Australia where? Rebuilding our borders

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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 …

The newly-revised map of Australia, 1 November 2012, based on Ptolemy's 2nd century vision.

So Australia chooses to mislay a few islands. Pretends – for the benefit of boat people – they simply don’t exist. Australia? What Australia? Let’s liquid-paper it out of the legislation, to avoid any confusion.

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!

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