Australia Rights the Ship

Refugees, the Australian Government and Christian Basics

The Australian government has shown the way when it comes to the vexed question of immigration.  Things have been scandalous, prior to the election of Tony Abbott’s Liberal Coalition to government.  Australia was beset by boatloads of economic migrants, mainly via Indonesia, landing on its shores demanding refugee status, together with all the entitlements attached.  Genuine refugees were squeezed out.

The Commentariat, and the Left in particular, had long employed a faux guilt and pity approach which framed  turning the boats back to be completely reprehensible, cruel, unthinkable–and so forth.  Anyone who even suggested such heresy was pilloried immediately as a moral monster.  You know the drill.  But how times have changed–and quickly.  Miranda Devine takes up the narrative:

AN extraordinary graph ­nestled in a press release issued today by Immigration Minister Scott Morrison encapsulates the humanitarian triumph of the government’s border protection policies. 
 
It shows two lines, one red and one blue, heading in ­opposite directions, from 2007 to 2014. Each trajectory is a mirror image of the other. When red goes up, blue goes down, and vice versa. This is the calculus of human misery.

Red represents the refugee places bestowed by Labor on “irregular maritime arrivals” — asylum seekers who arrived by boat. From nothing in 2007 to a peak of 5000 at the height of the madness in 2012-13.  The blue line represents the number of “special humanitarian” visas awarded to genuine refugees waiting offshore in desperate circumstances. The people waiting in a queue we kept being told didn’t exist.  Now that the Abbott government has all but stopped the boats, the queue is moving again. And so the blue line of offshore refugee visas will hit a record high of 5000 this year.

These are the most persecuted people on the planet, Iraq’s Christians and Yazidis who have been driven out of their homes, children catatonic with fear, after escaping the unspeakable barbarism of ­Islamic State psychopaths.  If you want to know what a refugee looks like, see the long lines of distraught humanity picking their way on foot in near 50C heat across the rocky slopes of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Yazidis, like Christians, are a religious minority under mortal threat from IS terrorists who have captured large swathes of Syria and Iraq in the past two months. . . .

Thanks to Morrison’s success in wresting back control of our borders from people smugglers, Australia is in a position now to give at least some of those refugees a lifeline.  He has announced that 4400 refugees from Iraq and Syria, including Christians and Yazidis will be resettled in Australia this financial year. Morrison describes this as the “humanitarian dividend” of strong border protection policies, permanent resettlement in Australia for those “who would have otherwise had their places taken by illegal boat arrivals under the previous government”.

This financial year 11,000 of the 13,750 places in the annual humanitarian intake will be given to desperate people overseas, including 6000 places for refugees identified by the UN, and 5000 for refugees who have close family living in ­Australia. This is testament to Australian generosity and compassion, which have been so maligned by ­alleged refugee advocates.

Because the government has shut down the faux refugee inflow, it is now able to concentrate upon re-settling genuine refugees.

Of course this in no way is meant to condemn the initiative or ambition of the economic refugees.  Most come from impoverished circumstances.  They are seeking a better life for themselves and their children.  In their straightened circumstances they are easy prey to the human-smugglers who sell them the “dream” of a better life in Australia if they pay passage on a rickety boat. The immorality here lies with the people-smugglers who misrepresent the truth and exploit the poor with false promises and deceitful blandishments. 

Sadly there are people in far worse circumstances than these economic migrants.  As Devine points out, Australia is now concentrating upon the genuine refugees.  What has made this possible? A firm, but consistent line by the Australian authorities, turning back boats of pseudo-refugees, the economic migrants.  The message soon spreads, leaving the people-smugglers exposed and out to dry.  This is a lesson the US might find useful.

All of this presents a welcome challenge to Christ’s servants.  Refugee migrants are often the hardest to assimilate into a culture because of the dislocation, coupled with the shock and horror of their circumstances.  Consider for example the difficulties of helping Yazidis integrate who have long centuries of religion, culture, and practice built around, and linked to, a specific geographical location in Iraq, from which they have now been wrenched.  To them, Australia will be a very alien land.  On top of this, will be the horror of what they have recently witnessed and experienced.

Integration will not be easy.  To be successful, above all, will require human-to-human contact, not human-to-bureaucrat officialdom contact.  Smiles, genuine friendliness, helpfulness, and servanthood in all the “little things” of life.  Cherishing people.  Taking care of them.  Once more, we know the drill.  These are the things which Christ’s servants can excel at doing and being.

Neighbourliness is a fundamental Christian ethic, for are we not commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves?  Even Samaritans.

Labour’s War of the Worlds

The Martians Are Coming

Spare a thought for the NZ Labour party.  If you do, you will be rewarded with a good laugh–which, as they say, is the best medicine.  Picture a headless chicken erratically racing around, with no sense of direction, flailing without purpose, until expiration mercifully transpires.  Then, there is the Labour Party.

Several commentators have observed that the party is deeply divided ideologically and personally.  And it seems we must grant their observations to be just.  Take the matter of immigration.  Labour has always cast itself as the party of compassion, with an eye to human suffering and deprivation.  Its historical belief in class warfare and the deprivations of capitalist exploitation require such a position.  But not now it seems.  Over recent weeks, Labour has decided that populist sentiment (as discerned through the headlines of our daily newspapers) is running against immigrants.  The dirty devils are coming into our country and buying up all our houses, so our own poor and disadvantaged are suffering.  Our poor are being refused the inalienable right of every New Zealander, not only to own his own home, but take out a prodigious mortgage in the process that won’t be paid off in three generations, unless housing prices continue to rise perpetually [which is fine, since everybody knows that is a natural law, a direct inverse to the Law of Gravity]. 

Every Kiwi has a right to perpetual debt servitude, and Labour is going to ensure that they get to exercise that right.  Standing for the common man, with appropriate Coplian fanfare, Labour announced a distinctly anti-immigrant policy.  It would restrict the number of immigrants coming into New Zealand, so ordinary Kiwis could get mortgaged to their eyeballs.

We must not quibble about the details of who, what, when, and how when it comes to restricting migrants.  These things will be worked out in due time–which is to say, they will be made up as one goes along.  Let’s not get sarcastic about the different  versions of the new policy and the changing details–good things take time, so button the lip.  And, yes, anyone who dares to point out that actually the data does not support the sensationalist claims of immigrants pushing up housing prices in New Zealand, will be marked down as a target for perpetual “Snowdenising” by the secretive GCSB, which hitherto Labour has steadfastly opposed–at least whenever they have been in opposition.

The point is that once Labour’s ideology cast it as pro-immigrant (“bring us your poor and hungry” etc. etc.) and a defender of the lower income earners and the legions of welfare beneficiaries camping our in our Socialist Paradise.  Now, the headless chicken has headed off in another direction entirely, away from supporting immigration to defending the rights of aspiring yuppies in Auckland, a city which a former Labour Finance Minister once condemned as a suppurating boil on the backside of the nation. 

But it gets worse.  Once Labour flirted with the idea that New Zealand should become a refugees’ paradise and our doors should be open to unlimited refugee intakes.  The flirtation occurred at a time when Australia was besieged by economic migrants out of Asia coming in leaky boats to alight upon its shores.  Australia’s hard line at the time was sniffed at by the Labour Party of New Zealand.  We, in this country, would not engage in such inhumane activities.  Our socialism was internationalist–the purest form of all socialisms.

When the current government took a different position and strengthened the law to enable the authorities to cope decisively with just such an invasion by economic migrants, the current leader of the Labour Party, David Cunliffe, sniffed sarcastically:

“. . . there is exactly the same probability of an alien invasion from Mars as there is of boat people from Indonesia or ‘Wogistan.” [Stuff]

Only a few days ago, credible reports have been received of actual voyages being planned by economic migrants out of Indonesia to New Zealand. 

Fairfax followed a bid by about 50 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh to reach New Zealand after they holed up in a villa south of Indonesia’s capital Jakarta for weeks waiting to board a boat. . . . No asylum boat has ever made it to New Zealand but the current operation is the third attempt in recent months. In March, four men were arrested in Jayapura, West Papua on their way to link with a boat, and last month asylum seekers gathered in West Sumatra for a proposed voyage down Australia’s west coast that was cancelled.

Once Labour would have welcomed them with open arms.  Now, maybe not so much, unless of course they promised not to buy houses for a decade or more, and certainly not in Auckland.   But what is far more concerning is the pronouncement by David Cunliffe that the exact same probability exists of an invasion from Mars as of a boatload of economic migrants sailing to New Zealand.  So, now we expect the headless chook will change direction yet again and call for armed readiness to face the imminent invaders from Mars. 

But every sober analyst will be moved to ask, What has Labour got against Martians?  After all, they may be poor too.  Why has Labour become the Discrimination Party all of a sudden?