Peter Dutton’s war on fighters returning from extremist hotspots around the world has taken on new life this week, and the country will suffer for it. As readers pointed out, the power the government seeks for blocking return or stripping citizenship threatens the fundamental legal rights of all Australians. Meanwhile, readers debated such broad topics as the broken visa system, the broken welfare system, and the broken wages system which allows underpayment to thrive.
On the foreign fighters bill
James O’Neill writes: There are some quite fundamental legal issues at stake here and the Australian government, in what is now a common stance, is ignoring them. It is a point to bear in mind when next you hear some minister rabbiting on about “the rules based international order” usually in the context of criticising another country for their alleged infringements. The hypocrisy is sickening.
On the ‘visa game’
Ben Aveling writes: The LNP don’t actually care. They just want to be seen as tough, because, in Dutton’s own words, “Secure borders are fundamental to securing public backing for skilled migration to fill skills gaps”.
Philip Stott writes: Ah, but Australian businesses are gaming everyone. Creating a new sub-class of working poor. Our equivalent of undocumented workers in the US.
On Newstart
Robert Smith writes: Why can’t we both help people find a job and increase Newstart. It doesn’t have to be either/or, prime minister. Labor also knows there is not enough sympathy for an increase in the voting public for “dole bludgers” so they can’t run hard on the issue. It’s OK for the government to buckle to the demands of retirees but not to allow the unemployed to live decently.
On George Calombaris
Malcolm Grant write: If your entire business model is based on underpaying staff or making them work for free, then it’s not a business, it’s a vanity project. Why should other people subsidise your hobby? When Jamie Oliver’s restaurants here stopped making money, he made the sane business decision and shut them down. People like Georgie boy and Neil Perry constantly play on their celebrity to make a pile of money out of spin-offs like recipe books and appearances while the people actually producing the food have their wages “miscalculated”.
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In this morning’s Crikey Worm the following is reprinted: Peter Greste (The Daily Telegraph): “Those who live in dictatorships understand something fundamental that seems to have been lost in our own debates around press freedom since the Australian Federal Police raided journalists from two news organisations back in June. Without it, all people are left with is government propaganda. Press freedom is not so much about protecting the rights of a handful of privileged journalists to stick their noses into the guts of government. It is about protecting the right of ordinary citizens to have a source of information about their government and the powerful that isn’t state-sanctioned puffery.” In the 1970s I lived in Suharto’s Indonesia for several years. It is not the case that all people were left with was government propaganda. It is true that government news releases were reported uncritically. Other than that the media reported most things factually, just leaving out anything that the government would object to. As, for example, the Australian media today leave out anything that would expose them to lawsuits for libel. Expect more of this as our media get used to being raided or having journalists arrested on trumped-up charges when their reporting hits a nerve. I hope it’s not too late to avoid the situation Greste is warning about but his own attitude to Julian Assange’s plight doesn’t help the situation. Anyway it probably is too late. Samizdat may have to be reborn but probably won’t have access to the internet.