According to Credit Suisse, Australia is the wealthiest country in the world. It has enjoyed a stellar run of 23 consecutive years of economic growth. It ducked the great recession thanks to a textbook Keynesian stimulus response combined with the momentum of an unprecedented mining boom. Yet to live in the frequently irate bubble that is contemporary Australia is to be subjected to persistent and shrill cries of “crisis” or “catastrophe” over productivity, red tape, security, debt and deficit, emergency low interest rates, sovereign risk and border protection. Take the latter, formerly known as immigration policy. For the last 15 years, Australia has struggled with a modest proportion of the world’s 54m asylum seekers arriving on its shores by boat. To punish the new arrivals and deter others fleeing from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Syria, government policy has sought to replicate the misery that prompted them to flee their home countries. A multitude of measures have been tested along the way. Of them all, two have endured: outsourcing and human rights abuses. Money has not been an impediment. Australia has bought off neighbouring Pacific island states, including Nauru and Papua New Guinea, to induce them to incarcerate refugees – men, women and children – until some of them end up physically and mentally broken. Many self-harm. Some die. Others have been sent home to be tortured or even killed. One asylum seeker detained on PNG’s Manus Island recently died from complications arising from a cut on his foot. Last week, Australia forged a new deal with impoverished, corruption-ridden Cambodia under which five refugees whose will have been broken on Nauru will “voluntarily” be resettled there. Officials from both countries celebrated with champagne at a ceremony in Phnomh Penh. There were no speeches, and journalists were not permitted to ask questions. Immigration policy in Australia also proves once and for all that religion can be invoked by its adherents to rationalise almost anything. While former PM Kevin Rudd briefly flirted with the “biblical injunction to welcome strangers”, his conservative nemesis and current prime minister Tony Abbott asked: “What would Jesus do?” The answer was obvious, at least to him: “Jesus knew that there was a place for everything and it is not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia”. ***
Posted on: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 23:39:12 +0000