If there's one thing that Bob Carr's recent comments on asylum seekers demonstrated it was that our politicians think they can say anything they want about 'boat people' and not be held to account for the truth. Our long and steady decline into the almost total victimisation of a vulnerable group of people continues. We are now at the point where it seems that the truth of people's lives counts for nothing.
Much has been written lately about the impoverishment of our public conversations and how they have become captive to political spin, endlessly repeated catch phrases and just plain, brazen lying for political and ideological gain. Well, the results are in — as individuals and as a society we have been captured by the lies and easy phrases. Our view of the world around us and our place in it bears too little resemblance to the truth of it; and in this we are doomed to live disconnected, small and impoverished lives.
We can see this at work in the pessimism about the state of our economy, one of the healthiest in the world, and the tendency of those of us with very healthy incomes to regard ourselves as somewhat 'poor'. We see it in the scepticism about human-induced climate change and its devastating effects — better to believe a comfortable lie than an unpalatable scientific truth. But in no other area of public policy have our hearts and minds been duped by this destructive rhetoric more than on issues relating to asylum seekers who arrive by boat.
It seems like truth and integrity have caught a boat and sailed right out of here.
Back in 1996 the Australian Government did what no other country in the world has done. It linked the intake numbers for the offshore humanitarian program (this is about the resettlement of refugees — not an obligation under the Refugee Convention) with those of the onshore protection program (the processing of claims for protection by asylum seekers who arrive on our shores which is the obligation we do have under the Convention).
Overnight the rhetoric of 'queue jumper' was born. By linking these two separate programs, the claim could now be made that for every person who comes 'uninvited' by boat, one long suffering refugee from the camps in Africa and Southeast Asia misses out.
It does not have to be this way, but no-one tells us this. There is bipartisan