Border Protection

You learn a lot about people when the pressure is on.

Some interesting facts emerged recently about what really happened during those extraordinary four weeks last year when the Oceanic Viking abandoned our Patagonian tooth fish to become home to 78 Tamil asylum seekers.

During these events the debate raged about who knew what and when. Where would they go and on what terms? The answers to many of these questions came to light during recent questioning in Senate estimates.

Continue reading "Rudd fails the Tampa test" »

It must be hard for a conservative politician to make a decision he or she knows will distress heartland followers. John Howard upset a certain hardcore group of loyalists – even within his own cabinet – by banning semi-automatic rifles after the Port Arthur massacre.

It is even harder when Labor politicians make decisions that might appear to lack compassion, because they are supposed to be the party that cares about social justice.

But there seems to be a greater willingness to find excuses for Labor politicians, as Melbourne barrister and civil libertarian, Robert Richter QC, demonstrated on Lateline Thursday night.

Continue reading "Heartlessness at the centre of an immigration scandal" »

Who knew the lower north shore of Sydney was a hunting ground for anti-immigrationists. This flyer popped up in mail boxes last weekend in more than one apartment block, in more than one suburb. Unauthorised of course, and probably the work of a nutter.

But it’s an election year, and these things don’t tend to happen in a vacuum. During the next six months there’ll be a lot more of this rubbish peddled by those outside the political mainstream.

Scott Morrison has requested we be able to debate immigration without labeling people racist. That’s more than fair. But keeping the debate clean is a two way street.

Continue reading "Want to lose “racist” from the debate, lose the racism" »

Marty Natalegawa is a consummate diplomat. The Indonesian Foreign Minister is also his country’s former representative to the United Nations and Ambassador to the UK.

At the age of 46 he has done more than most top diplomats do in an entire career. Now he’s the Foreign Minister.

On Tuesday this week I interviewed Marty Natelagawa in his Jakarta offices. In a long line of difficult issues between Australia and Indonesia, people smuggling has been the most awkward in recent months, so of course I had to begin our discussion on just that.

Continue reading "This man may be our best ally against people smugglers" »

Last week I returned from a visit to Christmas Island to Parliament where the Labor Member MP, John Sullivan, from Longman in Brisbane, interjected during a speech and called me a racist.

At the time, I was speaking to an Appropriations Bill that was seeking additional funds to make up for shortfalls in this year’s budget. Included in these shortfalls was $132 million for off shore processing of asylum seekers.  We were supporting the Bill.

I noted that the 100 per cent plus blow out in costs demonstrated the Government had failed to appreciate the impact of their policy changes on the detention population on Christmas Island, that is now at unsustainable levels.

Continue reading "You can’t debate immigration without being called a racist" »

Tony Abbott’s incendiary comments about immigration could ignite an Australia Day tinderbox.

Speaking last week at an Australia Day Council dinner, the federal opposition leader used language reminiscent of the darkest days of the Howard regime.

‘‘The inescapable minimum that we insist upon is obedience to the law,’’ he said.

Continue reading "Abbott’s message to migrants too incendiary by half" »

As a moderator of comments for news.com.au I see a lot of intolerance expressed in the debate over asylum seeker boats, especially from a vocal minority prepared to get very nasty.

The comments from this quarter typically employ broad-brush terms of abuse to stereotype on the basis of nationality.

The targets of these hateful attacks are Australians. The most popular terms of abuse are “redneck” and “racist”.

Continue reading "Rednecks! The new racist term for ordinary Australians" »

This is an emotional week. It started with the National Prayer Breakfast in the Great Hall of Parliament House where the keynote address was from Gemma Sisia, the founder and continuing driver of the school of St Jude in Arusha in Tanzania.

It was inspirational. A rigorous selection process of children who are 5, 6 or 7 (not 4 ½ or 8) as Mrs Sisia emphasised, are selected on the basis of intellectual ability, work ethic and poverty. If they get in they get 14 years of free education. The aim is to produce a professional class of doctors, engineers, and architects etc, who will lead the Tanzaman nation. That is they will stay in Tanzania and help their own people.

Mrs Sisia, an Australian, who now obviously lives and works in Tanzania seeks financial support from all over the world with her last big donor being American.

Continue reading "Australians who need compassion" »

Here are the eight inconvenient truths in the ongoing conversation on boat people over the last weeks and months in The Punch.

The first inconvenient truth relates to the claim that Australia can’t handle an influx of refugees, and we shouldn’t be forced to because we already take so many. In the face of the kind of suffering, and the numbers involved, in refugee camps around the world, and given the extent of our wealth, Australians could take many more – thousands more – refugees than we do. We would need far better integration programs, but we have the wealth that should allow us to provide these too. We could also afford a far more generous, even if better targeted, refugee aid program, especially with our South East Asian neighbours.

The defence of popular opposition to greater refugee intake in this regard is the morally unsustainable defence of a privileged country that refuses to take its own values, and what are arguably its international moral obligations, seriously.

Continue reading "The eight inconvenient truths on boat people" »

Evidence is now mounting that last week’s Newspoll poll showing a seven point drop in Labor support was a rogue result, with Essential Research’s weekly tracking showing no movement in the two-party preferred vote.

The Essential Report, that has Labor comfortably ahead 59-41, follows on the heels of Monday’s Herald/Nielson poll that was also steady.

Beneath the headline figures there are some intriguing sub-plots, with the public going close to welcoming the increase in interest rates, while continuing to rate the Prime Minister down on his handling of the asylum seeker issue.

Continue reading "It’s a blip – Rudd maintains lead with interest" »

John Howard’s dramatic re-entry in the political debate is notable for two reasons - the former PM has steadfastly refused requests for anniversary-type interviews, and he has also said repeatedly he would not “do a Keating” by commenting on domestic affairs, save to defend his record.

His interview with The Herald-Sun’s senior writer John Hamilton went well beyond defending his own record - rather, it was an exocet missile aimed squarely at Kevin Rudd’s record, most provocatively on border protection. The word in Liberal ranks is that the interview went ahead with the knowledge and support of Malcolm Turnbull, who has been buoyed by a Newspoll turnaround widely attributed to the border question. EMC director and Punch contributor Peter Lewis detected the same sentiment.

Lefties will regard the re-emergence of the man they despise as like something from a horror film. But the many millions of Australians who still voted for Howard in 2007 - and more disturbingly for Labor, some swinging voters who gently saw him off with no major sense of animosity - will have been interested to hear the input from the man from the toughness side of the ledger on unauthorised arrivals.

Continue reading "Heeeeeeeeere’s Johnny" »

Are you feeling left right out of the political debate in Australia?

As the parliament prepares to consider the Rudd Government’s ETS and the global bureaucracy invades Copenhagen, I’m getting a little tired of the forced and clichéd polarisation of the climate change and other important debates, such as border protection.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was on Friday when #KRudd tweeted the world at 6.54pm saying “Time for the “do nothing” climate change skeptics (sic) to stop playing roulette with our kids future. KRudd.” It was one tweet too many. Seriously, what a silly and juvenile thing for a PM to say.

Continue reading "Rudd tweets insults to every fair-minded Australian" »

Let’s accept the Federal Opposition’s interpretation of this week’s polling figures at face value; as a consequence of his “softness” on the issue of the alleged armada of boats laden with asylum-seekers arriving on our watery doorstep day by day, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his government are falling rapidly out of favour with the Australian public.

And for the sake of the argument, let’s also accept the statistical and methodological reliability – which we can do with considerable confidence – of The Australian newspaper’s latest set of Newspoll numbers.

So, accepting all of that, what does it all add up to? And what does it say about our collective set of national values?

Continue reading "What polls and asylum seekers say about our values" »

The debate around the Sri Lanka asylum seekers is beginning to spiral into Tampa territory with the Australian public ready to support tough action over compassion and prepared to believe the boats are harbouring terrorists.

For the PM it is a diabolical political dilemma, with this week’s Essential Report showing his attempts to play tough cop are failing to translate into public approval for his handling of the issue.

Given the bind, I reckon his only option is to follow the lead of his predecessor John Howard – not in sending in the troops, but by shifting debate through invoking the nation’s obsession with sport.

Continue reading "Most Australians want a tougher stand on boatpeople" »

With the re-emergence of asylum seekers arriving by boat to Australia as a major issue in this country it has led to an accompanying rise in confusing politics.

The average observer can be left lost by the bedazzling display offensive and defensive political tactics and what it all means, so The Punch has put together a users guide of boat people politics.

Tough but humane:

Nobody has quite gotten to the bottom of what this phrase, formulated by the Government to explain its policy, actually means. Scientists in Switzerland have constructed an atomic “tough but humane” collider and are currently clashing the two words up against each other at the speed of light to find the solution. So far the closest they have come to an answer is that you can leave 78 asylum seekers on a boat in the sea off Indonesia for days on end, but give them a good brand of bottled water to drink.

Continue reading "I’m on a boat: a user’s guide to boat people politics" »

Of the 9.1 million people who the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) describes as refugees, there are 827, 323 with outstanding applications for asylum around the world. This compares to 9.6 million refugees five years ago and 912,291 people still seeking asylum. Five years prior to that, there were 11.5 million refugees worldwide and 1.3 million seeking asylum.

Looking at even more recent data, between January and August 2009, there were 226,069 asylum applications worldwide. During the same period in 2008 there were 226,857 applications.

So much for the Rudd Government’s claim that international push forces are the cause of 41 boat arrivals since last August with almost 2,000 people on board, putting their lives at risk.

Continue reading "Kevin Rudd has no idea what he’s doing on boat arrivals" »

For a nation whose history is not exactly littered with foreign invasions, illegal immigration and refugee crises, Australia has a strange fascination with border security.

John Howard discovered the political mileage in appearing to be tough on border protection with his “we’ll decide who comes here” speech of 2001.

Kevin Rudd knows he can’t stray too far from Howard’s approach to retain the affection of middle Australia and has even sticky-taped the words Border Protection on to the end of the Australian Customs Service as if to prove his dedication to the cause.

Continue reading "Postcard from London: Poms see Aussies in dim new light" »

Once again, Australia’s focus has been on the so-called threat of boat people heading our way. Do we defend our borders? Are we soft on people smugglers? Is our way of life under threat?

It is a debate that has raged on and off for more than 30 years, since the first boats appeared off Australia’s northern coastline in the wake of the Vietnam War. There were many Australians who did not want to welcome those for whom we had sacrificed so many young Australians.

Good enough to defend, but not good enough to welcome. It was a time when a young man named Hieu Van Le set out on a perilous journey in search of freedom and opportunity.

Continue reading "The human story behind asylum-seeker hysteria" »