All is not well in the asylum

Philip Ruddock's policies led to some of the grossest abuses of human rights in Australian history.

His intervention last week - courtesy of the fearmongering campaigners at The Australian on the matter of asylum seekers - was a bleak reminder of the shame of the recent past. His unsubstantiated warnings of hordes of people heading for our shores was a grim reminder that this man would still, if only he could, tap into the xenophobic underbelly of this island continent.

Mr Ruddock was, and remains to this day, a Faustian character. Like the figure of legend, Mr Ruddock pursued policies that unashamedly harmed the vulnerable in order to win elections.

He, and his prime minister John Howard, turned this nation's soul into a dark and menacing beast that was the shame of the world. They played on fear, malice and deception. Their political manoeuverings on asylum seekers were as despicable as those executed by the architects of South African apartheid, or of segregation in the southern states of the US.

Have we as a country learnt nothing from what Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard did to our spirit and, more particularly, to the thousands of desperate people whom they demonised, degraded and humiliated, all in the name of winning the votes of a few swinging seats?

It appears not, at least as far as The Australian is concerned. It appears to think that asylum seekers represent some sort of threat to Australia when they clearly do not, never have and never will.

The Rudd Government, only after pressure in opposition from refugee advocates such as Howard Glenn, Ian Chappell and a handful of others, rightly ended what amounted, in anyone's language, to crimes against humanity being committed by the Howard government. I refer here, of course, to the jailing - yes, that's what detention is - of women and children, and temporary protection visas that kept people in limbo and in poverty. The TPVs were designed to break the spirit of people, and they did in many cases.

Let us be clear here. The Howard government policies on asylum seekers resulted in suicide, physical and psychological harm, and serial abuse of individual rights in the hell-holes called detention centres.

We must not do it again. If we allow Mr Ruddock, The Australian and ill-informed and opportunist opposition spokespeople such as the current Liberal migration mouthpiece Sharman Stone to force the Rudd Government to turn the clock back to 2001, then we will have learnt nothing, and we will show yet again that we are a nation capable of racism, xenophobia and irrational fear.

Do not trust the ALP on this issue. Its performance in opposition on this issue could be termed weak, gutless and equally odious as that of the Liberal Party.

I recall speaking on ABC radio in early 2003 when asylum seekers, fed up with being treated as though they were simply political fodder and numbers by immigration bureaucrats, rioted at Villawood in Sydney. I simply said if you treat human beings worse than you treat animals, then what do you expect.

Julia Gillard, she of the vaulting ambition, simply said such conduct should not be tolerated. I asked Duncan Kerr, one of the few ALP members with a dissenting voice on the matter at the time, why Ms Gillard would take such an unsympathetic line. Mr Kerr shook his head. Enough said.

There is much to recommend Australia, and it is not the only country in the world to spawn figures such as Mr Ruddock and Mr Howard, but what is it about the island mentality that so fears a handful - and even 10,000 asylum seekers is a handful - coming to our vast coastline and being welcomed?

Why won't Mr Rudd end that other monstrous Ruddock policy, the excision of islands off our coast, so that if asylum seekers land there they are not in Australia?

Why is Mr Rudd leaning on Indonesia, a nation that can barely feed itself, to take care of asylum seekers heading our way?

What does it say about the concept of nationhood in this country that a prime minister can thump the table in devious and calculating mock rage in 2001, declare that we decide who comes into this country, and get re-elected?

And perhaps most importantly, what does it say about our media that they give space and airtime to a man who locked up beautiful, innocent little children for years on end?

Edmund Burke, that great 18th century humanitarian whose name is taken in vain by today's conservatives, wrote: "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." This aphorism, now 239 years old, has never been more relevant to Australia today on the question of asylum seekers.