There are refugees and then there are refugees

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.