Why is the dog whistle successful in Australia?

This is how it goes.  Many people are outraged when non-white migrants struggle to feel welcome here, and especially when a few disturbed young people choose a violent, radicalized response.

The boot is put into asylum seekers, refugees, Muslims and any other soft targets of a good dog whistle. Our leader morphs as he passes from one bunch of electors to another, desperately seeking legitimacy, and failing that, a semblance of a legacy beyond ‘stopping boats', offshore gulags, Muslim baiting, climate change denial, Aboriginal marginalization and Sudanese vilification. Good luck, g'day, where the bloody hell are you?  Those that have tracked the dog whistle politics of the LNP know they routinely stir the racist underbelly of the body politic when they are under pressure.

In recent times who better to start the ball rolling than that bastion of fairness, Peter Dutton? They know their market when it comes to the race whistle. It has worked miracles for them in the past. 

We have been subject to a radical reactionary agenda that has taken Australia away from the political middle ground. Many of the media hacks don't understand that a large percentage of Australians have finally seen through the LNP extreme agenda, despite the lazy work of the hacks on the subject, and they don't like what they see. Morrison tries to hide his real self, but just a casual survey of changes wrought on the LNP watch reveal an ongoing determination to 'Americanize' our society and economy. 

I believe profoundly that much else besides the relative utility of human beings as units of production matters if you want to strengthen community and the social underpinnings of the body politic. I'm afraid the 'insider' hacks spend too much time around the political makers and shakers; they have largely lost sight of what matters.  Human rights considerations have dropped off the radar of politicians and their pamphleteers embedded in the 'LNP zone'. 

Despite a shifting backdrop of many white Australians having gone through a dark night of the soul and admitting they may have been part of the problem, and of small 'l' Liberals across the land fleeing the LNP war camp as it lines up one weak, marginal group after another for being un-Australian and in need of 're-training' in our ways, the racial attacks of Dutton and Morrison on Muslims everywhere and Sudanese migrants in Melbourne, one of the most vulnerable groups to ever seek shelter here, continue to scrape a well-scraped barrel.

Beneath the obvious default responses to people with different cultures arriving uninvited, lurk guilt complexes in the Australian psyche over treatment of Aboriginal people that surface in strange ways. Many of our fellow citizens and their forebears have built their fortunes on the backs of generations of 'black fella' misery and misfortune. They seem to have developed a racial psychosis to protect their sensitive souls from having to front up to what they and these forebears have done to the first Australians.
 
It is an ironic aspect of this phenomenon that quite a few of the most rabid proponents of 'white Australia' have a mixed race dynamic in the family cupboard.
 

This is my message to those drawn to the dog whistle:

It is about time this country faced up to the dispossession and cultural genocide perpetrated by forebears on indigenous people.

Part of this construct should see Australia become a welcoming safe haven for all people fleeing oppression on racial, ethnicity and religious grounds.   

That dark night of the soul and the manifest fear of the 'dark’ other will only be more broadly mitigated by a reconciliation that sets this country on a course to undo the damage of the past. 

Asylum seekers & Nauru- "Aid: With Strings Attached"

Asylum seekers & Nauru- "Aid: With Strings Attached"

Regular readers of this blog will know that Tampa and the Pacific Solution were the catalyst for my discursive rantings on Australia's human rights record over the last decades.

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.

Seeking Asylum Down Under: Did they queue?

 

   Jewish refugees looking for a safe haven in the late 1930s

Back to the future on Nauru -- 2005 and what's changed?

 

 

"My interest in asylum seeker issues gathered pace as Director of the aid program put in place to leverage Nauru’s part in the policy to keep boat people outside Australia’s immigration zone, otherwise known as the ‘pacific solution’ (a term attracting growing infamy).

From a paltry few scholarships per annum, post Tampa the Australian taxpayers have been footing a huge bill to keep Nauru on side. Nauru is a failed state. It was a failed state prior to the AusAID and DIMIA funding that forms the ongoing ‘bribe’ to keep the detention camps open on Nauru. The plight of asylum seekers detained on this benighted speck of guano continues in our name, paid for by our taxes.

 

Prominent refugee advocate, Julian Burnside QC, reminded Australians of the grave implications of these actions on Nauru The Age (27 March 2005):

"Julian Burnside QC said it was not an offence to arrive in Australia without a visa and ask for asylum. Yet the government was locking up asylum seekers and their children without charge for years, ostensibly to send a message to people smugglers, he said.

"None of these people have committed an offence, so by definition we've got innocent people held in jail for three years plus," Mr Burnside told the Ten Network's Meet The Press program."We're jailing innocent human beings and we're jailing them in order to send a message to other people. Now the mistreatment of innocent human beings to mould the behaviour of others is seriously bad conduct and it's conduct which most people would not approve of.”

"It's the sort of thing that hostage takers do. It's the sort of thing that terrorists do."

Mr Burnside said the message seemed to have got through to the people smugglers, with no new arrivals recently. “From now on, the cruelty seems to be quite pointless," he said. "We know that the people who are held in immigration detention have not committed any offence. Quite frankly, if they had committed an offence, do you think that any court would sentence children to three years imprisonment for coming along with their parents without a visa? Of course they wouldn't. It is not an offence to arrive in Australia without a visa and ask for asylum."

Mr Burnside said the only place the laws could be tested would be in the International Criminal Court."But more importantly I think this has got to be exposed in the court of public opinion," he said. "What we're doing to innocent asylum seekers fails every test of democratic principle."

 

 

Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership Part 2

Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership  Part 2

The meanness of spirit behind the base politics of punishing asylum seekers is finally starting to percolate through to the broader electorate. For a long time I could barely bring myself to look at and listen to the horror of our treatment of asylum seekers.

I once worked for a government that sold its soul to a devil. Our enthusiastic complicity in an illegal war, our rank hypocrisy in hectoring other countries about human rights, and our systematic violation of the rights of refugees was more than I could stomach; I withdrew gradually my services and then myself from the professional world I had inhabited for nigh twenty years.

I found myself in a fog of depression that threatened to destroy my life. Everywhere I looked I saw Islamophobia, sanguine apathy in the face of abject cruelty to our fellow human beings, bureaucratic solutions to human suffering. People I knew well were sprouting the poisonous stuff of ethnic demonization and the mindless slogans of hate and intolerance.

I set myself on a path of healing but I am constantly set back by the reality of hate politics; the mindless characterization of people on the basis of religion and/or ethnicity.

I kept thinking of two people I admired, and who had seen me through earlier difficult times, when a good friend was all that stood between me and dangerous depression. One of these great friends was a colleague who died in the Jog Jakarta air disaster; the other was a citizen of Iran who I met at University in India and who was unwilling to return home to a repressive regime. Both of these wonderful human beings were/are great humanists with a zest for life. Oh yes, and they were/are Muslims...

Morrison’s pseudo religiosity and hail fellow well met shtick clearly appeals to many of the 'me me journalists' and the crypto-Hansonite set but it makes my skin crawl. What does it say about the psychological health of a country that elects a political party that had as the centrepiece of its electoral pitch the punishment of a few miserable refugees? It beggars belief that in the 21st century our body politic can be so trivialised.

The dog whistling politics of the Coalition has come back to bite it on the bum. It is about time the sunshine was let in on this grubby corner of the extreme right's campaign to hold office on the back of fear and division. It's a Coalition speciality of course and those out there peddling this racial vilification stuff are doing its bidding.

The anti-Islam campaign has been festering within the bowels of the Coalition for a long time now…Morrison is seeking to hold office on a platform of unbridled entitlement politics, encouraging division, selfishness and 'get out of my way' pitches to people who think Government is about nothing more than serving their narrow interests. Labor has had to tip toe through an electoral mine field of electors easily in thrall to hate-mongering, which has become an acceptable political tool when you have little else to convince the electorate you are fit for government.

                                          

                                               

Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership

Back to the future on offshore detention - Australia's political culture fails the test of leadership

 

Those with any compassion for the plight of asylum seekers will be choking on their breakfast cereals, hearing reports of colleagues of Morrison banging on about bringing asylum seekers to Australia from Nauru.  The treatment of asylum seekers has been made worse by a constant beating of a fear drum by the Coalition and a conga line of media supporters that have been busy maintaining the political wedge on this issue. 

Where was the media support for an inquiry into the abuses at the heart of the Pacific Solution? Where was the media (apart from some brave souls in the Fairfax media) when the appalling violations under subsequent reprisals of offshore detention in Manus and Nauru were taking the human rights record of this country into the gutter?
 

Over the years I have posted many messages on the miscasting of aid to Nauru and elsewhere under the offshore detention regime and the alarming 'somnambulism' of the Australian people as these events unfolded. Determined advocates have keep the fires of protest burning.

I have been critical of Australia's fourth estate for largely failing to expose and condemn successive government’s approach to human rights. I had hoped the profound negative implications of the Howard experiment for the health of Australia's body politic would be the subject of much reflection in the coming years.
 

Back in the day this blog called repeatedly for a Royal Commission into the immigration policies and programs of the Howard Govt and subsequent iterations of offshore detention.

                                                  

                                              

The Rudd government should have investigated this dark chapter. My oft repeated call for such an inquiry to shine a light into the dark recesses of the Pacific Solution pork barrel never eventuated. The chickens meanwhile have come home to roost for Labor. 

Labor should have exposed the whole grubby affair to bright light to put to rest any credibility the Coalition would have on this subject for at least a decade, and to provide an opportunity for a sensible public debate on this sensitive area of public policy. Instead they fell into the wedge and made matters worse for vulnerable souls caught up in the political grind.  The Coalition never cared about the welfare of these people. It was always about political opportunity.
 

I propose a Royal Commission with Terms of Reference to include, but not be limited to, an investigation of:
1. Implementation of offshore processing (including the role and use of official aid)
2. Wrongful detention of refugees and permanent residents of Australia
3. Operation and financing of detention facilities on the mainland and offshore
4. Wrongful refoulement of asylum seekers and refugees
5. Influence of Ministers in the determination of immigration decisions
6. Influence of 'understandings' and 'deals' with neighbouring countries on the management of Australia's refugee policies and programs

 

The Morrison way...a well worn Coalition template

 

1. Punish asylum seekers by sending them to fly speck, Nauru, and putting genuine refugees on TPVs to punish them some more

2. Do not put a price on carbon

3. Send welfare recipients to latter day salt mines for character building

4. Do a lot of prayer meetings to convince people you're a holy roller

5. Punish some more asylum seekers

6. Give miners, polluters and media moguls tax free status

7. Divert huge amounts of govt revenue to people on $200,000 or more per annum as gesture of solidarity

8. Divert huge amounts of annual aid budget to Nauru to keep Nauruans sweet

9. Trash regional approaches to asylum seekers as we will decide who comes here and the manner in which they come (preferably by Qantas)

10. Punish some more asylum seekers, just to keep the dog whistle in tune

 

Asylum seekers in Australia: Memories of Tampa, a leaky boat and a dodgy government

Asylum seekers in Australia: Memories of Tampa, a leaky boat and a dodgy government

 

In 2011 the ABC reported "former Defence Force personnel have spoken out about the Tampa and children overboard affair, accusing the Howard government of manipulating events for political purposes".

I was in harness in PNG when the Tampa situation arose. My heart sank and my stomach churned as I knew Howard was the type of politician to twist these circumstances to his political benefit. Little did I know to what extent I would be dragged into the disgusting quagmire that became known as the Pacific Solution.

I have mused on the experience as follows:

"In August 2001 news reports began filtering through that the Australian Government led by John Howard as Prime Minister had detained a boatload of mainly Afghani refugees on the high seas. The cargo vessel was the Tampa, a word that has become etched indelibly into my consciousness. The ‘boat people’ saga had begun. Ten weeks later the Australian people returned the Howard Government to office in a general election and the ignominious strategy to label offshore asylum seekers ‘illegals’ and detain them in third countries had been labelled the Pacific Solution. 

I am haunted by this epithet as it is resonates with sinister ‘solutions’ found elsewhere in the twentieth century in the name of national security and identity. The cover notes to David Marr and Marian Wilkinson’s chilling account of events that “shattered many of the myths Australia has about itself and changed profoundly the way it is seen in the eyes of the world” summarize events concisely: They put lives at risk. They twisted the law. They drew the military into the heart of an election campaign. They muzzled the press. They misused intelligence services, defied the United Nations, antagonized Indonesia and bribed poverty stricken Pacific states. They closed Australia to refugees – and won a mighty election victory. 

At the time I was well into the second year of a diplomatic posting to Papua New Guinea (PNG). I worked for Australia’s overseas aid agency, AusAID. My career had involved me in human rights and refugee activities in several countries, including Southern African states on the front line against apartheid, Nepal, India and PNG. During my working life Australia had held out a helping hand to refugees from various conflicts, including Tibet, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Cambodia and Sri Lanka. Now we were turning our back on Afghans fleeing the most repressive and murderous regime to emerge out of the ruins of the Soviet invasion, the Taliban.

 

I traveled to Afghanistan in the early 1970s as part of a wave of adventurous backpackers criss-crossing the Middle East and South Asia during those halcyon years. A Russian military presence was evident in Kabul but the hell of military invasion was yet to unfold. Young Afghan students in western dress gathered in coffee shops, tourists mixed with locals in cheap eating houses and live music could be heard in the evenings, emanating from a myriad small guest houses and hotels.

Kabul was a welcoming, relaxed haven for travelers en route to exotic destinations in this ancient tribal fiefdom, and Iran or Pakistan. Later as a doctoral student in India I had the great fortune to form deep friendships with both Afghans and Iranians. Some were escaping the strictures of the Khomeini regime in Iran and the terrors of war in Afghanistan. India provided a safe sanctuary and a place to study. 

The brutalization of Afghans and others under Australia’s refugee policies was not only an affront to ideals that drew me into the arena of overseas aid, but hurt at a more subtle emotional level as I projected what it would mean for my erstwhile friends. 

The Tampa affair and the crushing reality of the punitive policies it spawned saw me withdraw iteratively from a state machine that was imprisoning refugees in desert gulags, endangering lives of desperate people at sea, engineering and re-engineering the Pacific Solution and the cruel regime of temporary protection visas. 

I had been involved on the margins of the Pacific Solution in PNG but the crunch came in an ironic twist. On return from PNG I was thrust into the midst of a whole-of-government stratagem to punish refugees. As part of what I perceived to be an orchestrated marginalization process by senior managers, I was put in charge of aid to Nauru. This ill-begotten program was a bribe to a failed state to accept complicity in our politically motivated violation of the rights of the people dumped on Nauru. It ran contrary to the various manifestos of sustainable development and good governance we belaboured in our dealings with other Pacific states dependent on Australian aid. 

By default I became a member of the Prime Minister’s task force on offshore asylum seekers or ‘illegal migrants’ or ‘boat people’, depending on the agenda of the day. The core business of this group of senior public service, police and defence assets was to construct, deconstruct and re-engineer the legal, logistical and administrative underpinnings of boat arrivals policy and to shape (spin) the official line for their political masters. Lawyers were central to the exercise to test and tweak the legal ramifications and inner workings of excising chunks of Australia from the migration zone. 

The most extreme construct involved excision of the total Australian landmass from the migration zone. It would be ‘pythonesque’ if the consequences were not so tragic for the victims. I became a member of the Immigration Department’s coordination committee on the Nauru detention facilities, which regularly and perfunctorily discussed how to manage detainees who had self-harmed or adopted other forms of protest. It was a dehumanizing, soul-destroying experience."