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.