At least, that’s the headline on the ABC website. The story quotes a puzzled senator

CLP senator Nigel Scullion at a loss to explain the huge swing towards the Labor Party.
“This is a political tsunami,” he said.
“I mean…the obvious question is why? You’d have to grope for answers.”

I would have thought it was obvious that just about everyone in the Top End reads the Financial Review closely, and that it was this column that sank Opposition leader Denis Burke’s chances. Well, maybe not, but Burke’s absurd proposal for a 3000km powerline clearly hasn’t helped him.

Not just for the many families who are to be released from the horrors of mandatory detention but for all decent Australians. Every country has causes for pride and shame, but there have been few things in my lifetime that have made me as ashamed of my country as the way we have treated asylum-seekers. It remains to be seen how the changes announced yesterday will work in detail, but we can hope that it means, as Judi Moylan says, the practical end of indefinite detention.

Congratulations to the four Liberals [Petro Georgiou, Judi Moylan, Russell Broadbent and Bruce Baird] whose threat to cross the floor, combined with a shift back towards decency in Australian public opinion to bring about this change.

I’ll have some more to say later on this whole episode, and there’ll be plenty of room for debate than, but for the moment I don’t feel like hearing any of the old arguments, so I’ve closed this post to comments.

Jack Strocchi points me to this interesting piece by Michael Duffy, comparing the case of Chinese diplomat and would-be defector Chen Yonglin with the horrific treatment meted out by a series of immigration ministers to Peter Qasim, to whom could be added equally outrageous cases like those of Al-Kateb and Al Khafaji sentenced to indefinite detention because no country will take them, not to mention the many innocent children locked behind barbed wire.

Duffy, says correctly that Chen is a queue-jumper[1] and that the government’s position[2] is inconsistent with the tough stand it took on refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan. He says

This tide of toughness has lifted the ship of conservative government to ever new levels of success. Refugees have been locked up to deter others overseas, and the voters have given their thanks. The careers of people like Costello and Abbott have blossomed and rightly so, because they are strong men prepared to stand behind the beliefs they hold so passionately.

So he says, Chen and his family should be locked up with all the others.

I agree with Duffy that the inconsistencies are glaring, but not on how to resolve them. We should give Chen asylum and end mandatory detention immediately.

Of course, there’s a big problem here for refugee policy. As Duffy says, Chen brought his exposure to political persecution on himself by denouncing the Chinese government. But, of course this is commonly the case with refugees. Except during (sadly too common) outbreaks of genocidal madness like the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, the subjects of dictatorships are usually safe enough if they keep quiet. That’s why we used to use the category of territorial asylum, which, as I understand it, said that anyone who could get out of, say, the Soviet Union, automatically counted as a refugee.

But if we allowed anyone from China who denounced the government to seek asylum here, there could well be quite a lot of applicants. I don’t have an immediate answer to this other than to say that it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t get too cosy with the current Chinese government. They may like capitalism now, but its still a communist dictatorship they’re running.

A final point: Duffy coins the neologism “neocoms”, and offers the following explanation (which I missed in the original version of this post)

What a sudden about-face, what a strange and unexpected burst of compassion from tough politicians and commentators who have supported mandatory detention for so long. It needs a name, and I suggest we call it the new compassion, and those who express it the neo-coms.

To any who recognise themselves in this description, I can only say, “Welcome back to humanity”.

fn1. That is, if you accept the bogus claim that there exists a queue, and that potential refugees are in a position to take their place at the back of it

fn2. As far as it can be discerned among a fog of evasions

Update In comments, Andrew Bartlett suggested that Duffy was writing ironically. That was my first reading also, and seems to have been the impression of others. But the text is clear enough, and Duffy has consistently supported a hard line on asylum-seekers. As I’ve discovered before now, irony is a dangerous weapon. Still if Duffy has turned against mandatory detention in general, I’ll be happy to congratulate him.

Regular commenter Benno (Benedict Spearritt) has sent in a guest post advocating Condorcet voting, a favorite theme of his. My own view is that our current system of (preferably optional) preferential voting (AKA the single transferable vote) is as good as any of the single-member alternatives and drastically better than First Past the Post. It’s a Word document so I’ve tried an HTML translation but I’ll try to upload the file also when I get a moment.

Try this location for the word file and this Try this location for the HTML file

PM Lawrence has sent another version, which I’ve pasted in
Read More »

I’ve noticed numerous statements lately to the effect that the number of asylum-seekers dropped to zero after the Tampa incident, usually with the implication that the associated policies were tough but effective. Those who want to use this argument should be honest about their history. The Tampa was seized in August 2001. There were plenty of boats after that, including SIEV-4, which was at the centre of the “children overboard” incident. The event that brought the whole process to a halt was the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001, with the loss of 353 lives.

Most of the Tampa asylum-seekers were eventually recognised as refugees, and many made it to Australia in the end. It wasn’t the use of Pacific islands as detention camps, but the willingness of the government to turn back unseaworthy boats, reaffirmed after the SIEV-X tragedy, that ended the flow of asylum seekers. This policy, reinforced by the lesson of SIEV-X, had the desired effect. That doesn’t make it any less shameful.

More on asylum-seekers from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Dunlop, Nicholas Gruen and Ken Parish

I worked more on the Industrial Relations reform issue last night and I have written a draft paper, which you can read and, hopefully, comment on.

IR is a very complex topic, and for that reason I’ve tended to shy away from detailed analysis in the past. But with major changes inevitable, there’s no alternative but to get immersed in the details. This is going to be a slow process, but at least I’ve now made a start. I’m pretty much flat-out at present, so progress on this is likely to be slow.

Anyway, you can read my analysis, for what it’s worth (PDF file over the fold).
Read More »

Like lots of others, I’m not too happy about the Corby case. But I think most of the complaints from Australia have been misdirected. The problem is not with the trial which, while not as procedurally tight as the Australian equivalent, seemed basically fair[1] to me. The real problem is with Corby’s twenty year sentence. The likely imposition of the death penalty on the Bali heroin smugglers is even worse.

The reason that attention hasn’t been focused on this issue is that, as a society, we’re fairly hypocritical about the war on drugs. At one level, we recognise that it’s essentially pointless and unwinnable, like a lot of wars. So we’ve gradually backed away from lengthy prison sentences for bit players, and even abandoned the idea that the capture of a few “Mr Big Enoughs” would make any real difference. But it’s still convenient for us that our neighbours should have draconian laws, the burden of which falls mainly on their own citizens. It’s only when a sympathetic figure like Corby gets 20 years for an offence that might have drawn a good behavior bond in Australia, or when some stupid young people end up facing a firing squad that the contradictions are exposed.

fn1. That is, as fair as other drugs trials. The nature of the war on drugs is that normal legal principles have to be suspended if the law is going to be made to work at all. The routine use of procedures bordering on entrapment, and the effective reversal of the onus of proof, once possession is established, are examples of this, in Australia just as much as in Indonesia.

The Age reports that torture advocate Mirko Bagaric will no longer be assessing refugee cases

Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone confirmed that Professor Bagaric would no longer hear appeals to the Refugee Review Tribunal, which deals with many asylum seekers who have suffered torture overseas. However, Professor Bagaric will continue to serve on the Migration Review Tribunal, which deals with non-refugee immigration cases.

But Bagaric presumably didn’t arrive at his repugnant views overnight. From his own writing, it appears he’s a member of the “September 11, 2001 changed everything” school. Given that he held views so radically different from official public policy on this central issue, he ought to have disqualified himself from RRT appeals, or at least advised the Minister of his position. As it is, I would say that any rejection of an appeal by an RRT panel on which Bagaric served is morally, and perhaps legally, suspect.

According to this SMH report, two Australian academics are advocating the legalisation of torture, including the torture of innocent people who [their interrogators believe] might have useful information. If the SMH report is to be believed, the supporting ‘argument’ is just our old (and multiply-refuted) friend, the ‘ticking-bomb’ scenario. (Here’s my response, and here’s a fairly typical instance of the way the ticking-bomb scenario is used in practice to justify routine and prolonged torture[1].

I find it difficult to believe that this report can be accurate and I certainly hope it isn’t. The views of Bagaric and Clarke are spelt out in this opinion piece, which is as lame and morally obtuse as you might expect. A quick Google reveals that Bagaric is a Part-time member, Refugee Review Tribunal and Migration Review Tribunal, which is certainly inappropriate for someone who apparently advocates sticking needles under the fingernails of innocent suspects. At least, that was what this Age report said when I checked it an hour ago, but the relevant passage has now disappeared.

Update More from Ken Parish, Tim Dunlop and Benambra. I haven’t seen any comment yet from pro-war bloggers, but I hope at least some of them will repudiate this terrible proposal.

fn1. This was a case in Israel, but I don’t want to discuss the Israel-Palestine issue here. Any comments on this issue, or on the fact that there are other countries that do far worse, and don’t have courts to appeal to, will be deleted.

I’ve repeatedly criticised Kim Beazley for adopting a small target strategy aimed at peeling off marginal voters from the government while not upsetting anrybody. But his response to the Budget has been as strong as you could hope for. Of course, the press gallery sports commentators are almost uniformly convinced that it’s a bad move, though, as far as I can see none of them denied the point that the tax cuts give a lot to the well-off and hardly anything to the great majority of Australians.

Anyway, well done Kim!

More from Tim Dunlop, Ken Parish and Mark Bahnisch