DUCKPOND

As far as I can tell the Australian Government is seeking to deter refugees and deny them recourse to legal process (very much as they process to deny recourse to same legal process for citizens by their industrial laws). The methods to date have been imprisonment and incarceration at remote locations, such as Nauru.

I have seen the movie, Casablanca, so I realize there are business opportunities where refugees are concerned, as there are clear reasons why some would chose to leave their homeland. Poverty and despair would be as good a reason as political oppression, even torture and war, although I suspect the later combined with the initiative and means is the stronger motive force. Australia has been predominantly a country of European settlement, although not exclusively so, and the combination of political and economic motives have always played a part, beginning with the Penal Settlement at Sydney Cove. It seems to me the one motive does not preclude the other.

I am mostly puzzled by the lateral thinking in the announcement that Australia and the United States of America are going to exchange 200 prospective refugees each per year. The BBC carried a report. The refugees from Sri Lanka will be exchanged for those from Haiti and Cuba. We are told this move will act as a deterrence. Somebody had better write something in good clean Orwellian style other than the existing doggerel on the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Odd is not that governments who have refused to trade in carbon, but are prepared to trade in humans. Perhaps they are historically regressing respectively to the heroic experience of penal settlement and slavery.

In the absence of carbon trading, or some other method to counter the causes of global warming, it is likely that the pressure to emigrate from those parts of the world most effected will increase. By that time, Howard and Bush, will be long gone, and so might our respective, in some respects very successful experience and experiments, in liberal democracies.

While these governments stitch up this deal, they simultaneously refuse to accept responsibility for the refugees created by their invasion and occupation of Iraq and its concomitant generation and radiation of terrorism.

One thing we can be sure about is that Howard would not be announcing this counter-refugee policy if he did not thing it was an electoral plus for his government.

Oops I am sorry, as a good media consumer I should have bought into the government’s talking points, and if necessary double thought my way past them.

1984 is the policy manual for our time.

Postscript:

There is more to this story than meets my eye. The fuller story will be told over time.
I posted at Tim Dunlop’s Blogocracy. I was intrigued by his question: What is in it for the Americans? At the time, I was either muddled, or multitasking. I will take this opportunity to say what I meant.

The shortest distance between Cuba and Florida is about 140km. Escaping Cubans use a variety of means to get across the water. If they get to US landfall they are home free. If they get caught at sea, they might get sent to Guantanamo. The same principle applies to Haitians, except the distance is somewhat longer, and consequently one supposes that there are more Haitians than Cubans in the refugee processing centre.

Haitians might for a number of reasons find settlement in the US more difficult than Cubans, who have an well-established Spanish speaking community they can connect with. Haitians by contrast are more likely to be French speaking, be poorer, more prone to diseases such as HIV, and have a smaller and less resourced host communities within the US. So if true, it is reasonable to suppose, Haitians may be less successful, or at least more expensive as immigrants and new settlers.

No problems. John Howard has the Pacific Solution (not as I understand some ironical reference to The Final Solution). He will trade Tamil Sri Lankans, who also may have heard about cricket, and possibly speak English, for those people held at Guantanamo.

No doubt there is some deeper Machiavellian explanation that escapes my perception.