Boat Refugees in Australia are NOT Criminals
Something that pisses me off no end about this fair and lucky land of ours (Australia) is our obsession with border protection. Not against invasion, drugs or terrorists – but protection against women and children and people we are busy shooting the shit out of in foreign lands.
As long as Australia is contributing to the displacement of people in the world we cannot ignore our responsibility to house and protect the displaced from those conflicts (and other conflicts caused by globalisation and our voracious consumerism).
What makes me so mad is that our Federal Government (and each new government that gains power) incessantly rant on in Parliament about this issue as thought 3000 refugees will sink our economy or water down the master race. Let’s face it guys – Italy had around 30,000. And when the tide starts to come in we’ll be seeing a million or more knock on our back door for their right to life. How can we deny them that right?
All sides of the Australian political system have bought into the idea that refugees in boats are criminals. They certainly are not criminals – they are REFUGEES and displaced people. Our politicians frame this as border protection to stop queue jumpers and asylum seekers and bicker over the ability of one or the other party to keep these refugees, many of them women and children, in our purpose built maximum security prisons.
Hint: when boat numbers increase it does not mean our immigration policies have been wrong – it means our foreign policies have been wrong.
Here is a novel idea… but one I have heard bandied around the actual population before today. How about just letting the refugees into Australia with automatic temporary visas until it can be ascertained that they are bona-fide displaced people.
That means no prison. You are only a queue jumper (where is the queue anyway?) if you are just another immigrant flying under the radar. You ARE NOT a queue jumper if you have been bombed and shot and raped and crawled thousands of miles over five countries to get your family to safety.
Currently we treat everybody by default as a criminal. That is abhorrent behaviour from a civilised people towards victims of abuse.
So let’s start by just telling our politicians we don’t want to be totalitarian pricks anymore – we don’t have limited space on our lifeboat. Either that or they stop bombing the rest of the world in a bullshit war against terrorism (that incites more to become terrorists and insurgents against our invasion).
Fellow Australians, hypothetically, if we were invaded by our neighbour Indonesia at some point in the future then how would we expect to be treated if we made it on a battered old fishing boat to New Zealand? Would we expect to be treated as criminals by default? Locked in maximum security prison for years at a time? Would we expect the Gestapo response, or the humanitarian response?
It’s not until we accept our responsibility to the rest of the world as a humanitarian symbiotic relationship that we can even begin to think globally about other solutions to problems like global warming, species extinction, water shortage and poverty.
It’s time Australian politicians understood some issues are bigger than tit-for-tat in question time. Do we want to be totalitarian protectionist Australia, or humanitarian best-practice Australia leading the world in helping other people survive.
