Article
A nation condemned
As another asylum seeker boat signals distress and the lives of dozens hang in the balance (here), both major parties stand condemned. The only consistent ray of light is Greens’ policy.
An overloaded boat before it capsized last week. Pic: Australian Maritime Safety Authority
…
At the time of the 2010 election, his mantra of “Stop The Boats” was dismissed as a brutal and simplistic three-word slogan, unworthy of serious consideration. But now, less than two years later, it is unchallenged bipartisan policy, accepted by the Government and the received political wisdom of the mainstream commentariat.
And in the process it has become a caring and compassionate plea: “Save the poor wretches from drowning at the hands of the evil people smugglers.”
Last week the stalwarts of the Labor left lined up to recant: they had been wrong to resist off-shore processing, but now they saw the error of their ways and would vote for a course that only a couple of weeks ago had been utter anathema. The remnants of the Liberal moderates, those who had stood up against John Howard’s original Pacific solution, actually contemplated voting with Labor to put in place a regime potentially tougher and nastier than anything Howard had proposed.
And amongst this turmoil was Tony Abbott, incredibly occupying the high moral ground, posing as the last defender of the United Nations Human Rights Convention against the barbarians who would tear it to pieces. There has seldom been a more astonishing transformation.
But unfortunately, like most such transformations, it was the stuff not of reality but of a fairy tale. It is true enough that the Labor Government has succumbed, although it actually did so a long time ago, when Julia Gillard defied Kevin Rudd and lurched to the right on the pretext of fixing the asylum seeker issue for good. Having failed with East Timor, she fell back on the Malaysian solution, which was rightly torpedoed by the High Court and then rejected by Abbott, who did so to gain political advantage.
His purported stance – that he would never, ever, send asylum seekers to any country which had not signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees – is simply preposterous; as a member of Howard’s government he enthusiastically sent thousands to Nauru long before that country signed anything, and his current policy involves returning boats to Indonesia, which still hasn’t, and won’t, sign the convention either.
And he intends to re-introduce temporary protection visas (TPVs), which clearly violate the provisions of the convention which govern freedom to travel. And of course the convention derives from international law, which rules out off-shore processing altogether. If Abbott is really so keen on becoming the United Nations’ champion, he will immediately start voting with the Greens, who may be, as their opponents sneer, impotent, but are still the only members of our parliament whose position has remained consistent throughout this whole shemozzle.
But of course, that’s not the point: the imperative is, as it has always been, to Stop The Boats. And to do that, all we need to do is go back to the policies of the Howard years, because they worked. This, like all of Abbott’s simplifications, is not entirely true.
…
• Earlier on Tasmanian Times: Paralysis in Parliament; Why the Greens voted against
First published: 2012-07-04 06:10 AM