Governments all over the world give these fucks plum contracts to āmanageā facilities paid for by tax payers. They are a cancer, like G4S.
[quote=āDamienW, post:20, topic:54822ā]
As an Australian, our extreme right-wing government makes me sick.
[/quote]Ok, Iāve been wondering about this for a while. From what I understand, voting is compulsory in Australia.
Are most Australians rather dense people who vote in these right-wingers or is there more to the picture where right-wing politicians are slithering their way into office like they do here within the USA with gerrymandering, etc.?
I mean, are Australians (in general, not you) this ignorant (and hateful) or is there something else going on?
Didnāt the Labor party rather sabotage themselves last time with all that bullshit where Rudd undermined Gillard until he pushed her out?
I suspect itās largely like the US and the UK where the left parties are so anaemic that itās easy to say ātheyāre all the sameā.
Then you have those nice One Nation people, who are racist nutjobs like UKIP.
Australian too. Makes me sick too.
Yep. Dense is a little harsh, though. Thereās a lot of folks out there that have a tendency towards conservatism (small c) and are slow to accept change.
Also yep. IMO, most of the problem seems to stem from Murdoch. Thereās not that much diversity when it comes to news and reporting. Immigration (and the associated xenophobia) has been hyped up into an issue by the press and the pollies need to have issues that they can appear strong on. It sells papers and gets politicians elected. Hence āStop the Boatsā when the boats are actually all that much of a problem.
Immigration and the treatment of refugees and those seeking asylum is Australiaās national shame, with Nauru being the latest in a long line of abuses that are the spiritual children of the White Australia Policy.
Me too. Just to be clear, the conservative Abbott government does not represent me or, I believe, the majority of Australians. They lied to the electorate on a majority of issues, and over the last two years this has been revealed.
They demonised refugees as somehow being a threat to national security (whatever that is), and managed to convince enough people that this was true. Just like the US, Australia has a significant part of the population that do not actually engage with the community themselves, but just absorb the bigoted views of media commentators.
I suspect that many now know the error they have made.
[quote=āknersis, post:19, topic:54822, full:trueā]
Notably, arriving in Australia is not illegal.
[/quote]ā¦if I may refine your comment, seeking asylum in Australia is not illegal, and it is for this ācrimeā that people find themselves sent to Nauru. It should be added that people are placed here for processing, for which there seems to be no hurry. It should also be noted that most are found to be refugees. However people found to be refugees are offered money to return home , and if they donāt will be resettled in a place other than Australia, such as Vietnam or Papua New Guinea (Manus Island). On Manus island racial tensions are escalating due to local people fearing the resettled refugees will take their jobs, women, and suspecting that they are given preferential treatment.
To fully understand the implications of the graph , you have to understand Australian politics, and how the āillegal boatsā issue ( they really try to dehumanise it as much as possibleā¦) has become such a polarising electoral topic. The current conservative government ran hard on this issue going into the last election. One successful candidate for western Sydney said "illegal boat refugees " where responsible for increased traffic congestion. The new Labor government of 2007 tried to take a more humanitarian attitude to refugees , but the conservatives used increased boat arrivals to whip up fear and loathing, which eventually led to a race to the bottom to see who could be the toughest on refugees. Labor ended their time in government with an asylum seeker policy as harsh as the previous government.
Just as an aside , Iām constantly amazed that most Australians know that most āillegal boat refugeesā are caught near Christmas Island, yet nobody understands exactly on the Earth this is. I strongly encourage anyone interested to look on a world map where Christmas Island, Nauru and Manus Island are in relation to Australia .
Ugh, they didnāt need to call it a āsolutionā.
Ozzies, I love ya, but your country has some weird affinity for proto-fascist policies. At least when it comes to politics youāre not as stagnant and unresponsive as the UK or as fundamentally crazy as the US.
But thatās not really saying much. Unfortunately.
Used to be Iād look to Canada for a sane less crazy, English speaking western country but thatās gone sourā¦
Hopefully Eire will suddenly find a massive Lithium mine under the ocean or something.
people who were caught trying to illegally enter Australia
Just to clarify something, it is not illegal to enter Australia without authorisation and with the intention of seeking asylum. Both sides of politics here have gone down the grubby path of demonising asylum seekers as illegal immigrants but, in reality, they are not illegal.
If this forum goes the same way as every other forum on this topic then I can probably expect a million people explaining to me that if the boats coming in are sailed by men wearing blue cowboy hats and the Queen of England has just had her breakfast and accidentally dropped a hash brown on the floor at exactly the same moment that a solar flare developed then there are elements of the process of coming here that are illegalā¦
Which, of course, is a nonsense. If the act of seeking asylum once here is not illegal then obviously the process by which you come here isnāt illegal either. Or, at worst, isnāt relevant.
Iāve traveled a lot, and you always meet young Australians on the road (almost all of whom are white). Usually one expects those traveling to be more open and tolerantāespecially given their ageābut many Australians come across as extremely racist. This is particularly surprising given that Australia has even more foreign-born residents than my native Canada does, at 28%.
In 2001-02 in Europe, most Australians I met took a hard line on boat people, and werenāt too happy about monied Asians coming there, either. At the same time they were clearly embarrassed by Pauline Hanson (just like many Italians were embarrassed by Berlusconiā¦ though he kept getting elected, just as Hanson stayed somewhat politically relevant). Attitudes towards Aboriginals were even worse than Canadian attitudes towards Natives. Some Australians have suggested that they really arenāt any more racist than Canadians or Americans, just that they are more likely to express their thoughts in ways that North Americans are not. There may be some truth to this. But I also met an Australian medical student who was vacationing in San Diego and was surprised by the strong Mexican accent he heard from the cashier at a local McDonalds, and even more surprised that none of the other customers were outraged: according to him, if you heard someone speaking with an accent like that in Australia everyone would loudly demand to be served āby someone who spoke English.ā
Itās difficult to know what to make of Australia, as an outsider looking in, but Iām not hugely encouraged to visit and see for myself.
I think these are not unconnected. As immigration goes up, so does anti-immigration sentiment, especially if itās being pushed by politicians.
You have won the thread.
Itās a disgrace. On many, many levels.
And we still have the chutzpah to sing our national anthem, which includes ā¦
For those whoāve come across the seas
Weāve boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.
Fucking shameful.
The nearest country is 1,500 miles away. Anyone who makes it to Australia by a boat smaller than a yacht has enviable skill and determination and should be begged to stay, not turned away.
Technically, from the mainland PNG is our nearest neighbour on the other side of the Torres Strait, about 100 miles away but thereās an awful lot of fuck-all infrastructure punctuated by crocs up around Cape York.
Closest major settlements would probably be Daru in PNG to Cooktown up in Far North QLD and theyāre about 450 miles apart.
The proximity of PNG and the Torres Strait Islands also meant that Islam was practiced in Australia long before Christianity, a fact that tends to annoy a certain type of bigot when you point it out to them. 
In my experience as a Canadian, thatās not exactly true.
I trusted the internet, which said PNG was nearly 1,500 miles. Maybe it was measuring capital to capital?
From a super small set, I have also gotten the impression that many Ozzies are still working through the very complicated, recent history of social and racial division in their country. Their racists seem to be about as racist as everyone else is, they just seem to be less conditioned to behave faux-ashamed about it.
When you mention accents and I was reminded of an interview I saw with The Daily Showās Al Madrigal where he mentioned that heād been the target of in-group discrimination from other Mexicans who disliked what they saw as his use of a āfakeā, non-Mexican accent. If youāve ever heard Al talk, he has (to my untrained ears) a fairly strong Californian accent of some kind. Like, surfer almost.
Anyway, it strikes me that there is a very strong current of peer group pressure concerning accents throughout different cultures that wants to mould you into a stereotype. To fit in.
English people are particularly good at inaccurately ācorrectingā novices of the tongue with weird received pronunciation and affects like Chine-ahr for China. And thatās supposed to be well spoken English. Hardly matters, though, itās all about fitting in with the in-group.
Anyway, what I guess Iām trying to say is that people from all countries are pretty much racist and all pretty much in the same way. Itās the accentuations of flair and character driven by the in-group gestalt that fosters this lustre of bigotry that, to foreign sensibilities, can seem āalienā or out-of-balance when compared to the home-brew.
Some Ozzies just seem a little moreā¦ ideologically unfettered and free from guilt in their pursuance of a semi-homogeneous utopia.
Aannyway, I was really talking about the political machinations of Australia, rather than her cultural practice. Their politics seem to be influenced by the less all-out freedom-centric Asian Politik in the region.
IM(Potentially Racist)O.
Port Moresby to Canberra? Yeah, thatād make sense. Map shows about 1750 miles, so close enough for the internet.
When people talk about Australiaās nearest neighbour, thereās also a tendency to default to itās closest cultural neighbour, meaning NZ*, rather than itās nearest geographical neighbour.
But when you factor in Torres Strait Islanders (who are considered to be indigenous Australians along with the aboriginal peoples) the definition of āAustralianā can get really blurred, both socially, culturally and geographically.
*Although the treatment of NZ migrants is also less than stellar and is becoming something of an issue, too.
