The Royal Commission into asylum seeker 'policy'

Ian Rintoul of the Refugee Action Coalition says the decision is hypocritical as it does nothing for the Iraqi and Syrian asylum seekers in Australian detention. “The government’s mantra of ‘stopping the boats’ has got nothing to do with helping refugees in Iraq and Syria; it’s got everything to do with the government helping its own domestic agenda.”

And it may not even be doing that. As a domestic issue asylum seekers and boats have gone off the radar in the face of the monumental budget stuff up, where the government has managed to alienate many of its supporters. The government has lost the fiscal plot with the punters far more worried about their back pockets than ‘illegal’s’ coming through the back door.

The zeal with which Morrison and Abbot persecute boat people and will soon, in the name of fighting terrorism pursue Muslim travellers, underlines the racism contained within Abbott’s slogan of ‘Team Australia’. But his team is the B Team and not one for which many Australians aspire to play whilst the rules include demonising asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants, students, the sick and disabled, pensioners and the disadvantaged including Aboriginal Australians.

The more things change the more they remain the same. In the 10 December 1977 edition of The Bulletin magazine the otherwise conservative columnist, Peter Samuel, argued a case for accepting refugees from South Vietnam. The previous Whitlam government had been reluctant to do so, having sympathised with the political aims of the North Vietnamese. Samuel argued, “...I have found it extremely difficult to accept with equanimity the cheap sneers and repellent ‘labelling’ of refugees...Refugees are refugees, wherever they come from. One really does not, if one retains a shred of decency, try to deny them asylum by making foul accusations against them – accusations that could not possibly be based on any knowledge at all.”

He might have been referring to the illegal detention of over 50 Tamils from Sri Lanka, found to be refugees, but detained by ASIO on allegations of terrorism supplied by the government they were fighting in a bloody and protracted civil war.

In the same article Samuel opines, “There is something self-selecting it seems in people willing to board small boats for the hazardous sea voyage to Australia’s shores...The boat people cannot be ‘intercepted’ as some bigots suggest because interference with shipping on the high seas is piracy. And they cannot be ‘turned back’ or ‘flown back’ because that would be sentencing heroes to deprivation and death, and destroying Australia’s moral standing in the world.”

And so it is.