Australia where? Rebuilding our borders
It seems the Australian
government has discovered its love for Ptolemy, most specifically Ptolemy’s
version of the world as it existed in the second century. In Ptolemy’s vision nothing
exists below the Malay Peninsula beyond wind blowing faces, scorpions and
centaurs. Labor hasn’t put those into its migration map yet, but it is early days …
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Next, we excise the
whole of Australia. For all boatish migration intents and purposes, Australia?
What Australia? It simply ain’t there. So what? You say. Mercator’s 1598 map of
the world doesn’t have an Australia either. We’re just one great big chunk of
Antarctica.
So now all men, women
and children who come by boat won’t technically land on Australian soil. They
land in legal nowhere land. Subject to the punitive elements of the migration
laws of Australia, but not afforded any of their perks. You know, the little
things, like the right to seek asylum.
But Australia has come
a long way in a few hundred years you say. We’ve developed a civil society. Our
convicts are all free. Women have a right to vote and work. Children are not
enslaved in Drizabone factories. It’s true we’ve developed morals and
standards, things we wouldn’t dream of going back on, or outrage would befall
all the land. That is outrage for certain people. Certainly not all.
But with all of
Australia resembling a map of Ptolemy’s time, what is there left for people who
come here by boat if not the soil beneath their feet? Not a hell of a lot.
Certainly no recourse to the courts. And no recourse to natural justice. No access
to human rights instruments; not a whiff of them here. No rights at all.
Sorry how wrong of me;
I should be more accurate. Boat people do have rights. They have the right to
be detained indefinitely on an overseas island made of dung and riddled with
malaria. And they have a right to mental illness, running rampant within long-term
detained populations.
Oh what hopes we had
for a Labor-led Australia. And oh how the mighty have fallen, and all in the
time it took Jamie Oliver to make his new fandangled 15-minute meal.
Bring back our Petro
Georgious and our Judi Moylans. Where are their Labor equivalents? Lost in the
jungles of no-conscience Labor. Crushed in the embrace of the far right.
Labor the party of the
working man, the down and out, the battler. You’ve lost your way Labor, for who
is more of a battler than someone fleeing persecution? Who is more down and out
than a child who has known only war and misery?
In my confusion, I look
to the Labor Values website to see what Labor stands for in 2012. There I find
some clues.
Our Values: Through the good
times and through the tough times, the great mission of Australian Labor
governments for more than one hundred years has been to improve the lives of
ordinary Australians—giving every Australian opportunities through education
and training, ensuring fairness at work and supporting Australians throughout
the different stages and transitions of their lives.
Oh I see. It’s an
Australia for Australians, mentioned four times, just in case I didn’t get the
message. I get it. The rest of yous can bugger off.
Labor
has stood by Australians in difficult and uncertain times, building a strong
safety net and providing help through hardship. Labor has promoted social justice,
compassion and the fair go at home and abroad.
Oh a fair go, at home. And abroad. For far-flung peoples like those poor starving Africans. Set foot on our land buddy and
watch our values be thrown to the winds.
There’s no fair go for boat people. Stuck on an
island, no one processing their cases, in the hands of a nation so impoverished
its only 737 was repossessed to pay off its debts.
Did someone not say:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Oh sorry, that wasn’t us was it? Might we even pretend
to say that? Sequester that for our own? That’s right we do have something
along those lines...
Australians all let us rejoice
… for we are young and free.
I can’t sing it. Not for the horrid tune … does
it even have a melody? No, but for its sentiments.
The children we’re about to send to Nauru, Manus or some
other far-flung island, are young, but they are not free. Some are newborn
babies, some still rest in their mums’ wombs. Whether we put fences around them
or not they are not free. Not free to live their lives, plan their futures, not
free to study what they want or set up a life for themselves, to have a home.
And sooner than we know it, they will no longer be young. Their childhoods will
have been sacrificed for a greater goal: saving other’s lives at sea. To
protect our great nation, our values, our people.
Because if that’s what each precious child’s life is
about, saving another child’s life, shouldn’t we all sacrifice our children, if
we really love children around the world? We should sacrifice them on the altar
of ‘let this be a lesson to everyone who comes after your time.’
Because that is what you are saying Labor party, and
those Liberals and Independents who vote with you.
This child’s life is inherently worthless, beyond the
message it sends to others.
Prove me wrong. I dare you.
Show me your pages and pages of documents, those that
prove you are planning for the welfare of these children.
Show me how they shall be educated, how they shall be
protected, show me what recourse they have to justice, and what example they
will have on an island of marooned desperate people.
I want to see this. I want to see your plan, and I don’t
want to weep when I see it.
Because so far that’s all I do when I hear your
hard-hearted excuses for policies. Howard-era White Australia trash ramped up
for a 2012 audience.
This legislation will go down in the annals of
Australian history alongside the
Immigration Restriction Act 1901 to
“place certain restrictions on immigration and ... for the removal ... of
prohibited immigrants”, which drew on the inspiration provided by those white South
Africans.
Rest assured those of you who vote to send children
overseas: your actions will be viewed alongside the acts of those who
encouraged Aboriginal children to be ripped from their parents, put to work on
little or no wages in white homes, and often treated miserably, in
households that maintained lies of their abandonment.
Your place in history is assured. I hope you don’t sleep
at night for what you are allowing to happen. I hope you know the extent of the
damage you’re causing. And if you don’t I hope one day soon you see it with
your own eyes and weep.
Do not flinch from this. If you do it, do it with full
knowledge. It has been done before, and the lessons we learned from last time
are clear. People detained for years with no cut-off date lost their minds,
some lost their lives, and all lost pieces of themselves they could have used to
build long and prosperous lives. Many many years later, as the vast majority
were finally granted legal access to our shores, we the people pay for what we
allowed to be done in our name.
And now, we launch into it again.
Australian federal politicians know this. This is your
doing. In history’s eyes and the eyes of people who know better, it will not be
forgiven. Because you cannot rebuild a broken childhood or a broken family. You
cannot save a child from a fast drowning only to kill them slowly on an island
made of dung.
Jessica
