Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock has lashed out at Kevin Rudd’s handling of the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers on board the Oceanic Viking warning that the Government’s offer of a “special deal” to resolve the stand off will create a “diabolical precedent” that will effectively encourage more boats to head to Australia and more standoffs in the future.
To date, the asylum seekers have refused to disembark the Oceanic Viking insisting that they would rather die on board that disembark in Indonesia or be returned to Sri Lanka.
The Prime Minister has been left red faced over the Government’s handling of the crisis, insisting, innacurately, that the aslyum seekers were in the process of being processed in Indonesia, when no such process was underway.
According to The Australian, the asylum seekers have been offered “fast track” resettlement in Australia in as little as a month, as well as homes, jobs and social security payments once in the country.
But the Sri Lankan Tamils rejected the offer because it would have required them to wait in an Indonesian detention centre.
The written offer, made by Australian government negotiators to the Sri Lankans on Sunday and Monday, included “lessons in the Australian way of life”, help in tracking down family members and “assistance in . . . accommodation, medical help and advice, income benefits, English lessons and help with seeking employment”.
It promised the boatpeople daily contact with Australian officials during their remaining time in Indonesia, provided they left the Oceanic Viking.
With no end to the crisis in sight, Philip Ruddock has blasted the Rudd Government’s capitulance to the demands of the asylum seekers.
Mr Ruddock told The Australian that the government’s concessions and offer to fast-track processing and resettlement of the group after they refused to get off in Indonesia will feed perceptions that if you put the government “under duress you will get the outcome you are looking for”.
“It’s a diabolical situation of the government’s own making. It’s going to feed expectations that if you put the government under duress you will get the outcome you were looking for,” Mr Ruddock told The Australian Online.
“It becomes a clear incentive and it is a clear indication that if you put the government under duress you will get what you want.
“What the Indonesians have been saying is code for, `what are you doing to encourage people to get on these boats?”’
Mr Ruddock said using force or calling in the Australian Army was clearly a difficult option when you were under the jurisdiction of foreign government.
Mr Ruddock said while it would not be appropriate to turn the boat back to Sri Lanka without offering the refugees a safe harbour, he had an open mind to such a tactic if asylum-seekers refused to disembark in a safe port, as the Oceanic Viking 78 had refused to do so.
“But if you have given people the opportunity to disembark somewhere they are safe and they have chosen not to that’s a different set of circumstances,” he said.
Meanwhile, Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce says Mr Rudd has surrendered the sovereignty of Australia’s immigration policy.
“It is in summary capitulation. He has lost the fight and they are on their way to Australia. Bonza, beauty, but pathetic,” he told The Australian.
“The tactic is simple. Mr Rudd wants them off the boat before parliament sits next week. Our immigration policy has become determined by Parliamentary sittings.”
One Nation Under CCTV by Banksy
The United Kingdom is now one of the most instensely monitored societies in the developed world.
In his report, “Paranoid, suspicion, obsessive surveillance – and a land of liberty destroyed by stealth,” Henry Porter notes that the United Kingdom has “become the sort of society that we would unhesitatingly have railed against a few years ago. But, because the change has been brought about with such stealth, we are the very last to see it.”
Returning to Britain from a summer holiday abroad, Porter says “you begin to notice things that perhaps escaped your attention before – the huge number of CCTV cameras that infest our public spaces and, much less obviously, the atmosphere of watchfulness and control that has now become a way of life.”
This is the regime that 12 years of New Labour have imposed on Britain, a place of unwavering suspicion, paranoia – and obsessive surveillance.
Today Britain has one and a half times as many surveillance cameras as communist China.
In fact there are now 4.2million closed circuit TV cameras in the UK – one per every 14 people.
In contrast, in China, which has a population of 1.3billion there are just 2.75million cameras – the equivalent of one for every 472,000 of its citizens.
It is estimated that Britain has 20 per cent of cameras globally and that each person in that country is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.
Liberal Democrat spokesman Chris Huhne said “It cannot be a justified response to the problems we face in this country that the state is spying on half a million people a year.
‘The Government forgets that George Orwell’s 1984 was a warning, not a blueprint. We are still a long way from living under the Stasi – but it beggars belief that it is necessary to spy on one in every 78 adults.’
The number of Big Brother “snooping missions” by police, town halls and other public bodies has soared by 44 per cent in the last two years. Last year there were 504,073 new cases – an average of 1,381 a day. It is the equivalent of one adult in 78 coming under state-sanctioned surveillance.
Despite public opposition and protests from civil liberatarians, the Government is determined to introduce new measures that will require every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by Britons to be stored for one year and available for “monitoring by government bodies.”
Under the legislation, all telecoms companies and internet service providers will be required by British law to keep a record of every customer’s personal communications, showing who they have contacted, when and where, as well as the websites they have visited.
653 public bodies will have access to the data, including police, local councils, the ambulance service, fire authorities and even prison governors.
They will not require the permission of a judge or a magistrate to obtain the information, but simply the authorisation of a senior police officer or the equivalent of a deputy head of department at a local authority.
Ministers had originally wanted to store the information on a single government-run database, but chose not to because of privacy concerns. But the Government announced this week that it was pressing ahead with privately held ”Big Brother” databases that opposition leaders said amounted to state spying on the public.
It is doing so despite its own research showing that it has little public support.
The law will increase the amount of personal data that can be obtained by officials through the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which is supposed to be used for fighting terrorism.
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: ”The big danger in all of this is ‘mission creep’. This Government keeps on introducing new powers to tackle terrorism and organised crime which end up being used for completely different purposes. We have to stop that from happening”.
Chris Huhne has criticised the scheme for what he said is in effect ‘’state spying”.
”It is simply not that easy to separate the bare details of a call from its content,” he said. ”What if a leading business person is ringing Alcoholics Anonymous?”
The proposed law will not come before Parliament until after the general election. But the Home Office insisted it would push it through.
However, the House of Lords Constitution Committee has warned that increasing use of surveillance by the government and private companies is a serious threat to freedoms and constitutional rights.
The Committee’s report said:
“The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. Mass surveillance has the potential to erode privacy. As privacy is an essential pre-requisite to the exercise of individual freedom, its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country.”
Earlier this year Interception of Communications Assistant Commissioner Jonathan Bamford said:
“For some time we have warned about the dangers of sleepwalking into a surveillance society and the risks to the privacy of individuals. More of our personal details are kept and for increasingly longer periods of time. They can fall into the wrong hands and be used in ways to the detriment of individuals.”
The way things are heading, it appears it may already be too late.
Despite pre-election assurances of slashing unnecessary Government spending on counsultants, the Rudd government has spent some $940 million in new consultancy contracts for policy advice, research and audits since winning office two years ago.
According to The Australian, the cost of the high-priced consultants’ work is equivalent to the wages and salaries bill of the 1000-strong federal Treasury for almost 12 years.
Tom Dusevic reports that Labor has increasingly turned to private sector advisers, academics and experts to flesh out its policy agenda, particularly in high-profile areas such as the proposed national broadband network, climate change, the so-called “education revolution” and health reform.
Labor currently has some 7706 consultancy contracts underway. The Department of Defence was the most active seeker of new work, “letting” $110.5m in consultancies since November 2007, while its related agency the Defence Materiel Organisation has signed up for $58m in outside advice.
The Department of Health and Ageing has awarded $80m worth of work, followed by Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts ($64.4m), Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy ($62.8m), Finance ($50m) and Julia Gillard’s super-sized Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations ($47.3m).
Actual spending on consultants grew by 5.6 per cent last financial year, amid difficult economic conditions.
In its pitch for office in 2007, Labor vowed to cut $3 billion over four years in what it called “wasteful” spending, including $395m on consultants.
The rate of hiring consultants has escalated after Wayne Swan’s first budget last year.
However, the global financial crisis and a deteriorating fiscal deficit have led to federal departments commissioning fewer outside experts for traditional public roles in the latter part of this year.
Gaining a large chunk of the policy advice work over the past two years have been multinationals Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey and KPMG, estimated to be worth about $75m in total.
These firms can command fees of up to $500 an hour, depending on the expertise sought and the turnaround time of the project.
One local outfit that has also prospered under Labor has been the Allen Consulting Group, which has won 46 contracts worth $5.5m for its expertise in childcare policy, water management and economic modelling.
The reliance on consultants by the government has led to calls from senior public servants to boost the capability of Canberra’s bureaucracy, especially in research, economic modelling and program design.
Opposition finance spokeswoman Helen Coonan yesterday called for greater accountability in the awarding of contracts.
Which is a fine thing. However, my concern is that counsultants generally tell you, in my experience, what you already know. They reach their conclusions and recommendations based on the information that is provided to them by the party that engages them.
In the public service, it isn’t difficult to reach the conclusion that appointing consultants to make recommendations is just a simple and effective way to avoid accepting responsibility for a decision that may subsequently turn out to be imprudent.
I thought the buck stopped with Kevin Rudd?
Guest post by Ray Hunt *
This week the Prime Minister takes cricket diplomacy to India where he will reportedly commence negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the other emerging Asian superpower.
Mr Rudd then flies East to Singapore for the APEC summit. High on the agenda at both meetings will be plans for a European-Union style economic and political grouping for Asia.
It’s a serious proposal for a geographically-huge free trade zone that includes Australia and New Zealand.
The push to establish an Asian Union is a reaction by the region’s most powerful Governments to the massive social change and rapid economic developments that have already occurred – and recognition of the potentially dangerous Asian geo-political shake-up that has only just begun.
The balance of power in our neighbourhood is tilting fast. Deep rooted ancient hatreds, coupled with rapid economic development, North Korean nuclear weapons, the emergence of a large regional consumer class, rising individual and national expectations and a naval arms race, make some of the atmospherics surrounding Asia’s development eerily similar to that of early 20th Century Europe.
I recently wrote a blog about the chilling possibility that, if things went wrong, China, India and Japan could replay World War One with nuclear weapons in our backyard:
http://blogocrats.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/north-korean-bomb-tilts-asian-balance-of-power/
Posters discussed the urgent need for a diplomatic “talk shop” to ensure the historical hatreds and geopolitical, environmental and economic growing pains of Asia are, in the future, more systematically managed.
“Closer personal and political relations need to be built incrementally. In untroubled times. Expecting countries with serious historic hangovers to be able to deal with all their toxic baggage during a time of crisis is really asking for trouble.”
Two weeks ago at an ASEAN regional summit, the leaders of China, Japan and South Korea publicly advocated plans for an Asian political and economic harmonisation process. Asian newspapers and the BBC have subsequently focused a lot of attention on the proposal:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8323742.stm
Such a complex political organisation will undoubtedly take a generation to evolve. It’s certainly not going to be delivered by the 2015 date nominated in the BBC story, presumably by someone with a straight face.
However, the clear and present need for an Asian diplomatic “talk shop” almost guarantees swift inter-governmental action to commence building a new organisation from scratch. Commence being the key phrase here.
This speech by Taro Aso, the last Japanese Prime Minister, is the likely foundation stone for closer Asian ties:
Proving Yes Minister-style governance applies beyond the Anglosphere, the new Japanese Government repackaged Aso’s framework as “new,” obtained diplomatic support from the other East Asian economic heavyweights and went public with an ambitious concept.
Last year, Kevin Rudd proposed another pan-Asian-institution but the Prime Minister’s plan will definitely not proceed against one supported by East Asia’s big three and may now be diplomatically withdrawn?
Asia Already Our Largest Export Market
The incremental creation of an Asian Union will obviously mean changes great and small across the region, including for Australia. I don’t have the space to address any detail here, however, I do note in passing that one positive would be the opening up of new trade opportunities across the world’s fastest growing economies.
But Australia’s economic and security interests are already tied to Asia. China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Korea are crucial to our future.
Japan and China are our two largest export markets and our two largest trading partners. Our fastest growing export markets are in Asia and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Trade with India, for example, has ample growth potential in the decades ahead.
So for the purposes of this thread, I assume Australia will be a proactive participant in Asia’s economic and political harmonisation process (Coherent dissent against this assumption welcome).
Accordingly you, dear blogger, are being asked to prepare an Australian Government public relations pitch to sell the benefits of an Asian Union to the Australian public.
What do you tell the people to sell the people?
Do you focus purely on the positive economic arguments? Asia’s billion new “cashed up” middle class consumers, for example?
How do you go about reassuring those with the kind of fears that Pauline and Johnnie tapped into?
Do you include the enormous environmental pressures Asia faces? The looming Chinese and Indian water crisis? The growing impacts of global warming? The potential for tens of millions of climate refugees and the need for a regional political response?
Are the benefits of getting our system of democracy and its accompanying legal and human-rights incorporated into any new AU regulatory and legal framework worth pitching?
Would the potential for improved environmental standards right across Asia motivate support?
Or is the prevention of an utterly catastrophic Asian nuclear war sufficient justification for the formation of an Asian Union and Australia’s active participation in the process?
Byline link: * Ray Hunt is a Melbourne-based Broadcaster and Writer
Who would’ve thought?
The humble Gutter has crossed the threshold of 100,000 hits!
On average we get around 1,000 visitors a day from all parts of the globe. Together we have published over 200 posts with almost 10,000 comments so far.
A big thank you to everyone, and a special nod to Miglo and Tom who have provided much support.
Also, I’d like to extend an invitation to any lurkers to get involved…
And if anyone would like to post a discussion for discussion, please feel welcome – just let me know…
cheers!
reb.
Tom raises the following questions –
• Is climate change a science? A model? A theory?
• Is there a disciplined curriculum for the profession of Climate Scientist? is there a professional association to uphold standards?
• Do we have “global climate change” or “local climate change”?
• How much is contributed by actual human/industrial emission and how much is due to forest clearing?
• Why is population growth not widely seen as the primary contributor to carbon emission?
• Why hasn’t our government initiated a “behavioural change” program, to wean us off carbon consumption? Why is the federal government just focussing on the blunt instrument of a price mechanism to change behaviour?
• What are the qualifications of Ross Garnaut? I think he has qualifications in economics, and a distinguished career in this field, so why is he the climate change guru?
Tom of Melbourne writes this interesting perspective on the anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall…
Today is the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The collapse happened incredibly quickly, the floodgates simply opened. Firstly by people fleeing the east through Hungry, then through the wall itself.
It an interesting reflection, the demise of communism in Eastern Europe. The collapse started in Poland.
While it is easy to be critical of unionism and the Catholic Church, these organisations were the only structures capable of surviving the Polish totalitarianism, they were the only opposition. It was church and union resistance to totalitarianism that saw the collapse of communism in Poland and opened the way for so many people.
East Germany is now simply part of West Germany, no federation, just integration. The citizens completely rejected the separate state structure as soon as they had an opportunity.
Most East Germans see this as a time for celebration, despite the relative economic hardships they continue to endure. But the east is apparently in danger of becoming a ghost state as the youth seek opportunities in the more developed west.
I recall some of the left used to offer a spirited defence of East Germany, apparently the wall was to keep out capitalist advocates, the secret police were supporting a cohesive socialist objective, the regime had popular support, and the wall wasn’t to imprison the population. Really?
We might believe we now live in interesting times, by who would have predicted the collapse of communism even 22 years ago?
who are you really voting for?
Nature 5 has alerted us to a speech delivered today by Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey called “In Defence of God.”
You’ve really got to wonder what motivates politicians to pander to the religious believers with public displays of wearing their faith on their sleeves.
Former President George W Bush together with former Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Blair took the Western World to war in the Middle east with the firm belief that “they had God on their side.”
More recently, former Treasurer Peter Costello joined the happy-clappy brigade with the media in tow at the controversial pentecostal Hillsong Church, while Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has no qualms in delving into the public purse to fund the Pope’s Big Day out in Sydney.
Claiming the moral high ground clearly has its rewards.
Few would call in to question the motivation of someone who claims to have “God on their side”.
However in their rush to compete for the “Holier than Thou” Title, are our politicians with their sanctiomious posturing and moralising actually doing more harm than good?
What does it say about Australia as a nation, when politicians on both sides of the fence happily declare that they have conversations with invisible friends and insist that more people should get in on the act?
Should these people even be allowed out, never mind allowed to run the country?
As Nature 5 notes:
The ‘avuncular one’ is making his with his ‘come all ye faithful’ speech. While Abbott is stuck on the ‘right’ in the religious spectrum, Joe is going for the centre a la Rudd.
The Battle of the Believers is heating up! Whose religious convictions will reign supreme…??!!
[Thanks to Nature 5 for the info]
Tony “Shit Eating Grin” Abbott, is upset with the language of the nation’s Prime Minister, and in particular, Kevin Rudd’s use of the term “political cowards” to describe the Liberal Opposition.
Clearly not happy with the description, Tony Abbott has warned the Prime Minister to be ‘more respectful’ when dealing with Coalition MPs.
“He can’t really be serious about getting our votes if this is the kind of language he uses,” Tony Abbott told ABC Radio.
If Mr Rudd was serious about getting the scheme through parliament, he had to deal with the opposition “respectfully”, Mr Abbott said.
“If he wants our vote he’s got to take us seriously.”
Oh the irony of it all…
Hello!
And welcome to a special Spring Edition of Monday by The Magazine Rack.
Our beginning of the working week idle chit chat thread. And what a lovely day it is.
We had a delightful day at our place yesterday, with Victor inviting a few other ‘food bloggers’ around for a pot-luck lunch on the deck. The food and wine were excellent as was the company. With the exception of one small statured slightly inebriated Scottish person who kept wanting to drag the poor performance of politicians into the conversation. One of our friends Rita has some photos of the day on her blog here.
I had an interesting conversation with one of our guests who happens to be a QC. He is about to take on the case of Denis Ferguson and will be challenging the NSW Government’s recent amendments to some laws which were changed for Denis Ferguson. He feels that we may be venturing into dangerous territory when the Government can change laws specifically to disadvantage one individual, and this type of conduct has greater ramifications for the rights and freedoms of the broader public.
He was also involved in defending David Hicks. Here he is with Major Mori.
And a big well done to Miglo for hosting another highly successful family friendly forum. It hasn’t escaped my attention that Migs’s posts receive much greater attention than my own. One could begin to get a complex.
Anyways, here we go head first into another week!
reb
