Sunday, July 21, 2013

angry sunday

today i'm angry about this country. i'm reading and posting and commenting on the Rudd government's new refugee policy. from now on, any refugee arriving in Australia by boat will be sent to Papua New Guinea. so Australia sheds itself from any responsibility in helping many refugees, instead deporting them so that their treatment, conditions, and rights need not be considered by the Australian government. it's being framed as a deterrent against 'people smugglers', of course, yet regardless of caricaturing them as criminal evil-doers (hang on, aren't they also enablers, and people who save people?), this policy impacts upon 'the victims' that Rudd is pretending to fight for: asylum seekers. Rudd is saying 'lives are at stake', and so deterrence measures are required. yes, the value of lives is being used to justify a policy that is actually very negligent of lives. hello doublespeak.

maybe i don't know enough about the issue - we keep being told that it's a "complex issue" after all. and maybe i'm being too emotional in my response, but maybe that's valid. because the coldness of the Rudd 'solution' is something we should be disgusted, angered, and hurt by. this is not what politics should be. and this seems to be the difficulty many of us are facing.

and of course it's all about winning votes in marginal seats. there's a clear and obvious history of Australian electioneering that uses the lives of others (or irrational fears of otherness) to do so:



materials that offer facts and evidence about asylum seeker and refugee issues in Australia are surfacing, and this is great to see, but i wonder if they're read by anyone not already left-aligned. and i guess, i too have a fear of otherness, but my phobia is of those who appear impervious to compassion, and of a political landscape in which this not challenged, but accepted, and worked into national policy.

lastly, and mostly, i just need to say "fuck you Kevin Rudd".