One
might hope that the climate change denying and racist heartland of
Australia might see sense. I won’t be holding my breath
'Tiny
hearts' and 'balls of steel'. Is this really what the world thinks of
Australia?
Katie
Hopkins has held Australia up to the world as some kind of racist
role model for our violent treatment of asylum seekers. And why
wouldn’t she?
20
April, 2015
Australians
have “tiny hearts and whacking great gunships”. We “threaten
[migrant boats] with violence until they bugger off”. And British
people should be more like us.
That’s
Katie Hopkins’ view, at least. Her column for the Sun on Saturday
about asylum seekers leaving North Africa, crossing the Mediterranean
by boat and arriving in the EU was full of this candid language, the
sort of thing you might expect to hear outside a pub just after
closing time.
Hopkins,
who first came to public attention on the reality TV show The
Apprentice, calls asylum seekers “vermin” and “a virus”. In
her view, “These migrants are like cockroaches”. Some of them
eventually get to Britain – a place Hopkins wishes to keep free of
boat arrivals – which should prompt the UK to “get Australian”.
Perhaps
there are a few people in Australia who would share this opinion, and
would rather see people die than reach our shores. As an Australian,
I prefer to think that people who genuinely share Hopkins’ view of
things are a tiny minority.
That’s
because I believe most Australians are decent people who genuinely
believe in a fair go for everyone. So it comes as a shock to see
Hopkins invoking Australia’s approach to asylum seekers as an
example of best practice.
While
her view of Australians is deeply offensive, it has to be said that
it is a view increasingly held of us by others. Overseas, we are seen
as cruel and selfish, which in Hopkins’ view corresponds to “balls
of steel [and] can-do brains”.
She
goes on to say, “Migrant boats have halved in number since
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott got tough.” The Australian
government, for its part, insists that boat arrivals on our northern
border have, effectively, stopped.
Let’s
assume that is true. Two questions remain: what is the value of
stopping boat arrivals? And what is the cost?
Initially,
the Abbott government’s justification for its hardline policy on
asylum seekers arriving by boat, dubbed Operation Sovereign Borders,
was that it would save lives. There is no evidence to support that
idea. Of course, it is tragic when asylum seekers die in a desperate
attempt to reach protection. It is also tragic when they stay behind
and are slaughtered.
The
key difference is that when they stay behind and become another
statistic in the grim arithmetic of ethnic cleansing, we do not
empathise with them; our conscience remains untouched. When we learn
that they have perished in an attempt to seek safety in our country,
it seems different.
Nor
have the boats stopped setting out. They have just been turned back
by the Australian Navy, which has even breached Indonesian
territorial waters in the enterprise.
And
the public is not allowed to know how many people have perished in
their thwarted attempt to get here, because that is an “operational
matter” that has become a state secret.
So,
Australia cannot sensibly claim to have saved any lives, although it
may have saved its citizens the burden of compassion. The only
benefit we can point to is that we are not encumbered with refugees
who come by boat, although we are untroubled by refugees who come by
plane.
Second
question: is it a benefit to reduce the number of asylum seekers who
get to Australia?
It
is worth knowing that the average number of asylum seekers who have
arrived here by boat in the past was about 2,000 per year. The
highest number over the past few decades is 25,000 in one year. Not a
big number in such a big country.
Not
a big number when you consider that, at any given time, there are
about 50,000 people in the community who overstay their tourist
visas, mostly backpackers from Europe and the US. Not a big number
when you consider that we receive about 200,000 new permanent
immigrants each year.
So,
stopping the refugee boats is a trivial demographic benefit. It does,
however, provide a great political benefit to the government, because
they have created the entirely false idea that refugees are criminals
and that ordinary Australians need to be protected from them.
By
calling boat people “illegals” the Abbott government has deceived
the public and has induced them to tolerate the calculated
mistreatment of people who are desperate enough to risk their lives
to escape persecution. The Labor opposition has not dared step
forward to tell the truth about it.
Even
if we are so in love with politicians that we get pleasure from
giving them a political advantage (even a dishonest one), we need to
look at what it costs us.
Australia
spends about $5bn a year mistreating asylum seekers. But that is just
the financial cost. As Hopkins’ column shows, it has plainly cost
us our national reputation.
Refugees
have traditionally made a major contribution to the Australian
economy. Many major studies show that the initial costs associated
with new arrivals are more than compensated for once immigrants have
been in Australia more than 10 years.
“Boat
people” are a special group of immigrants. They do not come as a
free choice: they come to escape persecution in their own country.
They come from a different culture, with a different language; they
risk their lives to get here and they take on the burden of starting
again.
What’s
not to like about them? They are people with initiative and courage,
not, as Hopkins says, a “plague of feral humans”.
It
would be a fine thing if we could show Katie Hopkins she is wrong
about Australians. But that won’t happen until our politicians
start telling the truth: we are brutalising innocent people, and it’s
simply un-Australian.
To read the original article -
You
may as well set up a Libya to Italy P&O ferry
I
still don’t care. Because in the next minute you’ll show me
pictures of aggressive young men at Calais, spreading like norovirus
on a cruise ship.
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