Home Affairs’ latest mask-slip — after a senior portfolio bureaucrat implied that Australian citizenship is a “privilege” — came as little surprise to some Crikey readers, who saw it as merely an extension of the department’s “broken thinking”. Elsewhere. Readers discussed the dangers of Australia’s lagging oil reserves, and asked who had allowed it to happen.
On Home Affairs
John Richardson writes: The claim by Home Affairs assistant secretary Derek Bopping that “citizenship is a privilege” may have come as a shock to some of our precious parliamentarians but Australians should not be under any illusion that this is the view of those who believe that everything should fall within the remit of government. After all, what better way to ensure compliance? This bent and broken thinking has been permitted to infect our nation’s psyche by those who support totalitarianism and care not a jot for our so-called “democracy” and the natural rights and freedoms that all Australians take for granted; including the birthright or lawfully conferred right of “citizenship”. The very last right that should be the gift of any government.
On oil reserves
John Gleeson writes: In the event of a national emergency Australian is reliant on delivery from overseas vessels. Additionally, should ships need major repair work, Singapore is the nearest location for specialist repairs. Add to that the rundown of fuel stocks, especially that fact that there is only 22 days of diesel oil reserves, and we have a potential disaster that has been years in the making. Not discussed either are the reserves of lubricating oils, needed just as much as fuel oils.
Chris Jones writes: On the subject of fuel reserves, the Australian Electric Vehicle Association has long argued that we wouldn’t need to import much oil at all if we just moved to electric vehicles. We would save tens of billions of dollars each year on oil not being bought — funds we could easily divert into locally produced renewable electricity.
Peter Schulz writes: This idiot government is so obsessed with dog-whistling the national security threat of a few rickety boatloads of asylum seekers that it can’t see the real threats to our national security, such as this one. National security of our energy supplies might be worth a cursory glance or two, but not if it impinges on the sacredness of the market or the short-term self-interest of the big corporates who donate so generously to both major parties and provide all those lovely sinecures to retiring politicians.
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Not only Dutton but also the entire two or three top layers of managers of the departments involved in the extraordinary rendition of asylum-seekers, the eager citizenship-stripping, and domestic repression generally need to be sacked, and never re-employed by government. All the lower-level operational people should be required to re-apply for their jobs.
As with Aboriginal affairs, a department can come to be poisoned with a culture deeply hostile to its proper aims and to a just society; the only solution is a thorough purge. Whitlam‘s government abolished the Department of Immigration because its administrative culture was considered to still reflect the White Australia policy despite that being effectively scrapped in 1966.
Then abbott Misgovernment Attorney-General Brandis (now well-paid High Commissioner to the Court of St James) does after all think it to be “irresponsible” for the government not to respond to public concerns “ … where there is a systematic and ingrained cultural pattern within an institution that needs to be exposed”.
Indeed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission may be necessary regarding this institutionalised pattern of criminality and cover-up.