Posts Tagged asylum seekers

Stop making the link

by Spock... on 19 July 2010
Categories: Federal election 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,

I am really quite sick of this.

Why must we link population growth to immigration? What does immigration have to do with population growth in Australia? Scott already discussed this in April. Why do these two discussions need to be linked when they so clearly aren’t? Australian politicians should stop using population as a smokescreen for discussing asylum seekers, and the Australian media needs to stop letting them.

But they are still at it. Stories like this one over at The Australian, that link the two discussions are part of the problem.

In an address to Brisbane think tank The Eidos Institute to launch the Building Better Regional Cities program, after a visit to a Welcoming the Babies function with Wayne Swan, Ms Gillard said that while urban dwellers faced traffic congestion and had trouble accessing doctors or finding seats on public transport, many regional areas were desperate to attract more workers. Her government would back them, she said, and in doing so relieve pressure on cities.

Let us ignore, for one moment, the fact that these problems in cities aren’t caused by population growth but by years of under investment in infrastructure from our governments. There is nothing wrong with discussing the population limits of our cities and there is nothing wrong with discussing population distribution. But in the very next paragraph is if it is somehow related:

The comments came as Tony Abbott – after a visit to western Sydney, an area under pressure from population growth – said the asylum-seeker issue was making Australians feel they were losing control of their own destiny. He promised annual reviews of immigration intakes and guaranteeing a Coalition government would ensure infrastructure development kept up with population growth.

They have nothing to do with each other! Abbott should stop insisting they do and The Australian shouldn’t re-enforce the connection by putting it in the same story.

Also, having Tony Abbott promise that a Liberal government would invest in infrastructure development is like hearing Joe Hockey promise he won’t eat all the Cheezles. He might mean it, but I wouldn’t want to leave him alone with them.

5 Comments

Wilson’s Lament

by Ross Sharp on 16 July 2010
Categories: Foreign matter, Immigration, Politics | Tags: , , , , , ,

(With apologies to John Cooper Clarke)

Bloody wogs on bloody boats,
The bloody border’s a bloody joke,
Bloody Rudd was a bloody clown,
The bloody cunts should bloody drown,
Bloody Turnbull was bloody fucked,
No one had the bloody guts,
To bloody do what needs be done,
And bloody shoot the bloody scum.

I’m bloody sick of spicks and wops,
And bloody chinks who eat their dogs,
The bloody coons and bloody gins,
Should have their bloody heads bashed in,
I’m bloody Wilson bloody Tuckey,
The bloody Party’s bloody lucky,
To have a true blue Aussie ’round,
Who’ll grind these bloody bastards down.

The bloody feminists are bloody Nazis,
The bloody greenies are bloody arses,
The bloody weather’s not bloody changing,
It’s bloody hot or it’s bloody raining,
To bloody build a bloody town,
Bloody raze the bloody ground!
This bloody country’s bloody lucky,
To bloody have Ol’ Ironbar Tuckey.

Our bloody miners are bloody legends,
Bloody Gillard should pull her head in,
Her bloody tax is a bloody shocker,
She’s bloody off her bloody rocker,
She’s bloody got no bloody children!
What bloody world do we bloody live in?
The bloody country’s bloody stuffed,
And I’ve bloody had e-bloody-nuff!

These bloody terrorists on bloody boats,
They’re bloody proof shit bloody floats,
I’d bloody bring the bloody Navy,
To blow their bodies to bloody gravy,
It’s bloody them or bloody us,
Never bloody mind the fuss!
The bloody bastards can bloody starve!
Now where’d I put that old iron bar?

6 Comments

Australian politics is not the West Wing

by David Bonnici on 7 July 2010
Categories: Politics | Tags: , , , , ,

I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are very politically aware to the point of being a bit nerdy. They’ll defy a hangover to get up and watch Insiders and tweet about it; QandA is the highlight of their week and they mourn the retirement of good politicians like normal people do when football stars hang up their boots. I admire their passion, which I share to a point. However, I note their political romanticism seems to cloud the reality that politics is severely hampered by politics. Australian politics is not something that flows along and inspires like an Aaron Sorkin script. There is no wonderful oration, wunderkind political aids who are there to do the right thing for the country, or an intelligent media to keep the public properly informed. It isn’t about idealism and good ideas, it’s about reacting to what agendas are set by unpredictable events and ensuring one gets the rhetoric right.

There is no better example of the absurdity of Australian politics than the asylum seeker issue. The facts are clear. Australia has a relatively small number of people seeking asylum. The number is a fraction of Australia’s migration intake. There is a trickle of asylum seekers not a flood. And the situation is being well managed, though it could be better handled if the government wasn’t afraid to use detention centres on the mainland to process refugee applications. It shouldn’t be as big an issue, but it is because the Liberal Party has made an art form of turning it into a border security problem; while pandering to those concerned that the skin colour of those arriving allows for further fears about the impact on Australian culture. This bullshit could have been nipped in the bud a long time ago. Instead it has been allowed to fester because we have a media organisations that by and large doesn’t question such claims, but happily reports them to suit their own agendas.

What results is a chicken-egg situation where one side of politics thinks it has traction on a particular issue and runs with it. The media whips it up verbatim with little analysis apart from op-Eds that usually preach to the converted. The public is then made to think it’s a big issue and then add their own emotional comment further inflating the supposed importance. The politicians and media then turn around say this is an issue of great public importance. So, how can we expect a government to make decisions that do not have to take all this into account?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Compare and contrast

by Spock... on 5 July 2010
Categories: Politics | Tags: , , , ,

People

People

Cockroaches

Cockroaches

See? They are quite different. So can we please, please, PLEASE stop talk about them as if they are the same thing?

Thank you in advance,

Spock…

3 Comments

One Nation radio

by Scott Bridges on 14 May 2010
Categories: Media, Science, Society | Tags: , , , ,

Last night I had cause to drive around Sydney for a couple of hours in a car generously borrowed to me by a close friend. As I flew through the streets I searched through the AM radio band for something to listen to. Landing on one particular frequency, I was assaulted by the voice of ex-One Nation supremo David Oldfield who is now apparently doing an evening show for 2UE. I decided to listen for a while and, solid gold as it was, I’d like to paraphrase for you what I heard. Here was his first segment:

I don’t want to patronise anyone, but earlier today I asked my wife what air was made up of. My wife is a university-educated woman but she couldn’t tell me the gasses that were in air. I reckon she’s like most people who don’t really know that sort of thing. Anyway, air is made up of — and excuse me for rounding the percentages here — about 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen. The nitrogen is a useless, filler gas, and oxygen is the stuff we need. There are also a bunch of trace gasses like argon. There’s also carbon dioxide, which is the gas we’re told is responsible for global warming, and it’s found in air in about the concentration of a tiny fraction of a percent. That’s air.

Now, when we breath in we take in a lungful of air — 80% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, and a range of trace gasses including carbon dioxide — and our bodies use about a quarter of the oxygen. When we breath out can you guess how much carbon dioxide is in our breath? Remember, only a fraction of a percent of this global warming gas went it. Well, we breath out 4% carbon dioxide. That’s right, our bodies actually produce carbon dioxide which we’re told causes global warming. There are seven billion of us on the planet, each of us breathing ever five seconds, or three seconds for children, and each time we breath we produce carbon dioxide.

And you know what? I’ve never heard a single scientist talk about this.

Flushed with pride after pwning the world’s entire scientific community, Oldfield took a call:

Caller: I just think that if they come here they shouldn’t try to make it like it was at home.

Oldfield: Yeah, well you’d think that if things were so bad at home, and things are so much better here — which is why 99.999999% of them apply to come here in the first place — then they wouldn’t want to change this place once they got here.

Caller: Yep. This is not a Muslim country and they should stop trying to make it one.

Oldfield: Well, I don’t think that it’s so much Muslim culture as it is Middle East culture, and people shouldn’t come over here and try to build Middle East culture in the place of Australian culture.

Then Oldfield brought a news story to the attention of his listeners:

Four men have been charged over a credit card skimming scam. Three of them, it turns out, are boat arrivals who are now either citizens or have permanent residency. The government says that its vetting procedures are sound but obviously they’re not.

I just can’t believe this because what we have here is a case of three people accepting Australia’s compassion and then turning around and biting the hand that feeds them.

And finally, Pauline Hanson’s ex-colleague took a call and jumped on the dump button.

Oldfield: We have [caller] on the line. Hello, [caller].

[Caller] (with thick accent): Hello, David. I just wanted to talk about the Jews killing the Muslims.

Oldfield: Um, well, we won’t be allowing that call. We can’t broadcast racism. Racism is when you make sweeping perjorative statements about one group of people instead of restricting those statements to only those individuals for whom those statements might apply.

Got that?

16 Comments

Still not quite the other guy

by Spock... on 10 May 2010
Categories: Federal election 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , ,

So, Rudd is struggling in the polls? This is hardly surprising considering he was elected on a platform of not being the other guy. We didn’t really know what he stood for then, we don’t really know what he stands for now. Once the Coalition got their shit together, they were always going to gain ground.

We know he stands for action on climate change … kinda. Only enough so as to not piss anyone off. We know he stands for a more humane asylum seeker policy. Sorta. As long as that more humane policy doesn’t appear to be ‘weak’ on ‘border protection’. (How the right keep framing the debates so well will never cease to amaze me.)

And in being so careful not to step on anyone’s toes he has alienated everyone. And for what? The people he tries so hard not to offend were likely never to support him anyway. Instead he comes across as gutless, do nothing, and direction-less.

We know he hasn’t had the easiest Senate to deal with. Working with the Coalition would seem a lot easier than trying to get Family First and The Greens to agree to agree with each other, let alone the ALP. But it’s weak. It waters down their policy and closes the gap between the ALP and The Coalition even further, when there really wasn’t a lot of margin there to play with. Rudd has acted in government like he acted in a campaign. He has had three years to govern and he doesn’t really seem like he has done much of it.

The ALP loses credibility when discussing the issues and looks weak when discussing the process.

That said, I hope Labor gets a second term and an easier Senate to negotiate. The Greens holding the balance of power in their own right would bring the debate back towards the left, and I don’t think that’s at all a bad thing for the country or for the government.

With more certainty in the Senate, perhaps Rudd won’t fold so easily. A stronger ETS policy, more ‘revolution’ in their education and health policy, a genuinely humane approach to asylum seekers and real action on closing the gap with indigenous Australians.

If Rudd wants to win this election, he now has an uphill battle to fight. He needs to sell a vision, he needs to stop playing so ’safe’ and sell a vision of Australia. Stop being so process driven, and chase after the policy and sell it to Australia. Of course, this assumes he has a vision that he’s struggling to sell. Which I am not totally convinced he has.

But if you’re running out of reasons why he deserves another chance and a second term, remember: he’s not the other guy. Worked for him last time.

But just quietly, I’m kinda hoping Julia books her ticket to Mars.

6 Comments

EXCLUSIVE: Family First political ad campaign launched

by Scott Bridges on 10 May 2010
Categories: Federal election 2010 | Tags: , , ,

Groupthink can today exclusively reveal the first advertisement in Steve Fielding’s 2010 election campaign. The VHS video cassette containing this ad was found in a bar wrapped in an iPhone 3G leather case.

11 Comments

Maybe if we dig a moat?

by Spock... on 24 April 2010
Categories: Federal election 2010, Foreign matter | Tags: , , , , ,

On the plus side, voting in this year’s federal election just got a little easier.

AN Abbott government would buy three unmanned spy planes to use as weapons in its pledge to turn around illegal boat arrivals.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft – costing between $40 million and $100 million each – would provide early detection of asylum seekers.

Because that is the rational thing to do. Spend $300 million on planes to catch leaky boats. In fact why stop at planes? I think we need surveillance satellites, the full resources of the navy and the air-force and the army and while we’re at it LET’S BUILD A GIANT WALL!

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: What happened to political discourse in this country where refugees are talked about like pests?

This year will be the first federal election where I will be able to exercise my democratic right to decide if I’d rather a turd sandwich and a giant douche, and I feel like it is a really bad election to pop my voting cherry with. I would have liked the 2007 election. Government change, revolution, excitement. Howard lost his seat after almost 12 years. Sure, the man we replaced him with turned out to be a giant douche, but we didn’t know that for sure at the time.

But this year, we have Rudd vs Abbott. We have seen them both in government before and they both stink. Hooray for democracy!

Also in that same story: Abbott can’t think of any reason not to sell uranium to India.

8 Comments

Send them … somewhere

by Scott Bridges on 12 April 2010
Categories: Politics | Tags: , ,

Family First’s Steve Fielding has been banging on for months now about queue jumping boat seekers and sending them to the back of the queue. No actual policies, mind, just ridiculous bullshit about Motel Christmas Island and Apple Mac envy. Of course, the whereabouts of this queue that is being jumped have remained a carefully guarded secret, as has Steve’s solution to the queue jumping problem.

No longer.

“Every time we accept a refugee into our country by boat, another refugee waiting patiently in a camp somewhere is forced to wait even longer,” [said Fielding]

“There are thousands of refugees patiently waiting in line in camps across the world trying to gain asylum but boat people just push them further down the queue.

“There is no way I think we should be rewarding people for jumping the queue and penalising those who are waiting inline (sic).”

Under Family First’s proposal queue jumpers, genuine refugees or not, would be sent to the back of the queue at various refugee camps around the world.

So, Steve Fielding seems to be seriously proposing that asylum seekers arriving by boat should be sent to refugee camps in “various” places around the world. Seriously. The man is a fucking foreign policy genius.

Hold your heads high, 56,376 Victorian voters.

16 Comments

Compare and contrast

by Scott Bridges on 7 April 2010
Categories: Immigration, Politics | Tags: , , , , ,

Perhaps members of the Liberal party should talk to each other before they open their mouths about refugee, immigration or population policy.

Here’s opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison saying the other day that the number of family reunions will be reduced if he has anything to do with it:

Tony Abbott’s Coalition will cut net migration levels if it wins government, in a bid to stop Australia’s population reaching its predicted size of almost 36 million in 2050.

[...]

[Scott] Morrison said the Coalition would support skilled migrants coming, but was likely to cut other elements of the program, including family reunion.

And here’s opposition citizenship spokesman Gary Humphries attacking the government for reducing the number of family reunions:

Concern is rising about the effect of the escalating number of unauthorised boat arrivals on family reunion programmes for refugees already in Australia.

[...]

“The greater the number of boat arrivals visas, the smaller the number ofvisas available to the family members of refugees and other humanitarian arrivals,” Opposition citizenship spokesman Gary Humphries said today.

Just like the population smokescreen, it suits the Libs to talk about boat arrivals in terms of lovely-sounding families and togetherness rather than in terms of the plight of the people on those boats and whether we do or don’t want to help them. Now all they need to do is say the same things when opening their mouths.

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