 Simon Thomsen's Editorial
Australia has a long, proud history of kicking wogs (of course I can use that word because we've banished the strictures political correctness...). Remember the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act? It ended when Gough Whitlam revoked what was commonly known as the White Australia Policy in 1972.
In the post-war Australia of 1945, Arthur Calwell assured a nation starved of labour and unable to rebuild that it would not lose its essentially British face. His master plan to bring 40,000 Britons to Australia failed from the beginning for lack of shipping. Instead he turned the displaced people of war-torn Western Europe, and 12,000 Baltic 'foreigners' arrived. They were cheap manual labour, dumped in outback concentration camps, along with many others from across Europe. But they later become part of many proud moments in Australian history, including the Snowy Mountains scheme.
Concerns about refugees continued to flare from time to time, but the general consensus from white Australia was that a steady flow of immigrants into lowly paid, unskilled jobs was to everyone's economic benefit.
In the '70s, war brought boatloads of refugees from Asia, and despite all-time lows in post-war migration, concerns heightened once again. The boom times of the '80s saw few worries, but soon after the bust Pauline Hanson predicted our doom in being 'swamped' by Asians.
Now a nation of 19 million is considering making a decision about who will lead the country for the next three years based on how badly we can treat a few hundred people desperate enough to pay to escape a country the world has turned against. What do we gain from kicking people who behaving the same way as those escaping Pol Pot's Cambodia three decades earlier?
We are not being offered leadership from either party at the moment. It is a lemming rush to the lowest common denominator of our fears. Five years ago they were denouncing Hanson, now One Nation has had its electoral way.
Fear, as any good ad spruiker will tell you, is one of the great human motivators.
Australia's churlish humanitarian response to global events has diminished us internationally.
Why should we care? Because we are a trading nation. Our economic prosperity depends on our ability to establish markets overseas, and much of the pain of structural reform to make us globally competitive could be squandered if our trading partners perceive the dazzling welcome offered 12 months ago at the Olympics as a lie.
Australians have always taken a keen interest in foreign policy and defence, but they should not be the issues which decide who will govern us.
The concerns of a daily life - health, education, public infrastructure - should be the electoral test.
Keeping a few hundred desperate refugees out of the country may make you feel better, but it won't help when the city floods while waiting for $4 million in federal funding for a flood levee.
|
