Over at Pure Poison T.Zeigler nails Paul Kelly’s arse for his usual fluff piece in today’s Oz. Kelly argues that a softening of Australian detention policy is a pull factor on refugees. Ziegler(with help from Possum C) shows there’s no evidence for that.
It’s more of Kelly’s asinine mantras – hard heads soft hearts – dressed up as insight, borne of a desire that the issue will run just like it did last time. It won’t.
Witness the way that the Oz has suddenly become concerned about kids behind razor wire – albeit in Indonesia. The very fact that they want to ping the government on its hypocrisy is a sign of how successfully the government has purused a dual strategy. But it’s not hard and soft – it’s national priorities combined with acknolwedging the humanity of the refugees.
But clearly, the Indonesian solution is where the fault line now lies. Morally it is no better handing a victim over to someone who will beat them up, rather than beating them up yourself. If refugees are picked up by the Indonesians that’s not our responsbility. If the Indonesians are paid to, or if the process becomes a binational management of those water then it has to be campaigned against given Indonesian detention conditions (though the degree to which the Indonesians run Baxter style detention, rather than simply camps is exaggerated) .
Mainland processing with a minimum mandatory period and none for women and children, has to be the demand – from unions, churches, and social movement groups. Then the government can react as it sees fit. Good to know the Oz will be part of the campaign, by publishing stories of Indonesia depredation above the fold
12 Comments
Sorry Guy, but the help came from Possum – not the Poll Bludger:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/10/19/push-vs-pull-asylum-seeker-numbers-and-statistics/
The Oz must have swallowed very hard to actually write something other than persecuting and demonising boat people. Just shows you how desperate they are to attack Rudd.
thanks grog. corrected.
Just curious… how is it that a policy proposal which treats men differently from women (and children) isn’t decried as “sexist”? Women can be criminals and terrorists too, you know.
Yes women can, but they are rarely users of violence outside of a condition of struggle. Thus there are female suicide bombers in the middle east, many female tamil tiger fighters etc. the people being looked for are those with a history of actively leading criminal or political violence – which in the latter case does not disqualify them from asylum.
The only people who should really be in mandatory detention – and then not for long – is a subset of men between 20 and about 45. In effet only a small percentage of those arriving by any means.
It’s not sexist to suggest that violence has a gendered character. quite the reverse.
Possum only makes graphs that suit his agenda, so I doubt that his data can be taken too seriously.
What is quite clear to me is that after the introduction of the Pacific Solution there was a very sharp decrease in the amount of boatpeople, much to the Chagrin of the far left.
Then after Rudd softened Australia’s boatpeople laws, we began to get flooded by boatpeople again, this time we didn’t have chagrin from the lefties, but complete and utter denial.
Of course we all know what the boatpeople numbers will be next year: EVEN HIGHER. The left won’t deny this because even they know that Rudd’s soft touch policies are EXACTLY the reason for the flood… but that is EXACTLY what they wanted now wasn’t it? These people want as many boatpeople coming here on leaky boats as possible, to me that has become abunduntly clear.
I’ve been sprung! Although let me tell you, it was very tiring work – not only having to organise all those boat people coming to Australia for the last 15 years – but having to organise half a million or so fake asylum seekers around the world, every year since 1994!
Thankfully, when I was 4 years old, I laid the groundwork for my nefarious future agenda by working the political backrooms of Iraq and installing Saddam Hussein as Iraqi President. Using my powers of fortune telling (you do know my real name is actually Posstradamus!) I had a vision that an Hussein regime would ultimately become one of the worlds largest sources of human population displacement – assisting greatly in the creating of my Graphporn Propaganda Agenda (TM) some 20 years later.
It’s all in the planning you see – ask me one day about the shit I had to go through to get the Taliban installed in Afghanistan (started that one when I was in the womb!), causing 911 and eventually creating a huge wave of asylum seekers washing out around the globe.From Sri Lanka to Somalia, from the Balkans to Burma – my entire life I’ve been a very busy and naughty Possum, all in the pursuit of creating the raw data needed to make graphs to piss you off.
Alternatively, mr Truth Hurts – you could always take your medication and stop being a farking imbecile.
Guy – the statistics and threat profiles you describe are pretty much the way I see reality too. But reality seems to get ignored in favour of political correctness in this modern era. It just strikes me as interesting that the kind of policy Andrew described can somehow fly under the sexism radar when it blatantly discriminates on the basis of gender.
Or is it only sexist if women are the ones being discriminated against?
RS – (sigh) it’s not sexism if it recognises a continuing material difference between the way men and women behave.
The fact is that mandatory detention for the purposes of security screening will be unjust to virtually everyone who undergoes it. There is virtually no need to screen women , so why not exclude them as a category from the process? There are other groups – children, older men who can also be excluded.
By your logic we would impose mandatory detention on women simply to even up the ledger. the application of ‘antisexist’ measures would then increase the unnecessary suffering of women.
Guy – I think you’re taking me the wrong way. I like the proposed policy. It makes sense, even the common kind.
It just surprises me to see it in print, is all – I had reached a point where I thought even a whiff of differential treatment based on gender (or age) was verboten due to PC concerns, regardless of how rational and sensible it was.
rs – fair enough. but in that case i think you’re setting up a straw man/person/thing. you’re looking for some programmatic kneejerk reaction where there isn’t one – and no reason why there should be. It’s possible to argue that sexism and patriachy exists, without it being assumed that youre in favour of the word ‘personhole’
The Truth Hurts said “…this time we didn’t have chagrin from the lefties, but complete and utter denial.”
These days, I’m beyond being surprised at the mindlessness of the Right but I found myself rolling my eyes at this one. I assume TH has read Possum’s analysis. I found it quite convincing. I’ve certainly read nothing in the comments or elsewhere to dispute it.
It seems to me that TH’s comment is a good example of what he or she accuses the Left of. That is complete and utter denial. But that seems to be what the Right does these days. All around them their shibboleths are crashing down. Climate change, failed wars, global financial crisis… The world isn’t meant to be like this. So they deny that it is. It seems to have become a reflex action. Rather than rising to the challenges of the crises they’ve created, they deny that there any. They look at a graph of increasing temperature and say it’s decreasing. They close their ears to the consequences of their wars and claim them as victories. They look at the financial crisis and blame Roosevelt.
So, when someone shows them that they are wrong about refugee arrivals as well, do they even attempt to identify flaws? No. All they seem to be able to do now is deny.