There are many reasons why Australian foreign policy can be viewed from the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. For one, it is largely dictated, in terms of security, by the competitive, acquisitive urgings of the United States. Fictional reassurances are offered to supposedly calm nerves in Canberra against phantom threats: extended nuclear deterrence, the furnishing of nuclear-powered submarines, the need for a satellite intelligence base. In return Uncle demands cash, blood and loyalty; and Uncle shall receive.
The other perspective is economic. Here, Australia relies on China’s voracious appetite for such commodities as iron ore. We dislike you and your Middle Kingdom aspirations, President Xi Jinping, but please buy our minerals.
This state of affairs impoverishes policy and prioritises laziness. Where, then, to excel in this field of craven compromise? Given Australia’s distant, island status, and the obvious point that it is an immigrant society, political wonks and wags came up with the following formula: punish foreign arrivals seeking safety for the way they arrive (an open breach of the UN Refugee Convention), and libel them for their background (economic, selfish, queue jumping). For a country based on the fruits and celebration of illegality – the penal colony, the dispossession and killing of natives, the celebration of squattocracy – this was supremely ironic.
Since the 2000s, Australia has run a system of spectacular cruelty demonising those seeking asylum by sea. With nauseating consistency, the Australian body politic continues to keep concentration camp outposts for imminent asylum arrivals in Nauru and Manus Island. The government may have changed in May 2022, but the demonology had not. The Home Affairs Minister, Clare O’Neil, continues to use such expressions as “breaking the market model” and deterring people smugglers.
In September, according to Rear Admiral Justin Jones, 11 people had been intercepted in September “and they were transferred to Nauru for regional processing by the government in Nauru.” In line with traditional secrecy protocols, little by way of useful information was provided about the transfer, though the Rear Admiral was happy to explain that the boat was not turned back because “we were not able to safely or lawfully conduct a take-back or turn-back.”
The first assistant secretary of people smuggling policy at the Home Affairs department, Michael Thomas, was also reticent on operational matters, not wishing to compromise Australia’s relationship with Nauru “as well as privacy and safety.”
Despite this negligible number, the Daily Telegraph was keen to treat the attempt by eleven desperate individuals seeking Australian shores as a horrendous attempt at penetrating the country’s own vaunted borders. This was blamed on the account keeping types in the Labor government. “There has been a 14 per cent reduction compared to the previous year in the time when planes are out patrolling the borders and a further 6 per cent reduction in the days when there are ships out patrolling.” Be wary of those flotillas, threatening Australia.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton was beside himself with joy at the revelation, as was the Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, Senator James Patterson. In the Coalition, a lacerating sadism continues to fascinate.
In a press release on October 24, Senator Patterson was merrily announcing what unimaginative Australian politicians have been churning out since the 1990s. “The Coalition warned Labor that its dismantling of Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) would re-incentivise people smugglers and put lives at risk.”
OSB may have had a budgetary trimming but is hardly dismantled. But Patterson sees them as more or less equivalent. “The latest venture comes at the same time as a planned A$600 million cut to border security in Labor’s most recent budget, which the Australian Border Force Commissioner confirmed in Senate Estimates in May 2023 would leave his frontline forces ‘stretched’.”
With characteristic disingenuousness, Patterson goes on to claim that deaths at sea are tragic. Labor, we are told, was responsible for 1,200 deaths at sea between 2008 and 2013 from more than 50,000 arrivals. (Nothing is said about illegal arrivals by air, but Patterson is an obedient peddler of misleading narratives.)
Much like the Israeli commander who delights in pulverising several blocks of Palestinian civilians in order to destroy a terrorist military target, Patterson is keen to kill the fly with a bazooka to preserve hygiene. We come to that old, revolting solution: camps. And more camps. Centres where hope is stymied, quelled and suffocated. Spaces where education, revelation and curiosity are reduced to the perverted whim of guards, and the license of private contracting companies.
It follows that locking asylum seekers in offshore Pacific Island centres that denigrate, destroy, mutilate and rape them is somehow better than the watery grave they are supposedly spared from.
What the Senator then goes on to do is trumpet the virtues of a military grade policy that should, under any sensible human rights regime, be regarded as a crime against humanity. With little by way of evidence, Patterson squawks the line that “the Coalition’s OSB sent a clear message of deterrence to people smugglers looking to sell illegal voyages to Australia. This work is being undone.”
Unfortunately, its work is not being undone quickly enough, meaning that the Australian taxpayer continues to foot the hefty bill for running a detention system – A$400 million for Nauru this year alone, despite it having, on current numbers, only 13 asylum seekers.
The OSB operation, which has never been audited, was demonstrably corrupt, displacing, rather than terminating naval arrivals, merely shuffling the trafficking of those wishing to find sanctuary in Australia. There is much to suggest that OSB aided, rather than impaired, the maligned market model with payments made to people smugglers to simply return their human quarry back to neighbouring countries such as Indonesia. After all, it’s a bit difficult to scotch and stomp on the right to asylum, whatever the semi-literate filers in Canberra might claim. International law is forgotten in that cold capital, but it has a habit of reappearing in other, distant fora.
Perhaps, given the rampant Philosemitic feeling running with passion through the Coalition and strains of the Albanese government, they might want to consider how the likes of Oskar Schindler, the twentieth century’s great, law-breaking smuggler of Jews out of Nazi Germany, might be treated? For Senator Patterson, not well, one suspects.
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They’ve finished bashing First Nations people (for now), so moving right along …
Why do these pustular peanuts, conservatives such as Patterson (a curse) and P Duckwit-Futton adopt attitudes when we fought against this filth in the great struggles of W W 2? Since then, Australia has sent troops to many countries to interfere and even kill citizens of those countries in their own country. Such sickness and evil must be denounced. Conservative scum call everyone against their puerile imagination a “terrorist”, a “militant”, while overlooking homicide which should be labelled “murder.” Evil.
AUD 400 million for 13 asylum seekers incarcerated on Nauru… roughly AUD 30.7 million per person! One wonders at the logic flow within the Department of Home Affairs that arrives at the conclusion that this is a fair spend, as opposed to – per a reasonable thinker’s analysis – a form of madness and massive overreach, not to mention an unconscionable and wilful waste of monies that could be put to much better purposes rather than enriching the contractors responsible for aiding and abetting this seemingly never-ending exercise in cruelty.
Shame on the politicians, shame on their public service henchmen, shame on the media for not applying the blowtorch to this blatant wickedness, and shame on us too, I suppose, for being unable to swing the necessary changes that move us from this anti-humanitarian position to something more humane and appropriate in respect to dealing with refugees who are lawfully seeking asylum from intolerable conditions within their home countries.
Much of the leveraging of modern bigotry and prejudice is neither unique nor ‘native’, but now transnational in the Anglosphere and parts of Europe.
One figure looms large in small circles, known as ‘the most influential unknown man in America’ (former Reagan staffer Linda Chavez in NYT) dec. white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton, ‘architect of the modern anti-immigration movement’, at Rockefeller Bros. fossil fueled ZPG Zero Population Growth, admirer of the white Australia policy, visited and hosted by a faux environmental NGO.
Binkowksi of KPBS in UniCorn Riot explains ‘Eugenics, Border Wars & Population Control: The Tanton Network’ which has informed bipartisan policies in Australia, UK Tories and RW nativist parties in parts of Europe:
‘The Tanton network is, as its name suggests, a criss-crossing mesh of politicians, lobbyists, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, pundits legitimized by op-eds in major newspapers, and billionaire money.’ (in US shares donors with Koch or Atlas Network, according to DeSmog were behind the Voice ‘No’ campaign
https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-border-wars-population-control-the-tanton-network/
I note the insane injustice of forcing all the many seaboard asylum seekers into offshore detention can be better understood by reading the below link to Australia’s human rights recorded failures, forced upon that prior era’s asylum seekers. Australia’s 2 major political parties had continued on from the lying Howard Tampa Crisis, by strengthening the Federal legislation back in 2001. http://www.humanrights.gov.au/immigration-detention-asylum-seekers-and-refugees
Of lateral interest, have the many subscribers of AIMN realized that our nation is beholden to the maggoty Deep Swamp administration that Biden has been tasked to deliver?
It is my opinion that Australia’s prior and current Prime Ministers have collectively subjected our nation’s people to the demands of the world’s most chronic hateful nation.
It’s much the same thinking that’s caused the mess in the Middle East I suspect. Politics of what ever it takes, fuck the consequences. Again people smuggling is shoved in our faces as the straw man . A long queue of refugees trying to get out of an equally malevolent country is never mentioned.
You know don’t you, Jews caused the wars so why don’t we ship them out to an isolated bit of desert. Nobody lives there and it’s part of the empire. No longer will we be besieged by this wanton lot.
Sound familiar? Australia, your standing in it. Let’s ship all the criminals……………
The occidental operation of righteous piety has predominantly been cast on falsehoods, bigotry and a construct of otherness, purely to facilitate the obtaining and hoarding of wealth, and dominion by any means. Nothing original there, it was indeed borrowed from the empires of antiquity. Of course to maintain those objectives the subjugation and exploitation of others and mass murder of resisters has been cast as fully justified.
Seems since the 1400s, such piety reached new heights in the quest for new lands, but had to be tweaked with the inculcation of the concept of civilized vs non-civilized and the competitive rights of venturers under the flag of their choosing. A master-stroke of differentiation and beguilement, inferring an obligation to enlighten, again by any means.
So by that time they had it pretty well covered, the rights of competitors over and above no rights of barbarians and non-civilized aborigines.
Since then, the model has never really changed. It’s just become more ballistic and the subject of a more expedient-for-the-times, sophistry. And the sectarian landscape has changed to the celebrity of the individual and hysteria warped by the guileful manoeuvres of the merchants and their flunky advertisers and lobbyists, with the party politicians running second fiddle. They would have it that we are all trapped by convenience into a form of self-destruction.
The psycho-physicists and their statisticians advise us that 60% of the populace must ascribe to a structured faith to feel secure. Despite all the education, science and evidence as to the progression towards destruction, the 40% are bound to have difficulty shifting the convenient beliefs of the 60%.
And in that 60% lies an industry for the feckless, greedy, self-serving beguilers.
Canguro, I absolutely agree, a criminal waste of money. Tell the robodebt victims how justice works too.
The Libs will shout with glee because it was a cheap way to stay in office……at our expense. That’s all it was and all it can ever be.
Patterson is another poor example of a politician who has little/no experience outside the Canberra bubble or the LIARBRAL$ party.
How Elmo can hope to mend fences with Xi while still sticking with the disastrous AUKUS anti-China war machine will indeed be a miracle.
I get a weird feeling when I see images of things like Patterson,like it’s actually an alien in human guise.What’s more, the fucking conservatives are bulging with them.Skin crawling,stomach churning,hairs on the back of the neck standing up reaction.Zealots for a very dangerous stupidity.
Are the Lizard .People among us?