Well dammit. I was avoiding this. Too much like hard work. I've gotta go to like wikipedia and stuff for details and dates and crap you know. This isn't easy.
Right so first of all...
Remember Your Background Here
Australia is fucking racist. And it USED to be worse. Like WAY worse.
We WOULD have been half black, but we murdered all the aboriginals in pitched actual battles with imperial red coats that we don't even talk about anymore.
After the gold rush we WOULD have been half Chinese. But after they did all their work we stole all their stuff and booted the Chinese back out of the country again.
When we felt uncomfortable about Greeks and stuff not being white enough we introduced various perfectly sensible policies, like deporting them if they couldn't translate Japanese to English. And stealing good white English children from poor British families and importing them forcibly to Australia.
We actually honest to god had an officially titled "White Australia Policy" dedicated to making us as white and racist as possible. Even after THAT pretty much within MY life time we had an actual honest to god officially titled "Assimilation Policy" with honest to god Assimilation officers and Assimilation camps and crap to train all those pesky almost white Greeks and Italians how to be proper whites and stop eating all that fucking pasta and olive oil.
This changed a bit, gradually, but the big deal probably came with the Keating government and it's official switch to Multiculturalism. He pretty much just publicly embraced the growing multiculturalism already present in Australia's major cities and said "this is awesome this is what we want and now officially intend, so Pizza and Kebabs for all! The Party is on!"
And I know there are some fucking morons here who genuinely hate on Multiculturalism because they are stupid ahistorical morons. But I grew up before Keating and outside of the multicultural capitals, I have SEEN a mono-culture, worse a
white monoculture. And it is NOT pretty. You think you are white enough, mono cultural enough to fit in? Really? Where did your parent's come from? Your Grandparents? This country? This state? This village?
Or the next town over?
As a small example, the whole "multiculturalism means good food" may be a joke. But it is genuinely true. When I was a kid around here a meat pie was fucking exotic. Ethnic food was the British style fish and chip shop owned by assimilated Greeks that half the local population didn't shop at because the owners were too ethnic. You could not buy Tomato Paste in the shops. You could not buy Olive oil. You could not buy
pre made spaghetti in the shops. Let me make this clear. If you wanted to eat
spaghetti you had to make it yourself from SCRATCH, I mean with the basic ingredients you make the noodles themselves out of, and the machines, the elaborate hand wound noodle flattening/cutting machines.
I'm not even all that old. This is recent history. If Koumei were five or so years older and from a rural area she would remember something similar.
Anyway. This changed with or coincidentally/inevitably at the same time as Keating and it was awesome. Then Howard comes along on the anti-Keating anti-scary-changing-food reactionary conservative back lash and sides with the "fuck you no pasta" lobby to get the Hanson "One nation" crazy racist red neck vote because his party cannot win elections without it.
The Tampa Affair
The first Howard Government beat up of scary "boat people"
invading us with their massively inferior numbers and bloodthirsty desire to run away from war zones we pretty much created to a life that doesn't involve being dead was not actually Children Overboard. It was... the Tampa Affair.
So anyway. A boat full of desperate refugees is in trouble at sea. The Australian authorities that manage such things in those waters picked up the distress signal and properly requested that any available vessel respond to rescue the crew and passengers of the stricken ship.
A cargo ship called the Tampa rescues them.
The Australian Government is already on a big racism kick and claiming to be tough on "illegal immigration" (which refugees are in fact definitively NOT part of, and which we have much bigger problems involving white illegal immigrants who fly in on planes, but none of THAT ever stopped Howard). They are pulling this to get those racist one nation votes. They have been building up to this for a while and waiting for the next boat in so they can pull a "crack down" media stunt of some kind.
Now this is well into the lead up to an election. They basically are running Tampa as an experiment to see how the polls react, and if it looks good they set an election date and go full throttle on the racism.
So they lobby Indonesia to accept the refugees, which is crazy, because they suck, it's against our treaty obligations regarding refugees and hell just against international law about rescued crews and how they should be taken to the nearest port... which was Australia.
The Tampa picks up the refugees from the nearly sunken boat, including various sick, unconscious and pregnant ones. You know, one and all bloodthirsty threats to our nation and our patriotically limited range of food stuffs. The Tampa starts heading to Indonesia. The refugees say "WTF we demand to go to the nearest port, or anywhere that's not fucking Indonesia" and the captain goes "fuck it, might as well actually
follow international law instead of some really weird instructions coming in over the radio from crazed Australians.
So the Tampa heads to Australia. They say "oh hey, international law, also, we are now not seaworthy and lack supplies, facilities and life rafts for the extra 400+ people on our boat so we need to go to the nearest port, Okay thanks!"
To which the Howard government says "Permission NOT GRANTED" and also "We will fucking prosecute the captain of the Tampa for smuggling illegal immigrants into Australia.". They also deny any international law obligations in the matter, and claim that INDONESIA requested the pick up and organized everything, even though they already knew that actually the Australian Authorities organized it all. Which is actually a big deal because the minister lying in front of parliament about that is a MAJOR legal sin here in Australia, or rather
it was until the Howard era.
Now the Tampa captain then accedes to pressure and turns to Indonesia again. The refugees, desperate and sick are a bit pissed by this and he decides to turn back toward Australia AGAIN because fuck it they need medical care and supplies and he is afraid of riots and people trying to abandon ship. He BEGS for permission to go to port.
The Australian government... sends in actual armed troops to capture the vessel and forcibly prevent it from even APPROACHING an Australian port. Which becomes another minor credibility problem as their medical staff document the sick refugees which the Australian government... proceeds to deny were sick at all. You know. Despite having their own elite troops documenting it.
The SASR doctor later reported that the rescuees were generally dehydrated, malnourished and unhappy. Many were suffering from dehydration, exhaustion and minor ailments including sixty one cases of scabies, forty six of head lice, twenty four of gastroenteritis. They also attended to four pregnant women.
Now this all creates a major diplomatic incident with NORWAY of all places since it's their damn cargo ship we just seized with armed forces and ordered out of our waters. The Australian government...
tries to convince Norway to reach across the globe and take all the dirty refugess home. What with having endeared ourselves so much to the people of Norway so far. (This sort of crazy incompetence was typical of Howard era international relations in Australia, it was really that bad).
Let me just quote this brilliant passage from wikipedia here...
Captain Arne Rinnan received the highest civil honour in Norway as a result of his handling of this difficult incident. Rinnan has been a sailor since 1958, and a captain for 23 years. He said of the incident: "I have seen most of what there is to see in this profession, but what I experienced on this trip is the worst. When we asked for food and medicine for the refugees, the Australians sent commando troops on board. This created a very high tension among the refugees. After an hour of checking the refugees, the troops agreed to give medical assistance to some of them… The soldiers obviously didn't like their mission."
Now as it turns out everything Australia did was, well, basically illegal. Both internationally, and, well, nationally too as it turns out. So the Howard government throws together a desperate late night bid to push through legislation retroactively making every insane thing they had already done completely legal and adding in a bunch of big mean no-backsies clauses denying all recourse to ANY courts of law or applications for refugee status.
Everyone bar the ruling coalition opposes and it is barely scrapped in the senate. But then the Labor Party pulled it's "Me too! I wanna have racists vote for me too!" strategy (which didn't work) and compromised on
just excising Christmas Island and basically all Australian island territories... well... sort of from being Australia, for all
legal migration purposes. No really. If you are on one of our islands... you aren't really here yet and most certainly are not allowed to apply for protection from an evil regime trying to kill you that you traveled half way around the globe to escape. That would just be
too easy or something.
So then all the refugees get shipped off to the non-international refugee treaty signatory Naru where there weren't even proper
concentration I mean "detention" camp facilities ready yet. And some get imprisoned and some sent to New Zealand who we actually pay off in cash to take them. (also we paid off Naru, a lot).
Those that DO get Australian visas, you know, instead of just being imprisoned illegally for years and then sent back to
Iraq and
Afghanistan get crazy three year "temporary protection visas" which deny them most rights given to refugees, and Australian citizens or residents, and which grant the government the right at ANY time to just up and deport them to, again, Iraq and Afghanistan.
During all this there are high court challenges and crap where in the Howard government denies they are even detaining anyone at all and nothing ever happened and they can do anything they want and screw you all if their retroactive legalization bill didn't go through because they did it already and it's too late so it must be legal, no backsies. In the end Labor's
fucking stupid co-operation on the excising and Naru strategies also puts through enough me-too legislation to crush the appeals.
And fucking stupid it was. Because the Howard government ends up using the whole thing as a cudgel to hit the labor party with as they rake in the racist mono-dietary moron vote. But NOT before the whole children overboard thing happens.
Also. There are big official major government enquiries... and the Howard governments ministers all go there and deny all knowledge of everything they and their various civil servants knew or did. The ministers who lied to parliament, which again
big fucking deal here unlike for you guys, all just pull some of the first uses of the actually-titled-that-no-really "Ministerial incompetence defense". Where they just... never remembered things as they are documented and remembered by senior civil servants. So they never
lied to parliament... they were just non-criminally incompetent in their reports to parliament. And so on.
This cycle of lies, questionable legalities, fucked up court challenges, after the fact inquiries unearthing vast amounts of damning evidence and witnesses responded to almost solely with incredible and repetitive uses of the Ministerial Incompetence Defense would become a major defining trait of the entire Howard Government era. And sadly
not the thing that eventually lost them power whatsoever.
Children Overboard -
This is taking forever. OK. Let's try this one all quicker like.
Election nearly here. Polls not actually so good. Tampa affair somewhat backfiring with those inquiries and damning evidence and crap. In the last few DAYS before the election, a boat! on the horizon! HURRAY! Howard and co pull a similar attempt at turning it into a media stunt and exercising their incredibly bullshit new me-too granted legislation.
Australian forces turn up... and hook it up to tow it to fucking Naru or something. Only the boat can't stand the strain and it breaks and sinks.
The passengers hold up their children to try and get the Australians to
come rescue the children and so they can
save the children first. Then everyone ends up in the water. Because the boat fucking sank.
The Prime Minister and his various senior ministers and crap all then run out and accuse the refugees on the boat WE SUNK of the following. They sunk their boat themselves to MAKE us rescue them, those cunning assholes. And they threw their own children into the water
we have pictures. We must stop these scum etc... etc... racists of Australia unite and reelect us fucking TOMORROW.
So anyway. As it turns out when you send Australian authorities to a scene and get them to do this sort of thing you get lots of
witnesses and
documentation and all the information the ministers and government receive... all come from those guys, who along with various senior civil servants tend to again be witnesses to what was reported to who, and all that also gets documented.
And so... again along comes the damning inquiry... well after the Howard assholes won reelection in the racist beat up confusion, and again out comes the Ministerial Incompetence Defence, "I do not recall events as described", "I do not recall that meeting", "I do not recall that report", "I do not recall that desperate phone call in the night asking me what the fuck I was telling the Australian media", "I do not recall..." "I do not recall..."
Years of Detention, Years of rolling scandals -
And so we end up with many years of "detention centers" the failed "pacific solution" (no really we had a plan to deal with unwanted ethnics with the fucking word "Solution" in the title, NO REALLY, very recently, yes after world war II NO REALLY, we are now arguing about like Indonesian Solution plans, no really WE STILL USE "SOLUTION" IN THE PLAN NAMES, as yet though the Liberals and the Mee-Toos cannot settle on an, uh, Final um, plan about a Solution...).
Anyway. We do a lot of things in haste, take a lot of short cuts, employ a lot of private shadey American imprisonment companies to do our work, which is a big deal because OUR prison system for ACTUAL criminals largely
doesn't consist of over crowded privatized inhumane shit holes like yours does.
Time and time again ridiculous scandals leak out from the detention system. People are imprisoned without crime or court for YEARS, lots of years, children GROW UP in detention, without proper care, of course, the whole system and the fate of everyone in it run by completely unaccountable immigration department officials recently stacked deliberately with racist inhuman fuckers who say no to anything and everything and live to deliberately lose you in the system or deport you directly back to a waiting firing squad in nations we actually consider so dangerous we are fighting wars in them.
Every glance we the Australian public get into the secretive workings of the detention centers results in a scandal, possibly rioting, and with rolling closures (and re-openings) of detention centers to try and cover the whole mess up.
The first use of high pressure water cannons on peaceful civilian protestors in Australia occurs out in Woomera if I recall. A small but notable foot note.
A couple of notable cases... crop up. I forget a lot of them, there were plenty to pick from and they rarely got the significant media attention they deserved...
Deporting a confused crippled nun with a stroke
... well OK it wasn't QUIET like that.
So anyway in Queensland, there is this woman. Sorta swarthy and asian like.
She gets sick, has a stroke or something. She can't walk, her language is effected, she is very confused.
The authorities pick her up. Much to her misfortune SOMEONE brings in the fucking
immigration department nazis.
It is decided that the TOP PRIORITY HERE is not to determine her identity... as it turned out an Australian citizen (or was it resident?) and wife of a Queensland man... nor was it to GET HER SOME MEDICAL CARE... no the TOP PRIORITY was, since she was Asian looking and having trouble with her English, was to DEPORT HER TO A RANDOM ASIAN COUNTRY.
So she ends up in the Philippines. And only survives because a Nunnery takes her in and cares for her. (so actually if I was honest in the title they deported a non-nun... who was a confused crippled woman who just had a stroke, and she LATER became a Nun as a result of the deportation and stuff.)
Her family, with not particularly co-operative help from the immigration nazis, EVENTUALLY tracks her down, and with DIFFICULTY brings her back and then wins various law suits. The whole thing is NOT an isolated case, just, you know, the extreme publicized one with the fucking
crippled confused woman with a stroke as a victim, the general indication being there is a culture of this sort of thing and just in most cases with less crippled people it doesn't make the media or win as big with the many court cases.
Imprisoning and Abusing an (Australian) Crazy Women
Another notable and SORT of similar case had... much more disgusting implications.
So. I think it was in Sydney. This woman, Nordic accent and appearance if I recall, probably another one of those trouble maker Norwegians, only with actual Australian Citizenship. Is wandering around.
Turns out she is like, paranoid schizophrenic or something. And she is having a bit of an episode or is off her medication. (not all too uncommon with Howard and friends butchering of the mental health care services, but whatever). (edit: man, actually this story is CRAZY there is like a cult or something involved early on, but whatever,
eventually basically there is this crazy woman wandering around, and a lot of this happens in Queensland, again, never go there man NEVER go there)
So she gets picked up. And being paranoid and believing that authorities are part of a government conspiracy out to get her she does not give her ID. This results in what ultimately COULD be described as a conspiracy of government authorities out to get her.
Because with her
accent and all... in come the immigration nazis! In a turn up for the books they take action against a
white woman hell, I'm pretty sure she was even blond.
They send her to the detention centers. And throw away the key. As they like to do. She never did anything particularly wrong other than have a mental disorder, but bam, indefinite imprisonment.
Eventually the whole thing comes out, again.
But the big shocker comes when they find out what happened to her in detention.
Now at first she just ends up in a prison. And that's bad enough and it's clear to everyone, except anyone with any official capacity she is crazy. her immigration nazi in charge of her case... thinks she is a German tourist who wants to go home, but her story is inconsistent, her name is wrong, the Germans don't know her... and he never even
asks any other authorities in Australia if they know who she might be. Now the immigration department SAYS they
detain no one because anyone is free to go home and give up and die at any time. But this women does want to go home, to Germany, only that isn't her home and no one wants to take her, so later the government lawyers argue they had the right to... not detain her in detention until "hell freezes over" (their actual words) due to this... contradictory state.
Anyway. Then. For no apparent reason anyone can manage to explain she is told she is being sent back to Germany from the prison. She thinks this is awesome... until they try and make her sign transfer papers to an immigration detention center instead, at which point they end up sedating and restraining her and shipping her there anyway. No really. No one has an excuse or an explanation for that bit. It just sorta happened and no they weren't trying to manipulate a mad woman because they didn't KNOW she was mad (unlike all the prison inmates who KNEW a bit too well how mad she was) honest, trust the immigration nazis!
So she gets carted off to the immigration center. At Baxter.
Baxter as it turns out was the place the Howard Immigration Nazis were dumping the mentally damaged refugees at. Many of these refugees weren't actually mentally damaged BEFORE they went into the system, but these are abusive neglectful prisons, and they get stuck in them for years, after fleeing murderous regimes, with the constant threat of being returned to said regimes. These people are messed up bad. Some have such rare and extreme conditions as
psychological blindness we have
children in states of psychological catatonia (due to events that occurred IN DETENTION CENTERS), we have people who can't walk or use their legs... and it might be psychological, or it might HAVE been... originally... here let's just throw up a sample quote because an alliance of mental health professionals had been on the tail of this scandal for fucking years already by that point...
To try to explain the severity of the situation at Baxter and the level of officially sanctioned neglect, Jureidini told me a story of a woman he had visited some time before. “She hadn’t walked for two months. Her husband carried her to the shower and she crawled to the toilet … When I went to see her, from the moment she stirred and knew I was there, she started to scream and she screamed for the whole time I was in there. It was only about ten minutes because I couldn’t stand it any longer and I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop her. And then she screamed for another ten or 15 minutes afterwards … We eventually got her transferred down to Glenside [a psychiatric hospital] and she had fractures of her ribs from osteoporosis, from malnutrition. She was anaemic and the physician who saw her said she was lucky she wasn’t dead. She hadn’t been in the light for six months. She had a baby. Initially she wouldn’t let the baby away from her. It was dazzled by the light … And this was somebody who’d been judged by the psychologist or health services as being in the right place and as being adequately managed.”
And so this is where they dump this woman. Who they don't admit to being insane and haven't identified or anything.
And this
paranoid woman is now locked up in what amounts to solitary detention with CAMERAS EVERYWHERE. She goes more nuts than ever.
There are reports of sexual abuse, like the guards spying on her in the shower, maybe worse, a lot of it's pretty believable, but since it mostly comes from other inmates it's largely been ignored. But even failing the alarmingly credible suggestions that she was sexually abused and possibly raped in Baxter she was definitely just
regular abused plenty enough.
Now while she is at Baxter the Germans get back and say "fuck it, seems like she's Australian, have you tried missing persons or circulating her photo to the media or something?". Even an immigration nazi low level agent suggests the same. Memo's circulate... and management deems it not worth acting upon in any way.
Eventually some super depressed detainees pull a roof top protest that draws attention to themselves, others sew their lips together and go on a hunger strike, Howard and co as usual attack the filthy refugees for manipulative tactics and score political points with the racists again. Somehow a couple of activists leverage the whole thing into an independent mental health assessment and like two guys get to go in and interview a handful of detainees.
And basically all of them ask in their interviews "Are you here to do something about Anna?". Because her case was
that bad that the guys sewing their lips together and starving on roof tops to draw attention to THEIR own PERSONAL plights uniformly believed her situation was clearly more desperately in need of attention
it was that bad.
Her presence and unidentified status starts to leak out. Various officials ostensibly in charge of mental health are outraged, both about the general conditions in Baxter and numerous hideously neglected mental health cases there, but also about Anna specifically. Inquiries to missing persons are finally made, her photo, once released, hits ONE newspaper and she is identified immediately. Prompting...
After four months of lethargy on the Anna front, there was now a sudden urgency. Baxter guards entered Anna’s cell while she was showering. They threw a sheet over her and dragged her out, kicking and screaming. Five months later, Cornelia Rau described what happened to her like this. “I was suddenly transported to a mental institution and the circumstances were very strange. About five people in large clothing came into my room at night while I was having a shower and I hardly had a chance to turn off the tap. I was nude and hardly could get something on to cover myself. They were harsh and forceful. Then they slipped me onto an ambulance stretcher-bed. It was so foul. I didn’t know what was going on …”
What was the urgency about? The answer seems clear. The next day’s media was certain to report on the strange case of Cornelia Rau. When that happened, it was vital that she be “a former detainee”.
So anyway. Que the scandals the inquiries and the denials. This time though... it was bad news for Howard and co. This one really rocked the boat, screw the massive abuses in general at Baxter, this woman was
fucking blond. The whole detention mess is in danger of collapsing, Howard even is FORCED to promise that within only TWO MORE YEARS of detaining them they will EVENTUALLY get around to releasing all the remaining CHILDREN they have been detaining!
Also when this whole thing busts and they actually have like one guy make an inquiry into wrongful detention... um... they find like over 200 cases of just plain outright wrongful detention including the one with the crippled nun thing. Which is apparently largely how that one came to light. Oh and the minister responsible got off Scott free of all blame for what was officially recognized as massive systematic and largely intentional failure for basic duty of care for actual human beings. They blamed like her assistant. Then promoted him side ways to a department dealing with Indonesia instead. This is notable in particular because THIS particular immigration minister was largely the woman responsible for "reforming" the department into it's harsh punitive Immigration Nazi philosophy (not that it didn't have that tradition anyway, white australia and all) but she made it far worse, well, so did the guy before her, but it's really her legacy.
Anyway, you can read a lot of her
insane story yourself if you can stomach it.
Other Things
Of tangential relation are the scandals surrounding that doctor we called a terrorist, the Australian Wheat Board wheat for oil scandal, possibly the water front dispute, and almost certainly the East Timor intelligence scandal.
Oh and probably like five other scandals that were often based around illegal political beat ups and resulted in the heavy use of the Ministerial Incompetence Defense all by the Howard regime.
But none of the extra ones I remember right now directly involved "boat people", but often did involve a general appeal to racism and nationalism overtone. Or sometimes just plain old corruption.
Did I mention these days almost every major figure from the Howard era, especially Howard, seem to be living in Saddam Hussein style bolt holes hiding all traces of their continued existence from the media? These guys
know what they did and are terrified that impossibly, one day, SOMEONE will call them to account. Probably Saddam Hussein style, considering the bolt hole strategy...