Back in November 2006 Kevin Rudd wrote an article for The Monthly titled Howard’s Brutopia, in which he contrasted his own “social democratic” values with Howard’s “neo-liberalism” by saying that “neo-liberals reject the legitimacy of altruistic values that go beyond direct self-interest”.
In the final paragraph of the essay he related this contrast to the issue of refugees. “It is no coincidence”, he wrote, “that when the (Howard) government’s entirely self-regarding asylum-seeker legislation was recently blocked by the parliament, it was blocked by a coalition of political forces, including a conservative Christian from the National Party, long-time social Liberals, several community Independents, Democrats, Greens and the Labor Party’s full complement. Given that John Howard’s neoliberal experiment has now reached the extreme, the time has come to restore the balance in Australian politics”.
Fast forward to July 2013 and it’s as if the “legitimacy of altruistic values that go beyond direct self-interest” has been washed out of Rudd’s political philosophy like Pontius Pilate in whole-body wash mode. Even the right-wing Murdoch stable of correspondents are describing the New Guinea asylum-seeker deal as “brutal” and “cruel”, even while they obviously support it.
One thing is clear. The stigma of callous inhumanity which has clung to the Howard-Ruddock tag team since Tampa has now been relegated to more benign levels of political expediency by Rudd’s lurch beyond brutopia.
What appears clear is that in the period of time Rudd has spent on the backbench since Julia Gillard told him and all of us that his “good government had lost its way”, he has taken it to heart – literally – and decided to completely revamp his whole political belief system. Maybe he decided to carefully read Hayek again, and maybe Machiavelli and Hobbes. Who knows. Maybe he’s had a few heart to heart talks with Martin Ferguson about the “classless” relationship between the union political interest and the corporate interest.
Alternatively, the material he wrote explaining his “bedrock political philosophies” in the lead-up to the 2007 election was mere veneer, an opportunistic design for the times, an insincere populist appeal to Australians’ better natures when people were showing a yearning for some humanity and compassion in social policy development – whether in health or education or the work place or in dealing with refugees arriving by boats.
Whatever the case, social democratic values are yesterday’s propaganda, no longer useful.
Will it work? Will it keep the ALP in power?
That is a profoundly interesting question because one key reason for Rudd’s electoral success in 2007 was the hope that the dog-whistling genuflection to base fears and prejudices of the Howard administration would be replaced with something more uplifting and visionary. In fact, the Rudd about-face on asylum policy is most striking in how it rips apart some fundamental assumptions built into Labor values at least since the dismantling of the White Australia policy more than half a century ago. We need to go back to the pre-Whitlam era to see anything remotely similar, and maybe even back to the 1930s.
One of the major reasons that the Whitlam government came to power, and why the Hawke-Keating administrations were in office between 1983 to 1996, was the political alliance between labour and a tertiary-educated liberal urban middle-class, an alliance based on the values of social justice across a range of issues. That alliance became increasingly frayed during the 1990s, but was still significant in the Rudd and Gillard electoral victories in 2007 and 2010 respectively.
There is little doubt that Rudd has now shattered that alliance beyond repair. Maybe it was already in tatters anyway, undermined by factionalism of the worst kind, corruption, unionism without purpose beyond careerism, and most of all, a lack of principled coherence in policy formulation and implementation over the last seven years.
Paradoxically, Rudd’s abandonment of any claim to the moral high ground in relation to refugees signifies a continuation of the Gillard focus on winning back the “Howard battler” seats – especially in NSW. But where Gillard thought that a narrowly-based alliance with right-wing unions, especially the AWU and CFMEU, was important, Rudd’s approach is much more widely-based, embracing a catch-all of opposition to refugees, from Pauline Hanson’s support base to the Coalition’s.
Abbott is no longer the white knight of blast-from-the-past xenophobia, of hairy-chested racism and flag-waving social division. Abbott has been gazumped. Rudd hasn’t spent the last two years on the backbench knitting socks for British babies of the Windsor royal family. He’s been revising his thinking about how to do a reconstituted Menzies, dismal in 1941 but the real comeback kid from 1949 until 1966. He’s been revising his thinking about how to do a replica of Howard’s triple-bypass Lazarus operation, culminating in power without purpose between 1996 and 2007.
Rudd consolidated a thing or two from his time in the wilderness. One thing he really confirmed for himself – if he had any doubts at all – was that populism beats everything in Australian politics.
Populism is gold, especially populism which can be sold as strong leadership and decisiveness. Discard any dissonance with populism and the Australian political world’s your oyster, or so Rudd seems to have concluded with cynical finality. 2007 required a different narrative to 2013. The Kevin 07 who said that “this country is entitled to a greater vision than one which merely aggregates individual greed and self-interest” may have done enough anyway in his earlier time as Prime Minister to show he never meant it.
It’s rather akin to his victory speech after deposing Julia Gillard, where he announced that a revitalised ALP needed to attract altruistic young people to its ranks. How can that be reconciled with the PNG “solution”, just described by the right-wing commentariat as cruel and brutal? Not in any coherent way. It is only possible to be able to say such innately contradictory things together where pure populism is at the heart of all the messages.
This is by no means “a good government that has lost its way”, whether with Gillard or Rudd as Prime Minister. Rudd was certainly correct when he wrote in 2006 that “the time has come to forge a new coalition of political forces across the Australian community”, but it is now clear that what he meant was a strengthening of the worst and most inhumane elements of the “Howard brutopia” under the ALP banner.
Got to zip.
Peter Henning
• ABC: Labor support slips in Newspoll as Rudd surge recedes
• Amnesty, Facebook: Not In Our Name: Human Rights are not optional
• What Amnesty says: Australia passes the parcel and closes the door to desperate boat arrivals
• Radio National Breakfast: A respected expert on international refugee law has told RN Breakfast that Australia doesn’t have an asylum problem, but a political problem, and refugees are paying the price, as James Bourne reports …
The Federal Government has continued to defend its decision to send all asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia to Papua New Guinea. Under the regional agreement, Australia will bear the full cost of the plan—including the cost of genuine refugees being resettled.
Dr James Hathaway, an expert on international refugee law, told RN Breakfast that Kevin Rudd’s announcement on Friday was entirely unprecedented.
‘This plan is without question the most bizarre overreaction I have seen in more than 30 years of working on refugee law,’ said Dr Hathaway. ‘It just makes no sense.’
‘The only mandatory deportation to PNG is going to be so-called boat arrivals. Does the Prime Minister think that every refugee should arrive with a Qantas first class ticket in order to be real?’
Dr Hathaway, a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne, suggested that the deal struck between Australia and Papua New Guinea was in breach of the the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.
‘The convention itself says you can’t penalise refugees for arriving without authorisation,’ he said. ‘There is no visa that Australia or anybody else gives for a person to come and seek asylum.’
‘To take people who are… coming and asking for asylum and dumping them into the hell hole of PNG is in my view both an illegal penalty and a discriminatory penalty, which puts Australia in breach of the convention on two points.’
The crisis Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says is addressed by the deal doesn’t even exist, Dr Hathaway said. Compared to other developed countries, Australia’s intake of 30,000 refugees is ‘a totally average, absolutely manageable number’.
‘What is really striking about this is that Australia, unlike any developed country that I know, has been attracting almost exclusively genuine refugees as boat arrivals,’ Dr Hathaway told RN.
‘It’s the boat people who seem to have attracted his ire. It’s the most extraordinarily bizarre singling out of the group that…ought to be the very group that we should care about the most,’ he said.
‘So Australia does not have an asylum problem, it has a political problem, and refugees are being made to pay the price for Kevin Rudd wanting to appear, I think, more butch that Julia Gillard and more reactionary than Tony Abbott.’
‘The people who are so desperate—who so fear for their loss of life that they’re prepared to put their fate into the hands of smugglers and take a horrible boat journey to survive—are the very ones that Australia seems to want to punish.’
Dr Hathaway suggested that sending genuine refugees to Papua New Guinea was a reckless plan, despite the nation being a signatory to the Refugee Convention.
‘We’re talking about a country that ranks 168th in the world in terms of life expectancy, where more than half the country doesn’t have sanitation or clean water, one in two women in PNG have been raped, homosexuals can to jail for 14 years, this is where we’re going to send people who have done nothing wrong, other than have the courage to say that they don’t want to be persecuted for who they are in the country where they lived.’
The High Court’s 2011 ruling on the Gillard government’s proposed Malaysia Solution stated that an arrangement that doesn’t legally guarantee refugees the right to work, education and access to the courts breached obligations under the UN refugee convention. Despite these rights not being guaranteed by the PNG agreement, Australian Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has said that the arrangement ‘complies with our international obligations under the refugee convention’.
Dr Hathaway disagrees.
‘The word ‘rights’ doesn’t even appear in the agreement that the Prime Minister of Australia signed with the Prime Minister of PNG,’ he said. ‘That’s what makes it illegal.’
‘The government seems to think that its only obligation under the convention is to make sure that somebody at risk of being persecuted doesn’t get sent back to persecution.’
‘That argument is what the government put to the High Court of Australia in the Malaysia case and the High Court quite explicitly rejected that argument.’
Radio National Breakfast, here
A whistleblower who worked at the Manus Island refugee detention centre in Papua New Guinea has spoken out, condemning it as not even fit to ‘serve as a dog kennel’.
A whistleblower who worked at the Manus Island refugee detention centre in Papua New Guinea has spoken out, condemning it as not even fit to “serve as a dog kennel”.
The former Head of Occupational Health and Safety, Rod St George, made a series of disturbing allegations about conditions at the Australian-run centre in an exclusive interview with Dateline on SBS ONE.
“I’ve never seen human beings so destitute, so helpless and so hopeless before,” he told reporter Mark Davis, as he described repeated instances of rape and sexual abuse between asylum seekers with the full knowledge of staff.
“We might separate people in those circumstances on the mainland, but there aren’t any facilities at Manus to do that, so these people who have been assaulted are forced to remain back in the tent,” he said.
“We talk about this as an island that’s 700 kilometres north of Port Moresby… [but] if you knew there were people next door being raped and you said nothing, you’d be complicit.”
St George also described how detainee ‘heavies’ forced other asylum seekers to sew their lips together, and he detailed how one man had an ear drum perforated when he was tortured by other detainees.
And he claimed that acts of self-harm and attempted suicides are occurring “almost daily” among asylum seekers waiting months for their asylum applications to be processed.
“In Australia, the facility couldn’t even serve as a dog kennel. The owners would be jailed,” he told Dateline. “I felt ashamed to be Australian.”
St George resigned from his role after just a month.
The allegations come as the Australian Government announces all asylum seekers arriving by boat will be processed and resettled in Papua New Guinea, with the Manus Island centre to be expanded.
Dateline put the allegations to recently appointed Immigration Minister Tony Burke, who revealed it’s the first time he’d heard the most serious claims.
“I need to hear the very specific allegations, I need to make sure they’re properly investigated,” he told Mark. “If the implementation of different policies needs to be reviewed as a matter of that, then that needs to occur.”
Mr Burke asked to be put in touch with Rod St George to hear further details. Earlier this week arrangements were made for the two men to talk and they are expected to discuss the allegations this evening.
Dateline’s latest revelations follow Mark’s disturbing story two months ago about life at Manus Island, when Australian officials at the detention centre went to great lengths to stop him filming.
Watch Mark’s whistleblower exclusive HERE, and read more on the Dateline website HERE
