Graeme Harrison

The highest risk now is home-grown terrorism, as has happened in the US and UK. In the case of Australia, we have (at great expense) ‘caught’ each instance while they were still planning their acts of terrorism. The reason is precisely because they exist ‘under the radar’.

I agree with Peteyboy that most of the risk factors (prior visits to Middle East, association with people with profiles) are actually pseudo-variables for religious ones. And I agree that roads, tunnels etc need security as well, once those who may wish Western society harm are within the country. Peteyboy is right that the marginal costs are too high.

But there is an alternative. We use only evidence-based decision-making in health+drugs, so why not apply this to immigration. Any group which requires additional monitoring or integration costs, should have those costs applied in calculating how many of such sub-groups should be let in. This is not islamaphobia, as it would equally apply to (say) Tongans after five Tongan youth went onto a NSW school playground with machetes, confirming that there were integration problems with Tongans removed from the control structures of their traditional society. There is no feedback in the system at present. Tongan community leaders would want to get on top of their rampaging youth to ensure further Tongan immigration.

In the case of Imams preaching hatred against the West, about $1b has been spent by Australia on internal security, mainly tracking a handful of Imams and their close associates. We could have paid each of these individuals about $50m each to leave Australia and Australia would be financially better off.

My own view is that these additional costs should be brought into the equation. This would confirm the underlying maths of the Malaysian solution, that it is better to accept 4000 (or even 10,000) Burmese Hindus, rather than 1000 boat people from Afghanistan, the vast majority of whom may be peaceful, but with a very slim chance of containing within them a murderous anti-Western person, or of any of them having children who later grow up to believe they have a greater duty to their parents’ former country, or their religious beliefs (as happened with the UK-born Islamic terrorists).

We need to remember that Christianity took about a millennium to work out the futility of killing others for slight differences in faith (cf Crusades, Cathars, Inquisition, Catholic-Protestant Religious Wars, through to Northern Ireland of recent decades). Islam has never had the Reformation that was integral to such learned ‘modern’ religious understanding. Conversely Sunnis and Shiites may need to kill each other for centuries to come to such understanding. The Prophet advised Muslims that “not one iota” could be changed of his writings. So Islam may yet take many generations to achieve a ‘modern’ approach. Arguably it might be best to help the majority Muslim countries come to this enlightenment by helping them with educational programs, trading with them, sharing ideas. But letting them migrate to non-Muslim countries will always be problematic.

The Japanese have said for decades that they will accept their fair share of refugees, but that Muslims would find the culture-shock of Japanese society too great, so Muslim refugees should be settled in predominantly-Muslim countries, as they would be far happier there. I believe that Gillard’s Malaysian Solution was an acknowledgement that the Japanese approach is indeed correct. [Note that Japan's only terrorism has been from locally-grown nutty sects.] I’d be happy to welcome the extra 10,000 Hindus, as Hindus do not need billions spent monitoring them for subversive activities.

The lesson from the Balkan wars was that Muslim and Christian villages could live side-by-side for 500 years; but as there was no inter-breeding, when some leader encouraged racial or religious hatred, each group ‘knew who the enemy was’. In contrast, Australia’s post-WW2 immigrants have already inter-married, so the differences have dissipated within two generations. The only groups which will not integrate are those which prohibit inter-marriage and/or have harsh rules against apostasy… which covers a number of fundamentalist religious groups (including ultra-orthodox Jews, certain Christian groups and all Muslims).

We just need to remember, that it takes generations for societies to gradually learn religious tolerance. After 1000 years of Protestantism, Scandinavians are about 80% non-religious, whereas Africa is about 99% religious. It is silly to think that moving country can suddenly transform families who were nomadic villagers just two generations ago to modern multi-faith acceptance values.

The alternative to spending $400m/year on internal security (times 50-100 years) is to use evidence-based costs to ‘weight’ the numbers of different applicant groups. And when Muslims have worked out how to remove the violent element from their midst, we would automatically welcome them. The Iraq/Afghan wars prove that the West cannot achieve such goals – it must come from within. The current logic of ignoring the costs associated with specific sub-groups of migrants has not worked. When the West has gone a decade with no instances of home-grown terrorists, we should re-examine the weightings to reflect that new reality. In the meantime, let’s remember that Muslims speak of peace, but have had almost no success in getting rid of those preaching violence from within their midst. We simply need to measure actual results rather than being affected by talk.

Graeme Harrison

Ben,
I’m sorry for putting you in a quandary. I am FOR immigration, and I believe every group should start off with the same rights. In this way, there is definitely no Islamaphobia – as I suggest each and every group be given exactly the same opportunities. And I know that adjusting these opportunities based on actual facts of how well such groups are integrating is a sensitive issue, but the evidence-based approach is not prejudicial to any group, as any change in their opportunities are based solely upon the actions of such groups.

The rationale for dealing with the mix of immigrants in my first post is because, one simply can’t deal with security costs just when people are boarding planes. High costs for internal security generally (including aviation in that mix) are needed once you reasonably suspect you have ‘some’ people who wish the country harm… (and who are prepared to die for such cause, thereby removing most feedback possible from having judges, jails etc). Most people who have a gripe about a Western society are not prepared to risk decades in jail, so this acts as a ‘control measure’. But if people are mentally ill, or have religious convictions presenting some alternative reality (rewards in an after-life), the criminal justice system offers no deterrent.

The lessons of Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Soviets and the Americans is that one cannot send an army into Afghanistan and impose Western values, either before Mohammed’s time or since. Many changes simply have to come from within. Witness the success of the Arab Spring in bringing democracy to many countries, compared to the failure of $3T in wars supposedly seeking the same result!

It is simply political correctness that prevents Australia from having suitable feedback loops in our immigration policy. If success at integration (or at least no examples of grossly anti-social behaviour) was necessary for sub-groups to retain quotas for further immigration, the leaders of such sub-groups would self-police. This means that it would be very unlikely that a group of (say) Tongan youth would rampage through a school… or when it did happen, you could be assured it would never happen again. And indeed, in the case of those Tongan youths wielding machetes in a Sydney school, it has not happened again since.

In comparison, in the decade since 9/11 many Muslim leaders have reiterated that most Muslims are not like the terrorists. But in stating that they are not all like that, Muslim leaders have consistently refused to fully renounce such people. In other words Islam in the West has suggested they are not terrorists, but they have not universally rejected violence. Instead most have pointed out the grey areas, that jihads are part of Islam, but that what triggers sufficient conditions for jihad is subject to interpretation. It is a ‘middle ground’ like me suggesting that I am not a bank robber, but I fully understand why some people might opt for such activity. And why should Imams preach only love. They can legally recognise the ‘struggle’ that their compatriots fight elsewhere in the world, and they are not breaching any Australian law, as they are not advocating violence here. But this is the dilemma, Islam does not endorse its most violent constituents, but it does not repudiate them either. The small violent subset are never ex-communicated. Those suicide bombers are still part of Islam at the time they detonate. My proposal for a ‘feedback loop’ is to simply give each group some incentive to self-regulate, due to the impossibility of Western police structures doing this for them. A hundred security personnel cannot achieve what one imam can, in terms of having everyone in such group fully renounce violence.

And I understand Ben’s view that such measures are unlikely to get parliamentary approval at this stage. However, I put the ‘feedback loop’ proposal forward, so people can think about whether this might work where spooks find it difficult. It is better to head off violence in the mosque, rather than trying to discover when people are building a cache of weapons, or buying large amounts of fertiliser. And indeed, some might be surprised to see the Malaysian Solution as actually partially vindicating such an approach.

I believe Islam will learn to live within Western confines… but the necessary changes will need to come from within, by having radical and even marginal clerics thrown out… long before Western security agencies seek to have them deported. And the very best/easiest way to provide the incentive for this to happen is a feedback loop linked to immigration quotas. It has nothing to do with freedom to practice your religion of choice, but is simply ‘applying’ the relevant security costs back to the sub-sets of migrants on an evidence-based approach.