Chris Kenny highlighting the ABC for the true nit wits they are. Yes the ABC are protectors of illegal boat people, they want the illegal’s here and the fact that the elected government managed to stop the boats from arriving is something the ABC may never recover from. Aunty happy to ignore boat arrivals under Labor but cuts the Coalition no slack The Australian | August 02, 2014 12:00AM Chris Kenny Associate Editor (National Affairs) Sydney AS the number of asylum boat arrivals escalated under the Gillard government there was significant self-censorship in much of the media. The national broadcaster, for instance, which has long held an almost obsessive preoccupation with the asylum-seeker issue and has a statutory duty to report matters of significance, often didn’t find room in its news bulletins to tell us about boat arrivals. When 14 boats arrived in the first week of May last year the relative lack of reporting on the ABC was astonishing. I drew attention to it at the time on Twitter: “If a dozen boats arrive in week starting Sep 15, do you think #ABC news and #730 might find a way to squeeze in a mention? #theirABC.” This prediction — that there would be much more interest in boat arrivals once Tony Abbott was prime minister — came to pass. On border protection the ABC is nothing if not predictable. Despite a decade of relentless focus on asylum-seeker issues the idea of simply creating a webpage tallying boat arrivals didn’t occur to the ABC until the advent of the Abbott government. It went live with the page in October, headlined: “Operation Sovereign Borders: log of boat arrivals and other asylum-seeker incidents.” A table listed 20 boat arrivals and the number of asylum-seekers on board from September 22 to December 19. And then, the page says, nothing: “There have been no confirmed boat arrivals since December 2013.” The page records that it was last updated in March. This is passing strange given that 157 Tamils who departed by boat from India have now been taken to the Curtin detention centre, on the mainland, in a major development for Operation Sovereign Borders. Their arrival was described as “a blow to the pledge to stop the boats” by Sarah Ferguson on ABC TV’s 7.30 program. Yet there is no mention on the webpage; perhaps the journalists charged with maintaining the page got bored with OSB’s success. The ABC unofficial corporate view on border protection has been consistently wrong. It opposed the Pacific Solution under John Howard, endorsed its dismantling and, as the people-smuggling trade rebooted, it bought Labor’s excuses about push factors. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the ABC (and much of the Canberra press gallery) accepted that nothing could be done. There was, of course, no ABC webpage back then to keep tally of the arrivals as more than 820 boats brought 51,870 people into Australian custody, and more than 1200 died at sea. But when Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd accepted the need to attempt to control the situation their backflip wasn’t so much highlighted by the ABC as mimicked. And when Labor and the Greens said boats could not be turned back, this too became accepted wisdom at Aunty. No wonder ABC interviewers now bristle with disdain for Scott Morrison — the only way they can hope to mitigate the ignominy of being consistently wrong is for Morrison to fail. And so the jaundiced approach goes on: unsubstantiated stories of the navy burning asylum-seekers’ hands; desperate attempts to foment Indonesian diplomatic tensions; and now, apparently, the temerity to suggest that Tamils from India are more likely to be economic migrants than refugees. The national broadcaster is not alone in its border protection delusion and denial. Labor, for instance, seems determined to maintain its opposition to turning back boats. Immigration spokesman Richard Marles has bent over backwards to avoid endorsing this tactic, despite its pivotal success. “At the moment what we are seeing is that Indonesia do not accept this,” he told the ABC last month, “there is no doubt that the policy is one which is eroding our relationship with Indonesia.” That sounds awfully much like Australia, under Labor, would give Indonesia a veto over our border protection policies. Still, away from overtly partisan politics, the Human Rights Commission is also recalcitrant. This week it held hearings for an inquiry into children in detention; breathlessly reported by the ABC. The HRC last examined this fraught issue in 2001, under the Howard government. By the time the report was tabled in 2004 the boat arrivals had stopped. The number of children in detention had dropped from the 2001 highs of almost 1000 to fewer than 100. In other words, the problem had been fixed. After the Rudd Labor government weakened the border regime in 2008, the influx of asylum-seekers started again. The HRC watched on as tens of thousands of people were placed in detention over more than four years, and the numbers of children in detention, at any one time, soared above 1000 again. Yet it waited until this year, after the return of a Coalition government, to initiate another inquiry into children in detention. It comes as the number of children in all forms of immigration detention is again dropping, from 2000 a year ago to fewer than 800. The HRC was inactive while the problem was escalating but is agitating now. And while the ABC’s attention has waned on the boat arrivals webpage, it has started a new website to track the government’s broken promises. This idea did not occur to it in the wake of Gillard’s carbon tax promise but has popped up now. Quelle surprise. The “Promise Tracker” has found six broken promises (including, as two separate cases, the 1 per cent efficiency dividends demanded of the ABC and SBS). Another finding says the promise not to grant permanent residency to any asylum-seeker arriving in Australia by boat has been broken. This is because a High Court challenge led to a permanent visa being granted to a 15-year-old Ethiopian boy who arrived by stowing away on a ship. Time to stop the denial.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 00:34:37 +0000
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