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There was cause for celebration on Saturday night for both the Coalition and Labor. The Coalition was able to claim a decisive victory in the Federal Election, and Labor defied expectations and remains viable. But not so for vulnerable people overseas who will lose their Australian foreign aid lifeline so that the Coalition can fund its election promises.
How clever of you to choose the day of the federal election for me to offer these reflections. I come amongst you, not as a publisher or journalist but as an advocate in the public square animated by my own religious tradition as a Jesuit and Catholic priest engaged on human rights issues in a robustly pluralistic democratic society.
In some ways the intense focus on chemical weapons and red lines is diversionary. Enough blood has been spilt to paint a thousand red lines. 100,000+ people have been killed already. Is it somehow easier on the International Community’s conscience to think of families being ripped apart by artillery shells than dying from chemical warfare?
Hot-button topics such as economic management and asylum seekers are best seen from a wide lens, yet we seem determined to keep the rest of the world out of the frame. It is a sea-girt mentality that our politicians don't care to take apart because it is too hard to convince the average voter that there are in fact other people on the planet. Such denialism will inevitably leave us ill-prepared for significant challenges.
'Like many Australians, I had hoped that the dastardly plan announced on 19 July would stop the boats in the short term, as a stop-gap measure. It is dismaying to learn that appropriate consultations had not occurred with Indonesia with the result that the very people who were to receive the shock and awe message are yet to receive it. There’s only one thing worse than shock and awe; that’s shock and awe that doesn’t work because you haven’t done your homework.' 43rd Barry Marshall Memorial Lecture, Trinity College Theological School, 14 August 2013.
Welcome to Nauru. Land area: 21 square kilometres. Permanent population: around 10,000. Chief economic activity: human dumping ground. Nauru has joined PNG in the Cohort of the Willing — willing, that is, to take dollops of Australian money to hide away an Australian problem. Substitute 'asylum seekers' for 'convicts' and it recalls the way Australia was used by Great Britain in the 18th century to dispose of a British problem.
A constitutional challenge in PNG to the resettlement agreement could quickly destroy any disincentive value as far as people smugglers are concerned. Under the country's constitution, foreigners may not be detained unless they have broken the law in entering the country. Since the asylum seekers are being sent there against their will they cannot be held to have entered illegally.
His body itself is a symbol of his inherited power and privilege. He hears women talk about being afraid to go out at night alone. He sees the great strides women have made in the workforce, yet sits in management meetings where nine out of ten leaders are men. He sees bikini clad women on his television screen and feels guilty at admiring their bodies.
150 years ago the David McIver entered Hervey Bay carrying 404 immigrants, including my great great grandmother Annie. Some of the crew rowed to shore, where they were met and helped by two Aboriginal men. Who'd have thought that over a century later, one of Annie's great grandchildren would be a judge in the landmark Mabo native title case.
President Mohamed Morsi did not govern particularly well. Egypt's rating on the Failed State Index has slipped from 45 to 34 since the fall of Mubarak. But the truth is that this crisis was not merely 12 months in the making, and Egypt's democracy was merely grafted on to a structure in which the military was the real power.
Kevin Rudd told colleagues during the week that he would not 'lurch to the left' on asylum seekers. Foreign minister Bob Carr was on message when he said there's been a change and most boat arrivals are now economic migrants rather than genuine asylum seekers. He is boldly asserting that the Rudd Government's moral credentials are intact by framing boat arrivals as a law and order matter and not a moral issue.
The Cold War not only divided Berlin. It divided human rights into two politicised and hostile camps. Socialist nations championed social and economic rights over the civil and political rights prioritised by capitalist nations. Twenty years ago this month, the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna rejected this demarcation and declared that human rights were indivisible, complementary and interdependent.
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