Australia is often a good place to observe the workings of political agency. There is a blatancy here, in the connection between cause and consequence, and the alacrity with which sectional interests exploit procedures, that is both appalling and, in a perverse kind of a way, simultaneously appealing. Political parties and business lobbies seem to feel little compulsion to concealment: there is not the sense of layers of subtlety having to be peeled back to reveal what is \u2018really going on\u2019, that one might encounter in Washington, say, or London, Paris, Delhi or Jakarta.<\/p>\n
So, a review of defence spending, ordered by the government in Canberra, is manipulated by the simple expedient of putting an arms dealer in charge of public hearings and getting former arms dealers to serve as advisers. An \u2018intervention\u2019 in response to an inquiry revealing the extent of child abuse in Aboriginal communities turns out to require a(nother) land grab to fund the extension of decent public services to some of Australia\u2019s poorest citizens. Someone remarked this week on the habit of mining companies, faced with planning appeals by people whose villages are earmarked for excavation, to talk about what they will do \u201cwhen\u201d they win \u2013 not \u201cif\u201d (they are never disappointed).<\/p>\n
Media, too, often present as an \u2018open book\u2019. The public broadcaster, the ABC, adopted a statement of \u2018news values\u2019 to exempt it from having to carry out its own obligations to balanced coverage, to make sure nothing ruffles the cosy political consensus on ever-increasing \u2018defence\u2019 spending (in spite of sceptical public opinion). James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, scions of Australia\u2019s two best-known business families, are treated as celebrities despite their obvious lack of charisma or notable achievement. And lately, Australians have been misled \u2013 again \u2013 into believing their way of life is under threat from the arrival of \u2018boat people\u2019 seeking asylum.<\/p>\n
The total number of refugees to reach our shores by sea, over a 20-year period, is about 35,000; which means it would take nearly a century before they attained sufficient numbers to fill the country\u2019s premier sports stadium, the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground. Initially they came from Vietnam, but, as in every other developed country, the geographical spread of Australia\u2019s asylum claims offers a record of the conflicts and crises of our times. Two of the biggest groups in the last few years have come from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n
This is an election year, and the Labor government of Kevin Rudd is, sad to say, showing no semblance of leadership over the issue. Instead, it is it is trimming its sails in the face of a chill blast from the Liberal opposition, who have presented asylum-seekers as a threat to the \u2018security of Australia\u2019s borders\u2019: an opportunity to set the political agenda in their favour. Like other notionally social democratic parties around the world, Labor is discovering the truism that it is impossible to \u2018triangulate\u2019 on questions relating to immigration \u2013 imbricated, as they invariably are, with race \u2013 because there is no scruple, and no limit to how far an avowed party of the right will go in exploiting them. The ground will simply carry on shifting rightwards, becoming ever more uncomfortable in the process.<\/p>\n
One recent gambit by ministers has been to declare that no asylum claims by people from Afghanistan or Sri Lanka will be processed for a period of months, while the UN High Commission for Refugees reviews its assessment of the two countries. The implication is that conditions there are improving. Immediately before this announcement, Murdoch\u2019s Australian<\/em> newspaper \u2013 which has led the way, in \u2018serious\u2019 media, in alarmist coverage over \u2018waves\u2019 of refugee arrivals \u2013 ran a column by an obscure \u2018expert\u2019, claiming that Sri Lanka should now be regarded as safe, and that Australia therefore had no need to accept any more Tamils seeking asylum.<\/p>\n We did at least manage to get the paper to print a letter in rebuttal, which can be found here:<\/p>\n