September 17, 2003
THE VIEW FROM ABROAD
“There is a strange bipolarity in the Australian psyche,” writes Time’s Liam Fitzpatrick:
Compare the louche abandon of the Sydney Mardi Gras with the gruff, homophobic machismo of the outback.
By this standard, every place on earth is bipolar. Compare the louche abandon of Castro Street with the gruff, homophobic machismo of gangsta rap. Compare the louche abandon of the lobster with the gruff, homophobic machismo of the sea bass. Compare Liam Fitzpatrick with someone who has a clue.
Contrast the shining, multicultural cities with rural outposts where shadowy, armed survivalists zealously prophesize an Indonesian invasion.
Excuse me? Care to provide some names and locations, pal?
And consider the country's strangely conflicted attitude to immigrants: for every legal settler that gives thanks for the unfettered hospitality of the Lucky Country—as Australia has been famously known since the 1960s—you can line up a woebegone refugee from Afghanistan, Uganda or China who rues the day he or she ever made landfall there.
Last year 108,070 people migrated to Australia. Good luck finding that many unhappy refugees, Liam.
Australia forcibly imprisons all its refugees in isolated, desert camps until they gain permission to remain or a ticket to another country—processes that can take years. It's the only nation in the world to do so.
Besides the “isolated desert camps”, Australia also holds claimed refugees at urban centres in Sydney and Melbourne. England and Italy, among other nations, also detain asylum seekers.
These policies, widely condemned by the international community, are the target of From Nothing to Zero—a grim compilation of letters written in captivity, plaintive testaments and fierce counterblasts of a wretched Untermensch that came to Australia in leaky boats or suffocating containers looking for a lucky break they were almost always denied.
I’m not sure if any refugees have ever arrived here in containers. It’s kind of a long trip. As for always being denied lucky breaks ...
Some of the letters' authors are as young as nine. Several have been locked up for three years or more, and their writings depict an arid dystopia of razor wire, beatings, attempted suicides and surveillance cameras—hopelessly remote from the great Australian dream of a swimming pool and backyard barbecue for all.
Children at the Maribyrnong and Woomera centres enjoy swimming classes. And here’s a Woomera barbecue.
A letter from an Iraqi embodies the pathos: "I am half dead... I am ashamed to tell you I really need some warm clothes and shoes if you please. They never give me anything in this three year [sic]." A 14-year-old Syrian wrote, "I am maybe still young but I hate my life because inside this jail I'm stuck and maybe no one is going to help me get out of it."
Anybody inside the detention centres is free to return to their country of origin at any time. Hey, you even get paid.
Though refugees do eventually make it out of the camps, Australia's policies are nonetheless shameful—and have plenty of historical precedent. The country's refusal to accept refugees from Nazi Germany was notorious in the 1930s. ("We have no racial problems in Australia and no desire to import any," a government spokesman snapped at the time.)
It’s Godwin’s Law time! Liam is referring to T. W. White’s remark at the 1938 Evian Conference. Unless he attended, it’s difficult to understand how Liam can characterise White’s comment (misquoted by Fitzpatrick, incidentally) as snappish. Australia agreed at the conference to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees; about 7000 arrived before the war largely ended the intake. Two thousand refugees arrived aboard the Dunera in 1940, destined first for internment camps and later to a new life in Australia.
Likewise the White Australia immigration policy, which restricted immigration from countries such as India and China until 1973, was a gross insult to the generations of Asian pioneers (principally Chinese) who had helped develop Australia's farming, mining and mercantile sectors.
Listen to Liam and be ashamed, you bad ungrateful Australia!
Australia is often tardy in owning up to its darker past. One need only look at the Howard government's refusal to apologize to the "stolen generation" of Aborigines to understand that.
One need only look at that paragraph to realise how little understanding Liam has of this subject. Owning up to a dark past is entirely distinct from the political campaign to force an apology from Howard on the specific issue of the stolen generation.
The detention centers described in From Nothing to Zero are nothing more than convenient oubliettes allowing most Australians to consign refugees to dusty oblivion, aided by the fact that the media are not allowed to visit refugee detention centers.
Wrong. The immigration minister’s website records media tours of “Port Headland in June 1999 and February 2000; Woomera in November 1999 and January, March and December in 2001; Maribyrnong in March 2001 and Curtin in June 2001.”
You would have expected protests about that—but there have hardly been any.
In a vast, sunburned land where the beer is always cold and the surf forever up, darkness is more easily avoided than confronted.
Oh, that’s just brilliant. The man’s a freaking poet. I wonder if he’s ever actually been here? Maybe I’ll ask him.
Posted by Tim Blair at September 17, 2003 07:47 PMTim you've missed the biggest point:
Australia forcibly imprisons all its refugees in isolated, desert camps
That's crap. There are thousands of refugees who are given visas, and immigrate here, without ever seeing a detention centre, because they apply and are granted asylum rather than just showing up in a boat with a lack of ID.
It's a small minority - illegal immigrants - who are detained. Almost all immigrants, and most refugees, wouldn't know what Woomera was until they read a paper at work in their australian jobs/homes one day.
Posted by: Red Engineer at September 17, 2003 at 07:57 PMHow many countries have "owned up to their dark past"? Soviet Union? China? Vietnam? Egypt? Syria? France? Cuba?
Oh, I get it by countries he means the US, Austrailia, Britain.
Posted by: nobody important at September 17, 2003 at 08:03 PMAs one of those legal immigrants I will always be grateful to Australia and its people. Does Liam Fitzpatrick know Woomera has been occupied by Australian,British,American scientists and military personal for around 40yrs. Or does this fact take away from the dramatics.
Posted by: Gary at September 17, 2003 at 09:02 PMI'm mostly in agreeance with the idea that the refugee detention issue is way overblown and politicised. But there still seems to be something slightly wrong about locking up nine year old children.
It doesnt help that we have conservatives turning it all into a black and white, "with us or against us" style issue. Perhaps there is a possibility that there are some things we are doing which is morally and legally wrong, and some things which are fine and dandy? I know its not as simplistic as Tim likes his "bad left, good right" politics, but it would be much more constructive.
Posted by: Tom at September 17, 2003 at 09:17 PMI'm interested to find out the details of Liam's reply to Tim (providing a reply is given). Should be entertaining.
Posted by: Marty at September 17, 2003 at 09:25 PMTom
If people like Liam Fitzpatrick stop parsing on such obvious BS "I am half dead... I am ashamed to tell you I really need some warm clothes and shoes if you please. They never give me anything in this three year [sic]." more people will listen.
Posted by: Gary at September 17, 2003 at 09:32 PMAnd Liam would know... being a dentately challenged LIMEY who's never even been NEAR Australia.
Posted by: roscoe p coltrane at September 17, 2003 at 09:50 PM"But there still seems to be something slightly wrong about locking up nine year old children."
Tell their parents that. They're the ones responsible for the kids.
I guess we could ship every refugee family with kids back where they came from, or separate the kids from their families by putting them in foster homes. Would that be better?
"Australia forcibly imprisons all its refugees in isolated, desert camps until they gain permission to remain or a ticket to another country."
Like Red Engineer, that was the statement that hit me in the eye the hardest.
The number is around 12,000, Red & Tim.
Around 12,000 refugee and humanitarian re-settlements this year and every year for as long as I care to remember.
Per capita, Australia does as much as any other nation on the planet (and a damn site more than most) to resettle **genuine** refugees - found to be so by the UNHCR - from squalid refugee camps in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Every place stolen by opportunistic economic migrants who are abusing the international asylum system, aided by criminal gangs of people smugglers and local "refugee advocates", is another place denied to those who really need it.
Don't give me this BS about Australia being unfriendly to refugees or immigrants generally. If I remember the Census data I saw recently correctly, 26% of us were born overseas and 53% have at least one parent who was. We are a country of immigrants. Australians are just fair-minded, that is all. We have a limted capacity to absorb mainly unskilled refugees who often have poor English ability. We have set a quota that pushes our ability to the max and we want to make sure it is used to benefit people who really need help - not those who are trying to rort the asylum system to improve their living standards.
TFK
Posted by: Bob Bunnett at September 17, 2003 at 10:42 PM"convenient oubliettes"
What the hell does that mean? Continuing proof that most university educations are wasted.
Posted by: LB at September 17, 2003 at 11:06 PMLovely - nice work Tim.
Bob, you say "Per capita, Australia does as much as any other nation on the planet (and a damn site more than most) to resettle **genuine** refugees"
I have looked pretty hard for comparitive per capita refugee intake stats. I couldn't find the stats on UN sites. Where are they?
Posted by: Alex Hidell at September 17, 2003 at 11:11 PMAlex,
I didn't go researching again to make that post but I have seen figures in the past on the Australian Dept of Immigration's (DIMIA's) website. I expect that DIMIA would still have some factual information available on-line that shows Australia's leading position in refugee resettlement (I think that only Canada gives us a real run for the money, much to their credit.)
Within the last few weeks, I have also seen some comparative data in an excellent article by Adrienne Millbank in the academic journal "People and Place". You have to subscribe to this so I doubt if it is available on-line and my dead tree copy is at work, unfortunately.
Posted by: Bob Bunnett at September 17, 2003 at 11:24 PMThere's a link on my site to an item about a Samoan dialysis patient in NZ who decamped from immigration detention; her year 7 daughter is in the watch-house. I thought DIMEA was the new Einstatzgruppen, at least according to a lot of mouthy Kiwis. Hypocritical arseholes.
Posted by: habib bickford at September 17, 2003 at 11:47 PMAn "oubliette" is a dungeon with a trap door...a really lousy image for the wretched concentration camps where the poor, hungering to be free, are imprisoned by my jack-booted Australian cousins and friends.
But...er...what do they expect? I can assure you anyone wanting to immigrate to Theodopoulosia, after I get it going, had better do it legally or they'll think an oubliette is like a room at The Ritz.
Posted by: Theodopoulos Pherecydes at September 17, 2003 at 11:53 PMThis is the one that hit me in the eye:
Likewise the White Australia immigration policy, which restricted immigration from countries such as India and China until 1973 ...As we all know, Australia was a backward place until the election of Whitlam the Redeemer in late 1972. He ended the White Australia Policy and withdrew our troops from Vietnam. Hallelujah!
Except that he didn't. The previous Liberal government did both. I know from personal experience.
I met my oldest friend, later to be best man at my wedding, at High School in 1971. His whole family had immigrated from Hong Kong the previous year.
My father was a soldier who spent most of 1972 in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). When it came up in conversation that he was away, people would argue that he couldn't be in Saigon because Australia had already withdrawn its troops from Vietnam! (He was part of the clerical team packing up the Army's headquarters, in case you're wondering what he was doing there.)
Posted by: Stephen Dawson at September 17, 2003 at 11:57 PMFurther on the White Australia Policy:
The March 1966 announcement began a period of steady expansion of non-European migration and was the watershed in abolishing the 'White Australia' policy. Yearly non-European settler arrivals rose from 746 in 1966, to 2696 in 1971, while yearly part-European settler arrivals rose from 1498 to 6054.
In 1973 the Whitlam (Labor) Government took three further steps in the gradual process to remove race as a factor in Australia's immigration policies. These were to:
Because the Whitlam Government reduced the overall immigration intake, the reform steps that it took had very little impact on the number of migrants from non-European countries. An increase in the number and percentage of migrants from non-European countries did not take place until after the Fraser Government came into office in 1975.
I would think that the U.S. takes in plenty of 'refugees'... we just don't document any of them. We let them wander right into that sink-hole of a state called California and setup shop without so much as blinking.
We might as well annex Mexico at this point. We are already supporting a huge portion of their people.
Posted by: amy at September 18, 2003 at 02:56 AMalternatively, mexico might re-annex southern california... mexicans are already supporting a huge portion of socal agribusiness
Posted by: yeema at September 18, 2003 at 03:58 AMAmy,
The flow of economic "immigrants" both legal and illegal across your border with Mexico is a different issue. My country is blessed with the status of being a bloody big island with a moat all around it! That gives us much greater opportunity to truly manage our immigration programs for both the benefit of those who need help and the benefit of the nation as a whole.
In terms of its formal refugee resettlement program - ie helping out in resettling genuine refugees from around the world who need safe asylum - figures from around 2001 show that the USA took on an annual quota of about 80,000. At the same time, Australia took on about 12,000.
So the USA has a very good record in this area. But, per capita, Oz is doing better - we have less than a tenth of your population. Part of the reason *why* we can do better is because we are able to control illegal immigration much more effectively. Which is exactly the ability our thick-headed "refugee advocates" want to undermine!
Cheers,
BB
Strange how these people are always 'refugees" to those lame pricks.....
Never "illegal immigrants" or "ship-hijacking opportunists".
Contrast the shining, multicultural cities with rural outposts where shadowy, armed survivalists zealously prophesize an Indonesian invasion.
Excuse me? Care to provide some names and locations, pal?
well, i'm not this liam character, but i have done some research into far-right groups in australia, and he's on the money there - there are several groups, particularly here in queensland, dedicated to opposing the impending asian invasion of our fair country...
and these groups traditionally don't have website or visitors' centres, so can't help you with that info.
Posted by: uni-cultural at September 18, 2003 at 10:42 AMFitzpatrick's piece in Timeout is complete rubbish.
In yesterday's Australian, Janet Albrechtsen holds the oubliettes and delivers some salient facts instead.
"Australia has one of the largest per capita refugee and humanitarian resettlement programs in the world, a record intake last year of those from overseas refugee and resettlement camps. Critics are not interested in those figures. But history will record them."
Predictably, Janet Albrechtsen's reflexive critics will ignore her as well.
Posted by: ilibcc at September 18, 2003 at 11:37 AMAustralia has one of the largest per capita refugee and humanitarian resettlement programs in the world
There it is again. I hear it again and again but where are the figures? Albrechtsen doesn't provide them.
Posted by: Alex Hidell at September 18, 2003 at 12:09 PMBugger it: anyone who spots this feral animal called a psyche despatch it : recommended rifling express( for all you wombats - that is load to bring dow elephant) or make do with the 303.
On the topic of rifles this: in the 80's, so long before pansy wansy pisser abn or at least make it punitive enough to own anything more dangerous than bubble blower spotted this piece.
Anyone who has weilded that fine yet robust rifle, the SLR, will appreciate : walked intyo a sporting store and spotted in matt black an SLR in.308 load. Nearly purchased it but at the time it was impractical.
I frequented the shop just to admire it and, on leaving, would sigh.Drat it.No Mr. Howard, I would not have surrendered it but hidden it and so to to furtively take it out to some hidden locale to enjoy a fine machine on target range.
Posted by: d at September 18, 2003 at 02:39 PMHere's a new word for Alex - "initiative".
Bit big, I expect. OK, go to Google and enter
australia largest per capita refugee humanitarian resettlement
in the search box and see what comes up.
Posted by: Paul Johnson at September 18, 2003 at 03:57 PMIt's the only nation in the world to do so [detain refugees].
A plain lie. As Tim noted, many other countries do the same. In the early '90's, my US Navy ship twice picked up boat-loads of Vietnamese refugees drifting in the South China Sea. We took one load of them to Singapore, as that was our next port call, and the other, on a separate occasion, to Hong Kong. Both places had detention centers that held tens of thousands of refugees for years in what are truly filthy conditions (Liam needs some perspective on this issue) until they were either permitted to stay or returned to their country of origin (most often the case).
Posted by: Lawrence at September 18, 2003 at 04:16 PMWhy is it that do-gooders endlessly go on about Woomera being a hell hole when many Australians live there and defence personnel have been FORCED to work there for decades.
Stop the oppression of ADF personnal I say.
Posted by: Mike Hunt at September 18, 2003 at 04:43 PMPaul
Thanks for that (apart from the thinly veiled ridicule).
The problem I am having is that the stats I have found don't seem to accord with what people are saying here.
"...on a per capita basis Australia is ranked 38th, slightly behind Kazakhstan, Guinea, Djibouti and Syria; of the 29 developed countries that accept refugees and asylum seekers, Australia is ranked 14th. Per capita, the US takes twice as many refugees as Australia."
Posted by: Alex Hidell at September 18, 2003 at 06:01 PMIt depends on the criteria. Which of those countries is vetting immigrants? Which are classifying them as legals and illegals? Half of Mexico is working in bars in the US. Are they counted in the US figures?
When it comes to immigrants as a whole Australia is way up the list and building a good, strong, relatively secure and - yes, multicultural - population, despite the rubbish spouted by the likes of Fitzpatrick.
Posted by: ilibcc at September 18, 2003 at 06:08 PMContrast the shining, multicultural cities with rural outposts where shadowy, armed survivalists zealously prophesize an Indonesian invasion.
Excuse me? Care to provide some names and locations, pal?
Sorry, uni-cultural, you're a little behind the times. I've lived my whole life in the outback (and that's seriously beyond the bloody black stump, like, drive 250 km to the shop), and yes, I've met some crazies who blieve we're being taken over by Asians, but they're guns are usually loaded in readiness for snakes, not Indonesians. Unfortunately for Liam, but fortunately for them, good TV arrived in most of the bush long ago, and even out here we heard about the Asian economic crisis...it was impossible to miss, as cattle prices plummeted. Even a cognitively impaired red-necked homophobe has enough brain cells ticking over to figure out if you've got no money, you're in no position to begin a war or invasion, let alone win or succeed!!
And of course, there are no deranged loonies in cities, in Australia or overseas, who believe Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao were really good guys, that the latter's 'barefoot doctors' were an amazing healthcare innovation or that Jews get what they deserve...
Are there?
Are there?
Alex,
There is material of possible interest to you on the DIMIA website, like this information and table among Phil's FAQs.
The DIMIA site might not be the easiest to navigate around but, if you are interested in learning some more factual information about our immigration programs, there is no better place.
For example, here is a fact sheet on the many cruel methods we have devised to torture refugees.
In fact for serious and soporific reading, you can't go past the index of fact sheets on all aspects of Australian immigration.
TFK
Posted by: Bob Bunnett at September 18, 2003 at 08:34 PMMarevellous fisking, Tim. But now he's been so expertly exposed, we've probably lost the chance of some brainwashed op-ed editor giving him an unleashed run in one of our distinguished broadsheets. Hey, idea! Maybe someone could bring his words to Dowd's attention. Dat gal runs widdout shoes, let alone facts.
The impression I've received (and critics of Howard wouldn't lie, would they?) of the boat people is that the vast majority have come from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. If they were merely economic migrants, they would have come from a far wider variety of places. They shouldn't need to be coming on leaky boats paying $10K. In addition, refugees from those countries seem to be the most pro-Australian/pro-American out of migrants from the Arab world.
Posted by: Andjam at September 18, 2003 at 08:52 PMA lot of boat people come from those three countries because that is where people smuggling gangs are operating. They operate there because it is easier to find customers. In a nutshell, he places are shitholes - even if two of them have improved a lot and have a much brighter future than they did two years ago - and many people understandably wanted to get out of them.
Then again, genuine refugees who have fled across a border to a squalid refugee camp generally want to get out of there, too, but might not be able to afford to pay people smugglers and/or might be reluctant to deal with potentially dangerous criminals.
A very high proportion of Iraqi and Afghani asylum seekers have been granted refugee status in Australia because of our overly generous assessment system. The proportion is much higher than it is when the UNHCR is assessing smilar asylum-seekers in countries of first refuge.
Just wanting to get out of a shithole is not enough to qualify as a refugee, nor should it be. Those people are still "economic migrants" in my point of view. The international treaties on granting asylum were devised for a specific purpose - to ensure that people with a genuine and well-founded fear of persecution in their own country on political, ethnic or similar grounds could find a safe haven and not be forced to return to that country unless and until conditions were safe.
This very necessary protection is presently being abused terribly by opportunists all over the world, not just in Australia, so much so that the UNHCR itself is deeply concerned. While it is perfectly understandable why people want to escape from a shithole and take their family with them, those people do not have greater claim to the protection of developed nations than the millions of genuine refugees lanquishing in refugee camps around the world.
TFK
Posted by: Bob Bunnett at September 19, 2003 at 12:18 AM