Archive for the 'Immigration' Category

Reality and unreality in the pundits’ world

Published
by
Kim
1 week, 3 days ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Immigration, Media and Polls
. 17 Comments

Let’s take a look at today’s political “news”, News Limited style, and the ongoing construction of the “media narrative” that according to the press gallery gang, is the only news fit to print.

As noted here, The Opposition Organ spent a bucket of dosh to add extra questions to Newspoll, and chose to run with “Voters Want Costello” as its front page headline over the (presumably less welcome to the masthead of denialism) numbers on climate change, showing overwhelming majorities attributing climate change to AGW and support for an ETS, with a big majority for “not waiting on the world”. So that’s establishing the news agenda through polling to feed the current “media narrative” - centring on the Liberal leadership and Peter Costello lovin’ in particular. And selectivity in emphasis. Then we get selectivity in reporting. The numbers in Newspoll, as Possum points out, don’t show that the voters the Liberals need to persuade are particularly persuadable by a putative Costello return:

The Coalition needs ALP voters to shift to the Coalition, yet ALP voters have a breakdown of 15% more likely and 20% less likely. If Costello became leader, he might not lose voteshare, but neither does he look like he would gain much based on these results.

But Dennis Shanahan doesn’t mention that.

Let’s go back a bit and remember, as Mark pointed out in his review, that the extracts from Inside Kevin07 that kicked the Costello talk off were themselves highly selective - one bit of research done before Rudd became leader and highlighted while the other internal polling and focus group research showing Costello for PM being about as appealling as a piece of wet lettuce was studiously ignored. And let’s not forget either that the “Costello the Saviour” narrative basically depends on the publication date of a book! Leadership calculation by publishing schedule! Melbourne University Press and book distributors hold the nation’s future in their hand!

Then, the big showdown Bolta talked up on the Coalition’s emissions trading scheme stance comes - and Nelson gets rolled.

Meanwhile, the Labor government has basically done away with mandatory detention.

I would venture to suggest that is rather more important than all this other confected nonsense.

Continue reading ‘Reality and unreality in the pundits’ world’

Howard lies episode #809798?

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Crime, Howardia, Immigration and Terrorism
. 22 Comments

DOCUMENTS have revealed the department of former prime minister John Howard became involved in the Mohamed Haneef affair less than 48 hours after the Indian doctor was arrested in connection with a British terrorist attack last July.

Lawyers for Dr Haneef said the early involvement of the Prime Minister’s Department raised the possibility that Mr Howard may have colluded with then immigration minister Kevin Andrews to politicise the issue.

“One can have a view whether it was to Howard’s political benefit to whip up a storm like he did with Tampa,” solicitor Rod Hodgson said in Brisbane yesterday.

Indeed one can.

Mr Howard has denied any involvement in the handling of the Haneef investigation.

This highlights the fact that the Clarke enquiry lacks the power to compel witnesses to appear, and in fact that some are being examined without being on oath, and that witnesses will not be cross-examined. Will John Howard be giving evidence? And if he does, will it turn out to have all been Kevin Andrews’ idea? That was never easy to believe, and it’s getting harder.

Gleebooks Haebich event tonight

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Immigration, Indigenous, Notices, Sociology and Sydney
. 3 Comments

Folks might remember I attended my erstwhile colleague Professor Anna Haebich’s book launch earlier this year, and invited her to write a guest post for LP on her book Spinning the Dream. I’ve just received this via email from our friends at Griffith REVIEW. If you’re in Sydney, this event would be well worth attending.

TONIGHT! Wednesday June 11
Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970
gleebooks
upstairs at 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe
6.30 for 7pm. $10 / $7 concession. Book gleebooks 02 9660 2333
Multi-award winning historian and author Anna Haebich will be in conversation with Julianne Schultz to discuss the experience of assimilation in Australia. Anna explores how Australians in the 1950s and 60s were challenged by new visions of the nation. Assimilation was heralded as the mechanism to sweep away divisions and exclusions of the past and absorb Aboriginal and new Australians into a common shared way of life. The rhetoric and reality of assimilation was to have a profound and lasting effect on several generations of Australians before it was abandoned in the 70s for multiculturalism. Today a form of ‘retro-assimilation’ has come to haunt public debate on national identity and nationhood. Anna’s new book Spinning the Dream (Fremantle Arts Centre Press) develops some of the ideas she explored in her Griffith REVIEW essays Retro-assimilation (Ed 15: Divided Nation) and A long way back - reflections of a genealogical tourist (Ed 6: Our Global Face).

Will “the great immigration debate” take place?

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Climate change, Culture, Economics, Government, Howardia, Immigration, International, Media, Politics, Race and Urbanism
. 188 Comments

… Or have we already had it?

Immigration Minister Senator Chris Evans has called for a “great debate” about immigration.

Possibly because it doesn’t involve leaked emails from Malcolm Turnbull or struggling battlers on 150k losing benefits, coverage of the immigration decisions announced in the budget has been fairly sparse, with this piece by Paul Kelly something of an exception to the rule.

The long and short of it is that skilled migration and temporary working visas have been lifted to almost 300 000 a year, with more on the way. Add in international students and those on some forms of tourist visa and you have a very large boost to Australia’s workforce.

Kelly’s correct to write that Howard lifted the migration quota over his term in office, but doesn’t add that he played the politics of it through distracting attention with all sorts of “look! over there! Muslims!” scares. I’m not sure I agree with Kelly that there’s going to be a particular political risk for Labor here. I suspect that Paul Keating took the brunt of it, with his “embedding in Asia” rhetoric and his economic case for migration a long time before the perception of the need for more migration to build a skills base and competitiveness really kicked in. Opposition to the changing face of Australia washed out of the national psyche, largely, one could argue hopefully, with the receding of the Hansonite wave of protest and indignation. John Howard may have had his face turned towards the past in this regard in his last years of office.

We probably should be having a debate on the ecological consequences of increased infrastructure spending for a bigger population (among other climate change related impacts), and on the fact that while “unemployment” might be still near record lows, there are still a lot of people either underemployed or locked out of the labour market for reasons that are fairly intractable to short term policy influence, but I doubt we’ll be seeing much of either.

Continue reading ‘Will “the great immigration debate” take place?’

Under the radar

Published
by
Kim
3 months ago
in Activism, Howardia, Immigration and Media
. 29 Comments

… Maybe Kevin08 is one of those tricky housemates who tries to keep a low profile while attempting to snatch the big prize by doing nefarious work out of the gaze of the cameras.

I probably can’t stretch the Big Brother analogy too far, but one of the big concerns I had about the election of the Rudd government was that the momentum for campaigning around a whole range of vital issues would stall. That’s partly I think because elections provide a convenient end point - if you were horrified by what Howard was doing on refugees (for instance), the most immediate and pressing issue was to vote him out of the House. But it would be a fatal error to assume that’s the ball game.

Margaret Simons has a story in Crikey today reporting on the deep concerns the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has about the exercise of Senator Chris Evans’ ministerial discretion on asylum seeker claims since the election. 42 claims have been processed, and 41 rejected, a 97.6% rejection rate which is the highest it’s been since 2001 (the year of the Tampa.) According to Pamela Curr of the ASRC, one of the claims rejected has been that of a woman who escaped captivity while her “owners” were in Australia on holiday - she was being held against her will as a sex slave. She was originally from Africa, and had been trafficked to the Middle East.

This may not be the intent of the Government. Continue reading ‘Under the radar’

“Firm but humane”

Published
by
Kim
3 months, 1 week ago
in Australiana, Howardia, Immigration, Politics and Sport
. 21 Comments

The dense booklet, which was overseen by former prime minister John Howard, describes the uses of the stump-jump plough, the emergence of the Heidelberg school of art, the location of Phar Lap’s heart and depicts Australia’s first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, as “firm but humane”.

It’d be nice if the Rudd government grasped the bit between its teeth and just scrapped the citizenship test. Do we really need a Rudd-era one to supplant the Howard-era farce? Would anyone care except Planet Janet?

Props to Petro Georgiou for speaking up on this again.

I’m fairly sure Chris Evans - the Immigration Minister - doesn’t believe it has any value. What will be gained by setting up a review panel? And, incidentally, why is there a “former Olympian” on the panel anyway? To put a word in for teh sport? To carry the torch for that warm and fuzzy feeling of the unity of humankind we get when we think about sporting contests? If there’s any political pain in getting rid of such a nonsense, surely taking it now rather than stretching out the debate would be good politics. After all, when you’re riding so high in the polls, you can afford to take a few decisions which might be right but not universally acclaimed.

And, just think - admirers of Sir Hubert Opperman and Walter Lindrum would no doubt applaud!

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop says “Just dump it!”

White flight

Published
by
tigtog
5 months ago
in Education, Immigration, Indigenous, Parenting, Politics, Race and Relationships
. 152 Comments

That’s today’s big story in the SMH: the growing trend over the last decade, in NSW especially, whereby white parents choose not to send their kids to the local public school, particularly for high school education, meaning the public schools have become predominated by indigenous and immigrant children of Middle Eastern descent. The trend has also started to affect selective public high schools on Sydney’s North Shore with large numbers of Asian children. School principals are expressing grave concerns for the implications this trend holds for social cohesion.

One principal also made the point that it’s not only private schools that are contributing to the segregation of children:

Social cohesion was under threat, Dr Reid said, from increasing segregation in education according to race, class and academic achievement.

Public schools were becoming increasingly selective on the basis of academic achievement, sporting and artistic ability.

“We have increased segregation inside public schools into the smart and the dumb, the sports capable and the creative. It’s that crude,” Dr Reid said. “It has implications for social cohesion. What do we do if kids are no longer growing up together?”

I grew up attending several schools because my dad had a public service job that meant we moved around. My favourite school was in Newcastle, in an area of high immigrant population, where I was surrounded by a bunch of non-Anglo-Celtic Europeans, considered at the time to be very non-U. Certainly I found that those schools were better both academically and socially than several others I attended which were virtually wall-to-wall WASPs, largely because the kids came from so many different backgrounds that ethnicity became a very low-level concern: we pretty much just rubbed along. I have very little reason to believe that things would be that much different these days, even though the ethnicity of the immigrants considered most non-U has certainly changed. So why the changed perception, especially in Sydney, that if one doesn’t private educate one’s kids one mustn’t really care for their future advancement, and certainly not for their current safety?
Continue reading ‘White flight’

Guest post by Anna Haebich: Spinning the assimilation dream

Published
by
Administrator
5 months ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, History, Immigration, Indigenous, Politics and Sociology
. 27 Comments

Griffith University anthropologist and historian and Director of the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas Professor Anna Haebich recently launched her new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 at the Museum of Brisbane. This post is an edited version of the talk she gave at the launch.

You know that feeling when you’re writing and you get to the point where you think why am I doing this? Surely everyone knows all this already?

Well it was a relief to me to find out since my new book Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 hit the road last week that quite a lot of people know very little about the history of assimilation. For most it’s an old policy for migrants and Aborigines. But of course assimilation is more complex than this and far more important for all Australians.

Assimilation is woven into the fabric of our nation and will always be with us. It goes in and out of favour and takes different forms but is always lurking somewhere.

Most people aren’t aware of this – it’s the people on the margins who have to assimilate. I was at a conference in 2000 with academics splitting hairs over when assimilation started and ended. Finally a frustrated Aboriginal voice called out ‘it started when you wetjalas first set foot here’.

Assimilation is so ingrained that we can be living it without even realising it. Present governments reject any connection – it has become a dirty word. Yet for the past decade we have been living a dream of retro-assimilation where nostalgia for the past is mixed with current visions of nationhood using today’s spin to create an imagined world of equality and shared values. Global fears and anxieties leave us susceptible to this phoney dream.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Anna Haebich: Spinning the assimilation dream’

Pacific Solution coming to an end - sort of

Published
by
Robert Merkel
6 months, 3 weeks ago
in Immigration, Politics and Security
. 32 Comments

Two tidbits of information suggesting the worst aspects of the former government’s treatment of asylum-seekers is coming to an end. Firstly, the detention center on Nauru is closing, with the people detained there, such as a group of Sri Lankans, to be resettled in Australia. The second is that the high-security section of Villawood Detention Center is going to be either fixed or closed.

Why the qualification? While the practice of sending asylum-seekers to foreign countries for detention will end, the replacement isn’t exactly ideal either. Ones picked up outside Australia’s migration zone will now be taken to the new detention center on Christmas Island, which may technically be Australian territory but is a very, very long way from convenient scrutiny. The design of that facility also raises some concerns, to say the least.

All in all, steps towards improvement, but as has been noted before, the new government haven’t exactly demonstrated themselves to be a progressive’s dream on Laura Norder issues. It’ll be something to continue watching closely.

War on boat people (no job too large!)

Published
by
Mercurius
7 months ago
in Immigration, Levity and Security
. 23 Comments

I like big boats and I cannot lie

On my holiday, I discovered a fascinating dimension of the Australian government’s war on boat people. I wonder whether all those voters who salivated at the prospect of enhanced customs and immigration powers to keep out terrrsts realise what their taxes are actually paying for?

Let me begin by saying that I admire the resolve and determination of the Australian Customs Service to ensure that every single boat arrival to Australia is duly authorised.

In fact, so dedicated are they to this cause that they are prepared to endure 4 hellish days on luxury cruise liners like the above, just to check all the passengers’ arrival cards.

Continue reading ‘War on boat people (no job too large!)’

The Jo Hos discuss the race card over afternoon tea

Published
by
Mark
8 months, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Federal Elections, Film, TV, Video etc, Howardia, Immigration, Levity and Race
. Closed

More John Howard Ladies’ Auxiliary goodness at Facebook.

Originally posted at LP in Exile.

Guest Post by Jim McDonald: The Haneef coverup

Published
by
Mark
9 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Federal Elections, Howardia, Immigration, Law, Politics, Race, Security and Terrorism
. 13 Comments

Please visit Jim’s blog Rage and Enthusiasm for a fully hyperlinked version should you wish to refer to any of the sources.

Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, is simply not to be trusted on serious matters relating to human and legal rights. Indeed, the collective effort of politicians and public officers in the Haneef case was to deny Dr Haneef his rights as an Australian resident. And the Australian public has every right to be cynical about the performance of all the federal players in this case.

Continue reading ‘Guest Post by Jim McDonald: The Haneef coverup’

Lies, Damned Lies, and National Unity Agendas

Published
by
Gummo Trotsky
9 months, 3 weeks ago
in Federal Elections, Howardia, Immigration and Sociology
. 27 Comments
Under the Coalition, Australia is a different country from what it was under Labor – less apologetic about its past, more confident about its future.

We’re better able to appreciate the modern Australian achievement – a nation that, despite its faults, is a beacon of democracy, opportunity and tolerance in today’s world.

(Liberal Party policy summary)

Continue reading ‘Lies, Damned Lies, and National Unity Agendas’

Andrews again

Published
by
suz
10 months, 1 week ago
in Immigration and Race
. 130 Comments

‘Not too many black refugees thanks, especially if they’re Muslims and need trauma counselling. We’ve heard stories at the corner shop about their unAustralian ways and how they don’t fit in.’

Kevin Andrews embarrasses us again.

Where are the Iraqi Mandelas?

Published
by
Mark
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Disasters, Immigration, Imperialism, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 62 Comments

Well might George W. Bush ask himself that question.

Let’s not forget that Nelson Mandela was a highly educated lawyer. Where have the Iraqi middle class gone? Those who the neo-cons banked on to form the social constituency for “instant democracy” and provide its leaders? Fled.

40% of Iraq’s middle class, it’s estimated, are refugees. Most are in Jordan or Syria. A lucky few are in countries such as Canada and Sweden. Very few have made it to America, where they’re basically not wanted:

An aggressive American intake of refugees would suggest their quick return to Iraq is improbable: that smacks too much of failure for Bush. Moreover, you have to scrutinize refugees from countries “infiltrated by large numbers of terrorists,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff opined recently.

And the secular parties that had a commitment to modernity and national unity? Wiped out through the political system established by the Americans, who empowered the theocratic Shi’ite parties.

Roger Cohen writes:

People who risked their lives for America are dying or being terrorized because of craven U.S. lethargy. Others are in limbo. Bush now says “Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.” That’s too glib; one may be waiting to be saved.