Editorial: Migrant bashing in parliament
Migrants, she declared before parliament, were "being offered the opportunity to ride on the backs of battlers from the day they arrive".
No, this was not Pauline Hanson, the fish and chip proto-fascist from Oxley. This was the federal minister for social security, Senator Jocelyn Newman, responding to the Senate's rejection of the Howard government's draft legislation to deprive new immigrants the right to the age allowance, maternity allowance, special benefit, child disability allowance and carer pension.
Trying to whip up the anti-immigration sentiment further, Newman claimed that the rejection would cost $400 million over the next four years.
Scapegoating migrants for the economic and social ills of the system, we are reminded, is still high on the Howard government's agenda.
While the Labor opposition blocked these proposals it accepted other discriminatory legislation which will prevent immigrants under the skills provision from claiming unemployment benefits, youth training allowances and sickness benefits for two years. This move extends from six months a discriminatory provision introduced by the previous Labor government.
Immigration minister Philip Ruddock said that the opposition senators were sabotaging his efforts to restore public confidence in the immigration program. That was Labor's excuse for its earlier discriminatory social security legislation.
The Howard government says that its provisions are not inhumane. Refugees and others accepted on special humanitarian grounds will not face the ban and other migrants facing hardship might be able to obtain benefits and repay them to the government later.
The November 30 Sydney Morning Herald editorialised that the government's proposals were "harsh but justifiable": "It is not unreasonable to expect families that sponsor relatives under the family reunion category to take responsibility for them during the period of the immigrants' adjustment to their new life."
This apparently reasonable argument is full of holes. A large proportion of applications for family reunions come from recent refugees, some of whom have been forcibly separated for years from close members of their family.
The government may claim that its proposals won't formally discriminate on racial grounds. But as most recent refugees come from Asia and elsewhere in the Third World the cuts to migrant welfare rights will have a disproportionate impact of certain racial minorities, and indeed the poorest sections of these communities.
The recent attempts by Liberal and Labor politicians to try to distance themselves from Hanson's racist and xenophobic outbursts are being exposed as empty, self-serving rhetoric. Soon the Senate will consider the government's Hindmarsh Island legislation and changes to native title law — proposals that may breach the Racial Discrimination Act.