Whatever you may think of asylum seekers, it is unexceptionable to note that, if a large number of Tamils seek to enter Australia after the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, their ranks may contain former Tamil Tigers.
The LTTE are an extraordinarily vicious separatist group who turned suicide bombing into an art form and wreaked havoc among Sinhalese people over several decades.
Tamils will point to their treatment by the Sinhalese majority and say that therein lies the true reason for the savagery. From the point of view of the Australian Government, that’s not the issue, regardless of its merits. The Tigers are proscribed under Australian law. The assessment of the merits of the asylum claims made by boat arrivals will and should include their background and membership of proscribed organisations.
That’s what Wilson Tuckey, the ever-more-voluble Member for O’Connor, was initially getting at this morning.
He said:
If you wanted to get into Australia and you have bad intentions what do you do? You insert yourself in a crowd of 100 for which there is great sympathy for the other 99 and you go on a system where nobody brings their papers, you have no identity you have no address.
Fair enough. You might call it dog whistling, but as a factual statement it can’t be objected to – certainly not in the way that it was reasonable to object to similar arguments made by John Howard about Iraqi and Afghan asylum seekers in the early part of this decade.
Tuckey, however, then went further and suggested that it was possible a boat containing Tamil asylum seekers – no alternative meaning can really be attached to his reference to “one of these boats” – might tie itself to an oil platform on the North West Shelf and threaten to blow itself up.
Suicide bombing style, see. Cos that’s what Tamils do, right?
That amounts not so much to dog whistling as to blatant demonisation of people who appear to be genuinely in fear of their lives. Christopher Pyne was reported as immediately distancing himself from Tuckey’s remarks. There should be no need for anyone to distance themselves from Tuckey. He speaks for no one but himself on any issue.
And Kevin Rudd demanding that Tuckey be dumped from the Liberal Party for the remarks simply gives Tuckey more profile, more encouragement and serves to make Tuckey a martyr for the xenophobes among us.
I can’t see how the relentless focus on asylum seeker issues is helping anyone, given the scale of the problem. Oh, except the media, as ever looking for drama and conflict. They’re the ones who will truly be disappointed should Tuckey exit politics.
11 Comments
Mr Tuckey is nothing if not predictable, is he. Other people less so – for example, calling refugees ‘illegal immigrants’ sits better with the political right than with the party who one might expect to use honest and fair language when talking about refugees. Refugees are termed as such under international law – e.g., we all have the right to seek asylum in other countries when our lives are under threat. Until properly examining refugees through due process that is what these people are – refugees. My hope is that our present political representatives delineate their political identity more clearly than heretofore as being either Labor or as Liberal otherwise they all come to merge into the same kinds of features identifiable as Mr Tuckey’s: demonisers.
Bernard, no doubt Tuckey heard a very second hand account of contingency planning that people like the AFP and the Federal Police undertake to plan for potential events such as this.
Sooner or later, a terrorist organisation will try and use people smuggling channels to get people into a western country, if they haven’t already.
Equally inevitable is the fact that sooner or later a terrorist organisation will use a ‘refugee boat’ to conduct a suicide attack on either a navy or customs boat, or a maritime facility such as an oil rig.
After all, while a ‘fishing vessel’ illegally in Australian waters gets treated with a level of suspicion, a leaky refugee boat claiming it is sinking and needs to offload people urgently might be allowed close enough alongside a ship or structure to do potentially fatal damage to the target when it explodes in the maritime version of the suicide car bomber.
The attack on the USS Cole in Yemen where a small boat got alongside and detonated a significant amount of explosives almost sank a 9,000 tonne destroyer, there would be nothing left of an Armidale Class Patrol Boat or a Bay class customs cutter in that scenario, while an oil rig could suffer massive damage with attendant ecological damage.
It’s exactly the sort of thing that Al Quaida or Jamat Islamiya would love to try, if they thought it would work.
The real tragedy of such an attack, if and when it does come, is to make it even harder for those real refugees to get here by boat, and the attendant hardening of attitudes by Navy, Customs and others engaged in dealing with refugee boats which may turn out to be another attack.
Michael James, sooner or later someone will also use a legitimate commercial airline flight to mount a terrorist attack and fly it into an office building or something. Oops, hang on, did I miss something?
micae, I think the term suspected illegal immigrants (SIE) is used by the authorities.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the law (Immigration Act) was created so that the country could screen people to stop possible violent felons, foreign deseases, drug traffickers, contraband, illegal weapons and yes terrorists from entering the country.
So trying to dodge the process is illegal, and those suspected of doing so can therefore quite logically be referred to as suspected illegal immigrants.
As for Tuckey, he’s a good old fashioned politician, not afraid to speak his mind and not gagged too much by his own party, like many ‘individuals’ (if that’s at all possible) inside the ALP parliamentary collective. Yeah, he quite often puts his foot in it, but his annoyance value to the ‘True Believers’ is worth his weight in gold as far as I’m concerned. The Coalition need more of these individuals that shoot from the hip,
and IMO they should be hammering this border protection issue as nothing else seems to be working for them at present.
Micheal. I sincerely hope that our enemies try to sneak in via asylum seekers, with all the detention and background checking that applies to them, instead of coming in on a tourist visa, or a so called student “permanent residency” visa.
I hope all terrorist cells are that stupid.
Micheal – here is very good post called “The Futility of Defending Targets” by Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0910.html#4
Telling quote: “I tend to dislike security measures that merely cause the bad guys to make a minor change in their plans.”
There are a practical infinitude of targets. You can’t defend them. You have to catch the bad guys before they enact their plots.
You know, Australia sure got lucky with the Koori population. I wonder what the Aussie attitude would be to the Tamil Tigers and groups like them if we’d experienced a bit of, “You’re going to marginalize us, hey? Let’s just see about that.”
Groan…..
Yet more smoke and mirrors.
Must BK perennially make the Liberals the story, and but always in the derogatory sense, whenever his beloved, but thoroughly dishonourable, Krudd Spinnmeister f-cks up yet again?
The Krudd is actually the PM of this country.
Well, well, well, What tuckey said yesterday has been proved today. One Tamil terrorist suspect wanted by Interpol has been identified as hiding among dozens of other so called Tamil “refugees” inside the boat retained by Canadian authorities few days ago. Read: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2130108
These refugees came to Australia recently (Alex and the clan) claims that they will be nothing else but “killed” by Sri Lankans if they lived in Sri Lanka. Lies cannot be any sillier than this. If what they said was true then they are running just to save their life. If so, why not a boat ride to India (Tamil motherland) which is just 18 miles from Sri Lanka, or Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Phillipines, Indonesia and too many to list they just sailed past to come to Australia. Can they claim that Tamils will be “killed” in any of those countries?
Whether they are terrorists or not is one issue, and whether they are “genuine” refugees or “fake economic refugees who run for wealth” is another issue. Both criteria are to be applied carefully to filter them if Australia wants to take any of them on “compationate” grounds in allowing to jump the queue.
Manjula, wow! That proves it, case closed, all asylum seekers must be terrorists like that one.
Then again, isn’t there a risk that some Tamil Tiger terrorists might come by other means than by boat? Really, whenever we let in a Sri Lankan we risk letting in terrorists, don’t we.
Strange how a few weeks ago everyone was saying all terrorists are Mus-lim, but I suppose we live and learn, don’t we.
I vote all foreigners should be interned. I mean, we all know that terrorists are damn ethnics, don’t we. Using all their strange food to poison us, their strange clothes to disguise their identity, and their strange languages to speak in secret code as they plot our destruction.
No one has ever proposed an open door without guards. All we propose is to consider each on their merits, as the law says we must, and as we’ve agreed to under UN convention. And to respect their human liberties as we go about assessing their claims.