‘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.
Archive for the 'Immigration' Category
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.
“While the government is weak, any attempt to focus on a Sino-sycophantic Rudd administration as a peril to our national security will prove ineffective and futile.”
Here’s how a government that isn’t Sino-sycophantic does business:
A CHINESE man who has been in Australia for 10 years could face execution if he is deported after having his visa cancelled, refugee advocates said today.
The man, known as DP, has been held in detention for four years since his visa was revoked after Chinese authorities issued an arrest warrant in his name.
But the warrant was unsigned and undated and the man may be executed if he is deported to China, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre said today…
Talk It Out reproduces the twenty questions from the new citizenship test which have been released and wonders:
Now I may be too cynical, but I am not convinced that Australian-born citizens will be able to answer all these questions. I wonder how many know who the first prime minister was or what the floral emblem of Australia is or are able to tell the difference between head of state and head of government. Recall that a survey done some years ago found that 50% of the population didn’t know that Australia had a written constitution (and a majority of those who did know, thought it contained a Bill of Rights).
Speaking as someone who teaches first and second year university students Politics, I can guarentee her that very few of the best educated young citizens have a clue about the basics of how our political system works.
Unfortunately, the full list of questions hasn’t been released. But apparently there’s a 12 page booklet which gives potential citizens all the info they need to crib for the test.
ALTHOUGH many Australians might struggle to grasp their significance to everyday life, the program of the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, the emergence of the Heidelberg School of impressionist art and the uses of the stump-jump plough have emerged as potential questions on the Federal Government’s citizenship test.
So Kevin Andrews has, as many lawyers expected, egg on his face today with Federal Court Judge Jeffrey Spender ruling less than an hour ago that Mr Andrews was wrong to cancel Gold Coast doctor Mohammed Haneef’s visa last month.
When Mr Andrews made his decision, after a Brisbane Magistrate released Dr Haneef on bail, the Chairman of the Australian Bar Association Stephen Estcourt QC summed up the views of the vast majority of the legal fraternity when he dubbed Mr Andrews’ actions “a threat to the rule of law” and nothing more “than a cynical use of power.”
Crikey! has a few juicy quotes from the decision by Justice Spender. They make Andrews look incredibly incompetent, but hey, we’d already noticed that.
PM Howard wants to introduce legislation that would deny entry visas to foreign children adopted by same-sex couples. It appears that this is the response to the successful WA adoption of a child by two men after WA changed its laws regarding adoption by same-sex couples. A federal law would override the various state legislations that have recently changed to allow same-sex adoption.
More marginalising of same-sex attraction, with the result that children who could have had a loving home in our wealthy country will instead remain in orphanages or on the street overseas. The attempted justification by Howard and Ruddock that this law will simply mean that heterosexual couples will be given preference in adopting a limited supply of children totally ignores the facts on the ground: heterosexual couples are already given preference in adopting the very limited supply of healthy infants. Heterosexual couples have far less interest in adopting the children who are not healthy and not infants, and same-sex couples have shown themselves far more willing to adopt these less fashionable adoptees (perhaps purely because of the reality that they’re at the bottom of the list for adopting healthy infants). So Howard and Ruddock are deliberately creating a situation where the children that most heterosexual adoptive couples don’t want anyway now have even less prospect of growing up with love and in comfort.
Several senior Government sources have told The Sunday Age they were furious at the Australian Federal Police for their handling of the case and wanted to shut the issue down before it did more damage to the Government’s credibility.
“Our best option is to cancel the Criminal Justice Certificate, which was issued to keep Haneef here in Australia after we cancelled his visa, and that is my understanding of what our intentions are,” one Government source said.
The Age
Getting Haneef out of the country will get him out of the news, leaving the front pages free for the next crisis John Howard decides to confect in his increasingly desperate attempts to turn the polls, but the Government needs a pretext to give his deportation some respectability. Today’s Hun has done the honours:
The plot thickens in the Case of Mohammed Haneef’s SIM card. The ABC has confirmed the substance of the earlier blog post: that the SIM card was found, not in the burning Jeep, but on Haneef’s cousin in Liverpool eight hours hence (it’s an audio report, but it’s the best one available; there’s a short news report here)
However, there’s an aspect to this I wasn’t aware of - the actual location of the SIM card is not what the prosecutor was claiming in court! According to the ABC story, the prosecutor at Haneef’s bail hearing in Brisbane on Saturday explicitly claimed that the SIM card in question was located “inside the Jeep Cherokee”. In subsequent comments in a radio interview, Peter Faris QC (hardly a bleeding-heart lefty) said that a “competent cross examiner will cut the police to pieces” over the problem, and that it “may well be that the prosecution case will collapse”.
Continue reading ‘Prosecution, Minister get facts wrong on Haneef…’
There were some suggestions on the thread about Mohamed Haneef that the Labor response to wedges is for Rudd or a shadow minister to agree with the government, only to have Premiers and other state Labor figures cast doubts as the issue untangles itself. Perhaps this is smart politics when the government consistently raises issues and makes headlines without justifying properly or thinking through the consequences of policy and administrative moves? I don’t know. I’m just speculating. It is a pattern that we saw with the Indigenous Emergency and subsequent comments from WA Premier Alan Carpenter, NSW Minister Linda Burney, and a number of NT MPs. Similarly, perhaps, we can see this pattern emerging with Peter Beattie’s comments on the revocation of Haneef’s visa. This strategy might make some political sense, and it does sound like the sort of play Rudd would orchestrate, though I’d be interested in opinions as to how it does work politically, and personally, I’m very persuaded by the view also put on the other thread that there is an obligation on the opposition to stand up for the rule of law and due process if it’s being trashed by the government. As a number of commenters also remarked, it doesn’t bode terribly well for Rudd prioritising principle over opportunism if he gains office.
There is of course, another reason why Beattie might be concerned about the message that Haneef’s treatment sends, as he continually has to seek trained medical staff overseas, and often from countries such as India, where, quite rightly, no one can understand what the Australian government is up to by depriving Haneef of his liberty without benefit of judicial process.
Continue reading ‘Labor premiers do the differentiation? And other reflections on Mohamed Haneef’
Headline doesn’t ring true?
One of the things that doesn’t get much attention about the reporting of terrorism is the way in which fears created swiftly get sucked into a domestic vortex, and get framed in terms of domestic political debates. (NB: I am not saying terrorism isn’t a real problem, and I loudly denounce it! I do say that it’s more likely to be prevented by careful intelligence and policing, not by wars and crazed ravings about “clashes of/within civilisations”.)
The revelations in Australia that a doctor working on the Gold Coast was being questioned have led to a government response that plays to concerns about border security. Fair enough in this instance, though I always think we should beware of a bit of dogwhistling and be prepared to scrutinise the measures carefully.
In America, by contrast, revelations that the same two doctors who’d applied to emigrate to Australia had also tried to get US visas (and it’s worth observing again - none of the people who actually have been shown to have been involved in something nefarious were able to come to Australia or America) have played out very differently in the media. Continue reading ‘Medicare = terrorism!’
This month’s Prospect magazine has an article by journalist Shiv Malik, which is the result of months of interviews of the people who knew Mohammad Sidique Khan.
It will be disappointing to many in the “my simple solutions are better than yours” brigades, raising more questions than it does answers. It’s also a very long read as far as online articles go - especially long compared to some of the clever blogposts on the matter. But it’s fascinating reading for anyone who is actually interested in learning a little bit more about what could drive someone to blow up a bus full of people.
One of the most fascinating ideas is that pressure from families to submit to arranged marriages is being used as a way of separating potential terrorists from their families by offering them the freedom of marrying for love:
Butt also explained that traditional communities often inadvertently push their young into the arms of the radicals. Attitudes to jobs, dress, schooling and socialising all play their part in driving youngsters away from their parents’ generation. But one of the biggest factors that has helped the growth of British Islamic radicalism is marriage.
Islamism’s most important tenet is that Muslims should not be divided by race or nationalism—that all Muslims are one. It therefore can offer an Islamic route out of having to marry your cousin. Butt knows this because it happened to him. When, instead of marrying his cousin, Butt tried to marry his sweetheart, he found himself deploying the arguments of his Islamist recruiter against his own father—that compulsion in marriage is un-Islamic and that forced marriages were a cultural import from Hindu India. And when the forces of traditionalism refused to give consent, Butt, like many of his friends, ended up a pariah within his own community.
“When you’re cut off from your family,” Butt explained, “the jihadi network then becomes your family. It becomes your backbone and support.” He added that when you join it becomes impossible to leave because there is nowhere else to go. The network starts operating like a cult.
Charles Richardson writes in Crikey today:
From a lot of cultural indicators, you’d think that religious belief in Australia was on the increase. Certainly politicians and commentators talk about it more than they used to; Kevin Rudd is more open about his Christianity than any of his recent predecessors, and Paul Kelly assured us last year that secularists “are fighting a losing cause”.
…
But if we move from the world of rhetoric to the world of hard data, the picture is quite different. This week’s release of 2006 census figures shows that only 70% of Australians identified with a religion, and only 64% with some variety of Christianity (down from 71% in 1996). Just under 19% said they had no religion, while about 11% declined to answer the question.
Even those figures, however, overstate the extent of religious commitment. While, for example, the 1.1% who described themselves as Pentecostals are probably serious about their religion, we know that more traditional categories - principally Roman Catholic (25.8%), but also Islam (1.7%) and Judaism (0.4%) - function more as social or cultural identities, and do not necessarily involve religious belief.
They certainly don’t equate to church attendance: the 2001 National Church Life Survey found that weekly attendance was down to 8.8% of the population. A 2002 survey found that 18.8% “claimed to attend religious services at least monthly”, down from 20% in just four years. And surveys of what people actually believe consistently find that many professed adherents of traditional religions are in fact gripped by what George Pell calls “heresy or unbelief”.
There’s another particularly interesting aspect of the census data on religion, which was picked up by Bernard Salt in The Government Gazette yesterday. Ignore the gibberish about generationalism - his explanations are his stock in trade pop sociology, but he’s quite right to identify the crucial aspect of the data beyond the headline figures.
On this World Refugee Day, it might be an appropriate time to remember the refugee crisis resulting from the invasion of Iraq. You know, that war that we were all too eager to sign up for. According to Der Spiegel, most of the Iraqi refugee with sufficient means to make it to Europe are ending up in Sweden, because the rest of Europe won’t take them:
Alvesta is just one of scores of villages, towns and cities in Sweden that are hosting an ever-growing number of Iraqis fleeing the violence back home. The Scandinavian country took in some 9,000 Iraqi refugees in 2006 — over 40 percent of the 22,000 Iraqi refugees who found their way to Europe. And Sweden is bracing for a significant increase this year. Based on the numbers of Iraqi refugees arriving in Europe in the first two months of 2007, the total seeking asylum this year could be well over 40,000. And with much of the rest of Europe doing little to help, most of them are likely to end up in Sweden.
But, as the article notes, that’s chickenfeed compared to the 1.2 million or so in Syria, and 750,000-odd in Jordan. Yep, the invasion of Iraq has thus far resulted in 2 million-odd refugees, not counting the internally displaced.
According to this fact sheet from the recently renamed Department of Immigration and Citizenship (no more multiculturalism for you!), Australia took 2150 Iraqi refugees last year.
I’ve had my say on the Hirsi Ali debate over at On Line Opinion. What primarily interested me was the way in which her interventions in Australian politics, and her story, were the subject of some absurdly illogical articles from the punditariat in the MSM - most egregiously irrational, in my view, were the columns from Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine. If we’re going to trumpet the values of “Enlightenment reason”, I think it’s axiomatic that we need to be true to those values. And it seems to me highly significant that while both Albrechtsen and Devine claimed that “the left” condoned the vile practice of female genital mutilation on “culturalist” grounds, they were unable to identify anyone who actually did so. A number of columns were published from members of the Australian Islamic community, but the actual “secular left” was quite absent from the debate conducted in the broadsheet press. In fact, as I suggest, “multiculturalism, properly understood, in a liberal society does not and should not condone any practice, justified by whatever reason, which does such physical and psychological harm.” It does appear to have become part of the political culture of the right wing press to make accusations about “the left” without any foundation in fact, and this sort of symbolic politics of indignation does nothing to address the serious issues that do arise with regard to acts which transgress human rights and does less than nothing to improve the quality of Australian political debate. What we have exemplified in this debate is anything but a rational public sphere.
Quite an astonishing performance from Bill O’Reilly and John McCain on Fox:
Bill O’Reilly: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.
John McCain: In America today we’ve got a very strong economy and low unemployment, so we need addition farm workers, including by the way agriculture, but there may come a time where we have an economic downturn, and we don’t need so many.
O’Reilly: But in this bill, you guys have got to cap it. Because estimation is 12 million, there may be 20 [million]. You don’t know, I don’t know. We’ve got to cap it.
McCain: We do, we do. I agree with you.
Update: Amanda at Pandagon on Bill O’Reilly.
Continue reading ‘Noise machine outs itself as power structure’
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