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There are refugees and then there are refugees

By Russell Grenning - posted Friday, 16 March 2018


Consider this scenario: a racial minority is being persecuted by the racial majority, is being murdered in wildly disproportionate numbers and is being forced off their land in a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign.

We have all read of this scenario over the years and whenever new instances of this crime against humanity emerge we can always rely upon the left in Australia – The Greens and the left in the ALP as well as any number of refugee and civil rights organisations – to immediately demand that the government do something about it. And in their view "doing something about it" means letting every single one of this persecuted minority into the country immediately and providing them with all sorts of taxpayer-funded benefits.

Well it seems to the left that there are refugees and there are refugees. It is politically correct and warmly humanitarian to help some but not others. Christians in the Middle East have long been some of the most persecuted people on the planet but they have not been given any special protected status by the Australian Government (or any advocacy by the usual refugee advocates) and now this minority are joined by another minority – white farmers in South Africa.

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However, it seems that the government is recognising the horrors being visited upon white farmers in South Africa and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has announced that a range of options is being urgently investigated to smooth their path to Australia on humanitarian or other visa programmes.

The new South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, installed after the removal of the highly corrupt Jacob Zuma, has announced to cheering in South Africa's Parliament that he would "accelerate our land distribution programme ... to redress a grave historical injustice (and) make more land available to our people for cultivation". His African National Congress has taken its lead from the hardline Julius Malema, a former head of its youth wing.

In response to the President's announcement Mr Malema said, "... you mentioned expropriation of land without compensation and we all agreed that actually was the highest applause you got". Mr Malema issued this blunt warning to those who opposed this policy, "I want to warn you ... that's a fundamental issue which is going to make us fight with you because anyone opposed to expropriation of land without compensation is the enemy of the people, and as such a person will be dealt with". "Dealt with" has a deliberately grisly undertone.

Mr Malema argues that the government should be the "custodian" of all property and that mass expropriation of white-owned land is needed "to restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land."

Ironically, the determination of the South African Government to throw white farmers off their land without any compensation comes at a time when the Zimbabwean Government to its immediate north is trying to entice its former white farmers back after they fled because of the same policies now announced in South Africa.

The Zimbabwean Government's more or less open admission that its previous policy of driving while farmers out was not just a dismal failure but a catastrophic one is not having its required effect. Perhaps former white farmers there are adopting the cautious view of one bitten and all of that. Who could blame them?

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When Zimbabwe was Rhodesia it was known as the "breadbasket of Africa" and it had significant agricultural exports as well as feeding its own people, but after the overthrow of the white government, white farmers were driven out so that their land could be given to supporters of the corrupt dictator Robert Mugabe. Then agricultural production collapsed, its currency became an international joke and its people either fled the country or were left starving and relying on foreign aid.

The number of white farmers in South Africa has been dwindling for many years largely as a result of murderous attacks on their homesteads which have left hundreds dead since 1998. While completely accurate statistics are difficult to come by – the government has long discontinued the policy of identifying the ethnicity of murder victims – by some measures at least farming in South Africa is the most dangerous occupation in the world outside of an actual war zone. The best estimate is that some 400 white farmers were murdered last year.

Landless working-class whites are just as persecuted as laws are designed to give privileged status to the black majority in all workplaces and freeze out white workers however skilled and efficient they are. There are now hundreds of thousands of whites living in squatter camps and existing on charity.

Currently, the South African Constitution has a clause in its Bill of Rights which declares, "Property may be appropriated only ... subject to compensation, the amount of which and the time and the manner of payment of which has been either agreed to by those affected or decided or approved by a court."

Parliament under the new President Ramaphosa has already voted 241 to 83 to change the Constitution and a sense of real panic has been growing. He has spoken about the need to appropriate white-owned land "taken under colonialism and apartheid".

Land ownership in South Africa is a key issue. Some 72% of arable land is held by whites who comprise less than 9% of the population of 56.5 million. While under apartheid blacks were barred from land ownership, when the post-apartheid black government offered land restitution to its black citizens, most wanted cash and not land. Now that cash has been spent, there are demands that blacks get free land as well despite the fact that very few have ever farmed in their lives. Giving white appropriated land to unskilled blacks in Zimbabwe was hardly a runaway success and once-prosperous farms collapsed.

While the South African Government bows to the demands of its extreme left-wing nationalists, one major problem is that there is relatively little interest among black South Africans in farming and a distinct lack of necessary skills. Very little has been done by the post-apartheid government to train blacks for farming and most of the land that has been legitimately purchased under the existing Constitution on a "willing buyer, willing seller" basis remains in government hands and has not gone to aspiring black farmers.

What the South African Government has overlooked or, possibly, just chosen to ignore, is the effect this land grab is having on international investors who are already showing signs of nervousness. If there is a flight of capital from South Africa as well as an accelerated exodus of whites the fragile economy could collapse.

Meanwhile in Australia, developments in South Africa and what the Australian Government will do to help beleaguered whites there will be watched very carefully by the 200,000 South African expatriates and the 40,000 Zimbabwean expatriates here.

Announcing his department's review, Minister Dutton said, "The people we are taking about want to work hard, they want to contribute to a country like Australia. We want people to come here, abide by our laws, integrate into a society, work hard, not lead a life on welfare. And I think those people deserve special attention and we're certainly applying that special attention now."

I do hope that Minister Dutton is not expecting plaudits from assorted left-wingers for this policy. In fact, I'm prepared to wager that many on the left will actually demand that these white farmers be kept out of Australia because they are, at best, racists and most probably Nazis and, after all, all of this was their fault in the first place.

It's a very great shame, in retrospect, that our refugee policy wasn't always like this.

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About the Author

Russell Grenning is a retired political adviser and journalist who began his career at the ABC in 1968 and subsequently worked for the then Brisbane afternoon daily, The Telegraph and later as a columnist for The Courier Mail and The Australian.

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