The left may not like it, but one of the Coalition’s great success stories since 2013 is that it stopped the boats, bringing to an end a period in which Labor — helped by politically motivated obstructionism from the Coalition and the Greens — had allowed Australia’s humanitarian program to run off the rails.
Part of the credit belongs to Kevin Rudd, who adopted a hardline “no resettlement in Australia for maritime arrivals” policy in his second stint as prime minister. But the bulk of the credit goes to Scott Morrison, whose boat turnback policy was — whatever legitimate criticisms might be made of the secrecy in which it was shrouded — highly successful in stopping boats coming to Australia and, therefore, people dying on the way. Critics insist that, somehow, this merely displaced maritime deaths to elsewhere in the region, but evidence for that is minimal.
By allowing access to Australia’s humanitarian program to again be dictated by need, rather than by who had the resources to get a boat to Australia, our refugee resettlement program is more just. It can give priority to people who lack the resources to reach Australia by boat, and who are forced to wait in international resettlement camps for an opportunity for a permanent home free of persecution.
Now a group of Western Australian Liberals want to undo that good work by again hijacking our humanitarian visa program, this time in favour not of people with the financial resources to reach Indonesia and then pay a people smuggler, but white South Africans with political sway in another country and support from an influential media company. Two far-right Christian Western Australian MPs, Andrew Hastie and Ian Goodenough, are demanding 10,000 places in Australia’s humanitarian program for white South African farmers. Australia’s entire refugee intake in 2018-19 will be 18,750.
“I think that we should consider an intake as we have done so for Syrian refugees in the past,” Hastie said. The comparison with Syria is both extraordinarily offensive and reflects the culture of white victimhood that pervades sections of the right.
Syrian refugees have been victims of the Assad dictatorship for generations, their efforts to protest against him hijacked by outside forces and fundamentalists; they’ve been bombed, gassed, tortured and murdered by Assad, Putin and their Iranian mates; their cities have been levelled; they’ve been occupied by the barbaric Islamic State and other religious wingnuts; their kids murdered and their country made a plaything of both great power and regional rivalries. To compare this to the “plight” of white farmers in South Africa is a racist absurdity.
Like maritime arrivals, South African farmers — many of whom would be able to take advantage of other migration categories (which even The Australian acknowledges) — would be a hijacking of Australia’s humanitarian program away from helping those most in need of resettlement around the world, in favour of people with relatively greater resources and influence.
If the stereotype of queue-jumper ever had substance, it does for the white South Africans Hastie, Goodenough and their WA Liberal mates claim need to be brought here. It’s a stereotype peddled on the right that Labor’s immigration policies are strongly influenced by ethnic constituencies within the party’s various state branches. This appears to be a clear demonstration of the actual phenomenon, but within the Liberal Party. And the victims will be some of the world’s most deserving refugees.
Bernard, I don’t believe this will be your most popular article this year, but I think you have it right. There’s no way Australia can be proud of its policy implementation, but it has been devastatingly effective and produced precisely the stated intention, while tested alternatives so far have not. It’s a shameful policy that has nevertheless worked; a policy we’d protest most strenuously were it applied to our own citizens in other jurisdictions, yet we still have no clue how to implement a more effective one to balance border control and humanitarian aid.
Without question, the policy produces inhumane suffering and injustice far out of keeping with our broad cultural values, our aspirations, and our global responsibilities. We all know that running it is an hypocrisy undermining anything we advocate on human rights, and that we have a standing moral obligation to strive to do better. I’m confident that most Australians would support a more humane policy provided it could be proven that it was not substantially less effective. Obviously, a smaller but still significant number of Australians would also gladly dismantle the current policy regardless of whether a comparably effective alternative could be implemented.
Both options are viable decisions for a multicultural democracy, but the one that clearly isn’t is overturning needs-based humanitarian intake selectively based on ministerial cultural bias, and it’s beyond a cynical obscenity to attempt to do so while the current realpolitik detention policy is in place.
A brave article, B! Good luck on how it lands here.
It’s nonsense, the so called humanitarian program has nothing to do with any refugees, it’s a small voluntary program we use to pretend we are doing our share.
Everyone has the right to seek asylum and what Keane supports is genocide pure and simple. Pushing away people seeking asylum is a crime and it’s never a ”success”, pity Bernard is such a racist idiot.
Shepherd, I apologise if I have read you wrong but you posted similar insulting comments three or four times in a row over what appeared to be a 20 minute period. I believe you are looking for a fight more than a discussion, and you won’t find it with me. If I’m wrong and you’d like a serious discussion, the ante I need from you is that you nominate one country accepting more unauthorized refugees than its nominated capacity, yet still exercising effective border control, and acting more humanely in the exercise of both than is Australia. You will need to supply evidence for each criterion.
Your time starts now.
(For other readers, this is not a defense of Australia’s current policy, of which I’m also ashamed. It’s my suggested minimum criteria for a better policy that I believe we’d have the political appetite to support.)
If the solution to a problem is ‘death camps’ maybe we shouldn’t actually ‘solve’ it? I don’t know about you but I like to keep the number of death camps I have to help pay for at a level of zero. I see a non zero number of death camps run by the nation I am a citizen of as a pretty big problem to solve.
Draco, as death camps, the off-shore detention camps Australia has set up are neither efficient nor effective. Ours aren’t death camps. They’re misery camps, aspiration-killing camps, indifference camps, limbo camps that have also produced rape, assault, trauma, despair, medical neglect, disrespect, injustice, menace, administrative incompetence and death — as prolonged detention frequently does. They are doubly outsourced, Pilate-level handwashing fortified with cynical censorship and outright dishonesty to the electors of Australia.
You’re right: they’re morally indefensible. They’re not even democratic. We should not tolerate them long-term, and especially not as the policy is presently implemented and sold. But you damage your case to misrepresent them.
I’ve read and appreciated your comments on other articles. If you’d like to a constructive discussion with me on the broader question, the minimum ante I need from you is the same that I demanded from Shepherdmj above: you must name one country accepting more unauthorized refugees than its nominated capacity, yet still exercising effective border control, and acting more humanely in the exercise of both than is Australia. You will need to supply evidence for each criterion.
If you can’t, then I won’t blame you. It’ll put you in precisely in the same boat as me and (I suspect) Bernard. We want better, but don’t want to compromise conflicting priorities, and don’t know how to do it.
It’s okay to say ‘I don’t know’.
You’ve rigged this little game of yours two ways, Rav. First, by demanding that the only alternative policies that you will consider must be extant somewhere in the world. I agree that such a policy would be sufficient to destroy your case, but I don’t see why it’s necessary; why a well-reasoned and rationalised policy wouldn’t make do in this argument, conjectural as it already is (if you want an example of such a thought-out policy position try the RAC position papers.) Second, I suspect you would actually declare any country taking “more unauthorized refugees than its nominated capacity” to not, by definition, be exercising effective border control. Otherwise I’d give you Canada, Sweden and even New Zealand (though their intake is tiny, even per capita.) And you can look up your own evidence!
But no, I am not actually offering you your impossible ante to play and nor, I suspect, will anyone else. Because, beyond this voice-of-reason sophistry, the ease with which you can apparently separate moral defensibility from practicality and “effectiveness” is, frankly, disconcerting and doesn’t make you a tempting debate partner! Your ability to applaud anti-democratic immoral policies (albeit not in the “long-term”), despite all your heavy-hearted expressions of deep regret etc etc, suggests a certain moral, ah, flexibility, let’s say.
(For some reason, Lewis Carroll springs to mind: ‘”I weep for you,” the Walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes. “O Oysters,” said the Carpenter, “You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?” But answer came there none–And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one.’ Not obviously and directly relevant, true, but a nice verse!)
Decorum wrote: I don’t see why it’s necessary
I’ve offered these as a minimum criteria, Decorum, that I think Australians would accept and support. You might feel that Australians would accept other than the criteria I’ve advanced, and that’s okay. You could easily argue that with another reader. I might not participate, but I’d certainly read it if you did — especially if you were able to argue it credibly from opinion polls and other respected tests of sentiment.
As for why I’ve set minimum criteria, it’s because I’ve noticed that from the outset (and perhaps not unexpectedly), many readers here are talking down to one another. That is, they’re not just saying they’re upset, dismayed and ashamed as I’m sure we both are — they’re being sanctimonious, claiming superior and authoritative knowledge — trying to blame one another for the problem, responsibility-shift.
But such a posture requires more than just conjecture about what might work better. It requires policy one can point to that has worked better, and which we are presently ignoring. If one doesn’t have that, then as I pointed out to one reader before, it’s okay to drop the posturing and say ‘Actually, I don’t know’.
That doesn’t say there isn’t a better answer (there might be, and I hope there is), or that we shouldn’t look for it (I agree: we should.) Only that we don’t claim to have a better answer yet, and therefore won’t chastise fellow citizens and elected representatives over not having one yet either.
Those are my minimum criteria; they may not be your ante, but they’re mine, based on what I’ve observed. Nobody else has to accept my criteria, but that’s the bar a reader would have to jump before I’d also accept the rhetoric and sanctimony I’m seeing in comments here.
It is one thing to stop boats but another to keep a group of people in endless detention on Manus & Nauru where their lives and mental health have been destroyed.
Yeah because those 2 things aren’t related #rollseyes
They needn’t be.
So it’s ok to destroy this group of people if it discourages others from arriving by boat? Wow! That ‘s a great morality to follow.
That’s not what I said, or implied. I would favour having accepted the Malaysian solution, years ago – the perfect was the enemy of the acceptable. Also accepting the NZ offer. After that, cultivating good relations with Indonesia, so the comparatively well-off don’t see flying there as a fast route to settlement.
I hope they appreciate they are being sacrificed for such a noble cause.
Who cares if they appreciate it. They made the decision to try and come here without the government of Australia’s permission. They have no one but themselves to blame for their current circumstances.
Iseael would have just shot them. Far cheaper and just as efficient at stopping unwanted immigration.
We signed the 1951 Convention on Refugees which gives them the right to come here any way they can. The blame is all on Australia, its media, its government and ultimately its people. Your attitude is common and it is also misinformed.
Israel would have shot them, yes. Is that the government you want? Why don’t you just move to Israel? Oh, that’s right, they’d shoot you.
I am obliged to use the “Reply” slot here to respond to Zeke.
Unfortunately, Zeke, there is such a behaviour as “lip-service” in Politics and which, upon my mentioning it, I am sure that you will agree. Actually you are not quite correct regarding the Convention it is of little matter. Consider, as another example, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child which has been sloshing about for 90+ years. Do you recall Hawke’s “No Child…” (real question) Just how many signatories have offended and do offend currently with this Declaration ? Politics huh?
If Bobby or your good self cannot recall Hawke as PM (or were in day-care at the time) then there is a very good chance that either of you would be accepted as an Israeli citizen if you had desirable skills – but, I agree, not as a refo – high end skills excepted.
The refugee program is supposed to be for people who have nowhere to go to be safe from physical peril. South African fatmers, if they feel endangered on their fatms, are free to put a manager on the farm and move into a nearby town or city. There they would not be as safe as in Australia but they would be as safe as most black Americans.
“fatmers” – fat fingers. Don’t know how spell check let that through. “Farmers,” of course.
When in opposition the LNP frequently cried foul regarding seaborne refugees ‘jumping the queue’. This must be parroted back at them – in unrelenting Abbott-style – by Shorten & Co.
It’s actually a stroke of genius from the Libs.
The left may not like it but Australia is still predominantly white European people. People are naturally tribal.
See the outcome of the most recent US presidential election when you think you don’t need the votes of the majority ethnic group in a country. #shrug
Vomit. We are tribal with the people we know.
Once we only knew white Europeans.
Now the people we know includes Europeans, Asians, Indians, Chinese, Japanese and many others, including Africans, who are simply part of our friends and family.
Get to know any people and they will become your tribe.
“Who you mean ‘we’, Paleface?”
Lol. Have a drive around Sydney sometime. All those ethnic groups have a funny tendancy to huddle together in suburbs full of people from their same ethnic group. It was ever thus.
No end of studies have shown diversity leads to lower levels of social cohesion. Choices have been made (not by the actual voting public of course) and we will all now live with the consequences I guess
Absolutely. Forgetting in-group preference and accepting that the dominant culture in Australia has more in common with the Christian, English-speaking South-African farmers is a sad error. “Diversity is our strength” is a much-repeated mantra with little evidence backing it up.
“No end of studies”… really? How about you pick one and provide a link?
Apparently Zeke can’t use Google.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_lookup?hl=en&publication_year=2007&pages=137-74&issue=2&author=R.+D.+Putnam&title=‘E+Pluribus+Unum%3A+Diversity+and+Community+in+the+Twenty-First+Century+–+the+2006+Johan+Skytte+Prize+Lecture’