Mark Leonard looks at migration in the modern world.
Source: Are these the new migration superpowers? | World Economic Forum
Category: migration
“I tried but failed to ward off the second bottle of champagne,” begins David Brooks’s much-derided essay in the November 15 issue of the New York Times style magazine, T.
Despite official appeals to ideas of dignity or compassion, refugee policies manifest the absence of any substantive vision of the good. In the absence of an orientation towards the good, evil takes hold.
The light of human rights is fading in Australia
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Never has an Australian government talked so much about freedom while doing so much to undermine it.When it comes to national security and refugees we are increasingly pathetic, writes Ben Saul.
.The Government’s stocks are rising as it takes advantage of public anxiety about terrorism to ram through new laws. To be sure, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria needs to be combated to protect civilians there. But the threat in Australia is modest and the Government is overcooking it.
Terrorism here is not an existential threat. Nazism, imperial Japan, and nuclear holocaust in the Cold War were existential threats. Terrorism in Australia is a minor irritation. Your own furniture is more likely to kill you.
When our Prime Minister subordinates the magical diversity of what it means to be Australian to some absurdly jingoistic, reductive view of national identity, it is no surprise that others take it further: from hateful graffiti, to calls to halt Muslim immigration or ban the burqa, to Islamophobic attacks on Australian women wearing headscarves.
The new laws also go too far. They criminalise innocent travel to places the Foreign Minister does not want you to go. They criminalise free speech. They criminalise whistleblowers and the media that report them. They allow mass surveillance of innocent Australians on the internet. They deny procedural fairness. They violate the right to social security and therefore potentially leave people destitute.
All of this comes without the binding human rights safeguards that every other self-respecting democracy imposes on its security agencies.
The bill also erases references in our law to the Refugee Convention. The Immigration Minister spat the dummy on international law, saying: “This parliament should decide what our obligations are under these conventions – not those who seek to direct us otherwise from places outside this country”, such as foreign courts or the United Nations. The Minister assured us that Australia would comply with its international obligations – which is presumably not difficult if international law is now simply whatever the Government says it is.
The rest of the miserable story of Australian refugee policy is well known. Protracted and even indefinite, illegal detention. Cruel, inhuman and degrading detention conditions, where refugees suicide, are beaten to death, or die from treatable infections. Detention factories that manufacture mental illness. Naval interceptions and offshore processing based on grand lies about queue jumping, people smuggling, and saving lives at sea. Shifting our burden onto and bribing poor neighbours like Papua New Guinea. Coddling dictators in Cambodia and war criminals and torturers in Sri Lanka. Undermining constitutionalism in Nauru. Our system punishes refugees and tries to stop them coming at whatever the human cost.
Australia receives a few thousand boat people and our politicians – on both sides – some of our media, and many Australians go into meltdown. We have no sense of proportion or perspective, like a child that cannot control itself. Stinginess, selfishness, paranoia, and racism have become defining characteristics of our nation. We are increasingly pathetic.
The major parties are in lock-step on many of these abuses, whether on refugees or terrorism. Many Australian politicians are either hostile towards human rights or indifferent. They prefer to govern by marginal seat focus groups than to show courage or leadership.
Some of the great light of human rights is fading in Australia. It is a cause of sorrow, and shame, that our institutions are incapable of arresting it. Our country has become, in the words of our bush poet Randolph Stow, “a desert of broken quartz”, wracked by the crow.
ANDREW BOLT AUSTRALIA’S COMMUNITY COACH
Andrew Bolt ever the optimist:
” I don’t believe Australia has been greatly enriched on the whole by immigration from Lebanon, despite many obvious success stories:”
‘Hanging with an Islamic Dipper’ is a must read by Andrew Bolt not that anything could change his bigotry. Read Martin Flanagan Saturday Reflection in The Age 26/7/14 if you feel the need to shake off the continuous misery that is known as Boltism which is akin to botulism in the press.
Ali Faraj and his mates are true blue Lebanese Australians as is his whole community of friends.
After Cronulla Ali and his mate Wozza not only played for but turned Damo’s North Shore AFL Club Thursday pie night into a Lebanese feast of hummous,tabouli and kebabs.
Currently Ali and Emad work for the GWS Giants and belong to the half-Israeli, half- Palestinian AFL Peace Team. Ali coaches the NSW intellectually disabled team in the AFL Participation Cup.
What does Andrew Bolt 2nd generation Dutch migrant do? He highlights alleged often uninvestigated factless stories to bolster hate.
Ali and Emad picked Flanagan up on a Friday and took the Irish Australian for arvo prayers at their local mosque. What a surprise a non political English sermon in Bolt’s den of terrorism. It was Ramadan like Catholic Lent a time of fasting. However they took Flanagan to a cafe and got him a burger to tide him over till sunset after all the infidel was entitled to a last meal.
Then at sunset a long table, a hilarious group, story telling and all round laughter accompanied an evening meal in an area and suburb which had burst into life Lakemba was rocking.
Much to Bolt’s disappointment Flanagan didn’t encounter any hostility. Everybody agreed Mr Andrew Bolt, ” Muslim Christian or Jew it’s whether or not your a person of goodwill. Furthermore you don’t know a person until you’ve travelled with them.”
Andrew Bolt crowed to a journalist how the Dutch have a responsibility to hospitality as they sat alone to the lunch he’d prepared. One things for certain you will never find Andrew Bolt on the streets of Lakemba, Coburg or even setting astride a long table seat sharing joy and laughter with any large group he doesn’t know. He sits at home dictating how life should be writing at the expense of the Australian Lebanese and Afghan communities
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For Bolt’s edification.
Data collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that Lebanese make up the fifth largest ethnic group in Australian prisons after Australians, New Zealanders, Vietnamese and British and Irish, with 226 Lebanese prisoners last year accounting for 0.75 per cent of all detainees held for serious crimes. That Andrew Bolt is less than 1
Per head of population, Lebanese-born people had the seventh highest rate of imprisonment (after Samoans, Tongans, Sudanese, Vietnamese, Romanians and Indonesians).
Sinclair Davidson is a professor in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing and a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. “Right now, however, I haven’t seen any evidence to support the argument that migration, or the refugee intake, be reduced due to an enhanced criminality of new-comers.”
There is nothing in the statistics to support Bolt’s fanatical and continuous condemnation other than his illogical anecdotes which tend to be if true exceptions that prove the rule in favour of multiculturalism and not disprove it.
olddogthoughts 