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Tall ships need taller humanity on boat people

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=15558
http://bit.ly/1b8QNcT

ON LINE opinion, 9 October 2013

The spectacle of the white sails in the sun in Sydney Harbour was majestic. But the only indigenous Australians I saw were busking with their didgeridoo in Circular Quay.

It begged the question: what does this spectacle mean for the original Australians?
Was it an apocalyptic reminder of the First Fleet which offloaded white convicts then declared this their colony? Does the spectacle trigger an inherited phobia of white sails?

As boat after boat arrived on their shores, perhaps their elders saw the disruption, diseases and destruction to their ancient civilisation. Perhaps they dreamt that they could stop these boats and turn them back. Perhaps they contemplated their equivalent to Operation Sovereign Borders. Indeed, a cartoonist could have a field day depicting two tribal elders watching the white sails as one nudges the other declaring: time to activate operation sovereign borders as they dispatch their fleet of canoes.

Perhaps their descendants today shake their heads at our inability to see the irony of the latest wave of boat people phobia: the descendants of the white boat people who trespassed the original sovereign borders are now threatening to tow back any trespassing boats.

But there is another irony with the boat people phobia. Prior to the First Fleet, other boats had trespassed sovereign borders yet they were more welcome. The Makassan boats carried fishermen who sought trepan (sea cucumber) in trade exchanges. Like the current boat people, most came in fishing boats from the Indonesian Archipelago. And many introduced Islam to Australia. There is no evidence that the indigenous people were ever phobic of the spectacle of these Makassan boats.

It is this underlying phobia that is tainting the Coalition government’s Operation Sovereign Borders.

In his first briefing, the rationale declared by Minister for Immigration and Border Protection Scott Morrison was that that this “military-led border security operation” was his government’s “response to stopping the flow of illegal boat arrivals to Australia”. He evoked the relevant numbers that this cost Australia under the previous government: 50,000 people arrived illegally by boat on 800 vessels costing Australian taxpayers more than $9 billion and “sadly led to more than 1100 deaths at sea”.

It is the last conservative statistic that receives the least attention in the Minister’s ensuing “tougher approach”. The policy reeks of aerosol like an insect repellent. The rhetoric reduces the asylum seekers to tax-payer irritants that need a “broad chain of measures …to deter, to disrupt, to prevent”.

The problem is they are people, not insects.

Now imagine the same policy with greater emphasis on the last fatal statistic rather than on tax dollars. Imagine Minister Morrison declared a more humane rationale:

“Australians are proud of their warm hearted nature. We are proud of our hospitable rather than hostile nature. We remember that many of our ancestors took long sea voyages to settle into this great nation without regard to the sovereignty of the original people.

“Our primary concern is not the financial cost to our pockets, but the tragic cost of human lives lost. It is this statistic that must drive our resolve to prevention. Humans who drowned in vain, without names, without faces, without stories, without burials. Together, we must stop the causes of boat people, and stop the lies that predators peddle which give false hope to the desperate and vulnerable.”

His core message should not be that “those coming by boats will not be getting what they came for” but that boarding these fishing boats is suicidal for you and the children who you love more than anything in the world.

This more humane rationale protects Australia’s reputation while challenging the rationale of many asylum seekers who are driven by the love of their children who they desperately wish to save. We know that these families do not throw their children overboard, but the survivor testimonials of those whose children drowned at sea need to be amplified: boarding these boats may be akin to throwing your children overboard.

Ironically, voices of these grieving survivors could be the most powerful deterrent because they appeal to this universal love of their children.

As the white sails eclipse the Sydney Opera House which inspired its design, the navy ships dwarf the surrounding fishing boats. The juxtapositions create a memorable spectacle: our most powerful battle ships which were intended to deter and protect our borders are now being used to wage war on the weakest boats in the world.

It is only when our megaphone message changes to ‘stop the boats because we do care for you and your children’ that our humanity rises higher than the tall ships.

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Don’t turn your back on refugees

http://bit.ly/12WOdkU

Don’t turn your back on refugees
Herald Sun
18 July 2013

“AUSTRALIANS are essentially a warm-hearted, kind people who want to have the continuation of an orderly migration system.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s recent attempt to focus these two lenses of the Australian binoculars on boat people was missing the third lens: a global perspective.

When asked if we could be “more compassionate to the refugees” at a community cabinet meeting in Rockhampton, Rudd should have known that compassion requires a lens from the outside looking in, not the reverse.

On the other side of the world where I was born, my 4 million Lebanese compatriots have accommodated more than 1 million Syrian refugees, and counting.

Ironically, even the 500,000 Palestinians in South Lebanon refugee camps have opened their tents to the Syrian families. To reject fellow humans at their doorstep was deemed unthinkable and heartless.

This lack of perspective was confirmed by World Vision Australia’s Tim Costello, who recently returned from refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan, where he met many host families, who explained: “I tell my children we are still lucky we must accept them.”

When comparing the Middle Eastern perspective with Australia, he concluded that “we are thinking in stats and categories, not looking into faces”.

According to Lebanese UN ambassador Nawaf Salam, “Lebanon will not close its borders. It will not turn back any refugees”, even though one in five residents in this war-scarred country is a Syrian refugee.

In contrast, only about one in 200 residents in our land of plenty is a refugee.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees website provides further factual perspective, with 15.4 million refugees seeking a home in 2012, of which only 16,000 were in Australia.

Lebanon and our island nation are geographically and historically incomparable. Many may also argue that Syria and Lebanon share a border, a language and a culture.

This is akin to arguing that New Zealand shares the same affinity with Australia because of our shared language, Tasman Sea and British colonial history. Would Australia have taken a million Kiwis if they were rendered refugees due to war, earthquakes or global warming?
Would rejecting them be unthinkable and heartless? Are our refugee binoculars fitted with a cultural lens?

Our true colours are exposed if we see our trans-Tasman neighbours as “different to other refugees because they are the same as us”. They do not count as stats because we see their faces. Yet, ironically, neither of our “mongrel nations” are monocultural or monolingual.

Hence, it is peculiar that Rudd would be “looking at this right now globally in terms of the effectiveness of the Refugees Convention”, as Article 3 stipulates that the provisions shall apply “without discrimination as to race, religion, or country of origin”.

The 1951 Convention, which was initially a response to World War II on the European continent before the 1967 Universal Protocol, makes no reference to refugee applicants by sea or air.

So long as the applicant is “outside the country of his nationality” and has a “well-founded fear of being persecuted”, the refugee definition applies.

If Rudd intends to capitalise on Australia’s seat at the United Nations Security Council, perhaps he should take a more global rather than Australia-centric perspective.

He may propose to redefine Australian territory to exclude the sea, or redefine refugees to exclude seaborne asylum seekers, secondary points of origin (Article 31) and voyages arranged by people smugglers.

But such proposals may amount to a breach of Article 33, the principle of non-refoulement: “No Contracting State shall expel or return a refugee to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened.”

If Australia were to move to modernise the 1951 Convention, it ought to broaden rather than narrow the definition of refugee beyond “fear of persecution”.

Given the growing effects of global warming, there are refugees as a result of sinking islands in the Pacific.

There are internally displaced refugees in the face of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. And of course there are refugees from war-torn countries such as Syria, regardless of their race, religion, regardless of whether they are a majority or minority, and regardless of their economic status.

Only then could the revision of the refugee convention be given a global perspective.