After the Fire 4 – Refugee

Like many other Mallacoota residents, I was not in Mallacoota when the monster fire hit. I viewed/listened to the horror from a distance, tears rolling and heart hammering, through the filters of mass media and social media. I usually make a point of staying home over the Christmas holiday period, so it was a stroke of extreme good fortune that I wasn’t huddled in the hall or on the foreshore with the rest of the terrified summer population.

My ordeal – and it was an ordeal, make no mistake – was to become, effectively, a refugee. My life, my home, my pets, my “happy place” – all of it is in Mallacoota – and all of a sudden I was locked out of it indefinitely.

I put something on Facebook that day, along the lines of

If anything good can possibly come out of this shit, I hope it’s an acknowledgement that it’s very easy for ordinary people to become refugees - there but for the grace of God etc etc - and this country ought to rethink its stance on refugees.

The Australian government bad-mouths, mis-labels and tortures asylum seekers. It lets them rot and die in offshore detention centres rather than giving them proper medical care. It calls them “illegals” when there’s nothing illegal about seeking asylum (and sheep-like, too many Australians adopt that “othering” attitude and language.) There’s a feeling that “these people” are trying to take something from us; jump an imaginary queue; take jobs from Australians (at the same time that they’re taking benefits from Australians(!)); a feeling that there must be something inherently wrong with these people, and it’s their fault they’re in the situation they’re in. They are somehow inferior, lesser, less worthy, less human than we are – and therefore the inhumane treatment meted out to them is ok. It’s no more than they deserve.

It’s a shameful indictment of Australia: the smug superiority, the government spin, the gullibility and easy inhumanity of far too many ordinary Australians who refuse to share their great good fortune with vulnerable, frightened, displaced people who just happen to not be Australians like them.

While the 2019/20 summer fires devoured their way through millions of hectares of eastern Australia, terrified people huddled terrified on beaches and in showgrounds and evacuation centres; numb people returned to the twisted ruins of their homes. They needed, expected, hoped for – and were shown – kindness and compassion. (Well, apart from those poor Cobargo people whose hands were forcibly shaken by the Prime Minister before, photo opportunity over, he turned his back on them and walked away).

I spent my refugee time with dear friends in Michelago (one of whom, ironically, is an ex-Port Hedland/Baxter detainee) and family in Yass. I felt cared for and welcomed – but even so, I was desperately sad, and keen to return to Mallacoota as soon as possible. I cried all over anybody who would give me a hug (thank you, lady at Yass Visitor Information Centre! Thank you random strangers who went out of their way to be kind and helpful.)

After a couple of very long and frustrating weeks I was able to return on one of the police-escorted convoys from Eden, and found my home town and my community completely changed. BUT – I was able to return home – and I had a home to return to. I am very very fortunate.

There’s a shitload of lessons we need to learn from this bushfire experience, and this is just one:

All it takes for an ordinary person to become a refugee is for their home to become so unsafe that staying there is life-threatening.

--Rising sea-levels, raging bushfires, falling bombs, overwhelming oppression/discrimination/violence sanctioned and systematised by governments.-- These things are not the exclusive province of "others" - brown or black or foreign people...

We cannot afford to be smug. We cannot afford to look the other way. What goes around, comes around. Rediscover your humanity, Australia - because the next wave of refugees and asylum seekers could be us.

Asylum Seekers,(the telemovie) and other bright ideas

From the ‘bright ideas file’ of a government gone mad:

Don’t these asylum-seekers get it yet? The rule is “form an orderly queue and wait your turn to be processed by the refugee sausage-machine. Due process. Rules.” It’s not that hard, people.

We’ve done just about everything to stop them coming here. There was that awesome graphic novel that appeared on the Immigration department website (but is no longer there). The Guardian wrote about it though:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/11/government-launches-new-graphic-campaign-to-deter-asylum-seekers

We’ve spent a fortune on glossy communications campaigns:

http://www.customs.gov.au/site/offshore-communication-campaign-people-smuggling.asp

We’ve locked up the cowardly queue-jumpers (and their children) who would prefer to throw away everything they have on people-smugglers’ promises because they think that’s a better bet than taking their chances with the Taliban or Islamic State while they wait for the refugee sausage-machine to come up with their number.

We’ve made their lives unspeakably ugly in detention – so ugly that they self-harm. Some die. Still they don’t get it – what’s wrong with them? How can we get through to these people?

I know! Let’s make a telemovie! That’s SURE to work – everyone watches TV, right? – even people living in terror over there in those war-torn countries…

Imagine the excitement at the departmental morning tea when THAT idea was touted! I bet they almost choked on their sausage rolls.

A spokesperson for the Immigration Department told the ABC’s Lateline program that "television soap operas and telemovies are proven media to reach the target audience when seeking to deliver complex messages."

And they’ve picked Trudi-Ann Tierney, from Put it Out There Pictures, to produce it, by golly they have:

Ms Tierney is an experienced TV producer who worked in Afghanistan for four years making TV soap operas as well as an anti-terrorist police show called Eagle Four which was largely funded by the US embassy in Kabul and which she described as "propaganda".She also worked on Afghan programs backed by other embassies as well as UN bodies and aid agencies.In her 2014 memoir Making Soapies in Kabul, Ms Tierney wrote that: "Ostensibly I was head of drama (for a local TV company); but in truth I was nothing more than a propaganda merchant".

Here’s the whole story:

http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2015-04-09/tv-drama-to-deter-asylum-seekers/6381092

The bargain basement price tag of only $4.1m is another incentive for our government. 

I eagerly await the next bright idea from a government that is allegedly desperate to cut costs, and is willing to defund aboriginal communities and women’s refuges,  cut pensions, make the dole an impossibility for young unemployed, deregulate higher education fees while still allowing the uber-capitalists at the high end of town - the Gina Rineharts and Rupert Murdochs – to rake in the dough by avoiding their share of the ‘heavy lifting’ that our treasurer insists upon the rest of us doing.

http://www.smh.com.au/business/rupert-murdochs-us-empire-siphons-45b-from-australian-business-virtually-taxfree-20150406-1meu0l.html

So… I’ve been thinking about bright ideas, Aussie government, and I’ve come up with a few more to go on with in the wake of your fab telemovie:

• Asylum seekers - the board game. A game with all the randomness and rationality of Snakes and Ladders. 
• Asylum seekers – the phone app – race against the clock to turn back as many boats as you can. Extra points for at-sea detention or boat-scuttling.
• Build your own Manus Island detention centre’ – a construction kit made of canvas and razor wire. Extra guard-posts available at a small cost. Comes without bathroom doors. Build your own Nauru also available.
• Children-in-detention plush toys. Standard models come in male or female. Deluxe model cries real tears.
• Leering guard action figures.  Pose-able action figures complete with guns and erections.

That’ll work, for sure. And if that doesn't disgust you the way it disgusts me, then nothing will.

Musings on hypocrisy and virginity tests

I was reading a mag in the staffroom yesterday as I tucked into the lovely stuffed capsicum I'd taken for lunch, and I almost choked when I read this 'In Brief' snippet, :

 Virginity tests averted

(Jakarta, Indonesia), Feb 11 - A member of parliament on the island of Java has been scrutinised following an attempt to introduce forced virginity tests for females planning to graduate high school. Kusen Andalas, deputy head of the district, insisted that the plans will not go ahead. 'I don't think it's ethical to carry out such tests. It is against people's rights'.

Seriously, ya think?

The article made me realise, yet again, how little personal power we have - how our dignity and privacy can be stripped away by unscrupulous, unethical - dare I say in some cases twisted? - officials who truly believe they have a mandate to do whatever they bloody well like to us.

Was the official in question merely a 'dirty old man' who gets off on the thought of probing high school girls and tries to shield his depravity with a veil of religious devotion to 'purity'? The conspiracy theorist in me can't help also wondering whether it's part of a larger and far more insidious plot to deter girls from wanting to get an education - to make the prospect of even finishing high school abhorrent, a rite of passage only achievable after a shameful, irrelevant and unnecessary invasion of her most private self?

How the hell do these creeps get hold of power in the first place? What kind of morons vote them in?

When my train of thought reached that point I derailed it. After all, I live in the country that voted in a creep who has spent the last 18 months locking up children and torturing asylum seekers.

I live in the country whose government is wringing as much political mileage as it can out of pretending to be compassionate and locking horns with the Indonesian government over the impending state-sanctioned killing of two Australian drug runners who knowingly flouted Indonesian law, and whose own Federal Police actually tipped off the Indonesians in the first place, knowing the consequences of drug-running through Indonesia.* WTF???

I live in the country whose government refuses to accept any whiff of responsibility for the deaths of Reza Barati, a 23 year-old Iranian asylum seeker who was killed on Manus Island during rioting at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre as an unwilling 'guest' of the Australian government, and 24 year-old Iranian asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei, who died because of unforgivable delays securing urgent medical attention while he was also a 'guest' of the Australian government on Manus.

I live in the country that points fingers at other countries' human rights records, while ignoring its own deplorable treatment of its own indigenous people; whose self-titled Prime Minster for Indigenous Affairs supports the defunding and closure of remote aboriginal communities because they are lifestyle choices. Arrogant, ignorant, offensive creep.

*Let me make it clear that I do not support the death penalty. What I also do not support is the hypocrisy of a government that apparently values the lives of convicted criminals over the lives of innocent people who have fled torture and terror in their home countries.

For the Guardian story about this lowest of low acts, click  here

Stop the World!

Have human beings always been such arseholes?

Just recently, while listening to the radio in the mornings as I sort the mail, I’ve been shaking my head so much that I probably look like a Parkinsons patient. It’s awful. Actually, it's worse than awful.

If it’s not the Queensland government citing VLAD as a good reason to walk over the population in jackboots, and pretending it’s all because of outlaw motorcyclists, it’s men in Taiji luring and slaughtering thousands of innocent dolphins until the water of the harbour is a thick, angry red. Or some fucking council of chieftains in India ordering the GANG-RAPE (by middle-aged men) of a girl whose only ‘crime’ was to fall in love with a - gasp -  Muslim from another village.

On top of all this, our Prime Minister wants taxpayers to give Aussie newlyweds a $200 voucher for counselling services, while rich tax-cheats get an amnesty and the welfare system looks like being overhauled (because, you know, as one Queensland pollie mentioned earlier this week, people on the dole don't care about the community and are trying to screw the system.)

Oh, and meanwhile, our illustrious PM says, for the record, after a bunch of asylum seekers with burns accused the Australian Navy of mistreatment, something along the lines of “Who are you going to believe?  The Australian Navy or a bunch of lawbreaking illegal wannabe immigrants?” (yep, always believe the guys in uniforms, right?) 

Um. Well. If recent headlines about shenanigans in the defence forces are anything to go by, I’ll believe the asylum seekers, thanks.  Our defence forces, to their eternal shame, have made the headlines for hazing, bullying and sexual misconduct AGAINST THEIR OWN MEMBERS….. while asylum seekers have made the headlines for, um, seeking asylum.

And all that crap isn't even the TIP of the bloody iceberg of man's inhumanity to man (or, very often, woman). 

As for the environment - well, it's PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE. Always. Fuck the future, all that matters is profit NOW, for RICH PEOPLE here, now. Let's remove all the red tape that stops rich people getting richer, kick poor people in the guts so the bastards will work harder, fuck the environment if there's a buck to be made from it..... 

Am I angry? You bet I am. And even angrier that I am so powerless to do anything about any of it. All I have are angry words: words to send to governments via letter and email (and get back some bullshit pap of standard words copied-and-pasted by some arse-covering public servant); words on petitions that go God-knows-where; words on my blog, which sits out here in cyberspace reaching about fifty people if I'm lucky... words words words. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then the sword must be fucking useless. The world is going down the toilet, and every thinking person knows it. We're destroying the planet at such a rate ....

Ah, there's the answer. We're shitting in our own nest, big-time. It can't last. Perhaps the sooner we send ourselves to oblivion, and let the planet get on without the human race, the better. Sad, innit?

I'm so so so SO sick of it! I’m sorry. I’ve had enough of this shit. Stop the world. I want to get off.

What's in a name? Everything, apparently. Why I will not call VLAD an ‘anti-bikie law’

When I was a teacher, I always stressed how important it was to understand the ways language can be used, and the power that a skilled user of language can wield. I often started with that passage about Newspeak from George Orwell's 1984. Syme tells Winston that “the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.”

The idea is that if you have no word for ‘rebellion’, it’s a bit hard to talk about it or foment it - or even to imagine it. He who controls language can therefore control thought – and behaviour. Language is powerful.

Politicians evidently understand Orwell only too well. 

Scott Morrison, Australia’s new federal Immigration Minister, clearly understands that by changing the name of something, you can change the way it is perceived. Not for him Shakespeare’s wisdom: 

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.      (Romeo & Juliet Act II sc.ii) 

Mr Morrison’s linguistic practice is more Orwellian. Staff in his department were recently instructed to change the label given to asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. They are no longer ‘asylum seekers’ – they are ‘illegal maritime arrivals’. They have been dehumanised and transmogrified. Now they sound rather nasty and criminal, deserving of contempt, not compassion. Sneaky move, Mr Morrison - but you don't fool me with your wordplay.

Warwick McFadyen, a senior writer with the Age, put it beautifully in this article:  http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-minister-for-debasing-the-language-20131025-2w794.html ‘Say a phrase often enough and it attains a patina of truth’, he says.

That is why I will not now and not ever call Campbell Newman’s VLAD ‘anti-bikie law’. The media does us no favours by consistently calling VLAD ‘anti-bikie law’. It's dishonest. It's shamelessly misrepresenting something reprehensible as something desirable, and using the general public's antipathy towards 'outlaw' bikies to get support for an oppressive law. 

‘About time somebody stood up to those scumbag bikies’.

‘I’m not a bikie so I’m ok.’

‘If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.’

WRONG!

The dishonest labelling and marketing of VLAD as ‘anti-bikie law’ encourages public support for a law which actually has very little to do with bikies and everything to do with a power-crazy government wielding a sledgehammer, clumsily smoke-screened by the 'anti-bikie' tag – and besides, motorcyclists are a convenient target at the moment. 

VLAD is ultimately oppressive, and a potential weapon against ANY organisation that the government doesn’t particularly like. Today, bikies; tomorrow, soccer clubs/greenies/unionists or whoever happens to be on the Hit List du jour.

 ‘Anti-bikie law’ as a synonym for VLAD is a disgraceful and frightening example of linguistic legerdemain, and I will not have it in my vocabulary.