From A Just Austtralia: The PNG Agreement - What to do - Stuff to read - Contacts to make - Feedback encouraged

27 July 2013

Cruelty has no place in refugee protection

We’ve heard so much from the major political parties about smashing the people smugglers’ business model.

But the policies they are taking to the election will only smash the hopes of highly vulnerable people seeking protection from persecution.

The Government’s agreement with Papua New Guinea denies asylum seekers travelling by boat any chance of resettling in Australia.

The Opposition’s answer is a military operation to repel asylum seekers from seeking refugee protection in Australia.

Both policy positions are inhumane and lack fairness or decency. They are likely to punish people who have no safe pathway to protection, no so-called orderly process to access.

Refugees and asylum seekers in these desperate circumstances have little option but to risk their lives on the seas.

Having escaped the persecution, they will be further punished – just for asking a Refugee Convention signatory for protection.

If our political leaders are serious about taking away the people-smuggler’s business model, they need to be in the business of constructive diplomacy and cooperation – working with other governments in the region to give asylum seekers prompt and safe access to a fair asylum process closer to their country of origin.

It’s time to ditch the toxic politics and implement the policies that bolster refugee protection in countries in Asia where asylum seekers lack legal status, the right to work, access to quality health and education and are at risk of arrest, arbitrary detention and abuse.

Australians expect leadership from the major parties, not the unedifying spectacle of bullying the vulnerable.

How you can help

• Contact endorsed political candidates for the 2013 election from all parties
• Let them know you will support policies that are consistent with Australia’s reputation of fairness, decency and respect for human rights conventions we have signed up to
• Write letters to the editor outlining your concerns about the direction of asylum policy

Essential reading

RCOA statement on Australia-PNG agreement

http://refugeecouncil.org.au/n/mr/130723_PNG.pdf

RCOA statement on Operation Sovereign Borders

http://refugeecouncil.org.au/n/mr/130727_SovereignBorders.pdf

UNHCR criticisms on the Australia-PNG agreement

http://bit.ly/16fZjUt

Salvation Army staff on conditions endured by asylum seekers on Nauru

http://newmatilda.com//2013/07/24/nauru-staff-condemn-cruel-conditions

Arguments to counter claims deterrence policies are about saving lives

http://bit.ly/12hbzHr

Why the Australia-PNG arrangement is not regional cooperation

http://bit.ly/13Jqmst

Where Australia ranks in refugee protection

http://refugeecouncil.org.au/n/mr/130719_GlobalStats.pdf

How to contact candidates

Australian Labor Party

http://www.alp.org.au/candidates

Liberal-National Coalition

http://www.liberal.org.au/abbott-team/

The Greens

http://thegreens.org.au/

The ABC election guide also lists candidates and electorate profiles

http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/nameindex/

http://www.abc.net.au/news/federal-election-2013/guide/candindex/

Feedback is encouraged

Please share any responses you receive through your advocacy work. Send any feedback tomedia@refugeecouncil.org.au

Basin Communities Association Public Meeting in Griffith to-day: publicised livestreaming of the meeting didn't happen. Why?

As you will see from the Flyer for the public meeting held to-day in Griffith to discuss the Proposed Basin Plan, proceedings were to be livestreamed over the internet.  I promoted this in a previous post but those few of us who went to the livestream site only saw the OFFLINE sign.  Don't know what happened?  Any first hand report of the meeting would be welcomed.

Basin Communities Association: Controversial organisation livestreaming its meeting today from 11am. Details below

Controversy surrounds the Basin Communities Association.
You can read about this controversy in
Melissa Fyfe's article in to-day's The Age

I leave Networkers to their own conclusion with one proviso -
Water. Land. Development.
This triumvirate has always been, throughout Australia's history,
an attractor for powerful people, companies, corporations, political organisations
 who seek to put forward their own interests in the halls of politics and power.

As a communitarian from regional Australia, I have to say that I can't recall a time or a major issue in which agricultural lobbies have been so conscious of their "communities". I have to wonder if that is because there is a Labor Government in power and that it might be in the interests of industry lobbies and agricultural political parties to prove that they have a popular base in the towns of the Murray-Darling Basin.

I am not trying to foreshorten the right of MDB communities to their voice in this significant policy decision.  In fact, I want them to be there putting their own views forward.  However, I fear that the views put publicly by the townspeople and businesses will be put forward in the shadow of powerful interests....interests who would take their business elsewhere if dissenting voices are heard.

I wonder too if the significant Aboriginal communities represented by MLDRN - putting forward their proposal of cultural flows - will be heard at this meeting.  Anyway, Networkers, you might be able to see for yourselves at this meeting to-day which is being livestreamed.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan now an unprincipled and corrupted document - before it is officially published!

21st November 2011

Basin Plan: “compromised” and “corrupted” 

Accusations have been flowing freely from all sides, including from the Chair of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, with respect to the leaking of the Draft Basin Plan.

Following a recent meeting with the Federal Minister for water, Tony Burke, coordinator of Fair Water Use, Dr Ian Douglas, reported to FWU members that the Draft Plan was expected to be a “highly compromised” document, with the Authority failing in its statutory responsibility to manage the Murray-Darling river system in the interests of all Australians, rather than to the benefit of a vocal section of the irrigation sector and, of late, the shareholders of predatory coal seam gas miners.
Dr Douglas commented this morning,  “As a result of concerted pressure applied by commercial and political interests, the Basin Plan is now an unprincipled and corrupted document: one which will endorse the expenditure of many billions of taxpayer dollars to source only 300 gigalitres more water than the Productivity Commission has calculated would be achieved by buy-back alone, and one which seems certain to fail the environment and citizens of Australia.”
“The majority of the irrigation community seem to be accepting of the need for meaningful change, and many have made the transition from wasteful irrigation techniques - often at their own expense.”

“However a powerful minority, mostly involved with flood or open-furrow irrigation of water-hungry crops, appear to view the river system as a golden egg-laying goose, and will continue to resist any meaningful attempt to address the environmental degradation of the Basin.”

“In addition, it seems that Basin state governments, largely to blame for the mess that our rivers are in, due to rampant over-allocation of water licences, have successfully pressured the Authority to maintain water use at close to previous levels; most cynically by increasing groundwater extraction from the Basin.”

Dr Douglas concluded, “Under Craig Knowles, the Murray-Darling BasinAuthority has apparently abandoned any attempt to draft a sincere Basin Plan. Fair Water Use has serious concerns that, in responding to political and corporate lobbying, Mr Knowles has compromised the independence and integrity of the Authority”.

Authorised by:Ginny Brown
Media Coordinator
media@fairwateruse.com.au

Fair Water Use (Australia)+61 (0)8 8398 0812
PO Box 384, Balhannah, South Australia 5242
http://www.fairwateruse.com.au

Don't let the #RuralLobby dominate the conversation on #liveexports, #water, #mdb - feel free to #joinin

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Let me make myself clear, I have a jaundiced view of special pleading for the poor people in the country. Let me explain.

I am 67 years of age. From birth to 11 years of age, I lived in Brisbane.  From 1997 to 2001, I lived and worked in Sydney - which gave me a great deal of insight into corporate Australia, especially when I worked for a Packer company headed by Andrew Robb. From 2004, I have lived (and worked a little) in Melbourne. Of my adult life, therefore, I have spent ten years living in cities.  The rest has been lived in North Queensland apart from nine years in Toowoomba on the Darling Downs and four and a half years living in Tennant Creek in the NT.  I have spent thirteen and half years of my life living on the Barkly Tableland - a part of the world for which I have a deep love.  The Barkly Tableland extends across the Qld border, so - as well as Territory Time - I lived in Mount Isa for nine years.  I grew up in Bowen, at the northern end of the Whitsundays and, immediately prior to coming to Melbourne, was back again living in Townsville where I have lived for a total of nine years. 

I may not have lived "on the land" but I have lived in towns which have experienced the economic vicissitudes of rural life - droughts, governments with out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitudes who spend big on capital city freeways.  Nineteen years of my life were lived under the National Party Police State (of which Bob Katter Jr was a part) that was life under Joh Bjelke-Petersen.  Queensland (except perhaps for WA) is the one state where there is any National Party dominance.  NSW and Victoria have never really seen what the National Party will do when left to its own devices.  Queensland has. 

My father, J.J. O'Carroll Junior demonstrating cuts of beef

Bowen School of Arts in the 1950s

I do have an understanding of the current live cattle export drama.  You see, I grew up in Bowen beside the meatworks of Thomas Borthwick & Sons at Merinda.  In those days, Borthwick's were a family company owned by an English family and one of its younger members, whom I met, was actually called Tom. My father was a butcher, had gone to Bowen to be Boning Room Foreman, and became North Queensland Sales Manager.  My grandfather, in Brisbane, had been Queensland Stock Manager for AML&F - a pastoral house which became absorbed in takeovers, first from Dalgety and then Elders etc. So beef and cattle were pretty much the staples of family dinner-table conversation in my household.  Borthwick's meatworks at Merinda was an export works - exporting, in those days, mainly to the USA (very stringent export conditions) and the UK.  There may have been some Japanese exports too. 

My grandfather J.J. O'Carroll Senior sometime in the 1950s.

He was steward of the Fat Cattle at Brisbane's RNA (The Ekka) for many years. 

He was Queensland's, possibly Australia's, oldest licensed livestock auctioneer for some time

I used to watch the cattle coming over from stations like Alexandra on the Barkly in the NT.  I also know about the deliberate annihilation of export meatworks in Northern Australia by the rural lobby - someone should speak to Andrew Robb about this - so that they didn't have to put up with unions and so on. 

The pastoralists/graziers didn't give a fig for the economic lives of communities in Northern Australia for whom seasonal meatworks employment was a significant factor.  I am sorry for what has happened - although, as a vegetarian, I am a supporter of a complete ban on live exports.  Events seem to me to be a sort of natural justice, an ultimate outworking of decisions made a long time ago. 

As someone who has this sort of background, I feel I have heard - across the years - all that the rural lobby in all its forms has to say.  They are masters and mistresses of special and sectional pleading.

Other evidence of this special pleading is the fact that, with changes of government in Australia's most populous states, Victoria and NSW, water (our most precious commodity after clean, fresh air) has been consigned into the hands of the National Party.  Urban populations - who provide the bulk of regional tourism income to towns in the Murray Darling Basin by visiting National Parks, the Murray, the Darling, etc - have been excluded from consideration in the MDB discussions.  Only those special Australians of the rural lobby can have their say and their way in such debates, it would seem. 

A large section of rural people involved in agriculture talk too much to themselves about their specialness, how everyone depends of them, how they are at the mercy of those greenies and animal libbers.  This is the lobby that pleaded for tariffs to be removed so they could import their farm machinery from the USA and pay less for it.  And now we have Bob Katter Jr spouting a form of protectionism! This is the rural sector from whom John Kerin, the Hawke era Minister for Primary Industries, removed drought aid because there were so many people rorting the system!

I wouldn't care so much about the special pleading if there wasn't hatred and bigotry attached - but, as I have pointed out, their conversations are circular.

I don't believe the rural lobby and its constituents are aware of the huge social changes that have brought about clear, articulate, educated, intelligent voices in our society.

Bill Bishop, in his book 'The Big Sort", speaks of the clustering of like-minded Americans and how it is tearing them apart.

We are seeing a similar emergence in this country.  We see it the inner city suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney with the growing influence of The Greens vote.  However, that is not the only "sort".  Australians are wealthier and better educated and better travelled than every before. This applies to the rural sector as well.

   

The Ethical Consumer Guide

There are two factors which wealth and education provide - choice and reflection.  It is clear that over the last decade or two there has been increasing reflection on ethical consumption - and consumption is dependent on choice.  The ethical middle class has spoken with regard to the cattle crisis and yet, it seems,that the rural lobby - in spite of the levy - did not manage in an effective manner the risk to its brand and its business of the ethical consumer. 

In my view, this demonstrates the insularity of the rural community reinforcing its own view within its own constituency without regard to other social factors.  As well as everything else, the rural lobby would do well to gain the services of a non-sympathetic sociologist to wake them up. 

Oh, one final thing I forgot to mention.  When I lived in Mount Isa, I stood for Federal Parliament representing the ALP in the seat of Kennedy in 1983 and 1984.  The sitting member whom I was opposing was Bob Katter Senior.

Further reading:
Digest of related articles & videos on the cattle trade by the Fairfax Press

Cattle welfare ignored as MLA spends big on marketing

Cattle ndustry warned against rush to  resume live trade
MLA acts quickly to  improve  Indonesian slaughter methods
MLA 'disappointed' about being forced to pay industry compo
Pastoralists contact lawyer over possible class action against MLA
Sheep industry may limit  live exports during Ramadan
Blame religion for livestock torture: MP
Bills to end live export submitted to parliament 
Australia can't force Indonesia to stun cattle
Animals Australia virtual protest
Media Release AMIEU (Australasian Meat Industry Employees Union)
Live Animal Export - Australia's Shame
Animal Mortality Reports
Farmers rally in Perth over live cattle
Northern  cattle industry slams  export ban damage
RSPCA wants abattoir assurances
New strategy in cattle fight

Related articles

• Reframing the #animalcruelty debate: #ethics #economy #asylumseekers (misseaglesnetwork.blogspot.com)
• Compo for cattlemen 'on table': Bligh (theage.com.au)
• Extend cattle tracking: Nationals boss (news.theage.com.au)