HOW nice to see Prime Minister Julia Gillard so concerned with child welfare that she put a telephone call in to the teenager jailed in Indonesia for allegedly breaking that country’s drug laws. 
And in the same week that her government put before Parliament legislation that would have enabled the Minister for Immigration to bundle refugee children to a foreign country and wash his hands of them.
The legislation has been withdrawn for now, but it remains government policy. But the fact it was drafted and put to the Parliament is a national shame.
The legislation would have allowed the Minister to designate anywhere as “an offshore processing country” to which any “offshore entry person” can be sent. No appeals, no courts, no disallowances by the Senate. An “offshore entry person” is anyone who arrives without a visa on any Australian territory that is not the mainland or Tasmania.
It was aimed at removing the legally enforceable protections that the High Court held were necessary under existing law.
It was a shameful piece of legislation on half a dozen grounds and its withdrawal by the Government was the right deed for the wrong reason as was the Opposition’s refusal to support it.
First, the hypocrisy. The legislation stated that a reason for the change was that people smuggling causes loss of life. More like loss of votes.
The Government should abandon this legislation, not leave it sitting waiting for the numbers. It should lead. It should educate voters on how small number of boat people is compared to Australia’s overall immigration program or even the overall refugee program. It should explain to voters how small the number of boat refugees to Australia is compared to the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees to other countries around the world.
Instead, it remains committed to pandering to voters’ unfounded fears.
The other hypocrisy is the way the Government boasts that Australia is a tolerant compassionate society. Rubbish. Its continued adherence to this legislation makes it intolerant and lacking compassion.
The third hypocrisy is that we are signatories to the Refugee Convention yet the Government remains determined to breach its terms. The Government should either abandon the intent of this legislation or have the courage to withdraw from the Refugee Convention and stop the pretence.
I’ll leave aside the national hypocrisy of our leader telephoning an “illegal” drug possessor in Indonesia while so many in our society refer to legal boat refugees as “illegals”.
Then there is the cruelty. The legislation would have allowed the Minister to send people who had risked their lives to escape tyranny, persecution and even death to virtually any place on earth with almost no guarantees to prevent them being abused or even sent back to their deaths.
The basis of the legislation and the Government’s continued policy stand is the selfishness. The legislation provided that the sole determinant on whether a place could be designated by the Minister as an “offshore processing country” was what “the Minister thinks is in the national interest”. Australia comes first and everyone else can go jump. No sense of fair go, help for the underdog, compassion and all of those qualities that we are supposed to hold dear.
This legislation was a test for Australians. We should have been saying that we as a nation are not like that. The fact that so few said that, shows we have failed the test.
Tony Abbott’s Opposition to the legislation was not because of its inherent evil, but as a political game to attempt to force the Government to fall back to the Howard Government’s favoured place of refugee imprisonment — Nauru. The right deed for the wrong reason.
The other danger of the legislation was the creation of unprecedented ministerial power. The declaring of an “offshore processing country” could only be done by the Minister and the only consideration was that “the Minister thinks it is in the national interest”. Court review was thereby excluded.
If the Minister swore he thought it was in the national interest that would be it — however ill-founded, illogical or lacking bona fides anyone or any court thinks.
Further, the legislation provided that all “offshore entry people” be processed in offshore processing countries except that the Minister, and only the Minister personally, could exempt a person.
The legislation excluded what are called “the rules of natural justice” in ministerial decisions.
These rules embody a lot of what might be called fair play – the right to be heard, to have the decision-maker consider all relevant matters and no irrelevant matters, the right to be represented, a right to appeal and so on. The sort of things that any ordinary Australian would expect from government officials in exercising fairly ordinary powers — like getting a government benefit, or a zoning decision or a fishing licence, let alone life and death decisions on deportation or being shunted off to places which have no legally enforceable guarantees of protection.
The fact the Government seriously put this legislation to the Parliament is alarming. The concentration of power personally in a Minister with no review is a dangerous precedent.
Ministers should be dealing with broad questions of policy and leave the details to departmental officers. Ministers should not be mucking about personally deciding whether Muhammed gets processed in Australia or Malaysia.
Moreover, that possibility leaves open the opportunity for corruption.
What a dispiriting confluence of events that in the week in which Australia engaged in international leadership to meet one of the world’s gravest threats – climate change – the national Parliament was tainted with this poisonous proposal.
Thank pity it is dead, but the fact the Government has not totally abandoned it and the principles behind it is alarming.
DOT DOT DOT
WORDS with Friends (or Scrabble for the iPone) must surely hasten the end of our clinging to English (as opposed to American) spelling.
The App has gone rampant. This is social media for the baby boomers. I am playing about five games at a time across three generations.
“You have unleashed a monster,” my time-starved barrister sister-in-law groaned after I introduced her to the game.
The game uses American spellings, so you get points for “color” and none for “colour” – unlike Google which allows both.
Usually newspapers take the lead on spelling – program and dialog without the extra two letters at the end are examples. The Age uses the –or form, but has not gone the whole way with single l in traveler and jewelry, -ize suffixes and so on.
The Americans won’t move to us, but my guess is that the schools and universities, where young people write and play Words with Friends, will.
I am no longer changing American spellings in my University of Canberra journalism students’ work, even the stories which are published in our online newspaper, www.nowuc.com.au. There are far more important things to worry about.
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 15 October 2011.
While agreeing with you that the “boat people” issue occupies a disproportionate amount of political debate in Australia and that the proposed extension of Ministerial discretion is quite unwarranted, I must say that some of the arguments put forward by the “refugee advocates” are becoming as hysterical as the other side’s. At times the Greens Senator Hanson-Young seems to be suggesting that refugees who arrive on Australian territory in boats (and Christmas Island is close to Indonesia) are a special category who should be granted residency if not citizenship more or less automatically. The argument that the numbers are negligible smacks of the same reasoning that holds that Australia’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions are negligible. Shameful as it may be, it is not true that the majority of Australians are or were welcoming to refugees. There is a considerable literature on the difficulties that non-English speaking migrants had in the post-War era. Ironically, the inquiries into the Cronulla riots found that many earlier migrants were among those most violently opposed to “new arrivals”. Thirdly, the inference that the treatment refugees receive in mandatory detention in Australia is much worse than the unspeakable horrors they fled ignores the fact that much of the time spent in detention is the result of the requirement for “due process” and, in some cases, the exhaustion of all appeals against the results of that process. As I attempted to point out in a letter to the Canberra Times on another matter, special interest groups cannot demand officials decision-making be subject to lengthy public processes when they oppose something, but instant approval if they are in favour. I thought the High Court decision on the “Malaysian Solution” was saying that: if there is a process then it cannot be arbitrarily overridden. On the issue of the Refugee Convention, I wonder whether its drafters really contemplated that second or third-stage countries would have the same obligations as first-stage countries of refuge? The situation of say Thailand with respect to Burmese refugees seems obvious, but is Australia under the same obligation of relief of acute distress if one of those refugees makes his way through Malaysia and Indonesia and to Christmas Island perhaps years later? Finally, because I am going on too long, “refugee advocates” seem to suggest at times that the whole concept of “border protection” is wrong; as a livestock farmer I would remind them of the importance of trying to keep out rabies and foot-and-mouth, to name but two exotic disease threats.
Thank you for stating in such clarity what I would have expected to hear from any decent MP or Senator, but not one has had the courage to proclaim publicly: the moral bankruptcy of the government and the opposition not only in refugee/asylum policy but on a range of other issues concerning democracy in Australia. Makes one wonder how far down the road Australia has moved to put in place the prerequisites to becoming a ‘police state’ given the government’s numerous and often successful attempts at ‘enabling legislation’. 1933 and history thereafter should be a warning – obviously not understood by the current politicians gracing our major parties’ landscape.