Manus Island riot: a plague on both your houses
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Manus Island riot: a plague on both your houses

By Paula Matthewson

Posted Mon 24 Feb 2014, 8:13am AEDT

Photo: Don't expect any great satisfaction from this week's debate on asylum seekers.

Labor will attack Scott Morrison over the Manus Island riot, but both sides of the political divide are guilty of inhumane policies spanning more than two decades, writes Paula Matthewson.

Both sides ruthlessly exploited nascent voter anxiety about asylum
seekers into a full-blown paranoia. By framing the issue as one of
border protection rather than immigration or human rights the Howard
government implicitly encouraged voters to make a connection between
asylum seekers, terrorists and the war on terror. It's hard not to
conclude that Howard's ill-founded observation about "people like that"
throwing their children overboard wasn't similarly confected to demonise
asylum seekers.

Then as the events of September 11, 2001 faded,
at least in the minds of Australians, voter unease over asylum seekers
emerged as a by-product of the industrial relations battle. Having been
brought to a state of high concern by both parties claiming the other
was putting their job security at risk, voters began to equate asylum
seekers as yet another threat to their employment prospects. Neither
side has ever attempted to dissuade this misapprehension, with prime
minister Gillard even reinforcing it by capitulating to the unions and imposing a limit on the use of 457 visas for skilled foreign workers.

Voter
antipathy for asylum seekers has been kept at a fairly vigorous simmer
ever since – it's just too electorally valuable to the parties to be let
to go off the boil.

Perhaps most shockingly, Kevin Rudd exploited
it on his re-election as Labor leader in an attempt to consolidate his
Messiah 2.0 status. Erasing from that prodigious brain any memory of his
denunciation of the inhumanity that was the Pacific Solution, Rudd
unleashed the ultimate deterrent (and hopeful vote-winner) by vowing
that no asylum seeker would ever reach Australia and instead would be
settled in PNG.

After Rudd's defeat it was no surprise Tony Abbott
also embraced this extreme policy, having pinned his electoral
legitimacy on "stopping the boats" (shorthand for "not letting those
foreign devils steal Australian jobs, crowd our trains or marry our
daughters").

It's hard to imagine that we have to call all those politicians HUMANS that created a monster that is destroying the HUMANITY IN AUSTRALIANS.