Month: October 2009

Being Tough On Refugees Is Pretty Weak

We’re all just like Pavlov’s dogs. Last week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the Pacific Solution a quick polish, rebranded it the Indonesian Solution, and immediately everybody started yelling at Philip Ruddock.

Yep, if it wasn’t clear by now, ideological and partisan divisions over asylum seekers and boat people are deeply entrenched. But here’s the problem. Even from a liberal, libertarian or even conservative perspective, the case for being tough on border control just isn’t that strong.

Immigration is a good thing, for migrants and for the places migrants go. Aren’t people who are willing to risk their lives on boats propelled by motorbike engines to get to a society with social and economic freedom exactly the sort of people we want in Australia? (I can think of a lot of Australians I’d rather kick out.)

The sanest case for strict borders is a paternalistic argument that refugees need to be deterred from making the dangerous journey by boat to Australia. But it’s not convincing. Isn’t the danger of the journey a pretty significant deterrent itself? Refugees risk their lives and permanent separation from their families – a decision normally made under pain of imminent death.

So exactly what are we trying to deter? Refugees aren’t just going to quit being refugees.

It’s not clear whether deterrence even works. Australian refugee volumes correspond to global and regional refugee trends. That this recent surge of refugees is mostly Sri Lankan is because of the war there, not because of the Migration Amendment Bill 2009 (which hasn’t even been passed in Parliament).

But most damningly, deterrence leads to some atrociously illiberal, inhumane policies. Taking deterrence to its absurdly logical conclusion, in 1992 the federal Labor government decided to bill refugees the cost of their detention. Nobody in a liberal democracy should be locked up and charged for the privilege. To its enduring credit, the Rudd Government eliminated this punitive measure in September.

Still, Rudd seems eager to depict his Government as tough on refugees. The idea that we should punish those who do make it to Australia alive, to dissuade others from trying, quickly descends into outright cruelty.

There’s a deeper issue at stake about asylum seekers than just migration levels. Boat people force us to confront the classic opposition between the nation state and the universal rights of the individual.

John Howard’s line – that his government would choose who came to the country and the circumstances in which they came – has become the ultimate expression of state sovereignty and the supremacy of executive government. His doctrine has been implicitly shared by Australian governments for a century.

Governments have treated immigration as a kind of fruit and veg shop, where they can rifle through the available human produce to pick only the ”best” foreign stock. Fifty years ago, it was white migrants. Now it’s skilled migrants – the unskilled are left for other countries.

Obviously we’re a long way from the liberal ideal of global free movement of people to complement global free trade.

Paul Kelly’s book, The March of Patriots, quotes a Howard government official, reflecting on the navy’s policy of taking stranded people to the nearest port, saying ”the maritime industry in Australia [has] essentially a Left attitude” – as if the moral mandate to protect lives above all else was just some silly leftie thing, like peace studies.

But individual liberty stands implacably opposed to the sort of nationalistic state sovereignty which has been the foundation of our immigration and refugee policies. Those who place liberty at the front of their politics should be against harsh border measures, not for them.

According to some, there are 10,000 refugees massing on foreign shores, just waiting for the right moment to sneak across the ocean. Putting aside the dubious evidence for that figure, yes: 10,000 people would be a lot to squeeze into a living room. But the Australian continent is quite large. The settler arrival figures increased by nearly that amount just this year – from 149,000 in 2007-08 to 158,000 in 2008-09 – and we hardly heard a peep from anybody.

So if 10,000 refugees is the worst-case scenario, it’s not that worst a case. With 15.2 million refugees worldwide, the few thousand who make it to Australia are pretty insignificant. No one has a moral obligation to remain in the country of their birth. And no country has a moral right to deny anyone the chance to improve their living standards, or save their own lives.

Meet The Nanny Spider: It Wants To Wrap You Up In Little Rules And Eat Your Life

Ignorance of the law is no excuse. So here’s a bunch of things you can’t do without council approval.

You can’t sit in a chair on your nature strip. (The council will impound your chair.) Nor can you play with toy cars on your nature strip, according to the City of Maroondah’s Proposed Local Law No. 8.

You can’t set up a lemonade stand. (The stand will be confiscated.) Nor can you put lemonade on a tray and offer to sell it.

Well, you could; but you’d have to provide proof to the council that you possess public liability insurance of at least $10 million. You’d also need to submit a Temporary Food Event Application and Footpath Trading Permit to the council, as well as an Events Food Safety Program to the Department of Human Services – having familiarised yourself with a 40-page document detailing the protocols for cleaning, producing, acquiring the ingredients for and properly labelling your lemonade. (This is no doubt why we don’t have a vibrant street food culture like America.)

You can’t hold a street party. You can’t take a half-empty bottle of wine or spirits home from a dinner party, unless your journey home avoids footpaths, parks or travelling on roads. (Drink it all at the party. That’ll learn ’em.) You can’t busk without approval. If you have approval, you have to stay mobile. You can only play Billie Jean on your keytar for an hour at a time in any one spot.

That’s a lot of rules and paperwork for what most people would consider basic community interaction. So is it any wonder we don’t know our neighbours?

Australians have talked a lot about the nanny state since the Rudd Government came to power. And not entirely fairly. Many proposals to tax and regulate fatty food, booze and smokes were considered during the Howard years. (An endearing quality of the Howard government was they didn’t actually do much.)

But when we look at all the petty regulations that increasingly govern every aspect of our social and community life, it becomes obvious the nanny state is about more than just taxing alcopops.

The nanny state is a vast array of rules and regulations that filter our social lives though rough bureaucratic webs, and patronisingly hold our hands through the most basic of tasks.

Government advertising campaigns are morphing from information dissemination to schoolmarmish mollycoddling – just look at those WorkCover posters telling us to get health checks, or those “championship” violence ads that seem to believe the best way to communicate with young adults is through condescension.

There is no facet of life the Government doesn’t want a stake in. Our communications regulator has been trying to figure out why some people don’t use the internet or mobile phones much. The answer was revealed in a report released on Thursday: they don’t want to. The report says these people are missing out on the benefits of technology, but come on. If people don’t want to download iPhone apps, why on earth should anybody, let alone the Government, care?

The Federal Government has announced an expansive “Golden Guru” program, which seems to be a sort of real-life social networking for seniors. And every Victorian council puts out a brochure or has a spot on their website encouraging us to be good neighbours – some even recommend topics for small talk.

But at the same time these governments seem to be trying their darndest to stop communities forming. In 2009, the winners of the Premier’s Community Volunteering Award have to be more than just civic-minded; they also have to be really good at filling out paperwork.

This stifling of social interaction is a worldwide phenomenon. In the UK, more than a decade of Labour government has left a moribund nation struggling under the weight of bureaucracy.

It was brought into stark relief this week when the British Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills accused two best friends who babysat each other’s children of running an “illegal child minding business”. They determined that taking turns constituted virtual payment for services. Then they told the mothers surveillance teams would be monitoring the families to ensure this regulatory breach did not occur again.

Pretty much the same thing happened in Michigan: a woman was fined and threatened with jail for minding children waiting for the bus in front of her house.

Australian community hasn’t been totally regulated away yet. But it’s disappearing. Unless governments drop their nanny-first attitude, we’ll lose it.