I realise that by saying this, I might risk being perceived as agreeing with the asinine neo-con lynch mob a.k.a. the mainstream Australian press, but the Gillard government really have outdone themselves this time. As if the Carbon Tax fiasco and general policy paralysis wasn't enough, the fact that the High Court has confirmed what would be obvious to most 3rd year law students, namely that the Malaysian asylum-seeker deal is illegal, might just about be the final straw that brings them down. In some ways this is a shame, because when you look behind their idiotic focus on the 24 hour news cycle and political point-scoring, some of Labor's policy initiatives have been quite sound and well-considered. However, when you constantly muck up the execution of this policy and then have to cede ground to a bunch of eclectic minor parties and independents who most of us didn't vote for, then as a government you are just asking for trouble.
What the government were trying to do in Malaysia is another example of this, but I will get to that later on. First though I would like to look at the question of asylum seekers more generally and why they are such a hot political issue. I personally find it incredible given the amount of genuinely irritating things that go on in this country how people can get so worked up about a few hundred boat people. In case you are in a happy place at the moment and are struggling for things to get annoyed about, here are just a few:
- It being illegal to shoot on sight anyone either listening to an iPod on the train at volume 11, moving into the right lane on the freeway and failing to overtake or paying for beer with a credit card when the bar is 10 deep. Show some consideration, jackasses.
- The fact that when Queen Elizabeth dies, our head of state will not be an eminent Australian but instead will be someone who once expressed a wish to be Camilla Parker-Bowles' tampon. Quality.
- A few hundred Tasmanians getting the same amount of senators as a few million Victorians and New South Welshmen.
- A company like News Limited who have just been caught committing outrageous breaches of privacy in the UK controlling 70% of the print media in Australia - and the fact that most of us couldn't care less about it.
- Cab drivers whose vehicles stink of cigarettes and BO and who (a) don't know where the airport, MCG or Collins Street are; and (b) clearly think airconditioning controls are put into cars for decoration only.
Actually that last one is a nice segue into my point about immigration and boat people. I will sometimes strike up a conversation with these cab drivers once I have explained to them what the South Eastern Freeway is and we are headed in the general direction of my house. Almost without exception, they say they are "students" doing a degree in "IT" but that is invariably where they get very shifty and the flow of information ends. The reason for this is simple: there are thousands of people who come into the country under student visas but who abuse the system by indefinitely deferring their studies and going off to work full time - which under the terms of their visa, they are simply not allowed to do. Recognising that the student visa system was being exploited, the government moved quietly but effectively to put an end to this abuse and preclude people staying in the country under false pretences.
What is puzzling though is that people don't get peeved about the thousands of people engaged in this flagrant and frankly, illegal queue jumping but work themselves into a frenzy about a few hundred refugees whose circumstances back home are so dire that they are prepared to sail a few thousand kilometres in a leaky sieve just to escape their country. Think about it - a few hundred people in a country of over 22 million. It's hardly an invasion, is it? We get at least 100 times as many Kiwis coming over here and making a nuisance of themselves whenever there is a big Rugby match on. I personally find that much more annoying than some banged up dinghy landing near Port Hedland.
Nevertheless we Australians are a strange breed and the Howard government quickly learned from Pauline Hanson that there was a rich vein of political capital to be mined by belting up on boat people. Shortly after lying about people throwing their children overboard, they developed a plan called "the Pacific Solution" which involved re-directing boats to offshore processing centres. While this morality of this plan was questionable to say the least, it proved very effective in putting a stop to the number of boats arriving here. The message had obviously got back to those in the people smuggling racket that they couldn't guarantee to their "clients" that rather than being allowed to stay in Australia, they wouldn't be shipped straight back offshore to some remote 3rd World Pacific dump like Nauru - not that I could imagine Nauru being a whole lot worse than being holed up in Baxter or Port Hedland detention centres.
When the Rudd government came to power, it tried to remove some of the worst aspects of the Pacific Solution by limiting the amount of time people could be locked up for and shutting down the Nauru centre in favour of on-shore processing. The problem was, though, that this immediately caused a sharp increase in the number of boat arrivals and let the opposition have a field day about how poor the government was at border control. Not for the first or last time under Rudd, Labor had managed to turn the implementation of its policy into a political own goal.
And so we come now to Julia's latest blunder. Recognising the political need to pander to boat people-haters, but also understanding the moral and monetary issues associated with re-opening the Nauru centre, the government struck a deal with Malaysia for a certain amount of boat people to be processed there. On the basis that Malaysia by all accounts has running water and isn't reliant on bird droppings to prop up its economy, this on its face looked like a more palatable solution than Nauru for the government and refugees alike. The only problem was, under the criteria in the Migration Act which are required to be satisfied by a country that Australia wants to ship refugees to, Malaysia pretty clearly failed the test, a view the High Court resoundingly agreed with by a majority of 6-1. This outcome of course delighted the peanut gallery of the Murdoch press, whose reaction to pretty much anything the government does is either utter disgust or vitriolic contempt. Unfortunately with this one it's pretty hard to argue with them.
As of the time of writing, Gillard appears determined to stare down her critics and resuscitate the Malaysian option, even to the point of doing a deal with Big Ears himself. The alternative option - which would be to put the asylum seeker "problem" in proportion, appeal to the public's better instincts by educating them about just how desperate these people are and how they aren't any threat to people's jobs and then letting them into the community while their cases are heard (just like it lets the illegal immigrants do) - clearly is too hard a sell for this moribund government to even bother trying.
Is it really any wonder then that people despise politicians?
