Posted by John, June 21st, 2011 - under Malaysia, Nauru, Refugees.



It has to be said: you’ve got a better chance of compassion from the Gillard government if you’re a cow than if you’re a refugee.

While conditions in Indonesia are considered too bad for cattle to be exported there, the Australian government has no qualms about the export of human beings to Malaysia, where even UNHCR-approved refugees have no legal status, no right to work, and are routinely subject to brutal treatment, including murder, by the government and others.

The Australian government makes a habit of selectively condemning regimes for their poor human rights records. Sometimes, as with Malaysia, silence must be maintained.

Last week a spokesperson for Chris Bowen said it would not be appropriate for him to comment on living conditions for refugees in Malaysia because the government is still trying to do a deal with the Malaysian authorities.

Sometimes blatant hypocrisy rather than silence is required. There are currently 274 asylum seekers (47 of them children) in limbo on Christmas Island while the government tries to finalise plans to wreck their lives. Amongst them are 11 Syrians on whom the Gillard government is turning its back.

Kevin Rudd may strut the world stage, denouncing the vicious Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for atrocities against protesters, including the torture of a child, but that will not be allowed to get in the way of out-competing the Liberals in the anti-refugee stakes.

But what about Australia’s human rights record? The treatment of refugees in Australian detention centres, where thousands are locked up indefinitely, is itself a huge human rights abuse carried out under the government’s direct control.

Whatever happens to refugees forced back to Malaysia will also be on the hands of the Australian government, which is effectively contracting out its human rights violations to Malaysia.

Watching Immigration Minister Chris Bowen defend this policy on Lateline in early June was like watching him transform into Philip Ruddock. As with Ruddock, no shred of human feeling was allowed to intrude on the hard-line message of this “bold and innovative step”:

You need to send a strong message. I don’t want unaccompanied minors, I don’t want children getting on boats to come to Australia thinking or knowing there is some sort of exemption in place.

Eight hundred men, women and children are to be made an example of. Why?

The Labor Party’s hold on government is tenuous. Many of their policies are unpopular – and deservedly so. Two hundred and thirteen years of ruling class promotion of racism to justify their hold on power is a tempting tradition.

So Bowen is selling the Malaysian solution as harsher towards refugees than Howard’s Pacific solution.

Not only does it purposely single out children to be brutalised as an example to others, but it explicitly appeals to the racist “keep them out of Australia” idea which is the true meaning of “stop the boats”, the key competitive space for both Labor and Liberal on this issue.

Bowen, once he’d finished mouthing a few weasel words about how much dignity and respect there is in his plan to treat refugees worse than animals, got to the heart of the matter: “They get their claims processed [in Malaysia], but what they don’t do is get what they want, which is to be processed and resettled in Australia.”

Thus when Philip Ruddock argued that Labor should have simply said, “We made a mistake in criticising the Howard government and the approach they took,” Chris Bowen bragged in The Australian – the journal of record for refugee-bashing – that the Malaysia solution “will have the same (or better) practical effect as turning back the boats” because “If you go to Nauru, you would end up back in Australia – that’s what happened before.”

Gillard was proclaiming this intention to take over the “stop the boats” mantle in July last year when she dropped the bombshell of the East Timor solution:

I speak of the claim often made by Opposition politicians that they will, to quote: “turn the boats back … there is nowhere to turn the boats back to… We move forward to an effective, sustainable, long-term solution: to stop the boats not at our shoreline but before they even leave those far away ports.

And the export of human beings is how they propose to do it.

It should go without saying that there is a desperate need for the refugee campaign to mobilise in response. The central demands of the campaign – end mandatory detention, no offshore processing, no deportations – are more fitting than ever.

Yet some of the responses so far make you wonder if you’ve strayed into Topsy-Turvy World, where Tony Abbott calls Howard-abominators onto the streets, GetUp! declares the best way to oppose the government is to go along with them, and a refugee advocate calls for Nauru to be reopened.

Nothing but contempt should be heaped on Tony Abbott’s utter hypocrisy in suggesting that “all these people who thought that the Howard government was an abomination [should] be protesting in the streets against this effort by the Gillard government”.

Of course he doesn’t want any mobilisations. He just wants to embarrass those whose support for Labor is now in ever more stark contradiction to their support for refugees.

And the Labor Left doesn’t disappoint him. Once again exhibiting real gutlessness, the parliamentary Labor Left has declined to criticise the deal. Their spokesperson Stephen Jones has instead echoed the claims of Bowen that it is too early to pass judgement.

Along similar lines, GetUp! has distinguished itself by refusing to campaign against the Malaysian solution, pleading that this would “play into the government’s hands”.

In our mind we have to fight on what we can achieve in this space [i.e. about refugees]. That means getting children out of detention and the Minister has committed to doing that by the end of June.

How convenient that by ignoring the Malaysian deal there’s apparently no need to demand of the government anything it’s not already doing.

Even Marion Le, a refugee lawyer who played a key role in opposing the detention of refugees on Nauru under the Howard government, responded that “reopening Nauru would be far better than all the nightmare ideas this government has put forward”.

Such a capitulation to the “lesser evil” must discredit her, but it also indicates something of how the terms of the so-called refugee debate have narrowed.

Such apparently bizarre responses can only be explained by understanding the way in which refugee policy has moved Australian politics to the right over the last 18 months or so, since the Rudd government tried to dump the refugees on the Oceanic Viking and the Jaya Lestari 5 in Indonesia in October 2009.

While this “Indonesian solution” had the effect of prompting some protests, it opened up a competition between Labor and Liberal as to who could be more racist towards refugees.

With many refugee supporters unwilling to believe that Rudd would now reproduce Howard’s refugee-bashing, the racist policies of the Labor government were not immediately challenged by the kind of movement that had at its height mobilised thousands on the streets in support of refugees under Howard.

As in the Howard years, refugees in the detention centres have shown by their resistance that they are not prepared to just be the passive victims of the government’s policies. Their determination needs to be matched by the campaign outside the centres.

While what passes for the Labor Left in federal parliament has been pathetic, the blatant inhumanity of Labor’s new policy has brought out more opposition from elsewhere within the Labor Party than previously.

In Western Australia, 14 state Labor MPs signed a petition condemning the plan to send unaccompanied minors to Malaysia. Two Labor federal MPs, Melissa Parke and Anna Burke, have also not been able to stomach the deportation of children. On 8 June Labor For Refugees in both NSW and Victoria wrote to the newspapers condemning the immorality of the Malaysian solution.

Within the union movement, this week saw the Australian Education Union, which actively campaigned against the Howard government’s refugee policy, write to Chris Bowen to express the union’s “outrage and serious fears” about the Malaysian solution: “We had hoped that the appalling treatment of asylum seeker and refugee families and children in this country ended with the defeat of the Howard government.”

The campaign needs to take a clear stand against all aspects of the government’s racist policies and condemn the Gillard government’s attempts to play one group of refugees against another. That’s the key starting point.

But it needs to mobilise refugee supporters to protest. Already, Victoria’s Refugee Action Collective has held a speakout against the Malaysian solution at Labor Party Headquarters, and the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition greeted Chris Bowen in appropriate style when he turned up at a conference at the University of NSW this week. Future rallies at detention centres are also planned.

The World Refugee Day rallies on Sunday 19 June and Saturday 25 June were and are a real opportunity to mobilise to demand an end to mandatory detention, to all offshore processing and to deportations.

This article, by Diane Fieldes, first appeared in Socialist Alternative.