Posted by John, July 6th, 2010 - under Julia Gillard, Refugees.

Tags: East Timor

That people like my own parents who have worked hard all their lives can’t abide the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard on an ‘agreed principle’ she set out while speaking to the Lowy Institute today about immigration

I agree with Gillard. The big mining companies she cut a rotten deal with have got an inside track to special privileges – special privileges worth between $4.5 bn and $9.5 bn in forgone tax.

Ah, but Gillard wasn’t talking about the rich and powerful in our society, was she? She was attacking – nudge nudge, wink wink – refugees, the most powerless and vulnerable people on the planet.

You know – the people fleeing all those special privileges like war, rape, torture, death and risking their life savings and their lives to get here where they can enjoy all those other special privileges like life and liberty.

Here’s another one of Gillard’s ‘agreed principles’:

That hardworking Australians who themselves are doing it tough want to know that refugees allowed to settle here are not singled out for special treatment.

What special treatment? To live behind razor wire, with the threat of being returned to the country you fled from? To be subject to abuse? To be condemned by all sides of politics? To struggle to survive in Australia?

As Michelle Grattan puts it the dog whistle has turned into a wolf howl. Gillard is the destroyer of dreams, the hellfire of hope.

Gillard does, unconsciously, touch on an important point. Many hard working Australians fear for their future.

The pall of economic insecurity that hangs over working class Sydney, over working class Melbourne and other Australian cities has created concerns about border protection (whatever that is) and re-ignited the traditional white Australian fear of the yellow hordes.

This irrational fear of refugees is a reflection of the rational fear of poverty, unemployment, inadequate wages, crap jobs, inadequate housing and the poor schools, hospitals and transport systems that are the hallmarks of capitalism in Australia.

But the solution is not the demonisation of refugees. That won’t improve workers’ living standards one iota. It won’t create one job. It won’t build one school, hospital or train line.

In fact it weakens the struggle for a better life for Gillard’s hard working Australians by diverting attention away from the real creators of our misery – the bosses and their governments.

The campaign for refugees is the campaign for jobs, better wages and improved social services.

Processing asylum seekers offshore is a return to John Howard’s Pacific solution. It removes the ‘problem’ from Australia’s shores and dumps our refugees on the doorstep of East Timor, a country whose poverty rivals that of the refugees themselves.

We will use our wealth, and our control of the country, to impose this processing centre on East Timor. Gillard will buy off their acquiescent leadership with aid money, just as Howard bought off Nauru.

Dragging people from Australia and processing them in East Timor is not a solution. People will continue to flee from the devastation and destruction we have created in Afghanistan and Iraq, from the barbarity in Sri Lanka we support, from the dictatorship in Iran.

What Gillard is creating is hopelessness in refugees. There is no point in coming. We will remove you and put you behind bars, in East Timor, a country itself imprisoned for 24 years.

You have no future. Here is your hell. Abandon all hope.

We should welcome refugees, not abandon them. The fight for a just society is the fight for refugees.

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All Hope Abandon