Is Gillard pandering to xenophobes?
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Date Posted:
July-7-2010 12:19
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Second week on the job and Australia’s first first-lady is already stirring up controversy. Shortly after making peace with the miners, Julia Gillard barrelled straight into another contentious issue: what to do with asylum seekers.
Her solution – sending boatloads of refugees to East Timor to be “processed” – not only sounds vaguely like something certain book-burners might do to a certain chicken noodle soup-favouring people, but it also seems a tad… unnecessary?
Is Australia’s refugee “problem” really that much of a concern? Gillard said herself that last year Australia received a measly 0.6 per cent of the world’s asylum seekers, and on top of that, refugees made up less than eight per cent of the total number of migrants accepted into the country. A negligible number in other words and surely not an amount likely to tip the population scales into a state of overcrowding.
Hell, our like-minded Canadian cousins accept an average of 250,000 immigrants a year - 10 per cent of which are refugees - and the country’s not exactly falling apart. However, not the same can be said of their hard-arsed border-policing neighbours to the south.
Besides, when it comes to illegal immigration, planes pose a much larger “risk” than boats. An investigation by the
Sunday Telegraph last year revealed that in 2008, 4,768 people – a whopping 96 per cent of applicants for refugee status – arrived via plane. Only 161 arrived via boat during the same period. Yet, even in the face of such lopsided statistics, it seems the stigma attached to so-called “boat people” is still strong enough to stir up emotions that politicians can exploit.
So is that what Julia Gillard is doing with this latest policy shift? Is she tapping into a fearful, xenophobic section of our society which believes that boat people are a threat to our national security rather than a group of persecuted human beings who require our help before they either starve or drown?
We hope not. But even if illegal immigrants do pose a threat to our national security, surely it’s “plane people” that are the bigger concern.
What do you think? Is this a shameless vote-grabbing exercise aimed at the country’s xenophobes? Grab this month's copy of FHM to see if we printed your correspondence and you could win a prize!
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