BY SARAH STEPHEN
The April 2 Australian carried an opinion piece — "Refugee hard line is right" — written by Labor Party member and self-described "left-wing activist" Ivan Molloy. Molloy called for "reasoned criticism from a human rights perspective" of the refugee issue, rather than "emotive knee-jerk opposition". He declared his support for the federal government's refugee policies, considering the "wider refugee crisis".
Molloy, along with other "border protection" advocates, considers the movement of refugees to be a crisis for the rich countries rather than for the refugees themselves. The main issue, writes Malloy, is "the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Australian state".
It is sheer lunacy to argue that poor, tortured and persecuted refugees fleeing from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan are a threat to Australia's borders. "Border protection" is usually associated with the threat of invading armies, yet Molloy bandies these terms around as if all atrocities are absolved if performed in defence of "territorial integrity".
Refugees make up just 0.3% of the world's population. Only a small proportion are desperate enough, and are able to pool their meagre resources with others, to be able to flee to another country. This is not a flood as Malloy and others who whip up hysteria about hordes of "foreigners" descending on our shores would have us believe.
Federal Labor opposition leader Simon Crean, in his Australia Day address, stated that Labor would "get the balance right between protecting our borders and compassion". In other words, a Labor government would stop as many desperate people as it could from getting to Australia. Those that do manage to make the journey would get slightly better treatment than is being meted out by the Coalition government.
You cannot "balance" border protection and compassion <197 you either keep asylum seekers out or you don't. If Labor is interested in a "compassionate policy", it should drop the notion of "border protection" once and for all.
Labor has not disagreed with the Coalition government's deployment of the navy against boat people. It has proposed that a coast guard be established to do the job more thoroughly and at less cost.
"With its high standard of living, rule of law and democratic freedoms, Australia offers a valuable safe haven for all refugees, but the nature of this safe haven is essentially linked to our sovereignty and integrity as a nation... To allow [our refugee program] to be violated at will serves to ultimately jeopardise the egalitarian and democratic nature of our society", opined Malloy. He maintains that asylum seekers who arrive on our shores are not refugees, but "illegals" who are certainly not those most in need.
As William Maley describes in his 2002 paper, A Global Refugee Crisis?, "in the guise of helping the 'neediest', [Western bureaucrats] have contentedly sifted through refugee populations looking for English-speaking professionals (preferably with relatives in the resettlement state willing to pay their bills)".
The Australian government has no moral right to impose its ridiculous demand for an "orderly" system of refugee resettlement to disguise its preference for hand-picking refugees offshore.
What Philip Ruddock really means when he says that Australia is interested in "helping those most in need" is that the government wants only those refugees who impose the least economic "burden".
The obsession that Molloy and Crean have with "border protection" and Australia's "territorial integrity" reflects a deep-seeded current within the Labor Party which goes back to the party's foundation at the end of the 19th century. It was not a coincidence that the White Australia Policy was introduced by a Labor government, a party based on privileged white workers.
Trade union leaders and capitalist politicians allied to the emerging labour movement sought to protect those privileges, which arose from a relative shortage of labour in Australia, by maintaining strict immigration controls and preventing non-white residents from acquiring citizenship. Racism, and an irrational fear of immigrants in general, was whipped up to justify such discrimination.
Despite listing his "left" credentials, Molloy's SMH article reflects this deep-seated xenophobic current which is still a central, if more subtle, feature of the Labor Party.
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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