One of Howard’s core provisions was the excising of certain territories from Australia to prevent arrivals invoking Australian legal protections. While Rudd’s lot stopped sending the intercepted boat people to Nauru etc, they sent them to the excised territory of Christmas Island. The somewhat weak excuse was that there was a new expensive centre that needed to be used, despite the acknowledged heavy costs of running it and transporting people there.

This was obviously the ALP compromise version: we will be nicer to refugees, once their legitimacy is determined, but we will continue to look tough by sending them to an excised offshore island. However, this decision has now created an unnecessary problem because the facility has limited places and the numbers are becoming a political football of oversize proportions.

We have a major news story, moral panic and full blown political crisis because Christmas Island is about to overflow.

When 200 extra bunk beds make the media, there is a problem. Had the Government stopped sending the boat people to such a limited and visible facility, the extra numbers would have been a much smaller story. The fact that they continued this odd process reinforces the perception that there is a threat in the arrival of boat people that required both anxieties and high levels of spending.

We now have many years of settled boat arrivals, including those that arrived under Fraser and Hawke and NO evidence that they are in any way a threat to our social fabric. Yet Opposition politicians are still demonising the arrivals and creating a political panic and the Government has been caught in its own ambivalences. It should show some ethical courage by just bringing people to the mainland and processing them normally. Then people could just see them as just problematic arrivals who arrive inadequately documented.

I met some of the damaged people produced by the last Government’s policies and am appalled to see the start of another media feeding frenzy. Ruddock has learned nothing from the distress he caused, and the Opposition needs lessons in ethics v national and political self interest.

Please can we avoid the same mistakes again?

Last Friday he “announced his intention to sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), in what will be the U.S.’s first signing of an international human rights treaty in over a decade.”

The CPRD was only adopted by the UN in 2006, but until now, the USA had been the only NATO country not to sign the Treaty. Australia ratified it in July 2008.

Unlike Australia, ratification of Treaties in the USA have to be agreed to be the Senate, once the President has signed it.  In Australia, Treaties are usually required to be reviewed by a Parliamentary Committee, but our government is still able to go ahead and ratify a Treaty, regardless of any views, recommendations or findings of that Committee.

In this case, the Treaties Committee recommended the Treaty be ratified.  But they also did a follow-up report which recommended:

(a) that the Government consider expanding the role of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner to enable the Commissioner to provide Parliament with an annual report on compliance and implementation of the Convention and, if also ratified, the Optional Protocol, and

(b) that a review be carried out of the relevant provisions of the Migration Act and the administrative implementation of migration policy, and that any necessary action be taken to ensure that there is no direct or indirect discrimination against persons with disabilities in contravention of the Convention.

The Migration Act does have provisions which directly affect people with a disability (when it is of a nature to be viewed as a significant health condition), as I’ve noted before.  Whether it does so in a way which contravenes the Disabilities Convention is something which is open to debate, but it is still timely that such a review be done.

Those recommendations were tabled in October 2008.  As far as I know, no such public review has yet been carried out or commenced.

But I certainly hope that before the week is out the Prime Minister will also use the forum of Parliament to provide the financial details to justify what he is doing.  The sudden stimulus package, particular coming on top of talk of bringing forward infrastructure spending, is basically a mini-Budget without the documentation. Given the current economic uncertainty, any budget forward estimates would be even more of an estimate than usual – after estimate is partly just a fancy term for guessing – but those guesses are being used to make some major decisions at the moment, and it’s just not good enough to take such major economic measures without providing the details to verify what they are based on.

Over the weekend, we also had talk by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner that income tax cuts may be brought forward as well if more economic stimulus is needed.

I don’t dispute that all of these things may be a good idea (other than the big boost to the First Home Owners Grants, which I still think is bad policy), but there really should be a more formal statement provided to the Parliament to enable closer scrutiny of how solid the economic foundations are for the government’s actions.

Senate Estimates Committees are meeting this week, so even if the government won’t produce a formal statement to Parliament, there will no doubt be efforts made through the Senate to get some more solid data.

To his credit, Mr Tanner is following through with the same notion of using online forums to encourage participation and seek peoples’ views.  Next week he is participating as a guest blogger at Open Forum as part of an interactive, online discussion forum on the topic of better regulation, including how to use technology to regulate better.

Tanner says he is “interested in hearing new ideas and innovations, including better use of information technology to enable continuous regulatory reform.”

There are plenty of politicians who think the idea of genuinely trying to engage the community through blogs and online forums is at best a gimmick and at worst a joke.  If you disagree and think politicians should be encouraged to try to use this type of medium more regularly and meaningfully, here’s your chance to do some encouraging.

The forum is open for input now and Lindsay Tanner will be responding to peoples’ submissions throughout next week. It might seem quite a dry topic for many people, but that is what a lot of politics is actually about – serious solid policy consideration. It’s just that most of that gets little attention in the media (or on a lot of political blogs). A dry, wonky topic might could help encourage serious contributions and input, rather than partisan rants and point-scoring which can blight the comments threads of some political blogs. Certainly the early public contributions that have already been put up at time of writing are quite solid and substantive.

The recently tabled Senate Committee report into legislation amending the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act contained a dissenting report from the Coalition Senators. No surprises there – Coalition Senators seem to be very keen of late to express their opposition to many parts of government legislation. There were six Coalition Senators who put their names at the end of this dissenting report, three of them Queenslanders, as befits a Bill dealing with the Reef. But what I did find curious is that of those three, Barnaby Joyce gave his party affiliation as “Nats, Qld”, while long-standing National Ron Boswell gave his party affiliation as “LNP, Qld”, and Queensland Liberal Senator Ian MacDonald (who has long advocated a combining of the Liberals and Nationals, although not necessarily in the manner that has recently occurred) described himself as “LP, Qld”. 

In most respects this is a minor matter, but it does reinforce the lack of clarity about whether the Liberals and Nationals from Queensland are wanting to bond together or be apart.  This is reinforced by Barnaby Joyce adding some separate additional comments under his own name, but “on behalf of the National Party”. No other names were listed on this additional comment, which leaves it unclear whether Ron Boswell, describing himself as an LNP Senator, is among those they were made on behalf of.

The additional comments don’t actually take a substantively different approach on the actual legislation, so it is unlikely to lead to any splits in voting on the Senate floor.  It seems to just be Senator Joyce taking an opportunity to engage in the ‘differentiation’ tactic he has often espoused. There’s nothing out of the ordinary in that – minor party Senators do it quite often.

In this case, Senator Joyce is mainly making an extra appeal to the fishing lobby with some statements that are more hairy-chested than those in the main dissenting report.

As an aside, I was interested to see him quoting the Queensland Game Fishing Association describing themselves as “an organisation committed to the collection, dissemination and analysis of scientific information as the basis of sound marine resource conservation and management”.  Maybe they should call it scientific fishing, rather than game fishing. A bit like scientific whaling.

With Queenslander Barnaby Joyce now elevated to Leader of the (stand alone) National Party in the Senate, he has again talked about the need to differentiate his party from the Liberals. Yet going into next year’s state election in Queensland and crucially also the next federal election (which always has the potential of happening some time next year as well if the government judges that a double dissolution is necessary), the Liberal and National Parties (or should that be Party??) are presenting themselves to the public as a single, seamlessly intertwined entity.

With the latest negotiations on the luxury car tax seeing Steve Fielding potentially getting government agreement on special treatment for farmers and tourist operators, this article reports Joyce as saying the government should at least “quarantine all Australian cars from the tax.”

Joyce recently condemned the government’s tax increase on luxury cars as “left wing, last century socialism”, which is presumably different from the agrarian socialism he has said the Nationals stand for. (I’m not sure whether the National’s see that as 21st century socialism or 19th century socialism)

But given that Joyce is the now National’s Senate Leader, I don’t know if his idea for increasing the tax differential on Australian made cars is an idea supported by the federal Liberal-National Coalition or just the federal National Party, or only the Queensland Liberal National Party, or perhaps just the Queensland Nationals?

No doubt it’s just an attempt by Senator Joyce to pursue his strategy of “more differentiation for the Nationals”.  If I were in the Nationals, I would see a lot of merit in this strategy.  I just can’t see how you can differentiate and merge at the same time.

The only way I can make any logical sense out of this is if those who describe the merged Liberal National Party as just a National Party takeover of the Liberals are correct – in which case there is no Liberal Party for Senator Joyce to need to distinguish himself from. I’m not sure how the federal Liberal Party MPs from Queensland would feel about that interpretation though.