Just who is un-Australian?

[Violet_Crumble]

It's the new term of chastisement, but what exactly does it mean,
asks Hugh Mackay.

'It's un-Australian," Dick Smith asserted last week, as he railed against the seven-year detention of Peter Qasim, the Kashmiri asylum seeker recently transferred from the Baxter detention centre to an Adelaide psychiatric ward. "We drove him mad," Smith said on ABC radio, and then repeated his charge: "It's un-Australian."

Sorry, Dick, but it's actually not un-Australian at all. It might be unjust, unkind, unfair, unreasonable and inhumane but, unhappily, it's not un-Australian. Yes, seven years is a long time to lock someone up without charge or conviction, reducing them to such a state of despair that they lose their mind. It might not sound like the kind of thing Australians would do, but we do it.

Here's another thing we've been doing: locking up children whose only crime is to be the offspring of asylum seekers. Some of their parents might turn out not to be "genuine" asylum seekers (though still refugees, of course) but we've been treating them and their children as if they are criminals of the worst kind rather than people so desperate to leave their homelands that they were prepared to undertake almost unbelievably perilous journeys to start a new life here.

I'm in total sympathy with Dick Smith's sentiments; I only wish there were grounds for saying we Australians would never tolerate such appalling treatment of refugees being carried out in our name. I wish we didn't have to own up to a policy deliberately designed to inflict suffering on people who have already been traumatised in the countries from which they've fled.

The melancholy truth is that it has, indeed, been Australian to persist with a policy of indefinite and even brutal mandatory detention of asylum seekers. Our Government has been doing it for years with broad community support, so we might as well accept that it is a characteristically Australian act. In fact, it's so characteristic of us that some other countries, including Britain, are now examining ways of adopting the "Australian" model of mandatory detention.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/Hugh-Mackay/Just-who-is-unAustralian/2005/06/19/1119119722702.html

[Matilda]

1. Why does Howard keep getting re-elected?

Because he plays to the worst in people - greed, selfishness, racial
hate, and intolerance. And it works every time.

I like Hugh McKay, he's a very intelligent and humane man, and he
nails it every time.

[Djinn]

2. was at Melbourne's reffo rally yesterday

I skulked around the back listening to what the large contingent of coppers and other bystanders had to say, it was mostly "better have them in Nauru than here" - "they're all terrorists" and particularly pleasant, while Aladdin Sisalem was speaking "they should have left you there" (alone for over 10 months on Manus)

Most Australians are ignorant rednecks and we're pushing shit uphill trying to get them to care about anything other than they're hideous big houses in the outer shithole estates, buying a new car to keep up with the joneses and watching sport 24/7.

[SweetLeftFoot]

3. Yep

I have been back in Oz for about five days now after three years overseas and the attitudes are just sickening. God, we are so American without realising it.