Doug PollardLabor should Go for Broke on Refugees
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The High Court rejection of the ‘Malaysia Solution’ is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the Labor government. Even more likely, the end of Julia Gillard’s ignominious Prime Ministership.
This, folks, is what you get when the order of the day is trimming, compromising, placating and general brown-nosing. It is not a sustainable model of government.
You can’t win over the racists - the core constituency chanting ‘stop the boats’ - who don’t want any brown and yellow people coming here, no matter how they come.
Everyone else has long since worked out that any offshore processing solution is both ridiculously expensive and inhumanly cruel.
Labor needs to turn this around with a frank acknowledgement that refugees, however they get here, are Australia’s problem and need to be dealt with by the Australian government on Australian soil.
We can’t keep outsourcing this to our poorer neighbours, as if refugees were a product to be ‘processed’ (and what a telling word that is) like industrial waste, out of sight, out of mind, and who cares if it pollutes the environment, so long as it’s not our environment.
The situation calls for something that’s been missing in Australian politics for a long time: a bold and courageous policy based, not on what focus group say will play well in the Murwillumbah RSL, but on what is self-evidently right.
And let’s face it: neither Labor nor Julia have anything left to lose. Without a truly bold stroke that cuts through all the crap, they’re gone, and Tony Abbott is our new PM.
The ludicrous expense of offshoring probably provides the way to do it. If you can’t sell the notion of processing people onshore, in or near our capital cities, where help and support is readily available to assimilate the influx, on the basis of simple humanity – and that is how low we have sunk – you can at least make a decent fist of selling it on economic grounds. Protect the Budget surplus!
Onshore management of refugees is faster and cheaper, and delivers less-damaged people sooner. Provided with language teaching, social integration services, legal support and surrounded by members of their own ethnic community, refugees integrate into Australian society far sooner and better, and become a net economic benefit to the country, rather than a drain.
As it is, we are spending millions of dollars on something which, if truth be told, is nothing more than a vast bribe for the votes of racist rednecks. Who bank the cheques and vote for Tony Abbott anyway.
We can’t, and shouldn’t, afford it. In these straitened economic times, we need to get the Budget back into surplus, bank the proceeds of the mining boom for future generations, morally and fiscally responsible course, blah, blah . . . I’m sure you can write the speech yourself.
But what does this do to ‘stop the boats’?
Nothing. We can’t ‘stop the boats’, and especially not by incarcerating the people who get on them in malarial concentration camps, entangling them in endless mind-destroying bureaucracy in countries with scant regard for human life, let alone human rights.
That’s what they’re running from in the first place.
If the government would like to save money, save lives, and destroy the people-smugglers ‘business model’, they could get into the people-smuggling business themselves. Set up a public-private partnership to run refugee ferries.
Although the numbers are so small, it may not be economically viable.
Or they could just try running a decent, humane, transparent and generous refugee policy. Now there’s an idea.
Forget offshoring: bring 'em in
The High Court rejection of the ‘Malaysia Solution’ is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the Labor government. Even more likely, the end of Julia Gillard’s ignominious Prime Ministership.
This, folks, is what you get when the order of the day is trimming, compromising, placating and general brown-nosing. It is not a sustainable model of government.
You can’t win over the racists - the core constituency chanting ‘stop the boats’ - who don’t want any brown and yellow people coming here, no matter how they come.
Everyone else has long since worked out that any offshore processing solution is both ridiculously expensive and inhumanly cruel.
Labor needs to turn this around with a frank acknowledgement that refugees, however they get here, are Australia’s problem and need to be dealt with by the Australian government on Australian soil.
We can’t keep outsourcing this to our poorer neighbours, as if refugees were a product to be ‘processed’ (and what a telling word that is) like industrial waste, out of sight, out of mind, and who cares if it pollutes the environment, so long as it’s not our environment.
The situation calls for something that’s been missing in Australian politics for a long time: a bold and courageous policy based, not on what focus group say will play well in the Murwillumbah RSL, but on what is self-evidently right.
And let’s face it: neither Labor nor Julia have anything left to lose. Without a truly bold stroke that cuts through all the crap, they’re gone, and Tony Abbott is our new PM.
The ludicrous expense of offshoring probably provides the way to do it. If you can’t sell the notion of processing people onshore, in or near our capital cities, where help and support is readily available to assimilate the influx, on the basis of simple humanity – and that is how low we have sunk – you can at least make a decent fist of selling it on economic grounds. Protect the Budget surplus!
Onshore management of refugees is faster and cheaper, and delivers less-damaged people sooner. Provided with language teaching, social integration services, legal support and surrounded by members of their own ethnic community, refugees integrate into Australian society far sooner and better, and become a net economic benefit to the country, rather than a drain.
As it is, we are spending millions of dollars on something which, if truth be told, is nothing more than a vast bribe for the votes of racist rednecks. Who bank the cheques and vote for Tony Abbott anyway.
We can’t, and shouldn’t, afford it. In these straitened economic times, we need to get the Budget back into surplus, bank the proceeds of the mining boom for future generations, morally and fiscally responsible course, blah, blah . . . I’m sure you can write the speech yourself.
But what does this do to ‘stop the boats’?
Nothing. We can’t ‘stop the boats’, and especially not by incarcerating the people who get on them in malarial concentration camps, entangling them in endless mind-destroying bureaucracy in countries with scant regard for human life, let alone human rights.
That’s what they’re running from in the first place.
If the government would like to save money, save lives, and destroy the people-smugglers ‘business model’, they could get into the people-smuggling business themselves. Set up a public-private partnership to run refugee ferries.
Although the numbers are so small, it may not be economically viable.
Or they could just try running a decent, humane, transparent and generous refugee policy. Now there’s an idea.
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