Home Sweet Home

A few weeks ago, I commented on the sugar cane fires that used to be a regular sight in Bundaberg. I had been reliably informed that farmers don’t tend to set their fields ablaze quite so much anymore - “health and safety gone mad,” probably - but this certainly wasn’t the case earlier in the week, where a number of local farmers turned their crops into smoke-filled scenes from Apocalypse Now. A striking sight, I think you’ll agree. This is done to kill any vermin in the undergrowth, and careful attention is paid to contain the blaze and avoid any wild fires spreading into neighbouring fields. Which is why cane fires only ever happen at winter time when the temperature is cooler, and the crops are appropriately sheared before hand. We chanced upon this one just as the sun was setting, but I counted four other fields which had been set alight, all within relatively close proximity.

This asylum seeker row in Australia looks likely to unsettle Labor’s chances in the forthcoming election, despite the party taking a more hard line approach and adopting a change in leadership. I find it particularly hard to fathom the notion of the opposition: that so-called ‘boatpeople’ might pose a threat to the Australian way of life and - this reason seems most peculiar - that Australia might not be able to support any more people. Former PM Kevin Rudd put forward the idea of the ‘big Australia’ when he came to power in 2007, with plans to increase the country’s population to 35 million by 2050. Let’s put this into perspective: the population of England is 50 million, and, yes, nearly two thirds of Australia is arid desert - completely uninhabitable - but considering that you can roughly fit around 50 Englands in Australia, we’re still talking about an incredibly vast area of land. If there is anywhere in the world where these desperate people could feasibly go, then surely it is Australia.

The ‘big Australia’ was Rudd’s way of curbing the country’s aging population. As the number of Australians aged between 65 and 84 looks set to double in the next 40 years, there will need to be a steady stream of eligible workers ready to plug the financial gaps, not just to provide the necessary pensions and health provisions required, but to also cover the deficit as new retirees step out of the workforce. And who will plug that gap? Well, there have been three boats full of people since last Sunday who would be quite prepared to help, considering that the vast majority have already been unceremoniously displaced from their own countries (many of Australia’s recent arrivals are from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq) and have survived a long, arduous and uncertain boat ride in some considerable discomfort just to come here.

Peter van Onselen, writing in The Australian, put it well when addressing the fact that since 2007 - when Kevin Rudd’s Labor came to power - only 4,500 refugees have attempted to seek asylum in Australia, many of which have been assessed as eligible to fit into the country’s yearly quota of 13,750 refugees. “Australia's refugee numbers will always be low because of something called the ocean,” he writes.

But there is a clear notion of ‘not in my back yard’ going on here - as new PM Julia Gillard faces strong local opposition to the building of an offshore processing centre in East Timor, a small Southeast Asian country 400 miles northwest of Darwin. The East Timor parliament rejected the idea on Monday, and Gillard has been playing down the embarrassment ever since, now setting her eyes on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island while negotiating new terms with East Timor in what appears to be a large scale refugee version of ‘Deal or No Deal’. A cartoon in The Weekend Australian by Nicholson depicts Gillard telling a reporter that “we won’t rush our decision” as an octopus sprawls its tentacles over boxes labelled with a number of different locations - a parody of the German octopus who was alleged to have correctly predicted a number of significant results at this year’s World Cup. For Gillard, barely three weeks into her new position, the immigration issue is proving to be her toughest challenge yet.

But the history of Australia’s immigration policy has never run smoothly, and there are echoes in Opposition leader Tony Abbott’s ‘turn back the boats’ rhetoric that, distastefully, conjures up memories of the country’s more extremist past. It is worth noting here that Abbott has since refrained from using this soundbite and even corrected it, claiming that the Opposition (a coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals) will only turn back boats as a deterrent to people smugglers. But still, such corrosive language only acts to highlight inherent concerns about the dangers of immigration, a populist thought from the more right wing members of Australian society.

We’re yet to comment on the 'White Australia' immigration policy, which was inherited by successive parliaments over a period of 72 years, and prohibited people from entering the country on the grounds of race. Moreover, it was only abolished in 1973, after taking a period of roughly 25 years to dismantle.

The argument for such legislation was originally and primarily targeted against Chinese and Japanese labourers who, during the turn of the century, started arriving into Australia in large numbers for work on gold mines and sugar plantations. Chief organiser of the policy, Alfred Deakin, put it like this in 1901: “It is not the bad qualities, but the good qualities of these alien races that make them so dangerous to us. It is their inexhaustible energy, their power of applying themselves to new tasks, their endurance and low standard of living that make them such competitors.” Those wishing to enter the country would have to pass a controversial dictation test, obviously in a language which they couldn’t understand, all as a means of placing “certain restrictions on immigration and to provide for the removal from the Commonwealth of prohibited immigrants,” according to the words of the original Act.

For another example of racially-motivated border provisions, we need to turn to the unsavoury character of Pauline Hanson, a former fish and chip shop owner who started her political life as a Liberal MP, before leading her own One Nation party with a strong anti-immigration stance. She made a fiery maiden speech to the House of Representatives in 1996, which explained how she wanted ‘multiculturalism abolished’, among much else. “If I can invite whom I want into my home,” she said, “then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country.”

In 1997, Hanson took the strange step of recording a video of herself to be played in the event of her assassination, leading with the words: “Fellow Australians, if you are seeing me now, it means I have been murdered.” Disconcertingly, One Nation picked up quite a sympathetic following, acquiring one quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections of 1998, causing a rise in right-wing parties to form across the continent with equally strong and verbal anti-immigration policies.

All of which makes Rudd’s ‘big Australia’ prophesy even more courageous in the face of such opposition from certain ugly factions of society. Of course, we should not confuse these outdated opinions from the very real and prominent issue of Australian immigration today, and Gillard is more than sympathetic to the cause. “There are racists in every country,” she said in a speech on Tuesday in Sydney. “But expressing a desire for a clear and firm policy to deal with a very difficult problem does not make you a racist.” As a mere aside, it is worth remembering that Australia is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet: according to the 2006 census, a population count of 20 million included citizens from over 200 countries, with 45% either born overseas or having at least one parent born overseas.

We can only hope that Gillard doesn’t completely U-turn on Labor’s initial plans in the face of mounting pressures, especially as a tactic to merely appease the dissidents and stay in power for another term.


Incidentally, a quick note on the Americanised spelling of ‘Labor’ in this context. There doesn’t appear to be any concrete reasoning for this, as the party was formally known as the Australian Labour Party since their formation in 1908, but then changed the spelling in 1912. So it was clearly a conscious decision. Some credit the change as a way of modernising the party following the influence of the United States labor movement at the turn of the century. Alternatively, it could have been altered as a need to differentiate the party name from the more general labour movement in Australia. Regardless, it seems that both spellings of ‘labour’ were used before the formation of the ALP, so the reason for the variant is all a bit subjective. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘AFL: Western Bulldogs v Port Adelaide’ (Ten)

“Port Adelaide’s forward structure is working a lot better,” says the commentator at the start of the second quarter, which is good to know, although I’m not entirely certain what form a forward structure might take, let alone one whose function is improving. Actually, I’m not really too sure of anything here, as Aussie Rules is a completely baffling sport to me. It’s played predominantly in New South Wales and Victoria, and according to one of my Queenslander friends, “I’m not even sure they understand it.”

It’s phenomenally popular, though, taking up almost daily prime evening slots that something like ‘Coronation Street’ might occupy in the UK, and on a Saturday night too. The Australian Football League is the official governing body, mass marketed just like the English Premier League, and it’s commonly referred to as ‘footy’ by its followers. This, in itself, is quite confusing, as ‘footy’ is also used to describe rugby league (and union, actually), and there have also been calls to refer to soccer as football, further confounding things. This runs the risk of serious social suicide if you’re ever asked whether you saw the footy last night. In Australia, ‘footy’ just about covers everything that involves a pitch, large balls and goals posts.

Speaking of which, there are four posts in this game - two of a slightly smaller size - and different points are allocated to a ball passing through either side. Stick one down the middle and you score even more. This much I can just about fathom, but the rest seems like an absolute free for all: there is no offside rule, as far as I can tell, so the ball can be passed up field, or just booted as far as possible and (hopefully) into the waiting arms of a team mate. Catch it properly and the whistle blows. Players back off and the ball is hoofed up field again. This seems similar to the free pass rule in netball, but there are tackles too, hefty ones, just like in rugby, while the whole game is played on a cricket pitch. To use a cooking euphemism, the sport is basically like a Spanish omelette - a real hodgepodge of ingredients with no one having any idea how they got there.

Incidentally, the Western Bulldogs are Melbourne based, and there is a nice half time excerpt of the team paying a visit to a special indigenous training school in the Northern Territories (tonight’s game is held at Darwin’s TIO Stadium). Roughly 11% of all professional AFL players are indigenous Australians, and the sport is keen to be seen as playing a major part in the regional development of poor, indigenous communities. Furthermore, the AFL’s commitment to the cause is seen as a key motivator in discouraging racism within the sport, which is unfortunately still a bit of an issue. At a charity luncheon earlier this year, high profile former footballer Mal Brown referred to Aboriginal players as “cannibals”. He bizarrely excused himself by saying it was meant as “a term of endearment”. Such instances are also apparent in the other ‘footy’ sports, but seem to be dealt with swiftly and apologetically, even if they do suggest that, behind the scenes at least, these sports are not completely exonerated just yet.