How compassionate can you get!?!

There’s a lot of conservatives patting themselves on the back in light of the Howard governments ‘softening-up’ of its immigration detention policies. “See? We’re compassionate after all” they say. Problem is, this latest move is not driven by compassion – it’s driven by political expediency (In fact, the new visa can hardly be considered compassionate at all). The Howard government has detected a change in public attitudes towards detention. The government’s victory in the High Court which entitled it to detain asylum-seekers indefinitely didn’t have the electorate popping open the champagne - people just aren’t comfortable with the prospect of locking someone in a detention centre indefinitely, even if they haven’t succeeded in attaining refugee status. With discontent brewing on the back bench, the new visa is aimed at preventing detention centres from becoming a major issue of conflict within the Liberal party. It’s a tricky juggling act – Howard & Co need to appease the backbenchers and simultaneously insist that they are tough on ‘illegal immigrants’. Amanda Vanstone’s comment reported by The Australian…

If the boats were still coming, we'd be looking at this in a different light

…makes it pretty clear that this stunt serves only to win a few brownie points with Bruce Baird, Judi Moylan and Petro Georgiou. If a boat or two of asylum-seekers had arrived in the past month or so you can bet your bottom dollar we wouldn’t be seeing any changes to the detention system whatsoever.

I had to have a chuckle at Miranda Devine’s article about all this in the Sydney Morning Herald. When examining the reconsideration of asylum-seeker cases where Muslims have converted to Christianity she states…

Baird, an Anglican, heads the Parliamentary Christian Fellowship, a bipartisan group of about 60 religious-minded MPs. Politics in Australia being what it is, his advocacy and the Government's new policy towards Iranian Christian converts has been interpreted by some as a negative, an unreasonable bias towards Christianity. But Christian asylum seekers are given special consideration if they come from Muslim countries in which Christians are persecuted. In any case, why the surprise that a Christian country like Australia would look favourably on Christians? (My ephasis)

So what Miranda’s saying is that, putting aside the treatment of Christians in Iran, asylum-seekers who are Christians should get extra points because Australia is a “Christian country”, and this someohow makes them a priority for protection. Perhaps the surprise that Miranda is so baffled by stems from the fact that Australia is a secular nation, which suggests that the government should not favour people of one religion over people of another religion. Quite simple really.

She goes on to discuss “counterproductive detention politics”, and explains that…

For too long the debate has been distorted by a combination of competing interests. There were opportunists, such as socialist, atheist and green groups, who seized on a new way of whipping up Howard hatred. There were the sometimes overzealous efforts of well-meaning people. And there were the splenetic vendettas of John Valder and the New Matilda crowd whose hyperbole about concentration camps puts most of the Government and its citizens on the
defensive.

So we have socialist, atheist and green groups (refugee advocates), overzealous well-meaning people (refugee advocates) and John Valder & Co (refugee advocates), distorting the debate. Of course, no one on the right has distorted the debate - hands up anyone who believes that any of these comments have a familiar ring…

“If we let one in, we’ll be swamped”
“Only one of them needs to be a terrorist and then we’ll have 9-11 all over again”
“If they don’t steal our welfare they’ll steal our jobs”
“If they don’t steal our jobs they’ll steal our welfare”
“They don’t share our values”
“They don’t assimilate”
Etc. Etc.

I noticed that church groups, a central component of the refugee advocate movement, did not receive the same scrutiny as the socialists, atheists and greens. Perhaps they come under “overzealous well meaning people”?