http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/27/features/features4.html Ruddock's rantings a shot in the arm for Hanson By Mike Carlton Much as it saddens me to say it about my old schoolmate, the kindest view of the Immigration Minister, Phillip Ruddock, must be that the burdens of office have driven him insane. This can be the only explanation for his ever more outlandish behaviour, culminating last Monday in his wild proposal for shooting more tranquillisers into the unfortunate boat people at the Port Hedland concentration camp. Chemical injections needed to be "more comprehensively implemented," he announced, in the wake of another disturbance at the "facility," an event imaginatively reported in the media as a riot, a rampage and - most alarming of all - an uprising. I remember Ruddock as a bossy sub-prefect at our North Shore private school, obsessed with regulation socks and boaters correctly worn, but I do not recall any hint of the Stalinist inclinations he now displays. To forcibly inject prisoners with tranquillisers smacks of the KGB's techniques of psychiatric control in the Soviet gulags; it is a sickening thing to hear from an Australian Cabinet minister, mad or not. Stripping away the lurid reportage, the uprising seems to have been no more than the middling aggro you would expect from young men confined behind razor wire in 40C heat, some held captive for more than a year with nothing to do and, worse, nothing to hope for. A few bricks and garden tools were thrown; a police officer copped a thump on his helmet. That was about it. It is no accident that these camps are in some of the nastiest parts of Australia; Malcolm Fraser has famously, and I suspect accurately, described the Woomera cage as a hell-hole. They are run by Australasian Correctional Management, a subsidiary of the amusingly named Wackenhut Corrections Corporation of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which, among other things, controls a network of jails at that cutting edge of innovative penology, the US deep south. The Quiet American - the biography of George R. Wackenhut - is available at the corporate Web site for $US19.95 ($36.57), or 10 for $US179.50 ($329). George was once an FBI agent. "Set against the richly variegated backdrop of history," says the blurb, "this is the story of a unique American who started with virtually nothing and built a worldwide security empire." The inmates of the Australian wackenhuts ( I have just coined this useful noun) should be encouraged to study this inspiring work, but our first concern must be poor Ruddock. I hope it is not too late to put him on a course of intravenous Valium. How easy it has been for the Howard Government to pander to the Hansonite vote by kicking the immigrant can. It doesn't take much to re-awaken those atavistic, yellow peril terrors of our empty continent being swamped by the diseased and multiplying hordes to our north. Just over a year ago, without offering a tittle of evidence beyond referring theatrically to intelligence reports, Ruddock was warning the nation that "whole villages" in Iran and neighbouring countries were packing up to come here illegally. Why, even as he spoke, 10,000 people were massing for the move towards us. It was "the biggest assault on our borders by unauthorised arrivals ever", hyperbole which might have aroused a wry smile in any Aborigine who heard it. In fact - and these are his department's figures - there has been a grand total of 9,675 boat people arriving in Australia in the decade-and-a-bit since 1989. And more than half - 5,444 - were eventually granted entry as legitimate refugees. Hardly a mass invasion, and peanuts compared with the 53,000 tourists officially estimated to have overstayed their visitor's visa but who are not hunted down, flung into the gulags and given chemical injections. Perhaps this is because about a quarter of these overstayers are unthreateningly British or American. At times Labor's immigration spokesman, Con Sciacca, seems bent on surpassing Ruddock in righteous ferocity, presumably for the same grubby political gain; he is, after all, a Queenslander. Last Monday, Sciacca was fuming to anyone who would listen that the "criminals" should already have been deported, although he did not suggest where to. Meanwhile, our national orgy of patriotic backslapping continues. "The great egalitarian spirit of this country is very much a gift of this soil, it is a gift of the air we breathe together, it is a gift of the land that we share together," intoned John Howard in his New Year's Federation address, a speech of sub-Rotarian banality. Egalitarian for some. Australia is the only civilised country where refugees are automatically wackenhutted. The British, for example, consider some 70,000 requests for asylum each year - yes, 70,000 - and permit all but a handful of applicants to live freely in the community, with food and financial support and schooling for their children while each case is assessed. Here, the media would never allow such dangerous goings-on. Disease, violence, crime, ritual child abuse ! Stealing Aussie jobs ! There's nothing like a blast of thinly coded wog-bashing to light up the switchboards of the radio shock jocks. Few, though, can top Piers Akerman, the prime ministerial toady and Daily Telegraph hysteric-in-residence. "The criminals attempting to enter Australia illegally who rioted at the Port Hedland detention centre should be tossed out of the country immediately," he snarled on Tuesday. "If they need to be drugged, handcuffed or placed in chains before being bundled onto aircraft, it really doesn't matter." Apart from the acrid whiff of Adolf Eichmann in his luminous prose, Akerman was being just plain thick. As was the opportunist Sciacca. Which aircraft, and to where ? We have no air links to Iran or Iraq ; UN sanctions forbid flights to Afghanistan and, having flick-passed the refugees to us in the first place, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia have no incentive to accept them back. Afghan shepherds on Ashmore are no queue jumpers The Afghan folk who wash up on the Ashmore Reef are, by and large, shepherds and weavers of the minority Hazara tribe. Moderate Shi'ite Muslims, the Hazaras have been slaughtered in the tens of thousands by the Sunni Muslims of the fanatical Taliban regime which holds sway in Afghanistan. It is the lucky ones who fall into the hands of the people smugglers. Typically, young men are heavied by a Taliban thug offering the stark choice of death or ethnic cleansing. The going rate for an escape is about $US5,000, or an extended family's entire fortune. The smugglers pay off the Taliban and the venal Pakistani officials who run the human pipelines through the sub-continent. By any measure, these wretched people meet the UN definition of a refugee as a person who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country". The Government's disgusting propaganda calls them queue jumpers, but they are not, for there is no queue to jump. -- Alister Air Ph 9514 1277 IT Manager Fx 9514 1656 Faculty of Science, University of Technology Sydney "The time of your life is the one commodity that you can sell but never buy back." -- Bob Black -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
