ENRICHING IMMIGRATION

ENRICHING IMMIGRATION

In Australia right now the subject of Immigration policy is, once again, divisive, personal, social and psychological. It's also highly political and cultural and, as much as we may protest “Not so!”, religious bigotry creeps into the mess, too.

It seems impossible to have any kind of discussion about Immigration without a mess of prejudices, self-righteous positions, biased opinions, contradictions and double-standards being dumped on the table. Well, we're human, aren't we? And to delude ourselves that such a cleansed debate is possible is utter nonsense. To illustrate what I mean, in the first draft of this essay my first three words were “In my country....” When I started to re-read what I'd written, I had to stop right there. “Hang on,” I thought, “This isn't “my” country at all. Sure I was born here, as were my father, mother, grandparents and great-grandparents. But before that, we were immigrants from Cornwall and, before that, refugees from southern France. This is not my country at all. Standing alongside Jack Charles in Alex Buzo's play “Macquarie” at the MTC, it was very obvious to the audiences whose country this is, and it was not me, either in character or out of it.

While I'm in the mood for declaring my prejudices, I confess that, when suddenly confronted by someone wearing the full burqua, I feel uneasy. And since it doesn't happen very often and I've not yet been in a positions to converse with such people, that uneasiness persists. But I do get this --- my uneasiness is my creation, and it has nothing to do with whoever is wearing the burqa. Message to self -- "Deal with the author of your unease -- your self, Barrie"

So most discussion about the problem begins with that false assumption that “this is MY country”. Not even tribal aboriginals make that claim. As one guy said to me at Uluru – “We are not the owners of this land; how can we “own” our mother? We come from country, and are the care-takers and beneficiaries of a place called 'home'. Not 'my' home or 'your' home or 'her' home – just 'Home' – Country.” That was an “A-Hah!” moment for me.

Yet all through history we have chosen to turn our backs on inclusiveness and play games of separation, of limiting boundary-ing, of “mine” -v- “yours”, of native and foreign, of possession and dispossession, of dominance and subservience. In this country we have even come here as foreigners, taken over from the natives, and turned the tables, making ourselves into the "owners" and all others, including the original inhabitants, into aliens.

Why do we do that to each other? We have a finite amount of habitable space on this orb, so we go all out to reduce that by turning vast tracts of it into desert, and at the same time we engage in turf wars over what little is left in the name of “protecting our borders or interests”. What a mingy, miserable way to live!!

Chauvinism is not working, on any level. We have to somehow throw out the power-cliques that promote divisiveness. Between ourselves – real people – we are challenged right now to work out a more creative way of getting along. Hey, in a context of "Topdogs -v- Underdogs" the present system of “I'm here now and you can't be here in my space” is one way of getting along, but it is fast becoming evident to anyone with an ounce of awareness that this old, tribal thing that reportedly started at the Tower of Babel, has long since passed it use-by date. It isn't working, and we can't afford it any longer.

It is my view that immigration enriches Australia: culturally, economically, and spiritually. But one doesn't have to be a Rhodes Scholar to realise that we've gone horribly wrong somewhere, and that our current strategies are, to put it mildly, a dysfunctional mess of incompetence from 2 generations of politicians and bureaucrats who haven't a clue what they're doing, so have been quite content to generate and take advantage of ignorance and confusion and use “Immigration” as a cover for cruel, divisive and highly suspect hidden power-agendas.

When you hear the word “immigrant”, what conjures up in your mind?

Is your first reaction an image coming to mind of some person or group of people who in some way are “not-like-me”?

Is it a contentious debate over immigration policy reform?

Is it the memory of groups of strange people in strange dress wandering your neighbourhood or sitting on your tram, bus or train like aliens on the wrong planet?

Is it a thought about Boat People -v- Us?

Let's take a step or two back for a moment. Why do immigrants generally come to Australia? To escape persecution, war and famine, to get post-graduate training, to enter the work force in areas where we have trouble filling positions locally, and to create a better future for themselves and their children? Some immigrants have made seminal contributions in academia, the arts, small and large business, entrepreneurship, innovation and in groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Others have lived more ordinary lives of work, play, bringing up a family and contributing to their neighbourhood and social groupings, and minding their own business – a bit like you and me.

Here's a fact that most people are not aware of -- nearly one of every four of Australia's population of more than 22 million people was born overseas. Many, many more are the child of parents who came from abroad. And almost as soon as immigrants set foot on this soil, we expect them to regard Australia as “my country”. How unrealistic is that? Especially as we, personally, do so little to make them feel “at home”.

Here's a strange paradox, though –

Australia is predominantly a country of immigrants, but the Australian identity isn't an immigrant identity.

These two observations contradict each other. They don't sit comfortably together. They don't make any sense. Many of the thorny issues involved in immigration reform get stuck because we just don't own up to this reality, and the significance of it.

Another consequence of failing to recognise the paradox is that one kind of migrant (arriving long ago) seems to be more “Australian” than the other kind of migrant (arriving recently). And in our eyes a migrant's country of origin automatically makes him/her more or less “Australian than others – e.g. Ten-pound Poms are regarded as “more Aussie” than immigrants from mainland Europe, the Middle East or the Asian continent and archipelago. Even Pacific Islanders and Kiwis get a better reception than Sudanese – and if you're an indigenous native not wearing a suit and tie, regardless of your nation or language group, you're at the bottom of the acceptance scale, sitting even lower than someone in a burqua.

Wherever you come from, there is very real social and cultural pressure to forget your old identity and assimilate quickly. Yet even if you succeed at this, the amnesia that has been forced on each immigrant has its price in loneliness and anxiety over actually belonging to no country at all.

It seems to me that all immigrants have gone through, and still endure, the process of compulsory amnesia while making the transition to becoming "real" Australians – an undefined process that drags on long after they've made their hard-won Citizenship Vows. I have no idea how they're supposed to know when they've finally made it into The Club – I was born here so my unswerving Aussie-ness is assumed. Yes, I know the citizenship ceremony is supposed to mark that transition for those who were born elsewhere, but that ceremony is essentially a legal requirement for the immigrant, a chance for the local mayor to dress up in ridiculous costume and have pictures taken, and for eveyone to stand around politely sipping cups of tepid tea? (What if, one day we had instead a corroboree and passed around witchetty grubs and smoke goanna?) 

If anything, the present charade reinforces in its participants the nagging feeling of strangeness. How can any migrant feel anything but alienated from Australia when we, the club life-members can't even agree about what “being Australian” means? I suggest that, just as a fish doesn't know water until it's out of it, an immigrant has a far sharper and more deeply etched perception of what he's just given up than he has of what on earth he's come to. And all the correctly answered questions in the world about Don Bradman and Phar Lap are not going to make him suddenly feel right at home.

I know this, too, from personal experience. I never really knew what it felt like for me to be Australian until I left and migrated to Thailand. Then it hit me like a bolt of lightning. Suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. I remembered my childhood.......

Out of a farm in central Victoria, where I had no prior experience of immigrants (or aborigines for that matter), I was suddenly thrust at 6 years of age into Albury, a seething cauldron of “new Australians” escaping for the day, or longer, from the huge Bonegilla Migrant Camp – then a small city in its own right on the shore of Lake Hume. In the schoolyard I picked up on the prevailing zeitgeist of guilty until proven innocent-- that every “Balt” was a (politely) tolerated alien until he/she proved him/her self to be “one of us”. I never did know what they actually had to do to cross that Rubicon, and I still don't. It hasn't changed. My heart sinks every night when hapless perpetrators of major crime on the news, and minor misdemeanours on shows like “Highway Patrol” and “The Force” turn out to fit the stereotypes of drunken aboriginals, shifty Asians or angry Muslim males who are giving a finger to the country that has given them asylum. Intended or not, there's an element of “See, we were right about these people” behind the popularity of these shows. Reinforcing racial stereotyping.

I'm confused and dreadfully saddened by the barrage of snide emails and FB messages I get sent to me by acquaintances whom I know to be otherwise nice people, about how much welfare so-called illegal boat people get in comparison to “our own” citizens, and how pissed off I should be that “refugees get more than Aussie ex-servicemen” – claims all made without a shred of supporting evidence. Some of the bullshit flying on social media is mind-bogglingly moronic, myopic and utterly bewildering. And those who spew it out, presumably, vote! That scares me. Really.

How is it possible to come to so much mindless hatred of someone whose name we don't even know? I cannot begin to engage with this – there's no common ground for me to begin meeting them on. This is at the root of much of my current pall of helpless despair.

But, then, prejudices about refugees being automatically “illegals”, and dangerous radicals and freeloaders at that, aren't going to change simply by airing the facts. This is where I do start to find common ground with the knuckle-draggers. Each and every one of us would rather be right about our prejudices than be bothered by facts. This is a basic characteristic of every human ego. If it comes down to a choice – fact or the feeling of “being right”, fact will be the casualty. And to the redneck mind, “guilty until proven innocent” holds too much sway even if you arrived 'legally', especially as there's no agreement as to where the line for “proven innocent” is. My experience with blockheads is that they will die before they change their minds. I used to be like that – I know what it feels like; it feels Right!

Now that I've transformed somewhat, I change my mind more often than my Depends, and I'm treated with the utmost suspicion for it. People feel very threatened by, and hostile to someone with a flexible mind – “He's unreliable”, which is code for “I cannot predict which way he'll vote – he insists on taking things on a case-by case basis.” It's this pandemic insistence that others should be able to file you away permanently into a category that enables political parties to wield so much power. “The donkey vote” is alive and mandatory. I think it may have its roots in a rather sick need to belong, coupled with an abject fear of standing alone and putting you arse on the line.

Back to Immigration “policies” – For a migrant to be really successful at turning into an amnesiac Aussie, the best tactic is to be born the child of immigrants. At least you can rebel against them in your teens, and maybe even join ISIL or Al Quaeeda, for the same reasons that rebellious Christians of my era either joined pentecostal religions, or headed for Nimbin a grew dope. It's disgusting, isn't it, that in a land nearly totally comprised of non-indigenous aliens, your parents sold out on their heritage and worked so hard to dilute their foreign roots until they forgot their existence --- almost..

Assimilation, as unconsciously defined by Australians, is an ambivalent, happy/sad, win/lose affair. Oh yes, we have politicans like Malcolm Turnbull intoning how we are “the most successful multi-cultural nation in the world”, What he really means is that, during civic ceremonies and Australia Day or Anzac parades, national groups can leap and dance around in their colourful costumes and bang, pluck or blow on their weird exotic instruments with a less-than-even chance that the rest of us will suddenly turn feral and kill them. At such times we self-righteously pat ourselves on the back at how gregarious we are, but we won't walk the streets of Lakemba after nightfall. Instead we go home and “Share” emails about how “we should look after our soldiers before we spend a cent on refugees”, or “share if you agree that the burqua should be banned”. Every time I hear a politician intone “I am, you are, we are all Australian”, a voice in my head whispers “Remember Cronulla?” And in Adelaide the nightly news carries stories of drive-by attacks on suburban homes, and the witnesses interviewed are rarely fair, blue-eyed Arians. But maybe this is just an Adelaide thing. Maybe these things don't happen in Western Sydney, Blacktown, Woollahra, Mosman, Logan, Marangaroo (WA), or Thomastown. Contrary to the popular self-image we're force-fed by those who have something to gain by it, scratch an Aussie deep enough and you'll find a fascist prick. Look at Morrison and Dutton for Chrissake! Look at Abbott and Turnbull, too, because they're writing the storylines then hiding behind the aforesaid expendable pawns.

It could hardly be otherwise. At the present moment, during one of Australia’s periodic waves of politician-induced hostility toward immigrants, most “foreign-looking” people are suspect outsiders, and treated by us socially in the same way as our bodies treat invading microbes – 1) identify as a threat to survival, 2) isolate and 3) neutralise. I have understanding of both sides of this – I was happy to join in bullying and teasing of the “krauts” and “balts” at school; then just 12-13 years a go I experienced for a while being an immigrant – in Thailand. Lovely country, beautiful, gentle people, but they don't like foreigners – with some very understandable reasons. In Thailand, where rudeness is regarded as low-class, foreigners are charmingly tolerated as tourists – just – but not as citizens. They have a derogatory word for us = farang. It hit me hard to realise one day that, wherever I go in Australia, I can create a niche for myself with my name on it. But not in Thailand. Not possible. I now know a little of how it feels to be “foreign”. But that was in a gentle country like Thailand. In Australia you could lose your life for it. And the pressure-cooker is still on the boil – the ultra right-wing are seeing to that.

If I remember rightly, it was maybe a little better here, back in the 40s, 50s and 60s for immigrants when we at least called them more tolerantly “new Australians”. But in recent years, the animus of toxic tribalism has ramped up and no-one sees the double irony. Those casting "illegal" aspersions at would-be immigrants must first persuade the population to forget that they themselves came from immigrant stock. Those accused of being "illegal" (without charge or trial) must work as hard as possible to agree with us. Their only defense is to either forget what they are and where they came from, as fast as possible, or by getting uppity and demanding special rights – a choice that almost guarantees you will be ostracised. Look at the hysteria starting to erupt around, for example, halal certification. When rational discussion and facts further frustrate a redneck, he'llretreat behind a volley of "If they don't like it here, make them go back where they came from". 

Oh, there are some jobs and professions where we are so bereft of capable and willing workers that “foreigners” are allowed – sort of..... In country community hospitals, for example, prospective patients and administrators, anxious about staffing, make attractive offers to foreign doctors. When they arrive here, the jobs exist, as promised, but the welcome is a push/pull affair. They relieve the pressure of gaps in medical service delivery, but Australian-born doctors remain deeply suspicious of anyone with foreign training. A lot of immigrant doctors actually have to re-qualify -- ie. "do things our way" -- before they can practice here. That includes those trained and practised in China. Am I the only one who sees the arrogant absurdity of that?

Psychological survival for immigrants means relying on the time-honoured and utterly understandable mechanism of the immigrant community, coalescing into a cultural enclave. The Greeks live in one area, Italians in another, Sudanis, Muslims – all tending to gather tribally in a kind of voluntary ghetto. Enclaves are perceived by dinkum Aussies as a threat to their safety. These enclaves have traditionally developed in the cheaper, poorer, working-class inner-city suburbs, establishing house decoration styles, ethnic food shops and cafes, social clubs and places of worship. Eventually the acquired exotic flavour of those suburbs and their proximity to the CBD caused them to become trendy and sought after by up-market renovator/buyers, who economically squeezed the still-struggling emigrants further out to fringe and industrial suburbs. The luckier, smarter ones stayed, and became more prosperous. With prosperity came backyard barbecues, scotch whiskey, and husbands bragging about their first Mercedes. Willed amnesia became more fun. They were fortunate. Their choice to assimilate wasn’t made under hostile scrutiny, unlike the fate of today’s poor Asian, African and Middle Eastern Australians or religiously conservative Muslims.

Now, we have a situation in which mid-20^th century refugees are resentful of the money being spent on today's refugees. And they have a point when they say – and I quote –

Nik Ziogopoulos
I emigrated to Australia over 60 years ago – On the ship there were Poms, Italians, Germans, Yugoslavs, Poles, Ukes (Ukrainians), Balts (from around the Baltic) and Greeks. (Note – All European people!!) all looking forward to starting a new life in Australia. I arrived with 30 quid in my pocket and that’s all I had to my name. Did I put my hand out?? Of course not – I got a job and paid my way just like everyone else who came to this country back then.

Now, it’s my taxes that subsidise these people who think they have Gods given right (read Allah) to come here and criticise those of us who have worked for the country we now call home.

If I didn’t like what I saw when I got here I would have gone home – they have the same option. 

Nik has a point, but the times have changed and we're looking for some way to balance our need to be humane to strangers with our need to be fair to each other. And Australia is a little more prosperous now than we were then, and we can actually afford to do better than 40-50 years ago.

The darkest suspicion being aimed at current immigrants is our inbred doubt about their desire to become “us”, because we take remaining “themselves” as an insult and a threat to us. Why did they come here if they don't like it so much? If post-war immigrants didn't like it here, they went back home, only to find out the hard way that their memories of home had gotten falsely rosy, and Australia hadn't been such a bad place after all. And most of them could not get back to Australia again. In general, I find current-day arrivals extremely committed to making it work, and complaints that any temporary social assistance they receive as taking something away from "us" as hideously ignorant and twisted.

Yet, according to Facebook rants, migrants, although not wanted and viewed with suspicion, are supposed to fall to their knees and lick our thongs in gratitude for our "tolerance" After 9/11, many already astonished observers were utterly dumbfounded that the band of terrorists who crashed the planes had not been seduced and normalised by their stay in America. Embedded for months in Florida, Las Vegas, and elsewhere, the terrorists partook of American luxuries, but they hadn’t been seduced. How dare they!!??The locals' hatred only deepened. Now there seems to be a pervasive feeling, both in America and here in “the lucky country”, that other immigrants are following the same path. We put ourselves out for them, and this is how they thank us???? Understandable, and stupid.

Sikhs wearing their traditional turbans look like Muslims to many Australians, whose guiding rule has been, for as long as I've been alive, “they all look alike.” A harsher spotlight shines on immigrant Muslims who want to retain not just their costumes but their own mosques and private schools, the madrassas, where strong emphasis is placed on the Quran. In essence their desire to retain a strong, unifying religious identity and aloofness from Australian culture is the same as that of ultra-orthodox Jewish groups and Hasids in areas like Double Bay in Sydney and Caulfield in Melbourne. Tolerated -- sort of.......

The political difference, however, couldn’t be greater. Overt anti-semitism and Islamophobia are not confined only to the cretinous corners of the blogosphere. Historically a stigma was attached by turns to the Irish, Polish, Armenians, Italians, poor Russian Jews and Vietnamese as their waves of settlement arrived. Part of the trouble now is that political correctness has seen to it that we're not allowed to relieve the natural tensions of adjusting by joking about it any more. The very quality that Aussies are best at in helping us adjust to this alien island, we're not allowed to do any more. Why? Because they might be offended? Bullshit! I went to a dinner in Caulfield one night and rolled out 5 hours later with sore sides from laughing at the best Jew-jokes I've ever heard - before or since. What's offensive is the latent guilt that underlies a Jew joke told by a gentile, or a nigger joke told by a whitey. Guilt.

The panic is setting in among white anglos and their converts because a tipping point has been reached, the so-called demographic time bomb. There seem to be more of "them" than there are of "us". Now our willingness to let more immigrants come here, while we remain unwilling to acknowledge and change our deep suspicion of anyone or anything “foreign”, has almost guaranteed that the Cronulla Riots may have been just the beginning. As Bertholt Brecht might say if he were still alive and living in Sydney, “The bitch that gave birth to Cronulla is still on heat.”

If it's not already so where you live, there will soon be more of “them” than “us”in a shpping mall near you. The influx of immigrants, combined with their higher birth rates compared to the white population, and a preponderance of young people in their midst, has skewed immigrant populations as never before. Neo-Nazi “they're here to take over our world” scaremongering has ramped up unbelievably in the last 5 years, creating anxiety and violence in the suburbs, without much soul-searching. Independent thinking has been replaced by trite slogans. Adding to the paranoia of failure, many children of the foreign-born are also succeeding in their aspirations. They are outpacing both their parents and their white anglo age mates in university degrees, household income, and home ownership. They're doing well, and outstripping an increasingly scared and resentful underclass of low-aspiration, low-achieving bozos. Malaysia has had the same problem for decades – immigrant Chinese and Indians economically outstripping native Austronesian Bumiputras.

Back here in Australia, the last generation of Asian migrants quickly shed the anxiety of assimilation – at least we thought so – but this new generation’s anxiety, like Malaysia, has shifted from feeling inferior to feeling too successful. From our side of the fence, not only have these people got in here, they're now beating us at our own games! Resentment, distrust and fear on both sides of the fences led to the bloody anti-Chinese riots across Malaysia in 1969. I smell a stench of the same thing brewing over here.

Some Australian universities are having to confront suspicions about an Asian quota, so that “real” Australians aren't muscled out. Such a quota probably doesn’t exist, but the most prestigious colleges have embraced an influx of well-cashed, eager Asian students. That in itself has become a cause for unexamined suspicion and resentment. 

Asian children and their parents are being characterised as manic in their in ambition to take over the lecture halls and study-rooms of our tertiary institutions. The brilliant home-schooled Asian kid has become as much of a stereotype as the inbred Collingwood supporter.

Are “they” taking over? Or will this new slice of “us” turn out to be the most useful immigrants ever, taking care of an aging population, doing the jobs that no one else wants, competing in technology with other countries, lowering the age of our workforce compared with Europe, Russia, and Japan, and in the end swinging national politics in the direction of social evenness and justice? We can only surmise. But I was poignantly affected by a recent charity event I attended where young Indian-Australians were asked to help the poor in India. They gave lavishly, with tears in their eyes, and more than one said, “I never had any idea that things were like that over there.” Our splendid isolation has become their amnesia, except that they have nothing left that's unforgotten. White Australians have plenty to forget, and it ain't good.

Lest we forget, and lose our humanity. But I do despair when I read my morning emails, from friends who aren't really rednecks in any sense of the word, but they are anxious, and they're not getting any leadership from grubby little politicians who are more intent on doing whatever it takes to selfushly manipulate office/status. They piously intone “it's a complicated issue” as if simplicity is the only criterion under which they are expected to deal effectively with our national challenges. How dare people who are reaping the obscenely lavish incomes and perks that are afforded these parasites on the body politic complain that “it's all too hard” It actually isn't, as I'm about to prove shortly, and they are aggressively ignoring at least one alternative vision of how to solve the current Offshore Detention crisis and refusing point-blank to apply it to our betterment and growth as a nation of human beings.

So I now submit what I understand from Julian Burnside's offer to the debate – “An Alternative to Offshore Detention”. His offer, by the way, has been rejected by the major parties who simply refuse to consider it, and national press that has forgotten it already.

I hope this is not too late. Here's my reminder call. Next it's up to you.....

THE CURRENT SITUATION

The present situation faced by asylum seekers who try to get here by boat is cruel, by the deliberate intention of those who perpetrate and those who support it, actively or passively. And those responsible for legitimising the cruelty are proud of it. There seems to be a race to the bottom between the major parties in their promises to mistreat a particular group of human beings. They can do this because they have deliberately conspired together to create a web of secrecy and a  social climate in this country that accepts what's being done as entertaining. Suffering with pictures always goes well on the 6 o'clock news. As long as its not “us”.

The current strategy is also hideously expensive. For a country that this government claims is having trouble making ends meet, this version of private school bullying and hazing is costing us between $4 billion and $5 billion a year. And the prefects think this is money well spent.

The rationale is that if we treat asylum seekers badly enough, they won't come. The rationale is justified by describing them at every opportunity as “illegals”, thereby legitimising anything we do to them. And the perpetrators say it often enough for enough bozos to believe "it must be true".

Let me spell this out for you – it is not an offence against any law – Australian or international – to come here and ask for protection. And shame on the Labor party, shame on press journalists, and shame on you for not calling them on it every time they spray it.

Furthermore it is appalling that, in a shower of pious righteousness, ministers and spokespersons for our government profess “concern” for asylum seekers drowning in their attempts to find safe haven. Self-righteous “I know what is best for you” is far too easy for people who have never known what it is to be so desperate that they will risk drowning rather than stay one minute longer where the world has left them. (That includes you and me, by the way, because we are party to the underfunding of the UNHCR, the organisation that could stop most of this before it becomes the problem that it has become). In the meantime we continue to inhumanely punish those who get through the wall for not drowning, and we tow the rest back to “go die elsewhere” of other causes – out of sight and out of mind.

Well, you may be able to salve your conscience right now, but you will face your day of reckoning – that is cosmic law. And sitting on your hands and averting you gaze while this goes on is no defence. There's one rule for being allowed to come on this human journey – “Put your arse on the line” Failure to do so will score you an unequivocal “F”, and sooner than you imagine you will find yourself desperate and looking for a helping hand. As you are doing to others, you will be done to. I didn't make that up, by the way; it is a ruthless rule of reality that applies as inexorably to me as it does to you. And life, unlike Monopoly, does not come with Get Out of Jail Free passes. Not even if you live in Point Piper.

Contrary to what those fools on the hill tell you, there are solutions – solutions that are humane and in which everybody wins. And I am so grateful to Julian Burnside QC for pointing out the following flashes of the fucking obvious.............

Alternative “A”:

AN AUSTRALIAN SOLUTION (Option .1.)

• All offshore "processing centres" to be closed, remediated and security contractors sent packing. All boat arrivals to be detained initially in existing onshore Australian facilities, but for a maximum period of one month to allow preliminary health an security checks. That 1-month detention could be subject to extension, but only if a court is persuaded that a particular person should be detained for longer.
• After those initial checks, boat arrivals to be released into the community on an Interim Visa, subject to the following conditions –
  • That each person be required to live in a specified rural town or regional city
  • Each person required to report regularly to the local Centrelink or Post Office, to make sure they remain available for the remainder of the process;
  • They are allowed to work at rates of pay not less than those applicable to Australian citizens;
  • They are entitled to Centrelink and Medicare benefits. Yes, and for the same reasons that we have those benefits for Australians – to feed the economy.

The benefits of such a system would be:

• It avoids the short- and long-term harm that the present non-system inflicts upon refugees held in long-term detention;
• Any government benefits that are paid to the applicants would be spent on accommodation, food and clothing in the country town. There are plenty of rural towns across the length and breadth of Australia that would welcome an increase in their population and a boost to their local economy. According to the NFF, there are currently more than 90,000 unfilled jobs in rural areas. It is highly likely that most male asylum seekers would actively look for work, and find it.

Burnsnide adds that, even if every one of the boat people stayed on Centrelink benefits for the entire time it took to decide on their refugee status, it would cost our budget only about $500,000 per year, a saving of billions of dollars on the present offshore detention regime. And we'd be doing good, rather than harm.

AN AUSTRALIAN SOLUTION (Option .2.)

Same as above, except that the asylum seekers be required to reside in either Tasmanian or South Australian country centres, for the duration of their Interim Visa.

No, I'm not joking. These states really need a shot in the arm. As a sweetener, and to overcome any lingering resistance, the Federal Government would pay, say, one billion dollars a year to the chosen State Government to help fund the necessary social adjustments. It would be a great and needed boost the state's economy, and Australia would still be billions of dollars better off. Imagine if Western Australia and Queensland objected and put in a pitch to be the state to accept these refugees. That would mark a complete turnaround in social attitude!

Alternative “B”:

GENUINE REGIONAL PROCESSING

The main problem with offshore processing at the moment is that Australian officials are dragging their feet, and those submitting themselves to the horrendously under-resourced UNHCR in Indonesia face a wait of 10 to 20 years before they have any prospect of being resettled. During this time they are not allowed to work, and can't send their kids to school. No wonder they chance their luck with people smugglers.

Julian Burnside suggest that another possibility is to process protection asylum claims while the applicants are still in Indonesia. (Anyone arriving on Australian shores would be safely removed to the UNHCR processing centre in Indonesia, where they can lodge their applicaation for asylum.) When applicants formally apply for consideration, they will be assured that they will be resettled safely within (say) two or three months of their application being approved. Those who are successfully assessed as genuine refugees would be resettled in Australia, or elsewhere, within the agreed time frame and in the order in which they have been accepted as genuine refugees.

The rationale here is that, provided the process is conducted by UNHCR and is demonstrably fair, any incentive to risk getting on a boat would disappear instantly. There's no point to it. Without demand for their services, people smugglers will go back to fishing.

A similar model has worked before. Genuine offshore processing with a swift resettlement for those who were found to be genuine was the means by which the Fraser government successfully brought 80,000 Vietnamese boat people to Australia in the 1970's. In addition, other countries also resettled refugees processed in this way. If we could get some similar agreements from, say, New Zealand, Canada and/or Malaysia, it's likely that Australians would be even more receptive to taking part in a co-operative process.

This Offshore Solution does have a couple of problems that would have to be addressed in the setting up. The present situation which forces desperate people into risking a dangerous boat trip virtually guarantees that most of those launching themselves at us are going to be assessed as genuine. Otherwise, who would risk it? Over the past 15 years around 90% of boat people have been assessed, by Australia as genuinely qualifying for asylum. If the end-point of a dangerous boat trip is removed, it's almost certain that the number of non-genuine applicants will rise. That would pose a problem for Indonesia, and we would have to come to some arrangement with Djakarta and help them financially to deal with those who don't qualify. But since our present bills amount to around $5 billion, we'd still come out far better off financially than now.

There is another possible problem. There have been embarrassing moments recently in our relations with Indonesia, and they may not be receptive to this idea. But their reluctance may be softened if we negotiate a similar deal with Malaysia.

I am bound, I fear, to hear “It won't work”. If that is your stance, then you will be right. But in these forms, none of them has been tried yet, so you can be as right as you like but you'll never be sure.

I'm not sure that it will work, either, but I'd love us to give it a go. Each of these solutions is effective, humane and far less expensive than the jackbooted situation we've cornered ourselves into right now. The reason these alternatives haven't been given serious consideration by the “parties' is because they can't get out of this mess they've created without “losing face”. That being so, it's time we changed those who represent us. Their childishness is running us into economic and moral bankruptcy.

I think the process of seeing how it “might” work, and loosening up to allow it's possibilities to work out will be very, very good for us, both as individuals and together as a tribal group.

More than this, these solutions reflect the essentially decent side of the Australian character, something that's turned decidedly nasty over the last 15 years, thanks to the influence of some very nasty people making policy decisions on our behalf. For this, we must take responsibility, get rid of those people, make amends and remedy the social and personal consequences of our cruelty.

The sooner we get started, the better.