Jesus was a Refugee

Most refugees come to Australia on airplanes. But these get hardly any mention in the media. The ones who come on rickety boats get all the attention. They pay a few grand to people smugglers for a place on overcrowded fishing vessels, many of which sink in the treacherous waters between Indonesia and the Northern Territory.

Those who survive the trip are taken to Christmas Island (the most misnamed place in the world I reckon) and put in what is effectively a concentration camp for years. 15% are given visas to stay, the rest are hustled onto planes in the middle of the night and sent back to whatever hell hole they originally escaped from. 

Many of course make their way back onto boats and play the lottery to win one of those golden visa tickets.

I also paid a few grand to get residency in this fine country. I didn’t pay it to people smugglers, unless you want to put immigration lawyers into that category. A large portion of what I paid was directly to the Australian government. Which makes me think that they are hypocrites when they call the people smugglers the scum of the earth.

Only a few thousand try to make it to Australia in this way but it exercises the minds of the media as though it was Armageddon. It seems amazing to me that a country of this size and resources can’t accommodate a few people who turn up on their shores. They sent thousands of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan for example, all of whom require feeding and equipment. And yet when it comes to a few Afghans looking for a better life, the system goes into meltdown.  Two boats have sunk in the past week and a few hundred unfortunate souls are now at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

And what are the Australian politicians doing about this? They have spent all week arguing about which off shore country they should send asylum seekers to for processing. Labor wants Malaysia, whereas the opposition has plumped for Nauru, if only because that’s the place they used when they were last in power. 

Both parties seem to think that if they process asylum seekers off shore the message will get back to Kandahar and Colombo that it’s not worth getting on a fishing boat and sailing across the Indian ocean. They seem to misunderstand the misery that many people in the world live under and that they will do almost anything to carve out a better life for their family and that spending a few years in a camp in Malaysia or Naura rather than a camp on Christmas Island would make any difference.

The difference of course is that Christmas Island is part of Australia and the authorities here would prefer to have their dirty laundry sorted out somewhere else. Only the Green Party can see through this moral bankruptcy, which is a particular problem for me as I’ve been slagging them off for the past twenty years or so. I’m a Socialist at heart and always looked on the Green Party as one trick ponies, wanting to stop the poor from getting cheap food and electricity.

I was excited in 2007 when I finally got to live under a Labor government, after the dark years of Thatcherism in England, the corruption of Charles Haughey in Ireland and the right wing madness of the Celtic Tiger years.

But I have to admit it has been a huge disappointment. I should have known that things were not as they seem when Kevin Rudd got up to make his victory speech on that night in 2007. After thanking Australian working families (a phrase he never got tired of saying) he got on to thanking the Americans. It struck me as odd at the time. A little like that line in the Irish declaration of Independence in 1916 that mentions “our gallant friends in Europe”, which was code for the Germans. Everything has a context I guess. And Rudd was thanking the Americans because Australia is fighting two wars with the yanks at the moment.

But it struck me as an odd way to start a Labor government and to be honest it’s been downhill ever since. When Rudd was overthrown in a palace coup by Julia Gillard, I hoped things would get better. But even though I didn’t think it possible, the government lurched further to the right. They allow the mining industry to run up huge profits and not to share these with the Australian people who surely own the stuff the mining companies are digging out of the ground. They refused to pass legislation to restrict the massive gambling that goes on in this country because the billionaires that control the industry opposed it.

I put up with all this, because the alternative, the Genghis Khan policies of the opposition party are even worse. But I think the recent refugee issue is the final straw. I’m declaring that I have finally given up on Labor. They are a disgrace to the name of socialism and I’m throwing my lot in with the Green Party. I don’t make this decision lightly. I’m not vegetarian, I agree with nuclear energy and I think farmer’s markets are a con. But they have a compassionate attitude towards the unfortunate people who are willing to risk their lives for the chance of a new life in Australia.

They only thing is, this change of heart on my behalf makes no difference, because I can’t vote. You have to be a citizen here to do that. And then funnily enough you are obliged to vote. So maybe it is time that I swallowed my national pride and applied for citizenship. Some things are more important than my sense that my Irishness will be diluted. If I can help change the government’s attitude towards refugees, then I will have done some good. All journeys begin with a single step.   

Travelling with Kids

They say you should never work with children or animals. I’ve haven’t been involved in the chimney sweeping or circus industries, so they opportunities haven’t really arisen for me to test this concept. Little is said about travelling with children (apart from on the internet where reference to it is almost as common as gambling and pornography) and particularly the impact of time zones. As I’ve just got my head together enough to be able to spell, I thought it was time to address this issue.

Sometimes I imagine our five month old daughter is like Stewey from “Family Guy”, sitting there thinking conspiratorially thoughts about her parents while smiling angelically to the outside world. I’m sure some of these thoughts must have been going through her head when we arrived at Melbourne international airport on a Saturday morning some weeks ago. Ordinarily she’d be looking at a 45 minute snooze and maybe a trip to the zoo. Instead, we carried her onto an Airbus A380 (I’m a plane geek so I had to sneak that in) and took her off to Singapore.

The time zone probably didn’t bother her too much at this stage. It’s only two hours difference to Australia and she seemed to take it into her stride. She wasn’t too crazy about the temperature but thankfully Singapore seems to be based on the Truman Show and if they haven’t built a big Perspex screen over the whole island to keep the air conditioning in then I’m sure they have it in their plans.

We then flew to Paris where she slept for eight hours straight on her first day there and then slipped comfortably into European life. We took her to all the top Parisian sites for which she showed distain bordering on contempt. Youth isn’t the only thing wasted on the young. Culture and scenery come a close second.

After a week of meandering across the world, we ended up in Ireland. She coped well with the three flights that this involved, crying occasionally but generally showing so much curiosity that I think she would have flown the plane if we had let her. I did have to walk her up and down the aircraft a lot, particularly on the longer legs. This gave me the opportunity to observe the movie or TV selections of the other passengers (mainly out of envy I should point out as travelling with a baby precludes video entertainment if only because they take pleasure in ripping the headphones off your head at the first opportunity).

My observations showed that “Bourne Identity” type action movies are popular and that more adults watch cartoons than would care to admit it. The extensive European Movie menu on offer was meagrely savoured.

Traveling back to Australia was a different kettle of fish. We made the decision to make a dash back to Melbourne, in so far as you can do this while taking three flights and travelling 17,000km. Our only break to this plan was to take a six hour stopover in Singapore. We booked into a “day” hotel which offered clean sheets and a chance to sleep for a couple of hours. There are many other hotels in Asia that specialise in renting rooms by the hour, but ours was a civilised affair and didn’t carry the risk of discovering that the person you shared a short term bed with was actually the same sex as yourself.

The toughest of the six legs of our odyssey was undoubtedly the last. Most people on the flight from Singapore to Melbourne thought it was a red eye, leaving Singapore late at night and delivering its cargo, blearing eyed, into a Melbourne dawn. Our daughter was still on European time and considered the flight a mid-afternoon jaunt, during which she expected to be entertained while practicing her new rolling skills. She only got contrary when we needed to hook her into the ridiculous seat belt attachments that they gave you on airplanes. Trying to keep a wriggling baby with no concept of danger inside one of these things is like trying to herd cats. I hate to break it to the civil aviation authorities in Singapore, France, Ireland, UK and Australia but our baby wasn’t belted up while landing in your countries and to be honest, her nervous father who was fussing with her during most landings, wasn’t hooked up most of the time either.  

We arrived back in Australia pretty frazzled. As a European with our open borders, it is often confronting to come back to Melbourne and realise that this is a large island, protective of its food industry. If you were to judge by the signs in Melbourne’s arrivals hall you would think that it was a capital offence to smuggle an apple into the country while they would turn a blind eye to the fact that you have half a kilo of heroin hidden a place that only you and a doctor checking you for prostate cancer should look.

“Border Security” is a popular Australian program shown all over the world. I think it is fair to sat that the purpose of the show is to scare people rather than entertain, unless you find the idea of Chinese people who can’t speak English trying to explain why they have a live python in their luggage funny.

We were carrying two packets of tea in our luggage as my wife has become addicted to Irish brands of this elixir. We pondered whether we should tick the box on the arrival form to say we were carrying a food product into the country and put up with the endless questioning that this would result in.

In the end we decided to risk staying quiet, despite the panic that “Border Security” induces. Perhaps they took pity on us because of the goggle eyed baby in our front pack, or maybe we just look honest. We sailed through and are now smug smugglers. We can rest easy, if only our daughter realised that she’s now back in the Southern Hemisphere. Sleep well tonight darling, so we all can.