[LINK] Off Topic - Canberra Times article

[David Boxall]

Apologies to anyone on the list who isn't interested in this thread.  
Definitely off topic for Link, but encouraging that the revulsion 
seems to be growing.

------- Forwarded message follows -------

A new fault line in the landscape
By Tony Kevin 
THE RE-ELECTION of John Howard leaves many liberal-minded 
Australians ashamed and fearful for our country's future. 

What can they - whatever their political party preference, religious or
ethnic backgrounds - do in the bleak years ahead? 

First, some necessary retrospective judgements. The Labor 
Opposition, despite the undoubted decency and courage of Kim 
Beazley, did not fight for the principle of our universal shared 
humanity. In allowing Howard to set the national security terms of 
this election, Labor succumbed to his exclusionist, racist-based 
nationalism. 

Labor's strategy was based on judgements that this was the only 
way it could win. It is now clear this misread the electorate. In a 
close contest, lack of an inspira tional ethical alternative to 
Howardism bled off crucial votes of liberal-minded Australians to 
the Greens and Democrats. 

Howard used the power and prestige of his office to exploit anxiety 
over international events. Growing evidence of his Government's 
ruthless dishonesty made no difference, once Labor had 
compromised its integrity.

A strategy that compromises ideals should not again be attempted 
by a Labor party that aspires to govern Australia. The failure this 
time damaged the party's moral credibility, and left many 
supporters feeling soiled. 

Australia's political landscape is changing. Left and Right are being
replaced by a new fault-line. Australians who believe this country 
must co-exist in a global and regional community based on values 
of compassion and mutual respect (mainly, the better educated 
and more economically secure) were fractionated and outvoted by 
a fearful and narrow-minded majority that responded to Howard's 
opposite message. 

The election campaign sent a harsh subliminal message to non-
English speaking background (NESB) Australians: ''You're lucky to 
be here. Now shut up and assimilate. We'll decide who comes 
here, and when.'' Our cowed migrant-origin groups, conscious of 
their powerlessness, fell silent, hoping to save something for 
themselves from the wreckage of multiculturalism. 

Howard rode this ugly trend. He also shaped it. Two things are 
clear. Our majoritarian Australian democracy is now, by 
democratic mandate, illiberal. And many Australians are deeply 
ashamed and worried about this. 

They are ashamed because Australian voting majorities endorsed 
leaders who have gloried in treating desperate and defenceless 
fellow human beings with cold cruelty. 

They are worried because they know that Howard's re-election will 
damage Australia's prospects in an interdependent world. The 
economic and security costs will come sooner than we think. 

There will not be international sanctions against us - we don't matter
enough for that - but the work of 60 years of Australian diplomacy 
has come to a virtual halt. 

Our traditional friends in Europe, North America and the UN are 
manifestly discomfited by our treatment of refugees. It is no 
accident that the United States is largely silent on Australia's 
military contribution to the war on terrorism. 

In Asia, we are excluded from crucial regional cooperation 
initiatives we helped to build. We have virtually zero influence on 
Indonesia. People-smuggling negotiations will be unproductive, and 
bilateral relations will continue to corrode. Alexander Downer has 
no solutions. 

In Afghanistan, we are helpless passengers in a military strategy 
we cannot influence. The lives of 150 Australian SAS soldiers are 
at profound risk under a force commitment that Howard decided 
unilaterally and unnecessarily, without waiting to see if the US 
needed or wanted us, and never democratically debated in 
Australia. 

What are liberal-minded Australians to do now? I see three 
possibilities. 

Emigration: As in the bleak pre-Whitlam years, some whose career
qualifications allow them will leave Australia to work and live 
elsewhere:
teachers, doctors, business professionals, scientists, under the 
twin pressures of economic slowdown and an illiberal moral 
climate. A worsening brain drain will leave Australia to an 
increasingly less educated, less liberal, more frightened and 
exclusionist majority. Such emigrations have a way of becoming 
permanent. 

Only evidence of a committed fightback strategy by liberal-minded
Australians will give hope of stemming serious losses of our most 
talented young people. 

Quietism: ''Internal emigration'' - cultivating one's private garden, 
while waiting for a better society is a highly dangerous strategy. 
There is no reason to hope that an electorally vindicated Howard 
will now become a liberal-minded leader, or that he will hand over to 
Costello (who hopefully might be) any time soon. Quietism is not 
an option that this century's history recommen ds. If the bad is not 
resisted, it can give way to worse. 

Fightback: Resolute and united fightback by liberal-minded 
Australians is the best strategy. 

Let's be clear on the objectives: to return to a morally balanced 
Australia that believes in fairness for all and genuine 
multiculturalism at home, honorable policies towards Aboriginal 
people, helping international efforts to make the world a better 
place for all its people, and a border protection regime that 
balances a need to maintain broad control over who comes here
with an active compassion for the victims of war and persecution. 

Fightback in an increasingly illiberal society will carry personal 
costs, as it did in apartheid South Africa and Communist Eastern 
Europe. People who resist Howard's policies will be condemned as 
undemocratic elitists, even ostracised as ''un-Australian''. (There 
was a hint of this in his victory speech). Particularities of class, 
religion or ethnicity may be exploited as pressure points to 
intimidate d issenters. 

Penalties for dissent are growing. Our armed forces have never 
been so muzzled and misused. Already, refugees have died in 
confrontations with our navy. How soon will an unsafe refugee boat, 
pushed back under political orders, sink with major loss of life? Will 
we know? What will we do if we find out? 

Dissent against the war in Afghanistan will also test us. Those who 
question the strategy or ethics of Australia's involvement in this war 
 will be labelled traitors. 

Multiculturalism will die over the next three years, if not vigorously
defended. Howard's wedge policies have forced Australia's ethnic 
communities to battle each other for the meagre 12,000 places in 
the refugee, family reunion and special humanitarian category. Will 
NESB Australians finally find the collective courage and wisdom to 
tell the new Government that, in a country where millions of 
Australians are of post-World War II migrant origin, this ungenerous 
quota is too low to meet legitimate human needs in each of these 
subcategories? Or will they continue to cower in weak fractionated 
minorities at the bottom of Howard's ethnic hierarchy, hoping for 
particular favours if they behave well? 

If not resisted, Howard's security obsessions and exclusionist 
prejudices will draw Australia back to what it used to be: a race-
based stratified society in which NESB people were at best 
tolerated, at worst excluded and mistrusted. In such an ugly 
society, no ethnic or religious minority could feel secure. Tragic 
and unfair as is Australian Muslims' present plight, this is 
potentially about all of us. 

The churches will need to expand their efforts to show solidarity 
with disenfranchised and excluded groups. (And where is the moral 
leadership of our Governor-General?) Many of Australia's 
intellectuals kept silent in recent months, for fear of undermining 
Labor's election strategy. Now it is time to stand up and shout for a 
decent society. Expect large demonstrations, mass petitions, 
activism in cultural and aca demic contexts. The new Government 
must be publicly shamed using democratic methods, if boundaries 
are to be set on inhumanity. 

Business, trade union, rural and conservationist organisations - key
interest groups that understand that isolationism and exclusionism 
are not realistic options for Australia - will need to fight harder for 
more responsible policies on refugees, population and the 
environment. 

Our political parties have special responsibilities now. 

Will liberal-minded Liberals have the courage and vision to resist in 
the party room Howard's exclusionist policies, before these policies 
further damage Australia? 

The challenge for Labor is even greater. There must be a sincere re-
think of the fundamentals of Labor's platform. If I am right that the 
fault-line in Australian politics is rapidly becoming compassionate 
internationalism versus selfish exclusionism, Labor cannot try 
again to blur this choice with glib semantics. The voters will see 
through it. 

If Lab or is to win back or hold government based on uniting the 
votes of decent-minded Australians, it will need to consider 
seriously a strong electoral coalition (ie, a popular front) with the 
Democrats and the Greens, which together gained 10 per cent of 
the vote. Work on this historic choice cannot be delayed. With its 
percentage voter support badly weakened by its moral weakness 
on the refugees issue, Labor can no longer seek to marginalise 
these parties. It must work with them, to reunite Australians of
moral conscience. (Or, we will see a DLP-type scenario revisited). 

Only a strong anti-Howard social and political coalition, including 
all the elements I have mentioned above, can begin to educate and 
persuade the Australian electorate away from Howard's illiberal, 
socially divisive policies. 

Tony Kevin is Visiting Fellow, Research School of Pacific and 
Asian Studies,
Australian National University, and a former Australian Ambassador 
to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Cambodia.<?xml: 
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The Canberra Times, 20 November 2001

http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?story_id=106438&clas
s=your%20say


====================================================================
David Boxall                     |  The more I learn
david.boxall@hunterlink.net.au   |  The more I realise
                                 |  How little I know