Asylum seekers & Nauru- "Aid: With Strings Attached"
Over the years I have posted on the miscasting of aid to Nauru and elsewhere under corrosive asylum seeker policies and the alarming 'somnambulism' of the Australian people as these events unfolded. I have been critical of Australia's fourth estate for largely failing to expose and condemn Howard's approach to human rights. The profound negative implications of the Howard experiment and its lengthy aftermath for the health of Australia's body politic will be the subject of much reflection in coming years.
Writing in New Matilda in 2007, Nic MacLellan underscored the tawdry misuse of official aid under the Pacific Solution and the downstream implications of the strategy, which was made up on the run by bureaucrats trying to engineer good outcomes from bad motives. He quoted my published condemnation of aid to Nauru as "‘an unmitigated bribe’ to ensure the Pacific Solution continued". The public sector reform 'conditionality' that evolved was a half-baked and largely punitive response to Nauru's failed economy, wages crisis, decrepit infrastructure, growing civil unrest and the potential impact this instability could have on the management of the island.
Australia bullied, bribed and coerced its way to the current situation. The challenge remains to help Nauru avoid total failure as a state by salvaging its limited resource base sufficiently to sustain its small population into the future. We must commit ourselves to a genuine long term development partnership. The next Australian government must discard the cynical, mercenary gambit to compensate Nauru for hosting our offshore detention facilities and put the bilateral relationship on a proper footing.
It is necessary for the next government to investigate this dark chapter. I hope my oft repeated call for an inquiry (preferably a Royal Commission) to shine a light into the dark recesses of the Pacific Solution and the bad governance it spawned will be realized.
No comments:
Post a Comment