“The election campaign in Australia is being fought with the lives of men, women and children. Some drown, others are banished without hope to malarial camps. Children are incarcerated behind razor wire in conditions described as “a huge generator of mental illness”. This barbarism is considered a vote-winner by both the Australian government and opposition. Reminiscent of the closing of borders to Jews in the 1930s, it is smashing the facade of a society advertised as benign and lucky.”
“In 1992 the Labor government of Paul Keating was the first to impose illegal mandatory detention of refugees, including children. Since then, governments have waged a propaganda war on refugees, in alliance with a media dominated by Rupert Murdoch.”
Current prime minister, Kevin “Rudd’s banishment of refugees who come by sea is designed to wrong-foot his opponent: the Coalition leader, Tony Abbott, a Catholic fundamentalist. Labor restored Rudd to the leadership last month because Julia Gillard‘s unpopularity threatened to destroy the party at the polls and, with it, Australia’s Westminster-style club of two major parties with mostly indistinguishable policies.”
“Rudd’s move was nothing new – bashing the vulnerable is said to win votes in Australia, whether they are refugees or Aborigines. His predecessor John Howard bashed both. Shortly before the 2001 election Howard claimed that people on a stricken boat had thrown their children into the sea, and could not possibly be “genuine refugees”. Later it was revealed the “children overboard” story was a fabrication.”
“Two weeks before the next election, in 2007, Howard declared a state of emergency in the Northern Territory and sent the army into impoverished indigenous communities where, his minister Mal Brough claimed, paedophile gangs were abusing children in “unthinkable numbers”. The Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory police and medical specialists who examined 11,000 children found his allegations to be false.”
“As opposition leader at the time, Rudd gave Howard full support. Later, as prime minister, he made an emotional public apology to the tens of thousands of Aboriginal Australians wrenched from the families during the 20th century, known as the stolen generation. Quietly, Rudd refused the victims compensation of any kind. “
“Labor has since allowed the assimiliationist cruelties for which Rudd apologised. In a one-year period to June last year, 13,299 impoverished Aboriginal children were taken from their families, more than in the infamous years of the stolen generation. They include babies seized from birth tables. “We believe another stolen generation is well and truly under way,” Josey Crawshaw, director of a respected Darwin-based child support organisation, told me. “They are plucked from their communities often without explanation or any plan to return them, and are given to whites. This is social engineering in its most radical sense. It’s horrific.””
Read more: Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ policy is cynical and lawless
2021-week28
