Unwarranted Praise
Greens Senator Bob Brown, in a June 14 press release, congratulated federal Labor leader Simon Crean for having taken a large step in moving Labor from the 'me-tooism' on asylum seekers it proffered during the [2001 federal] election campaign. Brown's comment was in response to Labor's decision to oppose legislation to excise some 3500 islands from Australia's migration zone.
Less than a week later, the Howard government had Labor's full support in passing another piece of anti-refugee legislation a bill which further restricts asylum seekers' rights to judicial appeal.
Clearly the ALP hasn't taken the large step that Brown gave it credit for. Instead, Labor MPs opposed the Howard government's excision bill because, they argued, it didn't crack down hard enough on people smuggling and illegal immigration.
Crean made every effort to argue that it was Labor that was serious about border protection, and not the Coalition government. His tactic was to generate more fear and hysteria that boats with hundreds of asylum seekers would head straight for the mainland after they saw the government's white flag.
In his June 20 speech to parliament, Crean lambasted immigration minister Philip Ruddock: You are selling out Australia, and you are not protecting it. The government's idea of excision diminishes Australia. It purports to protect our borders, but it puts the real borders of Australia at risk.
The government, Crean said, stands for border destruction, not border security. Australians want to feel secure, Crean told parliament, so lets stop the boats coming here in the first place.
The excision bill has been shunted into a parliamentary committee for further scrutiny, and won't be debated by the Senate until the next session of parliament, beginning on August 19.
Labor's response to the Migration Legislation Amendment (Procedural Fairness) Bill, introduced by the government immediately after the failure of its excision bill, was to express wholehearted support for it. One of Labor's core policy proposals is for faster and more efficient processing of asylum seekers' claims.
According to Labor's Laurie Ferguson, given that drawn-out appeals are only made by people who don't have genuine claims and who want to prolong their stay in Australia, removing access to judicial appeal is a great way to get people processed faster (and out of the country).
Opposition immigration spokesperson Julia Gillard made a plea to the government to work with Labor. If the real reason that the government is engaging in the so-called Pacific solution is to get the benefits of truncated processing, then why don't we have a real debate and a real exchange about getting a better processing system in Australia?
Ruddock assured Gillard that he was more than happy to give her to opportunity to try some of her ideas on us in good faith.
With the latest piece of legislation stripping further rights from asylum seekers, Labor continues to give the Coalition's xenophobic scare campaign full support.
Labor leaders have made no effort to challenge or question the government's allegations that Australia continues to face a flood of asylum seekers. Yet the number of asylum seekers that have made their way to Australia in the past five years, even the past 20 years, wouldn't be enough to even partly fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The boat people crisis has been completely manufactured by politicians and the corporate media to serve a political purpose to create a generalised sense of fear and panic that the poor and destitute of the Third World threaten the relatively higher living standards and comparative security of ordinary Australians.
Through such manufactured fear our rulers hope to break down the sense of human solidarity that Australian working people have for the Third World poor, exhibited most recently by the outpouring of support in September 1999 for the people of East Timor. Such public expressions of international solidarity limits the extent to which our rulers can exploit and wage war against the poor countries of the world.
The two major parties' bipartisan approach to the issue of refugees closely mirrors their bipartisan approach to the supposed war on terrorism. Labor and the Coalition are in general agreement on every aspect of Australia's involvement in the US-led war on the Third World. Their campaign to undermine sympathy for those fleeing oppression (asylum seekers) will play a significant role in determining what success they have in winning public support for this ongoing and open-ended war.
From Green Left Weekly, July 3, 2002.
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