En Passant

Offshore processing of asylum seekers is an abomination.

It is a way to ‘stop the boats’, the slogan of the racist Liberals and their ALP mates.  The two parties are outbidding each other in inhumanity, with Labor making the Liberals appear less inhumane and more caring by allowing them to say they will only allow processing in countries that have signed the refugee convention.

Malaysia, the gulag for refugees favoured by Gillard and the rest of her rotten Labor crew,  hasn’t signed the Refugee Convention. Nauru did recently.

Labor until recently rejected Nauru because they said it ‘wouldn’t work’. It wouldn’t ‘stop the boats’ because most people sent there processing actually were refugees and so did end up in Australia. So cut out the middle man and bring refugees here to be processed while they are in the community, not kept in detention.

Now Labor and the Liberals have been meeting to sort out a rotten ‘compromise’. Labor has offered Nauru as well as Malaysia. The Liberals are pretending they still oppose Malaysia for humanitarian, not crass political reasons.  

Now the  soft left, people like Robert Manne, have joined the chorus, arguing The Left was wrong to oppose offshore processing.

We were not and are not wrong.

Australia has humanitarian obligations under the Refugee Convention, obligations that sending asylum seekers who have arrived here for offshore processing tries to avoid. The Left cannot adopt the racism of the Right (the Labor Party and the Liberals) and abandon its principles.

Remember, this is a Labor Party which at its National Conference a few weeks ago changed its policy platform to specifically allow offshore processing. It was carried easily.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott don’t care about refugees drowning at sea. David Pope’s cartoon in Friday’s Canberra Times captures this brilliantly. 

In fact refugees drowning is part of the the racists’ armoury.  

There are 4000 refugees in Indonesia. Instead of letting them rot there for many years or risk a dangerous sea journey, we could bring them here safely for processing while they are in the community.

A QANTAS jet holds say 500 people. The Gillard Labor Government could charter 8 of them to bring the refugees in Indonesia to Australia. That would save them from the risk of drowning at sea in seeking asylum here.

There are 93000 refugees in Malaysia. We could bring them safely here again for processing while they are in the community.

The 93,000 in Malaysia could be bought by plane and our navy and customs boats over the next few months.

Capital can flow unimpeded around the globe. It appears the freer it is to flow around the globe the more restrictions are placed on labour. Let the same freedoms of movement apply to labour as apply to capital.

One of the major causes of people fleeing their homes is war. If we hadn’t invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and propped up their murderous regimes (along with propping up the genocidal regime in Sri Lanka) many people wouldn’t be fleeing for their lives.

One way to keep people safe is for Western imperialism to stop invading their countries.

Given that this is not going to happen, the alternative is to bring the refugees in Indonesia and Malaysia here and to set up Australian quick processing units – here’s your ticket – in hot spots near Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka and the like.