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Some days I feel like a people trafficker, though I'm not making a zack out of the trafficking. Other days I see myself as a latter-day Oskar Schindler. But mostly I just feel trapped along with the 1000 refugees and asylum seekers I'm doing my not-very-successful best to get the hell out of an open prison called Bangkok.
This was always the natural endpoint of the constant see-saw of leadership: some guy who nobody knows and nobody likes being thrust into the top job by a panicked backbench. Like all great decisions of world-historical significance, it's out of fear of losing their own seats than any particular vision for the country.
Hopefully Australia will take stronger measures against what is effectively a one party state that ruthlessly crushes opposition at home and seeks to intimidate and threaten critics abroad. It is not surprising that after 25 years, I am again seeing Cambodian asylum seekers.
We see the occasional extreme Muslim cleric railing against the west. This week we witnessed a similar incident in Parliament, with a senator calling for a return to the White Australia policy and a ban on Muslim immigration. An insight of René Girard's assists in interpreting this incident and the resentment and fear which lies beneath it.
Fraser Anning's speech was heavily criticised, though few who did so bear credibility. Turnbull, Dutton and Tudge can hardly be taken seriously when they invoke multiculturalism. This is how racism works: it displaces focus from material problems to imagined threats.
As a society we are exposed to more information on how to remove body hair, and minimise wrinkles, than how to identify a toxic or abusive relationship, or how to counter discrimination. My safety, worth, opportunities, and rights should not be determined by the body I was born into.
How are we to honour the commitment to peace of these Japanese and Maralinga survivors of nuclear conflagrations unleashed maliciously or negligently last century? We need to renew our commitment to painstaking negotiation of international treaties and agreements designed to ensure peace and security for all, insisting on the dignity and human rights of all.
The adoption of the GCM should not be politicised as it is a non-binding framework that benefits our country, the international community and migrants. Migration is a global phenomenon, not a situation that single countries can deal with in isolation. Australia has nothing to lose and much to gain from adopting the Compact.
Indifference to human life is what made Australia, and it still permeates its approach to crises. As with many things, Indigenous experience provides the lens with which to see things clearly. First Nations people know the fatal measure of our indifference. It manifests in many other areas too.
Either they are flat-out wrong, unable to read crime reports or understand what the police and other agencies are telling them (which leaves in question their ability to accurately and intelligently govern), or some apparatchik in the strategy back-rooms has decided it is a good way to garner votes with a 'tough-on-crime' campaign.
Through last week's Sunday Night report on Channel 7, we were treated to another round of fear mongering. Never mind that just last year police admitted that the so-called 'Apex Gang' did not exist. As an Aboriginal woman, I'm tired of being told by politicians and newspapers which other people of colour I'm supposed to scared of.
It has become clear that the brutal Australian treatment of people who seek protection is part of an international punitive policy. This is sometimes attributed to a failure of political leadership. But it may reflect a deeper cultural change in the Western attitude to strangers, seen in migrant and refugee policy, penal policy, international relations and the scope of the rule of law.
133-144 out of 200 results.