Spite
©2007
Archive for March, 2007
Sri Lankan refugee at a camp, near Rameshwaram, India. Sri Lankan refugees are fleeing the country after renewed attacks by the armed forces. Photo: Ilankai Tamil Sangam, USA
Image from www.australiansall.com.au
From The Age
Mr Burnside, a Queen’s counsel and president of Liberty Victoria, said Mr Andrews had used innocent people as a deterrent policy when he made it clear the reason for sending the 82 Sri Lankans to Nauru was to send a signal to people smugglers.
“Mistreating innocent people in order to influence the conduct of others is morally beyond redemption,” Mr Burnside said in an article posted on the website of community group Australians All, which was co-founded by former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
So I guess that means my plan to imprison children born out of wedlock to punish the parents would also be wrong.
Mr Burnside said Mr Andrews had acted in breach of international treaties.
He said that if the Sri Lankans were found to be refugees, which looked likely, they would not be offered protection by Australia.
“Instead we will hawk them around the world to see if another country will take them. The effrontery of this is awesome … if history and common sense are any guide the world community will tell us to look after them ourselves.”
Mr Burnside said Mr Andrews was a devout Christian who had ignored the parable of the Good Samaritan.
“He will need a powerful anaesthetic to dull the moral pain of what he has done,” he said.
A spokeswoman for Mr Andrews said that although the Government did not provide legal assistance to the asylum seekers, it did facilitate legal access.
“They have access to phones, faxes and emails, and if people want assistance on how to contact someone, phone numbers can be provided.”
Mr Andrews’ spokeswoman said Mr Burnside had made a number of misleading and inaccurate claims in the article.
She said his claims that the Federal Government initially intended to return the men to Sri Lanka were false.
Yes of course that’s false, the Federal Government initially only wanted to return the Sri Lanakans to Indonesia who indicated they would send them straight back to Sri Lanka. Completely different. Certainly a wholly morally relevant distinction, pulling a lever that allows a train to kill five people is not the same as killing those people myself.
Read Julian Burnside’s article here.
Image from haamu.com
I’d like to propose the following neologism if I may:
Wepple.
It is a portmanteau of ‘Web’ and ‘Kipple’.
Kipple was the word introduced by Phillip K. Dick in ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ to signify:
useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There’s the First Law of Kipple, “Kipple drives out nonkipple.” Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you’ve picked – it’s too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can’t win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
-Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick, 1968
Wepple is the useless junk that accumulates and reproduces itself on the web or on your computer. Old emails that should have been instantly deleted, shortcuts to files that no longer exists, backups of backups, abandoned registry entries, empty folders. As digitization of information and access to the internet increases, so does wepple, exponentially.
Spam, pointless flash movies, youtube videos of incredulous banality, abandoned webpages, useless flamefests, and all the inbox fillers you can imagine.
Wepple Wepple Everywhere,
How I weep were you rare.
-Wepple, Illusive Mind, 2007
From The Australian
EIGHTY-TWO Sri Lankans plucked from the Indian Ocean last month will have their asylum claims processed in Nauru after the Howard Government scrapped plans to send them to Indonesia.But The Australian understands that Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, who announced the move yesterday, still regards Indonesia as a viable option for processing future unauthorised boat arrivals. The formal decision to send the Sri Lankans for processing on Nauru follows more than three weeks of negotiations between Australia, Nauru and Indonesia.
So their fate is to be certain uncertainty and indefinite isolation in Nauru, with the possibility of further uncertain temporary protection visas in years to come.As unconscionable as it sounds future arrivals may simply be turned back to Indonesia. It is unclear why we should be so fearful and so tough on ‘boat-people’ and not ‘jet-people’. Asylum seekers who arrive by boat (into our morally contemptible excised migration zone or even the mainland) are not afforded any of the legal protections given to those who arrive by plane. The majority of asylum seekers actually reside in our community, simply by virtue of the fact that they were able to arrive by plane.
From Machine Gun Keyboard:
In terms of actual numbers of undocumented or ‘illegal’ migrants, Anglos who arrive by plane and overstay their tourist visas outnumber Asian boat people transported by people smugglers by a very significant margin. It’s a lot easier for an Anglo to blend in with the general Australian herd. Even in terms of the actual headcount of illegal migrants to Australia by boat, the numbers are miniscule, certainly in comparison to the overall numbers of all ‘illegal’ migrants.
Kevin Andrews said, “The transfer of these illegal arrivals will send a strong message to those considering any attempt to enter Australia illegally.” If I imprison children born out of wedlock this is going to send a strong message to those who engage in premarital intercourse. That’s true, but it also doesn’t change the fact that I have unfairly treated an innocent person for some sick utilitarian purpose. And why the hell would it work? The people smugglers have been paid by the time they are out to sea, whether we have refugees lined up and shot or otherwise. It can only attempt to serve as a deterrent to asylum seekers who hear of their compatriots languishing in our detention centers.
Asylum seekers do pay people smugglers who get them into Australian waters on criminally neglected vessels, but they are innocent parties. It is not a crime to enter Australia to request asylum which is why no asylum seekers, officially a refugee or otherwise has ever been charged with a crime. This makes Andrews’ comment all the more misleading and par for the course in demonizing refugees.
This is the only possible justification for the elaborate and expensive “off-shore” processing we have in place. Claims of possible terrorists, filthy diseased Muslims or just downright dodgy people are all utter nonsense. Approximately 84% of all ‘boat people’ are found to be genuine refugees and are allowed to stay in Australia.
Whilst there remains no sustained public outcry, and Labor simply says the Sri Lankans should be processed on Christmas Island, there remains some measure of hope. A couple of weeks ago I was heartened to hear the following amongst a group of first year university students on a train:
Sometimes it makes me sick how racist Australians are, makes me feel ashamed of being an Australian y’know? How would we feel if Aborigines locked us up in detention centers? I mean we were all boat people after all.
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