http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/27/features/features4.html

Ruddock's rantings a shot in the arm for Hanson

By Mike Carlton

Much as it saddens me to say it about my old schoolmate, the kindest view
of the Immigration Minister, Phillip Ruddock, must be that the burdens of
office have driven him insane.

This can be the only explanation for his ever more outlandish behaviour,
culminating last Monday in his wild proposal for shooting more
tranquillisers into the unfortunate boat people at the Port Hedland
concentration camp. Chemical injections needed to be "more comprehensively
implemented," he announced, in the wake of another disturbance at the
"facility," an event imaginatively reported in the media as a riot, a
rampage and - most alarming of all - an uprising.

I remember Ruddock as a bossy sub-prefect at our North Shore private
school, obsessed with regulation socks and boaters correctly worn, but I do
not recall any hint of the Stalinist inclinations he now displays. To
forcibly inject prisoners with tranquillisers smacks of the KGB's
techniques of psychiatric control in the Soviet gulags; it is a sickening
thing to hear from an Australian Cabinet minister, mad or not.

Stripping away the lurid reportage, the uprising seems to have been no more
than the middling aggro you would expect from young men confined behind
razor wire in 40C heat, some held captive for more than a year with nothing
to do and, worse, nothing to hope for. A few bricks and garden tools were
thrown; a police officer copped a thump on his helmet. That was about it.

It is no accident that these camps are in some of the nastiest parts of
Australia; Malcolm Fraser has famously, and I suspect accurately, described
the Woomera cage as a hell-hole. They are run by Australasian Correctional
Management, a subsidiary of the amusingly named Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which, among other things,
controls a network of jails at that cutting edge of innovative penology,
the US deep south.

The Quiet American - the biography of George R. Wackenhut - is available at
the corporate Web site for $US19.95 ($36.57), or 10 for $US179.50 ($329).
George was once an FBI agent. "Set against the richly variegated backdrop
of history," says the blurb, "this is the story of a unique American who
started with virtually nothing and built a worldwide security empire." The
inmates of the Australian wackenhuts ( I have just coined this useful noun)
should be encouraged to study this inspiring work, but our first concern
must be poor Ruddock. I hope it is not too late to put him on a course of
intravenous Valium.

How easy it has been for the Howard Government to pander to the Hansonite
vote by kicking the immigrant can. It doesn't take much to re-awaken those
atavistic, yellow peril terrors of our empty continent being swamped by the
diseased and multiplying hordes to our north.

Just over a year ago, without offering a tittle of evidence beyond
referring theatrically to intelligence reports, Ruddock was warning the
nation that "whole villages" in Iran and neighbouring countries were
packing up to come here illegally. Why, even as he spoke, 10,000 people
were massing for the move towards us. It was "the biggest assault on our
borders by unauthorised arrivals ever", hyperbole which might have aroused
a wry smile in any Aborigine who heard it.

In fact - and these are his department's figures - there has been a grand
total of 9,675 boat people arriving in Australia in the decade-and-a-bit
since 1989. And more than half - 5,444 - were eventually granted entry as
legitimate refugees. Hardly a mass invasion, and peanuts compared with the
53,000 tourists officially estimated to have overstayed their visitor's
visa but who are not hunted down, flung into the gulags and given chemical
injections. Perhaps this is because about a quarter of these overstayers
are unthreateningly British or American.

At times Labor's immigration spokesman, Con Sciacca, seems bent on
surpassing Ruddock in righteous ferocity, presumably for the same grubby
political gain; he is, after all, a Queenslander. Last Monday, Sciacca was
fuming to anyone who would listen that the "criminals" should already have
been deported, although he did not suggest where to.

Meanwhile, our national orgy of patriotic backslapping continues. "The
great egalitarian spirit of this country is very much a gift of this soil,
it is a gift of the air we breathe together, it is a gift of the land that
we share together," intoned John Howard in his New Year's Federation
address, a speech of sub-Rotarian banality.

Egalitarian for some. Australia is the only civilised country where
refugees are automatically wackenhutted. The British, for example, consider
some 70,000 requests for asylum each year - yes, 70,000 - and permit all
but a handful of applicants to live freely in the community, with food and
financial support and schooling for their children while each case is assessed.

Here, the media would never allow such dangerous goings-on. Disease,
violence, crime, ritual child abuse ! Stealing Aussie jobs ! There's
nothing like a blast of thinly coded wog-bashing to light up the
switchboards of the radio shock jocks.

Few, though, can top Piers Akerman, the prime ministerial toady and Daily
Telegraph hysteric-in-residence. "The criminals attempting to enter
Australia illegally who rioted at the Port Hedland detention centre should
be tossed out of the country immediately," he snarled on Tuesday. "If they
need to be drugged, handcuffed or placed in chains before being bundled
onto aircraft, it really doesn't matter."

Apart from the acrid whiff of Adolf Eichmann in his luminous prose, Akerman
was being just plain thick. As was the opportunist Sciacca. Which aircraft,
and to where ? We have no air links to Iran or Iraq ; UN sanctions forbid
flights to Afghanistan and, having flick-passed the refugees to us in the
first place, Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia have no incentive to accept
them back.

Afghan shepherds on Ashmore are no queue jumpers

The Afghan folk who wash up on the Ashmore Reef are, by and large,
shepherds and weavers of the minority Hazara tribe. Moderate Shi'ite
Muslims, the Hazaras have been slaughtered in the tens of thousands by the
Sunni Muslims of the fanatical Taliban regime which holds sway in Afghanistan.

It is the lucky ones who fall into the hands of the people smugglers.
Typically, young men are heavied by a Taliban thug offering the stark
choice of death or ethnic cleansing. The going rate for an escape is about
$US5,000, or an extended family's entire fortune. The smugglers pay off the
Taliban and the venal Pakistani officials who run the human pipelines
through the sub-continent.

By any measure, these wretched people meet the UN definition of a refugee
as a person who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social
group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and
is unable or, owing to such fear, unwilling to avail himself of the
protection of that country".

The Government's disgusting propaganda calls them queue jumpers, but they
are not, for there is no queue to jump.