On Wednesday 19 November at 8:30pm (tonight if you are reading this today!) SBS will screen the documentary A well-founded fear. Malcolm Fraser:
Everyone should watch this documentary. It explains how harshly people seeking asylum have been treated and how Australian Governments have too often returned, what they regard as failed asylum seekers, to situations of very real danger. When will we again find our humanity?
Chris Sidoti:
Sometimes I feel ashamed to be an Australian. Watching A Well Founded Fear is surely one of those times. How could we have allowed this to happen? We all bear an immense personal responsibility, moral and legal, but no one so much as those who lead our nation in these inhuman policies. This documentary should lead us to two commitments. First, in spite of the policy changes under the Rudd government, we have not yet begun to make up for the profound harm we have caused. We must do that. Second, we must never allow this to happen again. Never, never, never.
Phil Glendenning, Director of the Edmund Rice Centre, has spent six or seven years investigating the return of 250 asylum seekers to 22 countries. He told Phillip Adams on Late Night Live that the last time he was in Syria he wore an All Blacks jersey. It’s not good to be known as an Australian in those parts.
The film has already had an outing at the Sydney Film Festival but will now be available to a broader audience via SBS. Adams quite rightly suggested that it should be broadcast to an even wider audience on the ABC. It’s sad, but can you imagine it being broadcast there? It seems to me that the ABC’s insane policy on ‘balance’ alone would make that unlikely.
The Late Night Live segment is worth a listen. There’s more at Project SafeCom Inc, including a number of newspaper articles, plus information at the Edmund Rice Centre website.
Glendenning reckons that they’ve documented the deaths of nine returnees at the hands of the Taliban, but he believes the figure is actually 20. He points out that asylum seekers we have specifically rejected have been accepted as refugees by New Zealand, Canada, the USA, the UK and Sweden. They obviously had different criteria.
He thinks Rudd has a good man on the job in Senator Chris Evans. He wants Evans
to reopen the cases of the rejected Afghans “as a matter of urgency”. He also wants the Government to “put in place processes and policies to make sure this never ever happens again”.
Evans is asking questions of the bureaucrats, but Dr Sev Ozdowski of the ANU wants an inquiry and wants them nailed. He reckons that where there are victims there are perpetrators.
Maybe they should be looking for the former minister, he who still totes an Amnesty International badge with barbed wire folded around a candle, you know, the minister who was greeted by the Liberal party as a hero after the 2001 elections. Someone did find him to poke a microphone under his nose.
The former immigration minister Philip Ruddock accepted mistakes may have been made. But he added: “The [UN] refugee convention does not say you cannot be returned to a dangerous place.
“The fact that somebody might tragically die may well be as tragic as a road accident in Sydney.”
Ian Viner once said that Ruddock had a very hands-on approach to running his department. He credits Ruddock with changing the culture of the immigration department, though not for the better. But I guess he too was but a willing servant of his master.
This is why belatedly we got rid of the Howard government, though most did it for reasons they didn’t understand.
Can anybody really imagine where Howard would have taken us and just what sinister use he would have made of the Global Financial Crisis?
People love to diss the Rudd government, its the trendy MSM thing to do at the moment, but his victory in itself is the best thing he could possibly do for Australia no matter what he does through his term.
I couldn’t agree more, Thomas, and one of the unintended outcomes of the Howard Years on the ABC has been, I think, to remind us just how putrid that mob were.
Brian, thanks for posting on the Edmund Rice Centre, too – they do very good work.
Sounds like one hell of a documentary, pity I won’t be able to see it. The Howardian take on immigration and asylum seekers is a poison which has been spread all over Europe. I don’t know how many time I’ve read the phrase “an Australian style immigration system” as some sort of catch-all justification for immigrant bashing. It might have something to do with so many ex-Libs working on campaigns in Europe though…
#3It might be something to do with it being the only sane response to hordes of illegal immigrants.
Mick, the next best thing, although I won’t really know until I’ve seen the doco, is to download the audio of the Adams segment.
Thanks for posting this, Brian … I too will have to try and get the audio from O/S …
While I think Chris Sidoti’s point is a good one, and that we all share some responsibility for what has happened, I also think a lot of people DID do something to try and help – not least those who harboured escapees, and whose stories we may (obviously) never hear in full.
Instead, we get one more vox pop from Ruddock/Burns, as if anyone ever expected him to change his mind!
Some of the links in the post aren’t bolded, so lest folks miss the scale of the injustices of the “actions taken in our name” (from the ANU enquiry link) by individual officers who were involved with day-to-day support of the system:
When Dr. Ozdowski says “I know it’s a very radical proposal (that) there should be some identification of individual officers who were involved … because simply where there were victims, there were perpetrators.” he ain’t just whistlin Dixie: where could that sort of approach of accountability lead, right up to the top of the Ministerial chain of command?
If anyone needs reminding of, but would prefer never having to see it’s face again, the full horror that was the golem who now hides behind technicalities of a UN convention, and is able in his mutant lawyerly conscience to equate the fate of a man being tortured and beheaded in front of his family as merely “as tragic as a road accident in Sydney”, Clarke and Dawe provide an anodyne solution
Mick @ 3
Many SBS programmes are now made available for downloading a couple of days after being broadcast.
http://www.sbs.com.au/television
Brian says:
The fact that some people in Syria do not like some Australians is not something I spend much time fretting about. The Syrians need to learn the art of good democratic government before they get on their high horse about us.
The Howard governments tough stance on deterring people smugglers was good policy and good politics.
It was good policy because detection, disruption and detention of smuggled people successfully constrained this deadly traffic. The people drowning industry has certainly run on hard times since OPeration Relex.
It was good politics because it reassured the Australian public that their borders were secure which increased public confidence in the alien intake system in general. Thereby actually improving the general status of NESB immigrants.
No Australian politician has done more good for coloured people – either native indigenes or adoptive immigrants – than John Howard. Its typical of the extreme moral perversity of Left-liberals that they make him an object of hate.
SatP – depopulating Europe needs those “hordes” to pay taxes & staff its creaky infrastructure. Just as Enoch Powell, when UK Health Minister in the 50s went abeggin’ an’apleading to the Windies for immigrants to staff the NHS and London Transport. Plus ca change
the idea of bringing Ruddock and Howard to account in a court of law is very appealing, but it will never happen.
Epicene, for what reason is Europe unable to use legal migrants?
Wow — savage indictment of Australian politicians there, Jack.
I’d love to hear what Jack thinks the definition of “good” is. I suspect it includes lots of “this is for your own good” type of thinking, like spanking children.
Coming from Jack, isn’t it rather a savage indictment of Howard?
David R I think the analogy is that you spank the children (and keep them in) to encourage other children not to come to your school. Then you send them home inspite of knowing that there is a fair chance they’ll actually be persecuted or even killed there.
Somtimes, as in the case of Syria, you send them there (Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghans) even though you know full well it’s not their home and they won’t be welcome.
That’s what Glendenning et al found, it seems.
“No Australian politician has done more good for coloured people – either native indigenes or adoptive immigrants – than John Howard….”
Says it all, really.
Us and Them, eh Jack?
“…coloured people….”
????
Incredible.
“The Syrians need to learn the art of good democratic government before they get on their high horse about us.”
Since the Syrians are hosts to over a million refugees from our war of choice in Iraq, perhaps we need to learn the art of how to treat refugees before getting on our high horse about them, Jack. Syria has a similar population to Australia, but much less area. While the US, cheered on by some commenters here, has p*ssed trillions of dollars against the wall in its invasion and ongoing occupation, not a zac has gone to help Syria and Jordan cope with the resultant refugee exodus. Nor have Iraqi refugees found any destination among the Coalition of the Willing nations.
The hysteria about refugees whipped up in Australia, Austria and elsewhere is based on bigotry and fear fed by ignorance. The entire influx of refugees arriving in Australian territory since 1975, Vietnamese boat people included, would not fill the Gabba public seating area. Compare and contrast with the million Iraqis and 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria – pushed there by the military aggression of Australia’s allies with the open connivance of Australian governments.
Yes, not actually a “horde” except in the fertile imaginations of tabloid editors and politicians.
# 14 David Rubie Nov 19th, 2008 at 9:52 am
There is nothing inherently wrong with “cruel to be kind” punishment. Policy should be judged by results, not compliance with some phony humanitarianism.
HOwever there is no need to resort to Machiavellianism to justify the better part of Howard’s policies on the colored question. I mean “good” for colored people in the common, ordinary sense of the term.
– Curtailing mass drownings of misguided people smuggled on unseaworthy vessels launched by unscrupulous operators;
– Arresting the epidemic of indigenous child rape in the Northern Territories;
– Liberating the East Timorese from their Javanese Jcolonial overlords;
– Stabilising the troubled Melanesian failing states to our Near North euch as Bougainville, Solomons and PNG (TACE)
– Denouncing and deterring barbaric practices such as Female Genital Mutilation imported from tribal badlands under the guise of fashionable “cultural diversity” slogans;
– Consigning to public igonominy the degrading, demeaning and debilitating ethnic lobby rackets that have spread like a cancer through the ALP;
– Turning public sentiment on NESB immigration almost 180 deg around after a generation of Left-liberal (Wets) asinine abuse and had brought much of alien intake program into disrepute. Now NESB’s are far more welcome by the ESB’s, since considered properly vetted;
– Cranking up the intake of higher-IQ immigrant NESBs to record levels.
– Rescuing modern liberalism from its faux sympathisers amongst the post-modern liberal lumpen intelligentsia.
All this has been pretty much “message received and understood” by both the native majority and various adoptive minorities. Excepting of course for those cultural elites who are either too wrong-headed or bad-faithed to “see whats in front of their nose”.
# 19 Hal9000 Nov 19th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
<blockquoteSince the Syrians are hosts to over a million refugees from our war of choice in Iraq, perhaps we need to learn the art of how to treat refugees before getting on our high horse about them, Jack.
There were millions of ME refugees before Howard cracked down on unauthorised arrivals (from Saddam and the Taliban) and there were millions of refugees after Howard cracked down (when he helped get rid of Saddam and the Taliban). The one thing one can rely on about the ME is that the place, with monotonous regularity, generates people who want to flee it.
A good enough reason to keep a weather eye on uninvited folk washing up on our shores who appear to emanate from those parts.
Hal 9000 says:
Blatantly false. Australia, under Howard, has taken in thousands of Iraqi refugees. Do some fact checking before moral grandstanding.
Hal9000 says:
Wrong. You should look to the disgraceful performance of people like the Theophanous Bros and Grassby Inc for an explanation of why the general populace are wary of foreigners whose bona fides are suspect. The “hysteria about refugees” and dodgy immigrants is mostly the responsiblity of Left-liberal ethnic racketeers who for a generation or more rorted the intake program for political advantage. Against the interest of the workers they claim to represent and the national interest.
Hal 9000 says:
Accusation inflation on a ludicrous scale. The invasion was a fait accompli whatever Howard would have said or done. Planet Hal9000’s accusation only makes moral sense by presuming that if the ADF’s contribution of a handful of engineers to build some schools for Shia in the South was the prime mover Mesopotamian conflict. Which is nonsense.
NO doubt we should take in greater numbers of ME refugees. And detain the unauthorised arrivals for shorter periods. But we should not drop our guard for an instant, lest we get a repeat performance of Left-liberal immigration policy 1975-95.
You need to cut down your meds Jack, you’re delirious.
Jack “Smack” Strocchi wrote:
aka Smack unfortunate boat people on their misguided attempts to escape the horror of their awful countries.
Smack abbos for a bunch of made up stuff that nobody can seem to find medical evidence for.
Finally smack those indos for collaborating with the Japs in dubya dubya two.
Smack those ignorant fuzzy wuzzies for their inability to turn wretched, ruined and exploited colonial islands into tourist traps for whitey.
Smack those intellectual elites for their total failure to denounce loudly everything everywhere at the same time.
Smack those filthy socialists for their impertinence at trying to politically organise ignorant serbs and lebboes who should never leave their kebab shops or carpet cleaning vans.
Smack those ignorant migrant “no speeka de eeenglish, no knowa da creeekeet” buggers with a new white Australia policy while simultaneously delivering a backhander to anyone who disagreed.
Then smack them again if they offer the other cheek.
Smack anyone who disagreed with Saint Howard of Kirabilli, a font of wisdom so deep and profound that even the public wearing of trackie dacks had a philosophical significance lost on ignorant leftists.
aka threaten to smack them again, for their own good of course.
I hope you’ve got skin left on your buttocks Jack, that must have been some upbringing.
Jack has a right of reply, but it seems to me he’s wandered off the topic of the post.
The post was about the film A Well-founded Fear shown on SBS tonight which looked at the effects of sending asylum seekers back whence they had come, or for some reason dumping them in Syria. My impression was that it didn’t add a whole lot more information to what I’d linked to in the post. What it did in the main was expose us to the emotion of what has been going on. That’s what film does well. It was gut-wrenching.
A couple of things. Using Pashtun speaking translators to interview Hazara asylum seekers in Nauru shows we were more interested in putting hurdles in their way than fairly assessing their situation.
Secondly, the woman looking for her son said he was not safe in the refugee camps in Pakistan. It stands to reason that if the asylum seekers can walk to Pakistan, so can their enemies. In the camps you are an easy target.
Australia’s position was that if these people left the camps in Pakistan they were queue jumpers. This ignores the fact that we were not selecting refugees in Pakistan. The nearest queue was in Jordan. To get there you had to walk across to Iran and then pass through Iraq. At my son’s school there was a family who remarkably had done just that. From memory, 35 days of walking over the mountains at night and hiding during the day. Of course they needed a guide and the guide had to be paid. You might call the guide a “people smuggler”. But the Taliban weren’t running guided tours over the mountains and there was no chance you’d find the way yourself.
Andrew Bartlett posts on the doco and makes this point (among others):
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/bartlett/2008/11/20/what-should-be-done-about-those-deported-to-dangerdeath/
That was an excellent post from Andrew, who as a parliamentarian visited Nauru four times from 2003 to 2006.
But he’s right. the question is what do we, and specifically Labor, do now to right the wrongs and make up for what we’ve done.
The Dark Victory, as Marr called it. Cheney’s got nothing on Ruddock.
My apologies Brian for teeing off and derailing the thread. I didn’t actually realise that my joke about Jack was exactly what he thought. It isn’t often you see a caricature come to life.
I’m not sure how exactly we make up for what we’ve done during the Howard years – there’s a hornets nest of rabid Jack-like sentiment in Australia that is, while temporarily shamed, begging for an opportunity to be stirred up again and I imagine Rudd & Co are well aware of it.
The steps they’ve made so far have been encouraging though. Although, wbb, as much as Ruddock is clearly evil, he’s got nothing on Cheney and Rove.
David, I think it worked out just about right. Jack’s views a re well-known and this time I actually thought he did a pretty good job of sending himself up. Still it’s not good to leave things you don’t agree with stand, because there is an automatic assumption that you agree with them and there are always new readers (I hope) on a thread who might not be aware of all that’s gone before on diverse threads.
Isn’t it a crime to issue false passports or to authoreise the issuing of same? If that is so, haven’t Ruddock and possibly Howard, broken the law. If so, Why aren’t they being prosecuted.
It was an excellent documentary, which should shame those in government who did it, and all those Aussies who continuously voted for Howard and his cronies.
“There were millions of ME refugees before Howard cracked down on unauthorised arrivals (from Saddam and the Taliban) and there were millions of refugees after Howard cracked down (when he helped get rid of Saddam and the Taliban). The one thing one can rely on about the ME is that the place, with monotonous regularity, generates people who want to flee it.”
Isn’t it rather contradictory to invade a country (on false pretences), claim they are ‘liberating’ the Iraqi people, and then refuse to allow these people refuge in your country?
Likewise with Afghanistan.
No wonder some of us suspect the real reasons behind recent conflicts are economic.
# 30 Brian Nov 20th, 2008 at 9:40 am
The title of this post is “actions taken in our name”. Implying the Left-liberal poster’s moral superiority to the agency (commonwealth govt, prime minister Howard) responsible for taking these unspeakable Right-”corporal” actions. But Left-liberals ride a very shaky high horse when they attempt to charge the high ground in this battlefield of the Culture War.
Brian feigns to find my criticism of Left-liberal moral posturing over the treatment of anauthorised or unwelcome arrivals a form of self-parody.
A review of the key characters on the Left-liberal side of the ethnic theatre of the Culture Wars would tax Jonathan Swift’s powers of mordant satire:
– Theophanous Bros: ethnic rackets and charges of sexual assault by appointment
– Al Grassby: in the pocket of the Calabrian Mafia, snow jobbing assassins,
– Geoff Clarke: pack rapist and individual rapist, ala carte
These people were not mere bit players in the pantheon of Left-liberal Culture Warriors. THey were officers of the highest rank.
THe problem is that I (and about 2/3 of the general populace) have a problem in accepting “actions taken in our name” when this sordid crew and their camp followers held the whip hand. A recent Age poll underlines that the public is more hardline on unauthorized arrivals than certain Right wing Culture Warriors:
There will be no political relaxation from the general public on the matter of unauthorized aliens until Left-liberal come clean about their Culture War crimes and misdemeanors.
So far not one single Left-liberal in the whole country for a whole generation has had the guts to confront the vicious underbelly of their political apparatus. Apparently people such as David Rubie, Mark Bahnisch and Brian have been happy to give these scoundrels a free pass whilst swallowing their ideological claptrap with faces unerringly straight.
What a contemptible display of moral evasion cammed up by political diversion.
Whatever, Jack!
As a matter of interest I took the title of the post from a phrase used late in the interview between Adams and Glendenning. My motivation in posting was to draw people’s attention to the program before it went to air.
Somehow I thought you’d be back. Others can debate you if they wish. Sorry, but I have to move on.
Jack “Smack” Strocchi wrote:
Only in your head Jack. I notice you failed to defend all those failed policies in your rebuttal, which means I suppose you concede failure and are now just stuck with disgruntlement. I’m not sorry the whole “whip up racist sentiment to win elections” thing failed – it gives most of us back our faith that Australians might grumble about immigration, but they place little value on it compared to economic stability, workplace justice and Howard personality cults.
No ‘feigning’ about it; as far as I can see, he really does think that, and he is not alone. Why are you implying that Brian is pretending?
Dr Cat, you’re right, I’m not. But Jack has special powers, you see. He knows better than I do what’s going on inside my head.
If you have to go back to the era of Al Grassby to dredge up examples of migrants-behaving-badly, you really have reached the desperate end of cherrypicking.
Looking at the bigger picture, I’d say migrants have behaved rather badly, right into the sixth or seventh generation of descendants and beyond. British migration to Australia, for example, hasn’t always been conducted well from the perspective of the native born. Examples can be found in the period beginning 1788.
Klaus, also looking at the bigger picture, we also know that each time the composition of migrants changed (British, Irish catholic, jewish, Italian (Hello Strocchers!), Greek, Vietnamese, Chinese, Lebanese…
Each and every time the incumbent population thought it was an absolute f**kn OUTRAGE and spelled the end of civilisation, and/or did their best to insult and belittle and demonise the incoming strangers; and each time, Australian society continued on its merry way and within a generation nobody thought much about it.
It’s a pity we never learn from this repeating pattern. (OMG AFRICANS it’s the end of civ as we know it OMG…)
Helen, did it ever occur to you that perhaps the “OMG! Outrage!” Effect which you describe was a key contributing factor in ensuring the social stability which you also describe? Resistance is what holds up structures. All that Royal Canadian Isometrics and so forth.
Here’s how it works: (1) fresh wave of “different” migrants arrive. (2) prior/settled/established population shrieks “OMG! They’re different!” and demands assimilationist compromises from the furriners. (3) The furriners say to themselves “OMG! Those guys mean business, we better put some compromises on the table to get along here.” (4) Social compromise and stability result, or as you yourself put it, Australian society continue(s) on its merry way.
Not too interested in causes and effects, are we?
FORTUNE: Don’t ever own an ant farm, you’ll wind up killing all the ants.
klaus K: nicely done, sir.
You DO write well.
It was the ties, wasn’t it. The wife said they were a bad idea.
#42, well, you really told me, didn’t you. I’ll never ignore the calisthenic theory of social relations again, along with the Gravity theory of the yellow peril (they were in the north, you see, therefore aided by gravity.) It’s science, don’t yer know.
Just on Al Grassby, they never convicted him of anything although they tried awfully hard and Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya thought he was alright.
Some friends of mine who lived in Canberra befriended him when he was penniless, was being pursued by was it ASIO or the AFP and didn’t have a roof over his head. They used to go for a walk in the park every time they wanted to say anything important to each other. Anyway he was acquitted of whatever they tried to pin on him and as far as I’m concerned the presumption of innocence applies.