same outcry when people are arrested in the United States or the UK. But put them in a jail cell in Thailand, Indonesia or Eastern Europe, and suddenly we’re in Midnight Express territory. The media is happy to feed this perception, demanding everything short of sending in the Navy (do we have a serviceable gunboat?) to rescue unlucky — or more typically criminal — travellers in durance vile in Third World conditions. Female travellers, of course, generate that precious damsel-in-distress dimension for the media.
This is a none-too-subtle form of xenophobia, an assumption that Australians have special rights when travelling in poorer — duskier — countries. It’s the mentality that assumes a form of extraterritoriality for travelling Australians who break the laws of the countries in which they are guests, which assumes a right for Australians to behave as offensively as possible. It’s the mentality that assumes Australia can lecture Turkey over how to maintain the heritage values of Gallipoli, as if the peninsula belongs to us and not to the people of the country we invaded in WW1.
It’s almost a type of latter-day colonialism, as the citizens of the Deputy Sheriff nation swagger around the region, drunk, boorish and behaving as they please. It’d be amusing if taxpayers weren’t footing the bill.
As much as I support the consular assistance to troubled Aussies overseas, I do strongly believe that the information about consular assistance ( and its limits) should be handed to every Aussie going overseas.
Brilliant comment about Gallipoli! None of Australians, I have asked so far, could explain what we were doing there and why. The only response is: ‘It’s not us. It was the British army’.
I have some problems with this answer:
1. If there were British, why do we celebrate it?
2. During the WWI Australia was already an indepenednt country. So did we really have to go, or we just enjoyed going there?
3. If we want to teach other countries about anything why did we thrash the place with cans, beer bottles and lots of plastic wastes during celebration; well what do we celebrate there, I wonder.
4.Isn’t it high time we introduced history of the world in general and Australia in particular as a compulsory subject throughout our education system?
Knowledgeable people are less agressive.
It beats me why Chapelle Corby and Annice Smoel have so much popular support?
Aussie values? or just Western values??
Rena Zurawel. You have written what I have been saying for years. My only gripe with you is I believe you’ve said it better. 🙂
PS Don’t forget, it is our so called culture(?) which believes sportsmen to be of far greater importance than an education. I’m almost tempted to believe it is-here I mean all governments’-interests to render the majority of people down to having the mentality of fifteen year old’s. I do know that a catholic education turns out a heaving mass of people who pronounce ‘H’ as haitch, rather than it’s correct spelling and pronouncing it as ‘H’ AITCH.
Sorry Rena, but the Irish got here first. 🙂
I can understand what youre saying, but for every idiot larrakin in the tabloid press – such as Sharpelle Corby, and this recent beermat woman – there must be a bunch of people who unfairly get caught living together unmarried in the U.A.E. without realising it’s illegal, or get charged for something else unexpected. Or am I just a bit naive?
Face it – Australia’s STILL the lucky country, LOL.
Goodness knows why.
How long can it last?
There’s a big difference between “consular assistance” and being “bailed out”.
I DO believe that, regardless of what you may have done or not, your local embassy/conusulate should at least be on hand to ensure you get access to medical attention, a lawyer etc, and you are being treated in accordance with what we consider to be basic human rights.
However, this of course doesn’t mean that Kevin Rudd should get on the next plane to plead for you to be pardoned.