Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.

If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

The post Heritage hunting appeared first on Inside Story.

When the International Refugee Organization sent him to faraway Australia in 1948, it probably sounded like an adventure. But the nineteen-year-old found himself doing back-breaking work in an isolated mine surrounded by dense Tasmanian forest. He would later tell government officials that it was “200 years behind European working conditions.”

After a year, Jakob decided he was finished with capitalist Australia and would return to the Soviet Union. Many of his peers were unimpressed by his decision — it even sparked a brawl during which he was stabbed. But his pro-Soviet migrant friends considered him a true patriot. Celebrating with them and a little drunk, the young refugee boasted that he would give the Soviets intelligence on Australia and go to Korea to fight the Western capitalists.

Unbeknown to Jakob, his audience of friends and acquaintances that night included two spies: a Soviet MVD colonel and an undercover agent for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Concerned by their informant’s report, Australian security officers began keeping an eye on Jakob. They followed him all the way to the docks when he sailed for the Soviet Union. Dissatisfied with the West and full of praise for his Soviet homeland, he was considered a threat to Western security.

This is not the familiar refugee story told in countries like Australia: a story of desperate, hard-working migrants who gratefully become loyal contributors to their new homeland. Jakob had certainly been desperate — he became a forced labourer at just fourteen — and, for the most part, he had worked hard in Australia. But the war and displacement produced complex, shifting identities that didn’t simply disappear when the shooting stopped. And life in the West didn’t always live up to its promises.

The second world war had left forty million or more people displaced in Europe. Some wanted nothing more than to return to their homes, but for others, particularly those from now Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe, the home they had left no longer existed. As the International Refugee Organization worked to solve this “refugee problem,” thousands of Russians who had lived through the war in East Asia were being displaced by China’s communist revolution.

Most of these refugees, whether in Europe or China, were stridently anti-communist. Many had good reason to be, having lived as exiles after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution or through the Stalinist terror of the 1930s. The views of “White Russians” and Eastern Europeans who considered their homelands “captive nations” would fit neatly into the West as the fresh storm clouds of the cold war built on the horizon. Increasingly, each Soviet refugee was a propaganda victory for the West: these were individuals choosing freedom, expressing hatred of communism by voting with their feet.

Some, however, harboured more ambivalent views. A few could even be called “Red”: communists, socialists, trade unionists or, most commonly, pro-Soviet patriots who were proud of the victorious Red Army and their homeland’s achievements since the communist revolution. “Displaced persons,” known as DPs, were resettled primarily in countries that now defined themselves as the anti-communist West, with the largest contingents going to the United States, Australia, Canada and Israel.

The lives and experiences of anti-communist DPs — the refugees who became model migrants in the West — have been chronicled in the rich scholarship on postwar migration that has proliferated since the 1990s. Yet Soviet refugees with left-wing views, DPs like Jakob who did not fit the model, have remained essentially invisible.

Surveillance and the persistent shadow of espionage were central parts of their lives in the West. Former or current Soviet citizens who were Russian speakers and left-wing sympathisers threw up multiple red flags for Western intelligence organisations, which often struggled to understand their traumas, experiences and intra-community politics. Many had been socialised in the Soviet Union, their political views shaped by complex lives in Europe and China.

In the cold war West, their ideas took root in new ways. Ideological convictions — that the world could be better and fairer, or that the worker’s lot was difficult — mingled with personal ones, shaped by memories of lost homes, murdered family members or forced labour. These ideas made them potential threats, forcing them to negotiate the incursions of state security into their everyday lives.

In many ways, it is because these refugees loomed so large in the eyes of intelligence agencies that we struggle to catch sight of them. The lives of “ordinary” people are often difficult to locate in official records, but that marginalisation was compounded by cold war anti-communism and surveillance.

Left-wing Soviet DPs had particular cause to recede from view by lying about their politics and backgrounds or simply keeping their own counsel. They knew they were being watched; most were aware that both the state and other migrants regarded them with suspicion; very few recorded their experiences. History maintains a sense of irony, though: the very surveillance dossiers that marginalised these migrants can now provide the historian with a window into their worlds.

Intelligence agencies are notorious for their secrecy and reluctance to reveal the details of even decades-old operations. When they do reveal information, it is typically on their own terms and in the service of their public image — take, for example, the declassification of the CIA’s Canadian Caper operation, which formed the basis of the film Argo.

In some cases, researchers can appeal to legislation. In the United States, the Freedom of Information Act provides a well-trodden path to accessing FBI and CIA files. A similar provision in Canada allows requests for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s files. But both have, to differing degrees, proven limited in recent years. Britain’s MI5 is subject to very few access measures, releasing files only as it chooses. Further, its release policy targets higher-profile individuals, leaving the files of more ordinary subjects unknown and unknowable for historians.

By comparison, access procedures in Australia are quite liberal. A dedicated application process via the National Archives of Australia provides greater access to security files if one is sufficiently patient. These dossiers are still redacted, equivocal and frustrating, but they provide unique glimpses of a left-wing presence among the DPs. Presumably, similar migrants ended up elsewhere in the West.

Though they had chosen life in the West rather than the East, and in some cases had experienced the worst that Soviet communism had to offer, these migrants continued to align themselves with the political left. For the most part, they were not activists. They tended not to join Australian political parties and their ideas did not often fit neatly under labels like “communist,” “Marxist” or “Trotskyite.”

Their views were idiosyncratic patchworks rather than refined political doctrines, reflecting lives lived across East and West in turbulent times. Their experiences of Soviet terror and state support, Nazi and Japanese occupation, concentration camps and forced labour often informed their understanding of the twentieth century’s prevailing political philosophies more than books or manifestos. Their politics played out at street-level: in living rooms, church halls, night clubs, theatre groups, factory floors and discussions over glasses of wine (or vodka) at parties.

Though some refugees chose Australia specifically for its distance — the furthest they thought they could get from the Soviets — the cold war arrived there, too. By 1948, as the revolution in China compounded still-heightened fears of invasion by neighbouring Asian countries, anti-communism gained a firm foothold in Australia.

As the historian David Lowe has written, the cold war was “Australianised” with settler-colonial anxieties about maintaining white racial homogeneity and preventing territory loss. Australia saw itself as part of the English-speaking world but was surrounded by a decolonising Asia-Pacific region with a growing socialist and communist presence, and so sought the security of close ties with Britain and the United States.

One result was the formation of ASIO in response to American concerns about Australia’s lax security and a Soviet spy ring in Canberra. Domestically, the cold war flared in 1950–51 as Australian troops were shipped to Korea and prime minister Robert Menzies attempted to ban the Communist Party. A referendum on the ban saw the public drawn into an increasingly heated debate about communism, national security and civil liberties.

Similar tensions were sparked in 1954 by the defections of Soviet officials (and spies) Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov — an incident soon christened the Petrov affair. Vladimir Petrov had socialised extensively among Soviet migrants in Sydney and many of them waited with trepidation as ASIO investigated and a royal commission enquired.

Both moments were cold war watersheds for Australians, a time when debates about communism and espionage hit close to home. But they hit even closer for Soviet refugees as their homelands and the ideologies they had lived under and knew intimately were discussed in daily newspapers and nightly news broadcasts. Many of the refugees knew Petrov personally; the affair played out in their lives in distinctive ways, providing new, rich layers to our history of this event.

The Petrov affair’s most iconic and enduring moment — Evdokia Petrov, her husband having already defected alone, being escorted across Sydney’s airport tarmac by two Soviet couriers — was heightened by thousands of anti-communist Eastern European migrants. They turned out to protest what they saw as the forcible return of a terrified Russian woman to a dire fate in the Soviet Union. Many had themselves felt at risk of a similar fate, in Europe’s DP camps, and arrived with placards and raised voices to warn Australians and their government of the Soviet Union’s cruelty.

These anti-communist exile groups existed alongside and often in conflict with smaller communities of left-wing migrants. For some, joining a left-wing group related more to opposing diaspora norms — their vitriolic anti-Soviet rhetoric and strong attachment to the church — than cold war politics. Less conservative social mores and better entertainment often helped too, especially for young refugees. But whether they intended it or not, many were then cast into cold war conflicts.

Sydney’s left-leaning Russian Social Club brought DPs into the orbit of the broader Australian left and the Petrov affair. A corresponding Social Club was also set up in Melbourne, in 1952, though it seems to have been short-lived. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet embassy officials stationed in Australia, who were often working covertly as spies. A host of left-wing Jewish organisations were also established by, or drew in, postwar migrants, such as the Jewish Councils to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism in Sydney and Melbourne, the Volkscentre in Darlinghurst and Kadimah in Carlton.

Left-wing migrants often participated across multiple groups and sometimes became involved with Australian-run organisations as a result. The typical “communist front” groups which proliferated across the West — Australia–Russia societies (later renamed Australian–Soviet friendship societies) and peace councils — were also hubs for left-wing Soviet refugees. The Melbourne friendship society even had, for a time, a DP as chairman. These clubs facilitated migrants’ connections with Soviet officials but also attracted Australian surveillance, and thus, interactions with spies on both sides.

Most put down roots in Australia, establishing themselves in new communities and becoming neighbours, friends, fellow churchgoers and colleagues of both other migrants and those born in Australia. Some shifted between communities, burying their earlier years, and some became more conservative with age. Most were naturalised, giving up Soviet passports or statelessness in favour of Australian citizenship — though, again, they pursued this in order to access specific benefits, rights or stability just as often as a desire to become Australians.

With naturalisation, they became Australian voters. Soviet refugees’ voting patterns are near impossible to ascertain, but both Labor and Liberal parties tried to some extent to cultivate migrant votes. Few of the left-wing group (even if pro-communist) appear to have associated directly with the Communist Party of Australia, but some refugees joined or maintained connections to the Labor Party.

But not everyone settled down. Australia was not typically a refugee’s first choice, and some moved on to other countries, such as Canada or the United States. Some never made it past the two-year work contract, deported for absconding from their assigned employment. Others did their best to get themselves deported: one way to obtain a cheap ticket back to Europe.

The other way, for Soviets, was voluntary repatriation. The Soviet Union wanted its “stolen” DPs back and Soviet citizens who wanted to return could often do so at Soviet expense. Repatriation figures were only ever a tiny fraction of the tide of Westward migration during the early cold war — between 1947 and 1952, some twenty-eight Soviet DPs returned from Venezuela, twenty-two from Argentina, sixteen from Canada, nine from South Africa and only two from the United States. Nevertheless, they reflected the fact that life in the capitalist world could also be harsh, especially if you were a refugee.

In Australia, the two-year work contract was often a catalyst and some, like young Jakob, left soon after completing it, homesick and dissatisfied. Others remained longer, even decades, before making the decision to repatriate. China Russians could also return if they secured the appropriate paperwork, though the Soviets likely would not foot the bill. Nevertheless, some did repatriate.

But whether they chose to stay in Australia or not, many Soviet refugees lived through the early years of the cold war in the West. As these battle lines were drawn, they had to pick a stance: leave politics behind and remain quiet, become anti-communist “cold warriors,” or accept the surveillance and suspicion that came with life as a pro-Soviet “enemy alien.” •

This article is adapted from Ebony Nilsson’s new book Displaced Comrades: Politics and Surveillance in the Lives of Soviet Refugees in the West, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

The post Red flags appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s been like that for more than three weeks since investigative journalists from the independent newsroom Correctiv revealed a “secret plan” hatched at a “secret meeting” in November last year. According to the report, twenty-two far-right politicians and businesspeople met in a hotel outside Berlin to talk about expelling millions of people living in Germany, among them “non-assimilated” German citizens. The attendees included office holders of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and members of the Werteunion, an organisation set up in 2017 by ultraconservative Christian Democrats unhappy about the refugee policies of then chancellor Angela Merkel.

A few hours after news of the meeting broke, eighty people protested in front of Hamburg’s local AfD headquarters. Two days later, 2000 took to the city’s streets. All over the country, the protests quickly gathered momentum. When a Turkish-born member of the Hamburg state parliament called for another protest on 19 January, he expected 4000 to join him. According to the police, 50,000 turned up, and the rally had to be cut short because the riverside venue was so overcrowded it was a miracle nobody ended up in the icy water. The following weekend around 100,000 people rallied in Hamburg.

Protests have continued every day in all parts of the country. Many of those taking part haven’t been to a demonstration in many years or are protesting for the first time in their lives. Altogether, millions have taken to the streets. The protests give no sign of fizzling out.

What exactly has prompted such outrage? The proposal to deport asylum seekers, other non-citizens and “non-assimilated” Germans to North Africa came as part of a master plan presented by Martin Sellner, a prominent far-right activist from Austria, at the November meeting. Sellner is known for propagating French writer Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement myth, which claims that Western elites are trying to replace white European populations using mass immigration, particularly from Africa and the Middle East.

The term “great replacement,” first used in Camus’s 2010 book L’Abécédaire de l’in-nocence, is a reference to an ironic poem by Bertolt Brecht. After the 1953 popular uprising in East Germany, Brecht asked in his poem “The Solution” whether, as the people had seemingly forfeited the confidence of their government, it might not be easier “for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?”

It was the proposed deportation of German citizens that may have startled many Germans most. But Camus and others from the European and North American far right have long advocated a Great Repatriation, or “remigration,” as a response to the Great Replacement. The concept of “remigration” shouldn’t have been news in Germany: Dresden’s Pegida movement and other far-right activists have long called for a cleansing of the nation by means of “remigration.” Nor was it a surprise that prominent members of the AfD want to turn Germany into a country only for ethnic Germans. Björn Höcke, the most influential AfD politician — a leader of its Thuringia state branch and occasional speaker at Pegida rallies — has made no secret of his intention to rid Germany of many of its current residents should he ever be in a position to do so.

The idea of Höcke as Thuringia’s state premier, let alone in power in Berlin, has long seemed fanciful. No more. It seems almost certain that the AfD will emerge as the strongest party in three forthcoming state elections in East Germany. In Saxony, it’s possible that only the Christian Democrats and the AfD will reach the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament. Provided the latter polled more votes than the former, the far right would command an absolute majority in parliament and form government. In Thuringia, where the left-wing Die Linke is particularly strong, the Christian Democrats could be tempted to strike a deal with the AfD rather than allow Die Linke’s Bodo Ramelow to remain as state premier.

The AfD’s performance is particularly alarming in East Germany, where the pollsters have the party at between 28 per cent (in Brandenburg) and 35 per cent (in Saxony). News of November’s “secret meeting” was just the trigger needed to prompt millions of people to protest.

At the Hamburg rallies I attended, the main focus was squarely on the AfD. “Ganz Hamburg hasst die AfD” (All of Hamburg hates the AfD) was the most popular battle cry, “FCK AFD” the most common slogan on placards. Judging by their hand-painted signs, many of the demonstrators equate the current mood with that of the early 1930s, before the Nazi party’s electoral success prompted the German president to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor. “It’s five to ’33,” some demonstrators claimed. Although many explicitly rejected “remigration,” other elements of the AfD’s program attracted comparatively little critical attention.

Besides, the focus on the AfD is not entirely justified. In Saxony, a party even more extremist than the AfD, the Freie Sachsen (Free Saxonians), is gaining ground. It may well win seats at the local elections in June. At the other end of the spectrum, the left-wing Die Linke, the successor of the East German communists, split last year. A group led by the charismatic Sahra Wagenknecht has since established their own party, the Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht, or BSW. It is as populist as the AfD and its migration and asylum policies hardly differ from those of the far-right party. The Werteunion too has decided to form a party ahead of the three state elections in East Germany in September. Some of its policies are likely to mirror those of the AfD.

Germany’s intake of refugees has been the number one political issue for the past six months or so, with most public commentators and politicians claiming that the country’s capacity to take in refugees has been exhausted. They say the number of asylum seekers arriving in Germany needs to be drastically reduced, despite the fact that the overall number of refugees arriving in Germany was much lower in 2023 than the year before. The authorities in Hamburg, for instance, registered 23,000 new arrivals in 2023, compared with 54,000 in 2022, the year Germany accommodated approximately one million Ukrainian refugees.

In response to Russia’s attack, the European Union invoked the European Council’s 2001 mass influx directive “to establish minimum standards for giving temporary protection in the event of a mass influx of displaced persons from third countries who are unable to return to their country of origin.” More than 4.2 million Ukrainians currently benefit from the EU’s temporary protection mechanism. On a per capita basis, most have been taken in by the three Baltic states and by Poland, Czechia, Slovakia und Bulgaria.

About 1.2 million of those Ukrainians are living in Germany. They are not required to apply for asylum, have immediate access to the labour market and receive the same social benefits available to Germans. Overall, their arrival has been surprisingly uncontroversial, not just in Germany but also in the other EU member states.

It’s not the Ukrainians who have prompted the current panic about new arrivals but refugees from elsewhere, who must go through the standard asylum process. Last year, about 330,000 new protection claims were lodged in Germany, compared with about 218,000 in 2022. Ordinarily, Germany should be able to cope with such numbers. But federal funding hasn’t kept pace with the rise, giving local authorities good reason to complain. Of course, capacities would be freed up if Syrian and Afghan refugees, who still make up almost half of all asylum seekers, were treated like the Ukrainians: if they too were granted temporary protection with immediate work rights and access to social benefits.

The AfD, whose success is linked to its vilification of asylum seekers, has tried hard to create a moral panic about the number of new arrivals. That it was successful has been due in no small part to the fact that other parties jumped on the bandwagon in the hope that they too would benefit from scare-mongering.

Michael Kretschmer, the Christian Democrat premier of Saxony, was among them. He demanded that Germany establish stationary controls at its borders with Poland and the Czech Republic, abolish the last remnants of the constitutionally guaranteed individual right to asylum, transfer asylum seekers to third countries, set an upper limit on the annual number of asylum applications, and cut benefits paid to refugees. His proposals were either unfeasible or would have little effect, but they added to the sense of a situation spiralling out of control. The much-evoked “firewall” against the AfD may still work when it comes to forming coalitions, but it’s permeable as far as political rhetoric is concerned.

Kretschmer was backed by his party leader Friedrich Merz, who last September said of asylum seekers: “They go to the doctor and have their teeth done, while Germans can’t even get an appointment.” Members of Germany’s hapless Ampel coalition — the Social Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens — have also talked of emergencies and crises rather than trying to steer the public conversation towards a rational debate about Germany’s responsibilities and its record of meeting them.

Ampel politicians have endorsed the idea that all those whose asylum claims were rejected need to leave Germany. In October, the cover of the news magazine Spiegel depicted a serious-looking Olaf Scholz demanding ramped-up deportations. It is true that about 300,000 people living in Germany are technically supposed to leave the country, mainly because their protection claims were rejected. But four out of five are not — indeed must not be — deported, because (for example) the country they hail from is not safe.

New legislative measures in Germany aim to reduce asylum seeker numbers, as do new EU-wide changes to the Common European Asylum System, or CEAS. The EU wants to set up Australian-style centres at Europe’s external borders to detain applicants while they’re being screened. Unsuccessful applicants would be swiftly removed. Several EU governments — and some prominent German Christian Democrats — want to go further by transferring protection claimants to third countries such as Rwanda.

Germany last experienced a comparable momentum — albeit with far fewer street protesters — in 2018 and 2019, when many cities and towns hosted demonstrations in support of search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean. Since then, relatively few protests have been held in support of migrant and refugee rights. When the European Commission and the European Council agreed on the CEAS reforms last year, dozens rather than hundreds of protesters rallied in Hamburg.

For the last movement of a similar size we need to go back to the early 1990s. Between 1990 and 1993, Germany experienced a wave of racist violence. Asylum seeker hostels were torched, and many “foreigners” assaulted. According to an investigation by journalists, fourteen people died as a result of racist violence in the first two years after German reunification on 3 October 1990 alone. On 23 November 1992, two men associated with the far right firebombed a house in the small town of Mölln in northern Germany. A woman and two children of Turkish descent died. The murders startled Germans as much as the revelations about the “secret” deportation plans startled them more than three decades later. Large spontaneous demonstrations took place all over the country. In Munich alone, 400,000 people attended a candlelight protest.

Then, as now, the protests were triggered by an attack on long-term residents of Germany. Then, previous murders of asylum seekers had not prompted similar demonstrations of solidarity. Now, too, calls for the deportation of everybody whose asylum claim has been rejected have prompted little opposition. Then, the protests followed the opposition Social Democrats’ agreement to restrict the constitutionally guaranteed right to asylum. Now, the protests followed the Scholz government’s introduction of a harsh new law to expedite deportations and backing for the far-reaching CEAS reforms.

There are also key differences between the events of late 1992 and early 2024. When the Social Democrats met for an extraordinary party congress to decide whether to change the constitution and restrict the right to asylum, hundreds of thousands of people protested against the proposed reform; when parliament voted on the change in May 1993 large numbers of people once more descended on the German capital. And some Social Democrats and Free Democrats did actually vote against the changes.

This year’s protests against the CEAS reforms have been insignificant by comparison. And while some Greens and Social Democrats have publicly grumbled, their opposition is not as principled as that on display in 1993.

Millions of people have rallied over the past few weeks and railed against the AfD. But have they also expressed solidarity with asylum seekers threatened with deportation under the Scholz government’s new regime? Have they spared a thought for the refugees pushed back at the Polish and Croatian borders or in the Aegean? For those who drowned in the Mediterranean? Or have the demonstrations rather been an exercise in self-reassurance?

The postwar architects of the Federal Republic’s constitution were convinced that the Weimar Republic failed because it gave its enemies too much leeway. They thought that those out to undermine or destroy democracy must not abuse democratic rights and freedoms to achieve their aims.

Thus, the constitution makes this provision: “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.” The High Court has twice deemed a party to be unconstitutional: in 1952 a party of the far right, and in 1956 the Communist Party. More recently, in 2017, the High Court ruled that the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany aimed to abolish democracy but that its influence was not substantial enough to warrant its prohibition.

The AfD has been monitored by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency to gauge whether it is seeking “to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order.” In three East German states, including Saxony, the state intelligence agencies have already ruled the AfD’s respective state branches to be “without doubt extremist.”

Since the revelations about the “secret meeting” in November, calls for the government to make use of the constitutional provisions and initiate a High Court ruling about the AfD’s unconstitutionality have become louder. A petition signed by 1.69 million people is requesting that the government make use of another constitutional provision. According to Article 18, a person who abuses civil and political rights (such as the freedom of expression) “to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights.” In this instance, too, only the High Court can order such a forfeiture and the proceeding needs to be initiated by the federal government, a state government or federal parliament.

It’s tricky, to say the least, to declare a party unconstitutional when it’s supported by a third of the electorate, or to target one of its most influential leaders. As the attempt to ban the National Democratic Party demonstrated, the High Court case would take a very long time and its outcome would not be a foregone conclusion. Using the constitution to restrict Höcke’s democratic rights and outlaw the AfD would also allow him and his party to portray themselves as victims of “the system” and “the elites.”

The constitution is, however, an asset in the fight against the AfD. Thus far, its opponents have tended to focus on the alleged similarities between the AfD and Hitler’s Nazi party and to suggest the AfD’s leaders aim for a return to the dark days of the Third Reich. But politicians like Höcke aren’t unreconstituted Nazis. They even claim that the German army officer who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Hitler on 20 July 1944 is their role model.

Their critics’ focus ought instead to be on how they deny the constitution’s most important principle, expressed in the first sentence of Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable.” But that may get some of those currently applauding the demonstrators into trouble, because AfD politicians aren’t the only ones who disregard that line or pretend it applies only to German citizens.

Will the demonstrations against the AfD have any impact on its electoral performance at the local and European elections in June and the three state elections in September? Italian researchers have shown that Italy’s anti-far-right Sardines movement in late 2019 and early 2020 muted the electoral showing of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. But if such an effect resulted only in a better-than-expected performance of politicians such as Michael Kretschmer, who have tried to deprive the AfD of oxygen by endorsing key concerns of the party’s followers, then little would have been gained.

“Nie wieder Faschismus, nie wieder Zweite Liga!” proclaimed a speaker at the rally in St Pauli on Saturday. It was a double-headed hope: never again should Germany experience fascism, and never again would the St Pauli Football Club play in the second division. For many St Pauli supporters the club has returned to Germany’s first division in all but fact, but in reality, more often than not, the Zweite Liga has been where St Pauli has played its football.

While “Never again second division!” gives the impression that the St Pauli Football Club has already left its past behind, “Never again fascism!” suggests that fascism was buried on 8 May 1945 and must not be resurrected now. But the break with the past was never complete. Elements of Nazi Germany survived well beyond the end of the second world war. The AfD would not have thrived in the past ten years if it hadn’t been able to exploit the widespread acceptance of — or even longing for — authoritarian structures. Racism was not only alive in the early 1990s when asylum seeker hostels burned, but has been an enduring feature of postwar German society.

From Lörrach to Kappeln, the admonition “Never again!” defines the current protests. Often the protesters don’t name the past that must not reappear, because to them it is obvious they are referring to the twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It’s highly unlikely that Germany will experience a repeat of that time. But an unholy alliance of the AfD on the one hand and Christian Democrats and Ampel politicians on the other could pave the way for a re-run not of Nazi Germany but of the early 1990s, when fear-mongering engendered racist violence.

For the current movement to have a lasting impact, the protesters will need to identify what exactly they do not want. There is more to the AfD’s wishlist than “remigration.” A close reading of the party’s program could prompt more startlement.

I also wish the protesters were less preoccupied with the past. Germany is in crisis not because it is moving backwards but because it lacks a positive, widely shared vision for the future. Surely the St Pauli supporters won’t be content with avoiding relegation once the club has been promoted to the Bundesliga. What comes after “Nie wieder Faschismus!”? It’s easy to understand what those millions who rallied in recent weeks do not want. But it’s unclear what they are hoping for. •

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The mass adulation came as Albanese — like a swathe of Australia’s politicos, strategic thinkers and business leaders — embraced India as the best available escape from dependency on China. Add to that the fact that the fast-growing Indian community is made up of the ideal sort of migrant: well-educated, professionally skilled, prosperous, English-speaking, pious but moderate and even cricket-loving.

India may well turn out to play a key economic role for Australia one day, and the Indian community, now nearly 800,000-strong and the second-largest foreign-born component of the population (after those from Britain), has all the qualities claimed for it.

But since the mass rally in Sydney’s former Olympic stadium in May, the lustre has come off Narendra Modi. Longstanding concerns about where he is taking India are getting more air, and other members of the Quad grouping lined up against China, and their Five Eyes intelligence allies, are questioning his scruples.

Most pointedly, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau revealed in September “credible allegations” that India was responsible for the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist gunned down in British Columbia in June. Canada immediately expelled India’s chief intelligence official in Ottawa

India called the allegations “absurd” and responded to the expulsion by sharply cutting the number of Canadian diplomats in New Delhi. But the following month, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess told the ABC he had “no reason to dispute what the Canadian government has said in this matter.”

Then, on 29 November, the US Department of Justice announced the prosecution of an Indian man allegedly commissioned by a senior intelligence official in New Delhi to organise the assassination of another Sikh separatist, US citizen Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, on American soil. The plot was thwarted when the hired gunman turned out to be an undercover anti-drug agent.

According to a contributor to the respected US journal Foreign Affairs, any intelligence plans to kill Pannun and Nijjar would most likely have been cleared with Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser: “He is known to be hands on, and the Indian intelligence bureaucracy is too hierarchical for something as high stakes as an international assassination to happen without Doval’s approval.”

The ripples spread further. A well-regarded Indian news outlet, the Print, reports that the British government asked a senior official of India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence agency reporting to the prime minister, to leave his station in London. The US also expelled a senior official with the same agency from his station in San Francisco and blocked the agency from replacing its station chief in Washington. US president Joe Biden, has since declined an invitation to be chief foreign guest at India’s big Republic Day parade on 26 January.

That kind of foreign interference, and its alleged source, was not what Australia’s government and security apparatus had in mind when they introduced controversial laws to criminalise clandestine influence-building in 2017. Their aim was to keep an eye on Australia’s Chinese-origin community, numbering about 1.2 million, and on efforts by Beijing’s spy agencies and Communist Party “united front work” operatives to manipulate its members and recruit gullible or venal figures in the wider population.

Now it appears our spooks and analysts need to worry about the possibility of India’s intelligence service working in illegal ways to further the political aims of its ruling party. They need to educate themselves about how Modi’s brand of communal politics plays out in the diaspora, and reassess the lengths to which they believe New Delhi is ready to go.

This isn’t likely to be a short-term problem either: after nearly ten years in office, polls show Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, to be as popular as ever and his Congress Party–led opposition failing to gain much traction, pointing to another Modi victory in elections due early next year.

Modi’s campaign to turn India away from the secular, minority-inclusive model of its modern rebirth into a Hindu-majoritarian state is likely to get fresh impetus after that likely win. At the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, he seemed to float a name change from India to the ancient, pre-Muslim, pre-British Bharat. The new Indian parliament building, opened in April this year, includes a mural showing India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and part of Afghanistan as forming Akhand Bharat (“unbroken India”), an idea pushed by the far-right, Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Order), or RSS, the movement from which Modi sprang.

On 22 January, Modi will inaugurate a lavish new temple at Ayodhya to mark the legendry birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram. To hundreds of millions of poorly educated Hindus, mainly in India’s north, the new Ram Birthplace Temple marks a historical truth rather than a legend. It is described as a replacement for an ancient one torn down centuries ago by a Muslim conqueror and replaced with a small mosque. That mosque was notoriously destroyed in 1992 by Hindu mobs fired up by earlier BJP leaders, initiating decades of communal strife and friction between Hindus and Muslims.

No wonder Biden didn’t want to chance standing alongside Modi four days after the new temple is opened. If he did, he might also have gazed down New Delhi’s majestic Edwin Lutyens–designed avenue — the avenue that ends in a memorial arch to the Indian dead of the British forces in the world wars — and noticed a new structure alongside, inaugurated by Modi last year. Under a stone canopy is an 8.5 metre black granite statue of Subhas Chandra Bose, the independence fighter who rejected the non-violent campaigns of Nehru and Gandhi and aligned himself with the Axis powers. After being smuggled by Nazi agents to Germany, where he met Hitler and Himmler, Bose was delivered by U-boat to the Japanese, for whom he raised an anti-British army among Indian prisoners of war. In Modi’s eyes, Australians, the British and the Americans were on the wrong side in the Pacific war.

Although Indians have been in Australia since first British settlement, the community’s present numbers were reached by a fivefold expansion only in the last twenty years. Its social and political streams are still in formation. But pointers to emerging internal pressures can be found in British historian Edward Anderson’s important new book, Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora.

Of an estimated thirty million worldwide, Anderson focuses on those living in Britain, making comparisons with the United States, in both cases communities that grew large a generation earlier than Australia’s. If our diaspora follows the same pattern, a Hindu identity will grow in importance over an “Indian” one, and even more than a “South Asian” one, for its members of that faith. And that identity will increasingly be flavoured by a Hindutva (“Hindu-ness”) wider than religious belief and worship.

Hindutva is almost synonymous with the Hindu nationalism pursued by Modi and his BJP: a majoritarian, conservative and militant political ideology and ethno-religious movement (in Anderson’s description) that rejects pluralistic secularism and is ascendant in contemporary India.

Strangely, Hindutva also has wide support among Hindus living outside India, who simultaneously favour a chauvinistic, majoritarian ideology in India while negotiating recognition and rights in their new homes as a “model minority” noted for peaceful and prosperous integration. “Why is it that some of the most outspokenly patriotic Indians are those who have chosen to live outside of their motherland, or may have never lived in India at all?” Anderson asks.

It’s not just an assertiveness masking insecurity or guilt about leaving for a better material life, he says, but the result of decades of cultivation by Hindutva idealogues centred on the RSS. Founded in the 1920s, the RSS has nurtured generations of pracharaks (cadres) dedicated to hardening up India’s Hindu population to throw off the influence of Muslim and then British overlords.

“The life of a pracharak,” Anderson tells us, “is in many ways modelled on an ascetic: itinerant (as and when required), abstinent and unmarried, and renouncing of material possessions (receiving no salary, but provided with accommodation and vegetarian diet).” They are often from middle-class and upper-caste backgrounds, university-educated and English speaking, and well travelled, though they don’t mix much outside RSS circles.

Although he comes from a low caste, from where he was put into a teenage marriage (apparently unconsummated), Modi spent his early adult years as an RSS pracharak. He was then placed as the BJP’s chief minister in Gujarat, just ahead of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom there that stained his reputation and kept him barred from the United States until he became prime minister. His humble origins count as a plus for a BJP often accused of trying to keep the Hindu upper castes in charge.

The RSS began its external proselytising in the 1940s among the Indian communities in East Africa, mostly from Gujarat, which thrived as commercial intermediaries between the British and the Africans. Expelled after independence, they were able to settle in English cities, notably London, Birmingham and Leicester, by virtue of their British passports. The RSS followed them, setting up in 1966 in England as the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, or HSS, an organisation that remains active today.

Living in group housing in Leicester, the pracharaks organise rank-and-file recruits, the swayamsevaks, at regular shakhas that start with a Sanskrit prayer and hoisting of the saffron-coloured flag of Hinduism, followed by marching drills and practice with bamboo staves, sessions of the Indian game kabaddi, closing prayers, and singing of the RSS anthem “Namaste Sada Vatsale Matrubhoomi” (Hail to Thee O Motherland).

Physical development is very much part of the ethos. The aim, Anderson says, has been “to ‘rebuild’ a population of strong Hindu male figures, largely to countenance (while simultaneously justifying) the threatening construction of the Muslim Other…” Tolerance and Gandhian non-violence have been shelved in favour of warrior models from history and legends.

“The promotion of physical training, toughness, and group unity also relates to the perception that individualism and material comforts of the West constitute a danger for Hindus,” he writes:

Second-generation Hindus overseas are considered particularly susceptible to picking up bad habits from morally bankrupt host societies, and many have discussed the “disdain” South Asian migrants have for the lax ethics of the West, its declining parental authority, licentiousness, culture of instant gratification, weakening family units, and so on. The HSS has performed a specific role in this context, providing segregated spaces for socialisation away from “corrupting influences,” in which curative “Indian” values can be transmitted.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the following is not large: the eighty-two shakhas operating in Britain have an average weekly total attendance of 1903. They are notably more casual than those in India (where volunteers turn out in uniforms), many participants are female, and the dropout rate is high. The local volunteers often find visiting RSS cadres from India possessed of a much more hard line against Muslims than they themselves feel, or are willing to express.

Recognising this tension, the cadre-based RSS and its mass affiliate the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) have slipped into the background in recent decades, pushing forward more worldly figures to head councils claiming to speak for the one million Hindus among the 1.8 million Indian-origin residents of England and Wales. The same trend is found in the Indian diaspora of the United States, which has grown to 4.2 million from one million in 1990.

The message is also much the same, expounding the virtue of ancient Hindu theology and social organisation. All religions that began in India — Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism — are claimed to be branches of Hinduism. The theory that Hinduism itself flourished among Indo-Aryan migrants from Central Asia, imposing the caste system on darker-skinned Dravidians, is portrayed as being wrong. The real invaders were the Muslim conquerors of the last millennium. Marriage and the rearing of children are the principal roles of women. The ideal diet is vegetarianism. Homosexuality is “against nature.” Caste provides social space and closer identity, and was much more tolerant and accepted until the British raj started classifying everyone. And watch out for those young Muslim men waging a “love jihad” to seduce and convert Hindu girls.

Any criticism of these historical distortions and attendant social ills is increasingly attributed to “Hinduphobia.” In fact, Hindu councils in both Britain and the United States consciously borrow the example of Jewish organisations using charges of anti-Semitism to deflect criticism of Israel. Indeed, India’s previously lukewarm, sometimes hostile relations with Israel have been transformed under Modi, who made the first visit by an Indian prime minister in 2017 and often speaks of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

Beyond defence and corporate interests (Modi’s favoured entrepreneur Gautam Adani runs Haifa’s port) and shared suspicion of Muslims, Modi would like to follow Netanyahu’s pathway to a state with two-tiered citizenship that gives the religious majority more rights than minorities.

Alongside this assertive victimhood, which Anderson calls a “soft” neo-Hindutva, have been occasional flare-ups of a harder version, often attributed to new arrivals from India. In 2006, a vandal forced the closure of a London exhibition of paintings by the Mumbai artist M.F. Husain, a Muslim forced into exile for his depictions of Hindu goddesses. In Leicester last year, hundreds of masked young Hindus paraded through a Muslim neighbourhood shouting Jai Shri Ram (Hail Lord Ram) after watching an India vs Pakistan cricket match.

Internet trolls in India and among the diaspora fire threats of murder and rape at academics who criticise Modi and Hindutva. In 2014, Wendy Doniger, an eminent Indologist and Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, came under attack by a US-based online firebrand, Rajiv Malhotra, for her book, The Hindus. Malhotra’s campaign eventually resulted in Penguin India pulping its local edition.

Although Hindu activists often accuse Muslims of living in ghettos, the Hindus in Britain are remarkably concentrated and have low rates of marrying out of their communities. Given the first-past-the-post voting system, this has made some British constituencies and their MPs captive to the Hindu vote. Periodically, British ministers invited to their functions are embarrassed when pictures circulate showing them standing next to dubious communalists visiting from India.

Where Indians were once more inclined to the Labour Party because of its warmer embrace of migrants, Hindu organisations have swung behind the Conservatives in the past decade. The diaspora’s advance into higher income brackets would have something to do with this, but the Tories are less likely to worry about human rights issues in India and have shelved a Labour initiative to outlaw caste discrimination in Britain itself. Britain’s first Hindu prime minister, Rishi Sunak, might be more representative of the secular, US green card–holding CEO class, but he does wear his Hindu identity as a temple thread on his wrist.

Conceivably, the United States could get a president of Indian ancestry in Nikki Haley, a US-born daughter of Sikh migrants (although she converted to Christianity when she married out of the community), or a part-Indian one in Kamala Harris if she were to take over from Biden.

Australia is probably a generation off seeing an Indian-Australian close to national political leadership, though many are already at the top levels of professions and corporations. But the diaspora’s generally sunny picture is already showing some of the tensions Anderson portrays.

The RSS has a local outfit, the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh Australia, running forty-nine regular shakhas with an average combined attendance of 1230 volunteers. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad is also well established, as is a self-proclaimed umbrella body, the Hindu Council of Australia, which fits Anderson’s definition of soft neo-Hindutva. For Modi’s visit in May, a new body calling itself the Indian Australian Diaspora Foundation, which claimed to include 367 professional, caste, regional, religious, cultural and local groups as well as RSS and BJP branches, organised flights and buses for thousands of attendees at the Sydney meeting.

Hard neo-Hindutva showed up in 2019 when hecklers forced the Australia India Institute at Melbourne University, set up by Kevin Rudd’s government to further bilateral relations and knowledge, to revert from public lectures to closed seminars on issues relating to Modi and Hindutva. More than a dozen India scholars severed links with the institute in protest at the decision.

Probably in response, the Albanese government announced during Modi’s visit a new body to take over the task of promoting the bilateral relationship, implicitly leaving the Australia India Institute to function as an academic think tank. The new Centre for Australia–India Relations has a banker, Swati Dave, rather than an academic as its advisory body’s chair. It will be located in Sydney’s Parramatta, a focus for the city’s Indian diaspora, whose newly elected federal MP, economist Andrew Charlton, has just written an upbeat book about the India relationship, Australia’s Pivot to India.

But there’s an important reason to think that Hindutva’s appeal might never be as great among the Indian diaspora in Australia. Our Indian population is more diverse than the British one, with Hindus barely 50 per cent of the Indian-born population and many of them drawn from India’s southern states, which are resistant to the BJP message.

As well as a large number of Christians, the diaspora also includes as many as 200,000 Sikhs, some of whom support the movement for a separate Sikh state of Khalistan in India’s Punjab. In their meetings, Modi has ambushed Albanese with charges that these elements have vandalised Hindu temples with separatist slogans. Albanese doesn’t seem to have responded by pointing out that police suspect some of these to be “false flag” operations, or that the most violent clash so far has been an attack with bats and hammers on a Sikh group in Western Sydney in February 2021 by men recognised from a BJP–HSS rally. Or if he has, we have not been told about it.

In Sydney, as in London, New York and Texas, Indian groups opposed to Modi’s Hindutva campaigns picketed outside his mass reception. This book will help our politicians understand why. •

Hindu Nationalism in the Indian Diaspora: Transnational Politics and British Multiculturalism
By Edward T.G. Anderson | Hurst | $57.99 | 488 pages

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Then there was the unexpected jump in numbers. Net overseas migration for the 2022–23 financial year hit a record 510,000 people, more than 25 per cent above the 400,000 anticipated in the May budget and more than double the October 2022 forecast of 235,000. Not only are more people arriving but fewer are leaving, especially students; the catch-up after Covid means many international students are still in the early stages of their courses and won’t return home for two or three more years.

Combined with the shenanigans of sacked former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo, these developments have made it easy for the opposition to conjure up an image of out-of-control migration and link this to housing shortages and other pressing issues. Immigration isn’t the cause of a housing crisis decades in the making, but the surge in arrivals does make a tight rental market even worse.

Arrival numbers would have been no lower under a Coalition government and Australia’s population would be higher if not for Covid. But facts count for little in an overheated debate. Migration is now Labor’s problem and it would be easy to construe the release of its new strategy as an attempt to wrest back the initiative on this fraught topic.

But the strategy is no knee-jerk response. It is the product of months of work, building on an expert panel’s finding that the migration program is “broken” and a report by former Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon confirming widespread abuse of Australia’s visa system.

The strategy adds detail to the government’s early responses to those two reviews and affirms its commitment to keeping both unions and business onside. It shows a government aspiring to wholesale reform rather than bolting yet more fixes onto an already unwieldly, overloaded and outdated migration machine.

In its existing form, the system satisfies no one. Employers and migrants complain about high costs, slow processing and uncertain outcomes, while the public questions the scale and integrity of the program. In their joint foreword to the strategy, the responsible ministers, Clare O’Neil and Andrew Giles, recognise the need to restore migration’s “social license.”

The strategy articulates four policy objectives, and while they are not ranked, the tone and content of the strategy indicate a descending order of priority. Migration, it says, should first, raise living standards; second, ensure a fair go in the workplace; third, build stronger communities; and fourth, strengthen international relationships.

To achieve the primary aim of higher living standards the government wants to refine migration to boost productivity, counter the perceived impacts of an ageing population, fill skills gaps and expand exports.

One step is to reform the points test, which scores and ranks applicants for permanent skilled migration according to their age, qualifications, experience and English language proficiency. A discussion paper will canvass options that are likely to give greater weight to the skills and qualifications of an applicant’s partner and downgrade factors that are “poor predictors” of labour market success, such as studying in a regional area and fluency in a community language. The aim is to reward skill over “perseverance” so that international student graduates working in their professional fields have a faster route to settlement while graduates stuck in lower-level jobs are screened out and leave Australia.

Another measure introduces a “skills in demand” visa to replace the “temporary skills shortage” visa. This is more than a name change. The government had already lifted the threshold wage for temporary skilled migrants from $53,900 to $70,000 to ensure that these visas are not used to recruit cheap labour. (The threshold, frozen since 2013, will now be indexed annually.) New rules allow temporary migrants to switch employers and sectors more easily, which should improve productivity as these workers move to jobs where their skills are more highly valued.

Labour market testing will be simplified, employers can pay sponsorship fees periodically instead of up front, and visas will be issued more swiftly, with the government committing to a median processing time of just seven days for applicants in the top “specialist skills pathway.” This applies to workers earning at least $135,000, who will no longer have to match one of the occupations in demand identified by Jobs and Skills Australia (though the category is closed to trade workers, machinery operators, drivers and labourers).

Workers paid between $70,000 and $135,000 are on the “core skills pathway” and must still have an occupation identified as being in shortage, with a promise that these lists will be updated more frequently to better reflect rapidly changing labour market needs. Both the core and specialist pathways will offer a route to permanent residency.

The details of a third “essential skills” pathway are yet to be worked out. This option will apply to lower-paid, hard-to-fill jobs with a focus on the care economy. The government says it will “further consult” on lower-wage migration next year, but any arrangements will be sector-specific, capped in size, closely regulated and designed to maintain the primacy of Australia’s relationship to the Pacific as “a guiding principle.”

The latter is a reference to objective four of the strategy — strengthening international relationships — and we can expect further development of PALM, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which has its genesis in a seasonal labour program for workers from Pacific island nations and Timor-Leste. Only 3000 Pacific islanders were working seasonally in Australia in 2016, but by October 2023 there were more than 38,000 PALM participants. The original scheme was broadened from horticulture to meat processing and other agricultural industries, and then extended to encompass tourism, hospitality, retail and care. It is mostly limited to regional and rural areas, but is no longer just seasonal, with workers granted visas for between one and four years.

But the scheme remains purely temporary, with no path to permanent residency. Pacific workers can bid for one of 3000 new Pacific Engagement Visas offered annually, but success is a matter of luck. Former top immigration official Abul Rizvi has highlighted a sharp rise in PALM workers applying for protection as refugees and attributes this to dissatisfaction with their treatment in Australia. He says the “silliness” of the Pacific visa lottery will just add to PALM workers’ frustrations and suggests the government should instead help them “develop higher level skills as a pathway to permanent residence, especially skills relevant to the regional communities in which they are currently working.”

Rizvi’s sensible suggestion points to an enduring dilemma of low-skilled migration. Once workers secure permanent residency they tend to quit poorly paid jobs in remote locations and move to better-paid positions in cities. Keeping migrants on temporary visas limits their labour market mobility and ensures they stay put, but it’s a recipe for disaffection and exploitation.

The structure of the PALM scheme runs counter to the second major policy objective in the new migration strategy, “ensuring a fair go in the workplace.” By allowing temporary skilled migrants to shift jobs more easily, the government has increased their power to challenge underpayment and resist unreasonable demands. Temporary skilled migrants who suffer abuse will have six months instead of two to find an alternative sponsor and be less reliant on any single employer to support their applications for permanent residence. The contrast with the purely temporary PALM scheme that ties workers to specific employers and regions is stark.

To tackle abuse, the government has introduced a bill to make it a criminal offence for employers to misuse visa programs to exploit temporary migrant workers. This recommendation by Allan Fels’s 2019 Migrant Workers’ Taskforce was ignored by the previous government.

The idea of a “fair go” also has a domestic element. The government wants to ensure that migrants don’t displace local workers or bring down their wages. Its primary move here is to tighten entry requirements for international students to ensure that their main intention is to study, not work. The strategy erroneously calls this closing “back doors and side doors” when, in reality, Australia opened the front door wide to support the growth of education for export; unsurprisingly, international students walked through in large numbers.

New barriers are being erected. International students must pass a higher English language test and prove they have significantly more savings. They will find it harder to switch from one course to another, especially if they appear to be going backwards — by, for example, swapping from a degree to a certificate-level course. The government will prioritise visa processing based on the “risk level” of educational institutions. Applications to study at top-tier universities will sail through while visas to attend private colleges languish in the bureaucratic pipeline.

The Australian Skills Quality Authority will also have extra funding to crack down on ghost colleges, those dodgy providers that are shopfronts for obtaining a visa with work rights.

Evidence of a more stringent approach is already apparent. In 2018–19, the last full year of Coalition government before Covid, only 13 per cent of student visa applications lodged outside Australia were rejected. In 2022–23 (the first full year of a Labor administration) 20 per cent were knocked back. The change was especially pronounced in offshore VET applications, where average rejection rates grew from 38 per cent under the Coalition to 46 per cent under Labor. The perception that Dutton was tougher on border control than his successor as home affairs minister doesn’t match reality.

Labor is also winding back generous post-study work visas, which the Morrison government made even more attractive in late 2021 to help international education “roar back” after Covid. Visas will be shorter: three years instead of four for a PhD and two years instead of three for coursework masters. The eligible age limit will be reduced from fifty to thirty-five years.

When the Gillard government introduced the 485 post-study work visa a decade ago, some of us warned that it would produce a large new cohort of “permanently temporary” graduates — migrants living and working in Australia for years without any prospect of settling. This has come to pass. Of the almost 200,000 temporary graduate visa holders in Australia, most are stuck in limbo. They struggle to find jobs in line with their qualifications and do low-skill work that will never enable them to amass the points needed to qualify as skilled migrants. It makes sense to rein the scheme in.

Over time, these measures could see international student and graduate numbers decline further than they would have, which may reduce the pool of casualised and precarious labour staffing kitchens and delivering meals. On the other hand, the government has reinstated restrictions on working hours lifted during the pandemic. Students can work a maximum of forty-eight hours each fortnight, up from forty hours pre-Covid. Some will need to work more “off the books” to make ends meet, making them vulnerable to ruthless employers.

The government will also evaluate another visa category rife with wage theft, poor working conditions and sexual harassment — working holiday visas — which have morphed from a cultural exchange program into a low-wage labour scheme, especially for agriculture. The scale of abuse has repeatedly been documented over the past decade, and it’s hard to see how the program can be rehabilitated short of scrapping the second and third visas backpackers can acquire if they complete three or six months of “specified work” in regional Australia. As with the PALM scheme, linking work and visas makes young travellers beholden to employers, often in remote towns and isolated workplaces. The PALM scheme is, at least, more closely regulated.

Improved conditions for student workers and backpackers would be a significant achievement and help to restore public faith in the migration program, even if we had to pay more for our food and collect our own takeaway. Whether the proposed measures can achieve this is an open question, but Labor is at least demonstrating a level of intent that was absent under the Coalition. In the words of former senior public servant Martin Parkinson, who chaired the expert review, the migration system has suffered “a decade of almost wilful neglect.”

The government hopes to meet the third objective of the migration strategy, “building stronger communities,” by shifting the emphasis from temporary to permanent migration and providing greater clarity about who can (or can’t) hope to settle here.

The commonsense implication is that permanent migration is more conducive to building “a cohesive multicultural society.” But the strategy is silent on family migration, apart from the strange formulation that the government will support “relationships with family abroad.” That doesn’t sound promising for overseas-born Australians who want to bring parents here to live with them. Parent migration could build stronger communities but clearly runs counter to the higher-priority goals of boosting productivity, filling skills shortages and slowing demographic ageing.

The conundrum of parent visas has been left to fester so long that the shocking blow-out in applications and waiting times means many parents are likely to die before they get a visa. This is causing distress and anxiety for tens of thousands of families.

One immediate option would be to suspend new applications pending a review of the system, just as Canada did in 2011. This would halt the growth in the waiting list and buy time to figure out what to do while working through the backlog. It is cruel to keep applications open and foster false hopes.

The migration strategy draws quite a clear outline of the government’s vision for skilled migration, even if there is lots of colouring in to do. When it comes to family migration, though, the page remains virtually blank, and the government is still “exploring” what visa settings are “appropriate.”

To support all four objectives, the migration strategy promises to make the system easier to navigate and administer. This entails, among other things, merging or closing some of the one hundred “visa products” to simplify offerings, as well as adding extra staff and upgrading IT systems.

The challenge will be to find a balance between the clear regulations and procedures needed to process a high volume of visas efficiently, on the one hand, and retaining enough flexibility to fit individual circumstances, especially in compassionate cases, on the other. Whenever the migration system re-gears, some people get chewed up, including many with compelling reasons to stay in Australia. Foreign parents of Australian-citizen children, for example, will often cycle through a series of temporary visas in a desperate bid to stay close to their sons or daughters. This will get harder as visa rules tighten. It would be ironic and disappointing if attempts to streamline migration mean even more decisions landing in the lap of the immigration minister in the form of last-ditch appeals for him to exercise discretion under various “god powers.”

The strategy is pitched as a bid to get migration working for the nation: “For workers. For businesses. For all Australians.” Noticeably absent from this top-line list is a desire to get migration working for migrants. The strategy (and the ministers’ language promoting it) tends to present migrants, especially student visa holders, as highly calculating and instrumental — as people who use “back doors and side doors” to milk the system for whatever they can get or even engage in outright rorts.

What gets forgotten is that circumstances and aspirations change, especially for young adults at a formative stage of life. Students may come to Australia with every intention of leaving when they complete their courses but then discover new freedoms and possibilities that were not previously available to them. Perhaps they can openly express their sexuality, their creativity or their politics for the first time. Perhaps they find a new vocation or meet the love of their life.

Yet the strategy essentially tells young temporary migrants: please come to Australia for a few years but don’t put down any roots, or even put out feelers, unless you are pursuing an occupation in demand and can help build Australia’s economy. Not only is this unrealistic, it also shows we might be the ones who are calculating and instrumental.

As long as we rely on international students to fund our higher education system and backpackers to pick our produce, temporary migration will continue at a high level. The least we can do is be honest with temporary visa holders about their limited prospects for building a life in Australia, and the new strategy points in that direction. Yet we should recognise that this might inflict an emotional and psychological toll.

In their foreword to the migration strategy, the immigration and home affairs ministers say they want to bring migration levels “back to normal.” It’s not clear what might constitute “normal” in 2024, but a better-targeted and more efficient system would certainly be an achievement, especially if it offers greater clarity and certainty, reins in workplace exploitation, and reduces the number of migrants who are rendered permanently temporary and stuck in a state of being not quite Australian. What it won’t do is resolve the practical and ethical challenges that arise when the number of migrants coming to Australia on temporary visas is so much greater than the number who can hope to settle here. •

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Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

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But it is complicated by social and economic inequalities, as Wanning Sun explains in her new book, Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences. And in the case of China’s migrant workers, it can’t be considered apart from broader issues of history, politics and economics. Reading this important, pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip.

For most of Chinese history, parents arranged their children’s marriages, a deal typically cemented by either a dowry or bride price, depending on local custom. Men of means were free to seek romance outside the home with professional courtesans or bring choice into the home through concubinage. Women enjoyed no such second shots at happiness.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, progressive and revolutionary thinkers advocated for an end to arranged marriages. The end of dynastic rule and the birth of a modern republic in 1911 created the opportunity for change, with rising educational rates for girls, industrialisation, the entry of more women into the work force, and exposure to Western ideas and culture all playing a role. The wild popularity of a sentimental literary genre known as “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck” fiction over much of the first half of the twentieth century reflected widespread yearning for relationships based on romantic love.

When it came into being in 1949, the People’s Republic of China abolished arranged marriages and other “feudal” customs such as bride prices. Yet its new, purposeful culture subordinated romantic love to revolution and comradeship. By 1966, when Mao launched the decade-long, ultra-left Cultural Revolution, the only sanctioned passion was for revolution itself. With the arrival of the Reform Era in 1978, love quickly divorced revolution to flirt with freedom and eventually marry the market.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, the decade when China’s economy roared past Japan’s to become the world’s second largest. Sun, who provides a brief overview of the history, picks up the story here. If revolutionary China had never been quite as egalitarian as it claimed to be, by the mid 2010s, she notes, it was “one of the most unequal countries in the world.” The new urban middle classes — including, with some caveats, those in the LGBTQI community — enjoyed relative freedom in their romantic and sex lives. Those with more precarious social status and economic stability, such as the migrant workers who are the focus of Sun’s study, faced a very different situation.

The legacy of the decades-long one-child policy, particularly in rural areas has been an outsized gender imbalance. Which is why so many of China’s internal migrants who travel from the countryside to the cities to seek work — its “migrant workers” — are male.

Unlike in nations where people are free to settle where they find work, the People’s Republic has a strictly managed system of urban residence permits called hukou. These permits define who may reside legally and permanently in a city and enjoy its hospitals, schools and other social services. The hardworking villagers who build China’s fast trains and gleaming office blocks, keep its assembly lines humming, deliver its meals and packages, and cook, clean and otherwise serve the middle classes and their businesses don’t for the most part have the right to settle in the city or send their children to schools near where they work.

They’re not an insignificant portion of the population. Before pandemic lockdowns returned most of them to their hometowns for a spell, they numbered 286 million. That’s about a fifth of China’s population. This makes Sun’s close look at how social and economic inequality affects their lives — and at the interdependent structures of capitalism, patriarchy and state socialism that reinforce these inequalities — essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of China today.

By the mid 2010s, when Sun began her field research, many of the migrants she met belonged to a second generation, born in the 1990s. The first, born in the eighties or earlier, typically retained stronger ties to their home villages, to which they planned to retire. Many were already married when they set out for the cities. The second generation, which includes children of the first, enjoy a less certain identity, caught between home villages to which they lack strong emotional connection and the cities whose urban and consumerist dreams they have absorbed while lacking the means to realise them.

They are thus more or less permanently migratory, mobile mainly in a lateral, geographic sense. With hard work — and most of their work is punishingly hard — they can improve their situation. Buying a flat in a township close to their village, where they can live with their children (typically farmed out to grandparents in the meantime) is a common aspiration. But the difficulty of obtaining an urban hukou means they have only limited hopes of joining the urban middle classes.

Those middle classes, in turn, regard them with a mix of conditional appreciation, distaste and fear. Sun notes that the Communist Party itself, for all its trumpeted and historical proletarian affinities, shares the middle-class unease at the “perceived threat” this majority-male cohort poses “to public health, moral order and social stability.” A key source of anxiety centres on the sexual desires of a floating single-male population, and the ancillary underground prostitution industry, involving migrant women, that has sprung up to service them. Many of the migrant workers (including sex workers) with whom Sun has spoken appear to have internalised this shame, knowing that they may be (however unfairly) perceived as living on the moral as well as economic margins.

I recall when migrant workers first began appearing in the cities in significant numbers in the 1990s. Friends in Beijing and Shanghai expressed what seemed to be outsized fears of these mostly male workers, whom they believed capable of the most heinous crimes. It was reminiscent of the eighteenth-century “soulstealers” panic, when mass hysteria grew around the idea that sorcerers disguised as itinerants were clipping the ends of men’s queues for dark rites that allowed them to steal the men’s souls. As Philip A. Kuhn wrote in Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, such apprehensions reveal much about a society’s structure and internal tensions.

Researching Love Troubles, Sun cultivated relationships with workers at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, speaking to them at length and over the years to be able to present nuanced portraits of their lives. There’s PC, for example, witty, vivacious and talkative, whose two children live with different sets of grandparents back home. She is constantly arguing with her husband about his gambling habit — not an uncommon vice among migrant workers. He infuriated her by secretly giving away half a year’s wages to his nephew, another gambler, while she was slaving on the assembly line to buy a three-bedroom apartment in a township near their hometown. She became a campaigner against domestic violence and a labour activist with links to a local NGO involved in workers’ rights. As her NGO-backed struggles with Foxconn’s management accelerated, her husband’s support for her activism helped them reconcile.

PC’s story is just one of many personal accounts threaded through this book, deftly contextualised and considered through the lens of ethnographic and other theories. The examples illuminate not just the variety of migrant experience but also issues including “male grievance” among the involuntarily single (and often celibate) members of the migrant labour force; the cohort’s higher-than-normal divorce rates; the “dark intimacy” of prostitution, exploitation and abuse; and how women especially typically face “compromises” rather than “choices” in their intimate lives.

Among the many intriguing subjects tackled in Love Troubles is the politics of romantic imagery. Sun begins the book with a description of her first meeting with some of the workers who would become her long-term informants. She thought to break the ice by asking about their favourite love stories. Some of the men openly scoffed at the idea, saying there was no such thing as true love. Then one of them began talking about the film Titanic. This drew the group into passionate discussion.

What most resonated with them was the fantasy of a poor working-class boy being loved by a rich girl — and how it was doomed to a tragic end, as they felt it certainly would be in China. One young woman, meanwhile, was most struck by the fact that following the death of her true love the heroine was nonetheless free to find happiness with another man, whereas traditional Chinese mores would have condemned her for not remaining chaste and “virtuously” true to his memory.

Other types of romantic imagery discussed by Sun include migrant workers’ self-portraiture in photography and literature, the culture of wedding photography (including a controversial artistic intervention in which an urban photographer posed migrant couples dressed in wedding clothes inside the factories where they worked), and documentaries produced by state media that portray workers’ relationships as unfolding within a broader China Dream narrative of hard work towards a brighter future.

The workers’ responses to such imagery often contrast with the reactions of the wider community. For example, a migrant worker published a suite of photographs of his peers titled “Rural Migrants’ Love in Dongguan.” It included candid shots of lovers, sometimes still in their factory clothes, snatching a cuddle on a park bench or sharing other intimate moments. (Two of these photos appear in the book; one wishes for more.) Widely viewed online, the series incited a range of comments from the patronising and sentimental (“how sweet”) to the moralising and condemnatory (“they’re not interested in learning, they have no souls”).

As Sun writes, the migrant workers’ “right to intimacy” is inescapably “contingent, conditional and vulnerable to violation and exploitation.” In their search for happiness in their personal lives they must balance their employers’ demands on their energy and time, frequently measured in twelve-hour shifts, with family pressures (including around the resurgent custom of bride prices) and their own desires for, and definitions of happiness. As Sun amply demonstrates, neither the men nor the women of this precariat are free from the “triple oppression” of “global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy.” Love can try bloody hard, and it does, but it can’t always conquer all. •

Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences
By Wanning Sun | Bloomsbury Academic | $153 | 216 pages

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What probably doesn’t come to mind is Cyprus’s leading role in selling passports to members of the global elite. Since the 2008 global financial crisis the island has joined the growing number of small countries that peddle their passports in the growing citizenship-by-investment market.

These countries — often island microstates with British colonial histories — offer citizenship to anyone who can afford prices ranging from around A$200,000 to A$1 million. You don’t necessarily need to visit the country whose citizenship you buy, let alone live there, but you’ll gain much easier access to the countries your new passport opens up for you. A passport for tiny Saint Kitts and Nevis, for example, entitles its holder to ninety-day visa-free access to Britain and the countries of the European Union — not a privilege available to many citizens outside the West.

As sociologist Kristin Surak observes in her new book, The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires, citizenship was once an equaliser, neutralising some aspects of class inequality. Now that it’s for sale, it has become another fading feature of the twentieth-century nation-state and its mildly redistributive policies. Hypermobility and growing inequality have created a business that, while still very small, threatens to replace our current sense of citizenship and nationalism with a more elastic variety of belonging based on class.

Some of the island microstates that figure prominently in the citizenship-by-investment market have also used their sovereignty to attract offshore banking. But this is not what motivates people to buy a passport, says Surak: wealthy countries like Britain and Switzerland have more than enough tax loopholes to go around.

Rather, non-Western elites are driven by the disjuncture between their economic status and their national belonging. They are mostly the wealthy, but not uber-rich, of the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia and China. They have enough funds for a business class ticket but are hassled at passport control. They have places to go and people to see and are sick of waiting weeks for visas to the European Union, the United States or Australia.

Increasingly, these wealthy individuals buy citizenship in places like Saint Kitts, Antigua, Dominica and Saint Lucia in the Caribbean; Cyprus and Malta in Mediterranean Europe; Vanuatu in the Pacific; and, surprisingly, Turkey. Of course, they could invest for citizenship in the United States, Canada, Britain or Australia, but those countries’ programs cost US$1 million or more and require residency.

The citizenship-by-investment industry emerged in the Caribbean in the 1990s but was largely kept in check by American concerns about money laundering. It started to pick up steam with the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, when a plethora of citizenship-by-investment stores with names like “Emergency Exit Company” sprang up in Kowloon. After the 2008 financial crisis, Spain and Portugal also launched popular residency-by-investment programs, which are more like regular immigration.

The Hong Kong example reveals another built-in attraction of these programs: many people want an extra passport as insurance. Hong Kong’s political future was uncertain in the 1990s, but it also had a roaring economy fuelled by mainland China’s free-market reforms; wealthy Hong Kongers, with their extra passport, could continue to make money while having a concrete exit plan.

The same goes for Russians, Kazakhs, Vietnamese and many other elites today. Doing business in a place without democratic institutions can be lucrative, but being able to leave — when there is a coup, mass imprisonment of those charged with corruption (sometimes by the very governments that cooperated with them), or a war — is prudent. That’s why Jho Low, a Malaysian business figure who stole US$4 billion from his government with the connivance of former prime minister Najib Razak, became a Cypriot in 2015. His new passport has allowed him to evade capture despite an Interpol warrant.

The programs that most interest Surak are those that involve a simple exchange of passports for cash. The European Union reluctantly allowed Cyprus and Malta to go ahead with their programs because migration is controlled by individual member countries despite local citizenship giving passport holders access to the Schengen zone. You can organise a flat in Malta (for the property rental requirement of its citizenship-by-investment program) but actually live in Paris. Similarly, investors in Caribbean countries might be taking a first step to using their new passports for investor-residence permits to the United States and Britain under their E-2 and Tier 1 visa programs respectively. Thus, citizenship in an island country is a backdoor to residency and investment in a global superpower.

As Surak shows, the leading citizenship-by-investment countries are accommodating elites despite growing anger among their own populations. In Malta the program was shut down after corruption allegations and the fatal car bombing of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had reported on cash-for-passports. In Cyprus, a sting report by Al Jazeera showed someone posing as a Chinese citizen-investor being cleared by government officials after announcing he had a criminal conviction.

Cyprus and Malta responded to the economic challenges brought on by Europe’s 2009–10 sovereign debt crisis by setting up their lucrative schemes. In the Caribbean islands the schemes have been even more successful: they are the biggest export product in Saint Kitts, where citizenship-by-investment made up about 40 per cent of the economy before Covid-19 struck, and in Dominica.

Although lawyers, accountants and property developers get a good cut (the leading global citizenship-by-investment firm, Henley & Partners, makes €32,000, or about A$54,000, on each Malta deal), governments get the majority, and the evidence shows that the more formalised the scheme, the less likely the money goes into officials’ pockets.

It costs a family of four €975,000 for Maltese papers and the government gets €700,000 of that for social and infrastructure programs. In the five years of the ironically named “Identity Malta” program, the country made €1.4 billion, or 2.1 per cent of GDP. This is why resistance, although present, isn’t strong.

Many former colonies have complex attitudes towards immigration after having governments thrust upon them by foreign powers. Rather than opposing newcomers, locals often feel that if people want to stay — and some citizen-investors do stay — then they can pay. In Cyprus, even the communist AKEL party supports citizenship-by-investment. As Surak points out, “Microstates in particular are diaspora societies. Their small size means that, by nature, bigger and more diverse opportunities are available only abroad.” These schemes add income to economies driven by remittances and bring people to places that are ageing and depopulating.

Yet the practice of selling citizenship is taking on extra poignancy as conflicts spread across the world. The biggest new player is Turkey, which is growing so quickly it may forever alter the market, particularly because it is a major regional power with NATO membership and a huge military. While its passport sales are probably driven by the collapse of the Turkish lira, they appeal to wealthy displaced people (as do the citizenship-by-investment programs in Egypt and Jordan). Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians and many others may use this industry not as a backup plan but as an immediate means of escape. Some are also being encouraged to “buy in” to societies where they are already refugees.

The Golden Passport opens with an account of a citizenship-by-investment conference in Montenegro where Robert De Niro and Wyclef Jean were guests. Drawing on his own background in the Armenian diaspora, the founder of the Global Citizen Forum, investor Armand Arton, declares that “migration needs a new brand.”

Surak is adept at showing how the citizenship-by-investment sector often exploits the language of human rights and freedom of movement while commodifying citizenship and stripping it of its former values. She lays out the contours of this surprising industry very well, though I would have liked to hear more from the buyers themselves, whose voices only appear in one small chapter. What drives them to invest? How does it affect their feelings of nationalism? Do they think it is fair that they can buy their way into better mobility at the very moment of multiple migration crises?

There are wider questions too. Citizenship-by-investment only accounts for 50,000 naturalisations a year, but what if it were to grow? Other writers, most notably the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, have shown how Gulf states bought thousands of Comoros Island passports in order to give their Bidoon populations mobility while simultaneously depriving them of state benefits. Others have warned that these schemes could be adopted to forcibly remove citizenship from political dissenters or ethnic minorities.

Citizen-investors mostly want to get a new passport to move somewhere else. Yet, given that most of these places are islands highly susceptible to climate change, there is a grave irony in this flexible sense of citizenship. Funds from the programs have been used to build apartments and infrastructure, but often in places ill-suited to more people.

Dominica, for instance, constructed a world-class eco-resort with citizenship-by-investment money, only to see it levelled by a hurricane. Vanuatu hopes to build an entire new city with Chinese funds, some from citizenship-by-investment, but it is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change (and some have even raised the possibility that the entire population may need to relocate to Australia during this century).

Looking at this phenomenon more critically, we can see programs run by small countries that have often been denied sovereignty in the past and now also face an uncertain future. This disconnect between the bright skies and sandy beaches of brochures and the pessimism of those actually living on the islands that pioneered these schemes can be startling. What will new citizens do for their new countries besides opening their wallets? And will their incomplete sense of national community catch on more widely? •

The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires
By Kristin Surak | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 336 pages

The post Can I get a passport with that? appeared first on Inside Story.

As a historian Davison has long been interested both in material culture and “commonplace objects,” and — as he showed in his earlier book, The Unforgiving Minute — in the history of time-telling itself. The scholars who shaped his vision of history were “preoccupied by the mystery of time and change.” Small wonder that when a grandfather clock, a family heirloom, came into his possession, it should have inspired him to commence an investigation of its place in history and heritage, and a meditation on “the nature of time in both its personal and historical dimensions.”

Notwithstanding the book’s evocative title, it was never really Davison’s grandfather’s clock. His great-aunt “Cissie” (Elizabeth Anne Davison) brought the clock with her to Australia in 1934, twenty-two years after his grandfather emigrated and only a few months before he died. The clock had passed from father to son for generations, but for years it stood in Elizabeth’s crowded bedroom, among other relics of her former life that she had brought with her from England. On her death she bequeathed it to Davison’s father, with instructions that it should pass, eventually, to Graeme himself. Women, Davison acknowledges, “are often the great keepers of family memory,” although patriarchal society and patriarchal sources tend to obscure their role.

The search for the longer history of the clock’s place in the family sent Davison along the path of his ancestors to the moment of its acquisition — and then further still. Digging into his ancestral past, he followed the male line into deep time where “conventional genealogy loses its footing.” He found the misty origins of his family story in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Davisons and Davidsons were caught up in the blood feuds that convulsed the borderlands between Scotland and England.

Any sense of connection to those Davisons of yore can exist only in imagination; but Davison’s surrender to the romantic myth itself belongs to the pattern of history. The impulse that draws us to such places, he suggests, has its origins in the discontents of modernity. In our “mobile, globalised, urban world,” the family history trail seems to promise the possibility of return to an ancestral homeland and a “more primitive, unspoiled version of ourselves.”

Here, as throughout the book, Davison unostentatiously weaves reflection on his feelings and methods into the account of his findings. The social, cultural and emotional impulses of genealogical research are shown to be themselves a product of the history of modernisation he relates.

For all that, he insists, the possibility remains that “some part of us is indeed a relic of things below the horizon of history.” With that conviction, he peers into “that dark space where heredity and nurture, memory and history combine to make us who we are.”

The Davison surname provides the unbroken thread the historian can follow through multiple generations, up to and even beyond the point where parish records peter out. Davison acknowledges that this is a selective path, albeit one balanced somewhat by his earlier exploration of his mother’s forebears in Lost Relations (2015). But the profound implications of his choice are worth pondering for a moment — precisely because they are so easy to forget.

Little in our society owes more to social convention than surnames, which inherently claim patrilineal descent as the primary defining relationship. To say nothing of the possibility of error in any attribution of paternity, the thread that follows the male line is just one among the thousands, or millions, that make up the spreading fan of our ancestry. When we follow a single line, as sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel points out, we consign to oblivion three out of four grandparents, or sixty-three out of sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents.

To come at this from the other side: the most we can inherit from the four times great-grandfather whose surname we may bear is something less than 0.05 per cent of our genetic material. In the “inherently boundless community” of family, argues Zerubavel, the traditions of classification that determine kin recognition are matters of convention, not genetics. Genealogies do not passively document who our ancestors were; they are “the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.” Such narratives exclude far more than they include, and not always with benign intent. So it behoves us to remember how tenuous is their basis in fact, and scrutinise the cultural assumptions they perpetuate.

Davison is rightly sceptical of the idea of genetic affinity with distant ancestors. While he surrenders willingly to the gravitational pull of the male line, he does so out of a combination of sentiment and pragmatism. The Davison name is the most “stable marker of personal identity” available to establish ancestry, while the records of women’s lives — the wives and mothers who might expand the picture — are even more scarce than those for men. Taking the ancestral line on which he can rely with greatest certainty, he uses it to ponder not genetic continuity but cultural continuity in the midst of social change.

The “things below the horizon of history” that form part of our identity, his book ultimately suggests, are not genes so much as elements of culture, beliefs, skills and aspirations that have passed quietly from one generation to the next. Untold generations of Davisons belonged to the “middling sort,” who struggled for life on the margins on whatever terms society offered them. Such experiences form family character in stubbornly enduring ways. The Davisons of whom he can write with personal knowledge “were modest, practical, plain-speaking folk, their manner abraded by the grit of their industrial origins. There was something uptight as well as upright about them; an effect, I suppose, of the hard school in which they had grown up.”

More than a mystical search for origins, this is a historian’s account of the place of the individual, or the family, in history. Davison’s ancestors come dimly into view in the context of great, if gradual, social transformation. Step by step, one decision at a time, sons moved away from fathers to establish new homes and learn new occupations: from a precarious existence in ancestral homelands to the acquisition of craft skills in a farming village, a port town, a factory suburb, and an industrial metropolis — until early in the twentieth century John Davison moved with his wife and children to the other side of the world.

The perspective of family offers a corrective to the generalisations of academic history, Davison suggests. Through the eyes of the people who lived through it, the industrial revolution can be seen as an evolution, the making of the modern world “more like a series of small adjustments than a leap from one way of life to another.” Each step, he argues, “was a one-off response to the map of opportunity at the time, but seen over the longue durée the moves fall into a pattern that suggests the operation of powerful unseen forces.”

In this story the grandfather clock, that accurate keeper of family time, becomes a powerful symbol tying the individual to the historical moment. Measured time, says Davison, was the foundation of modern life: when another John, six generations back, acquired the clock around the turn of the nineteenth century, “my family were joining a very large project indeed.”

For John the clock may have been chiefly a marker of growing prosperity and social status. For his son William, a skilled block printer paid on piece rates for what he and his sons could produce, it had an added utility, regulating the daily activities of his industrious household. Superseded by newer technology in the late twentieth century, it lost much of its earlier importance and stood idle for years, until rescued and repaired by a sentimental historian who likes to think, when winding the clock, of the “foggy fingers” of the ancestors who have wound it before him.

Pondering generational change, Davison offers a persuasive and thought-provoking account of the relationship between the agency of the individual (man) and the impersonal forces of modernisation. Yet I wondered at times whether a more expansive exploration of family within each generation — of the horizontal, as well as the vertical, structures of kinship — might have brought into view more of the “invisible” factors that enabled or constrained their choices.

Let us not forget, for example, how the clock made its way to Melbourne and eventually to Davison himself. Not by direct transmission through the male line, but through the agency of great-aunt Cissie, whose “map of opportunity” after her father’s death in 1930 showed only one path to survival, in her brother’s household on the other side of the world. While her journey and her bequest eventually restored the clock to its traditional path from father to son, her story has deeper significance, as a reminder that for some family members, women especially, survival has often depended on more complex webs of kinship. Though their stories may rarely be preserved, they too imprint a ghostly presence on the family tree, for those who care to look. Their imprint on family culture was profound.

But any account of family origins must leave out far more than it can ever tell. Each journey through family history is as selective as it is idiosyncratic. Though he doesn’t dwell on their implications, Davison doesn’t hide the choices he has made. His gentle, reflective, beguiling narrative invites us to travel at his side as he pursues his individual quest, and to surrender to the charm of the knotted threads of sentiment, imagination and hard-edged research that bind him to his forebears and to history. •

My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family
By Graeme Davison | The Miegunyah Press | $50 | 319 pages

The post Time’s quiet pulse appeared first on Inside Story.

I was lucky enough to work with Ken Inglis and friends on Dunera Lives: A Visual History, published in 2018. The book is an attempt to tell something of the Dunera story through 500 images, one of which attracted far more comment than any other. This was a grainy black-and-white photograph from Bern’s collection taken on 14 December 1938, a month after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht.

The photo shows fifteen-year-old Gerd Bernstein (Bern’s original name), dressed in a suit, raising a glass to his family. His mother Helena, father Otto and maternal grandmother Sophie Maas sit at a table in their Berlin home at Wielandstrasse 17. A picture of young Gerd hangs on the wall.

The faces most exposed to the camera are those of grandson and grandmother. Gerd looks thoughtful and hesitant, even sad, while on his grandmother’s face I see both love and terror — love for him, and terror about what the future holds for her Jewish family. The next day Gerd left Berlin on a Kindertransport, bound for Britain. On 17 December, alone in Britain just two days after leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar country, he turned sixteen.

His parents survived the war despite his father Otto’s imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. Otto was the sole survivor among the hundred people with whom he was transported to Theresienstadt; Sophie died there.

After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it. He thought this response muddled, our emotions skewed by knowledge of the Holocaust.

In Bern’s mind, this photograph showed a moment in the life of his family, no more and no less. To view the photograph through the lens of the Holocaust was a mistake, and he made a point of reminding me that in 1938 the Nazis had not yet embarked on the systematic destruction of European Jewry.

Bern’s position on the photograph reflected his historical preferences. The substance of any history, Dunera’s included, is in the detail. He saw history through a lens that allowed little room for the floating of partly conceived ideas and none at all for speculation, no matter how worthy the intention. If there were a place for emotion, it was after the facts were established. Perhaps his approach could be called traditional. I can’t imagine Bern thinking much of the modern belief that histories can be retold on the basis of emotions.

Whatever the merits of Bern’s approach, it made him a wonderful informant. His view of the past as the stuff of hard facts meant that he spoke only about what he knew. If he didn’t know the answer, he said so. If he thought the question irrelevant, he made that clear too, then explained why. He punctured myths, of which Dunera has more than its share, and raised questions that forced historians and others to think anew about key moments in the story.

Recently I asked him about an incident that looms large in Dunera history and memory. On the voyage to Australia, British guards treated the internees with calculated brutality in a gross, and in some cases criminal, dereliction of duty. The Dunera canon tells that guards, as part of this sustained assault, forced internees to walk over broken glass strewn across the deck of the ship.

The glass was there, Bern told me, but he doubted it was placed deliberately, and he and others simply stepped around it. While the weight of evidence about this incident is against him, I know that Bern, as a historian of the Dunera, never spoke idly. On that basis alone, his account demands consideration.

Ken Inglis cherished Bern’s clarity and commitment to accuracy. They corresponded from the start of Ken’s Dunera project — which also led to a second book, Dunera Lives: Profiles, in 2020 — exchanging emails regularly until Ken’s death in December 2017. Their voluminous correspondence, now part of the Inglis Dunera papers at the National Library of Australia, reveals two scholars in respectful and admiring conversation, one testing notions and ideas, the other encouraging or discouraging those possibilities.

While Bern was an oracle on Dunera, on one aspect of the story he had no answers. When the Dunera internees arrived in Australia, most were incarcerated first at Hay in western New South Wales. Because the camps there could house only 2000, around ninety-five of the internees, seemingly chosen at random, were taken instead to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, along with other men who had travelled on the Dunera and been deemed dangerous by British authorities.

Bern was part of this Tatura rump, and there he stayed for the duration of his internment, which lasted until January 1942. Thus, he knew nothing of camp life at Hay. Ken would chuckle at this inconvenience, suggesting that Bern had been remiss in not arranging his internment to suit the needs of future historians.

Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.

On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.

This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.

For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position.

Bern was an unusual Dunera boy in other ways, too. While happily Australian, he maintained strong links to his homeland. He returned to Berlin and Germany often, visiting past haunts and chasing up friends. He continued to speak and read German, and listened to German news on the radio. A couple of years ago Bern wrote to tell me about the Exilmuseum in Berlin, after he had heard mention of the nascent institution on a German radio program. He wondered if the museum’s curators would be interested in learning about the strange story of the German and Austrian exiles who in 1940 found themselves interned in rural Australia. They were.

For other Dunera boys, such engagement with Germany and Austria was anathema. Their wartime experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust poisoned their feelings for the land of their birth. Many never returned to Germany and Austria; many chose to avoid Germanic culture and language.

Bern too knew the pain of persecution and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism forced him and his mother to flee Germany for Britain. Hitler’s regime murdered his grandmother and imprisoned his father. But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.

Bern’s longevity conferred a sad and perhaps unwanted title. He was the last Dunera boy in Australia, and among the last anywhere. It is thought that there is a Dunera boy alive in France, and another in New York, and possibly others of whom my colleagues and I don’t know, though it is unlikely that these “unknowns” would number more than one or two.

Bern accepted his position with grace, acknowledging the dubious honour as a responsibility rather than a burden, which surely it was. To the best of my knowledge, he never refused a request for an interview, and was diligent in answering questions from scholars and members of the Dunera diaspora. Perhaps he saw duty in these tasks; the Dunera had led him to a good life in Australia, and provided both a scholarly purpose in his later years, and enduring friendships.

On what proved to be his last weekend, Bern travelled to Melbourne, where he delighted in the company of Peter Danby’s family. Danby, originally Peter Danziger, was also a Dunera boy, though the friendship was older than that, the two having met in Britain. Bern was accompanied by Peter and Joanna, two of his three children. The Brent–Danby friendship is now carried by the next generation.

In September 2022 I took the British author and activist Jennifer Nadel to meet Bern in his Canberra home. Jennifer’s father, George Nadel, was a budding scholar when he was deported to Australia on the Dunera. She knows little about his internment, but enough to realise that George’s postwar silences hid deep trauma. For Jennifer, Dunera has been a difficult and painful word.

Aside from their Jewish heritage, George Nadel and Bern had little in common. George was born Austrian, Bern German. Both had a passion for history, though they were driven by differing approaches and emphases. George, who went on to found and edit the venerable journal History and Theory, was an academic who practised history in more formal worlds and ways than Bern. If Bern were ever a reader of that journal, I imagine him warming more to the history than the theory. Bern saw the Dunera as a ship of salvation; for George, the Dunera seems to have heralded only misery.

And yet both men survived the Dunera, and by 2022 Bern was one of very few people anywhere in the world who could talk directly of the experience. Through Bern, Jennifer was given a privileged glimpse of a past about which George never spoke. As we drove away from Bern’s home, she said that his German-accented English, and certain of his mannerisms, evoked fond thoughts of her father.

When I wrote to Jennifer to tell her of Bern’s death, she immediately recalled his bearing and presence, and the importance to her of their meeting. Bern’s willingness to act as a conduit to the past, to talk openly and directly about Dunera, helped many people like her to better understand the story and their part in it. In so doing he aroused emotions. I wonder what he made of that.

Jennifer described meeting Bern as a privilege. It’s the right word. To have known, talked and corresponded with him was a privilege, and something I cherish. Ruhe sanft, lieber Bern. •

The post A Dunera life appeared first on Inside Story.

Before 1988, grandparents had near-automatic right of entry. Over the next two decades a slow accretion of administrative, regulatory and legislative measures put permanent residency increasingly out of reach. Slowly but surely the focus of Australia’s migration program shifted to working age migrants with useful skills.

That shift might make a certain kind of economic sense, but what does it mean for grandparents who want to live near their Australian-based children and grandchildren but don’t have Australian citizenship? And what are the implications for families who might come to rely on grandparents for all kinds of help yet live in a country that makes permanent residence so difficult?

I began to get a sense of life on a long-stay temporary visa when I called Edward Adams for an interview about his experiences as a British citizen living in Australia. (Many of the names in this article have been changed to protect privacy.) He couldn’t talk because he was busy picking up a grandchild from school, but promised to call back later.

Seventy-two-year-old Edward and his wife Tracey, sixty-four, have lived in Australia for most of their grandchildren’s lives. “We just couldn’t imagine not being here to help in their formative years,” Edward tells me by phone from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast after delivering his grandchild safely home.

Along with school pick-ups and drop-offs two or three times a week, Edward and Tracey step in at short notice to look after the children if son Rory or daughter-in-law Matilda get caught up at work. They also provide extra support when Rory is travelling for business. “And that means our son and daughter in law have been able to be much more productive than they would have been if we weren’t here,” Edward argues.

When not with the grandchildren, the couple have other distractions. They’ve joined the local golf club and made lots of friends. For all intents and purposes, they are settled in Australia, just a short walk away from Rory, Matilda and the grandchildren. Because they aren’t permanent residents or citizens, buying land and building a house required approval from the Federal Investment Review Board. Edward estimates that this added $40,000 to the cost. Since they sold their house in England, their Sunshine Coast house is the only home they have.

Originally from Bath, west of London, Edward and Tracey both retired in 2014. They came to Australia at the end of that year, ahead of Rory and Matilda’s marriage the following March. Although Rory lived in Sydney, the wedding was held on the Sunshine Coast, and Edward and Tracey immediately fell in love with the area. Edward joked that if Rory moved north, then he and Tracey would consider migrating to Australia.

And that’s how it went. Soon after the wedding, Rory’s employer asked him to move and, in 2016, Edward and Tracey came back for a six-month stay on a standard visitor visa. They returned the following year, this time on a twelve-month visa that they were able to renew for a second year by making a short trip to New Zealand.

Edward and Tracey had put money aside — around $100,000 — to apply for permanent residency via contributory parent visas. But they hit the brick wall of the balance of family test. They needed to show that half of their children are Australian citizens or permanent residents — or, if the family is scattered across different countries, then more of their children live in Australia than in any other country.

They have another younger son, Phillip, in England, who doesn’t yet have a family, and if that had been the end of the story they wouldn’t have had a problem. With one son in each country they would meet the threshold having at least half their children settled in Australia.

But Edward has another son, now in his forties, from a previous marriage that ended acrimoniously when Edward’s first son was just two years old. Frequently overseas for work, Edward failed to meet the regular access requirements set down by the court to share custody. He supported his son financially but was otherwise largely absent as a parent. Edward and his first son are only rarely in contact.

The balance of family test is a pure numbers game: it takes no account of the depth or closeness of family bonds. Since Edward has two children in Britain and only one in Australia, the system locks him out, and so it locks Tracey out too. And it counts for nothing that they’ve been emotionally enmeshed in the lives of their three Australian grandchildren since the eldest was a baby, or that they frequently care for them.

In 2019, another option to stay in Australia opened up for Edward and Tracey, when the federal government introduced the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. This visa isn’t subject to the balance of family test and enables parents to live in Australia for up to a decade. In May 2019, Edward and Tracey’s son Rory was among the first to be approved as a sponsor, and in August the couple returned to Bath anticipating a three- to four-month wait. But within a week of submitting their medical checks they were granted visas and in early September they were on a plane to Australia.

“It was very swift,” says Edward. “Our dealings with the immigration department have been very satisfactory.” It came at a stiff price, though, which is part of the reason why this option hasn’t been anywhere near as popular as expected.

If they’d not been tripped up by the balance of family test, Edward and Tracey could have applied for permanent residency by pursuing one of two options. The first is the “contributory” parent visa, which costs at least $47,955 per person. Around 7000 were granted last financial year but 86,000 people are still waiting in the queue. Given the backlog, Home Affairs advises that a new application “may take at least 12 years to process [their emphasis].” The expert panel commissioned by the government to review Australia’s migration program reckons this is an underestimate; it puts the processing time at fifteen years.

The second, non-contributory, parent visa is much cheaper, with charges starting at $4560 per person, and there are “only” 51,000 people currently in the queue. But since far fewer visas are issued each year — just 1500 in 2022–23— the wait is much longer. Home Affairs advises it will take “at least 29 years” for a new application to be processed; the expert review panel warns it’s likely to be more than forty years.

Given the delays, costs and difficulty of getting a permanent visa, and the number of people, like Edward and Tracey, excluded by the balance of family test, you might expect more families to follow their lead in opting for the sponsored parent (temporary) visa. The government anticipated significant demand for the visa when it was introduced in 2019 and capped the program at 15,000 places annually “in recognition of the challenges of an ageing population, as well as the overall budget impact of older migrants.” It need not have worried — by March 2023, almost four years later, only 8204 visas had been issued.

Why has interest been so low?

Covid travel restrictions are part of the equation, but price is also a barrier. A three-year visa costs more than $5000 and a five-year visa more than $10,000. The same fee must be paid again when the visa is renewed — so a ten-year stay will cost $20,000 per person in two upfront payments.

Visaholders must also pay compulsory private medical insurance at about $5000 per year (although at least one big insurer will no longer provide cover for holders of this visa aged over seventy). And families who sponsor a parent must prove that they have a taxable income of at least $83,455.

There’s a sting in the tail, too: parents on this visa are barred from applying to settle permanently either under the contributory or non-contributory options.

Edward and Tracey might not have been able to establish their lives on the Sunshine Coast and watch their grandchildren grow up if it hadn’t been for the efforts of Arvind Duggal. For someone who insists he’s not “political” and just wants “a happy family life” Arvind has had a big impact during two Australian elections when he’s managed to put parent visas on the agenda and influence the policy promises of the Coalition and the Labor Party.

Arvind hails from Jalandhar, a city in Punjab famous for manufacturing cricket bats and other sports equipment. He migrated to Australia with his wife and two-year-old daughter in 2008 without realising he wouldn’t be able to bring his mother to join them. Because he has two older sisters living in India, the balance of family test prevented him from sponsoring his mother to settle in Australia permanently.

Arvind, who was working as a bus driver, discovered that two of his workmates, Parminder Sohal and Davinder Pal Singh, were also dissatisfied with the existing options for bringing parents to Australia. In 2015 the three men launched an online petition to then home affairs minister Peter Dutton.

Despite its far from catchy title — “Introduce Long Stay Visa for Parents Who Want to Spend Quality Time with Their Family”— the petition took flight and eventually attracted close to 30,000 signatures. The non-political Arvind was thrust into the unaccustomed role of activist and advocate. Having started out not even knowing the name of his local MP, before long he was well-versed in the crucial marginal seats where migrant votes might be influential.

Most mainstream media paid little attention, though SBS reported extensively on the issue, especially via its Hindi and Punjabi language services, as did news outlets catering to specific migrant communities. But in the closely fought 2016 federal election Arvind’s petition had the major parties scrambling to outbid each other to offer a new temporary long-stay parent visa.

Labor moved first. Two weeks before the poll opposition leader Bill Shorten promised a renewable three-year visa. At the end of their stay, parents would only have to leave Australia for four weeks and could then return for another three years. This was a big improvement on the existing visitor visa, which offered a maximum stay of just one year and forced parents to leave Australia for at least six months between visits.

Three days later, the Liberal Party trumped Labor by pledging that a re-elected Coalition government would introduce a five-year visa. Both parties would require parents to hold private medical insurance and post a bond to cover any future expense for government services. Labor set the bond at $5000; the Liberals based it on the existing Assurance of Support scheme (between $5000 and $15,000, depending on who sponsors whom and for how long).

The Coalition squeaked home and within months things started moving. The government launched a discussion paper and announced community consultations to help design the new visa, which it “envisaged” would be in place the following year.

Arvind’s supporters were elated. “My heart is in celebration by the chance of having my mum close to me for longer than six months sporadically,” wrote one of them on Facebook. “I cannot express how happy I am for reading this media release… having my mum for at least three years near her only grandchild is a dream… Gosh, I am in tears!!!!!!!”

But it wasn’t until March 2019, just before the next election rolled around, that details were announced. In the slow transition from generous campaign promise to concrete policy the new visa had been hedged about with bureaucratic conditions and high fees.

Arvind still works in transport, though these days he’s a customer service officer. “Peter Dutton betrayed us on his election promise,” he says when we meet for coffee in Adelaide at the end of his shift.

Eight days before the 2016 election, Arvind received a personally addressed email from the Office of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection signed by Mr Dutton’s media advisor. It explained that the promised new visa would require sponsoring families to post a refundable bond “within the existing parameters.” There was no mention of a fee. Yet when details were finally announced in 2019, the application charge was a hefty $5000 for a three-year stay and $10,000 for five years.

The email also reassured Arvind that “the number of visas is not capped.” But when it eventually came to fruition, places in the program were limited to 15,000 annually.

Arvind says the Coalition chose to capitalise on the huge pent-up demand to bring parents to Australia. “It’s like selling a bottle of water in the desert,” he says. “You can choose the price… This is making money from grandparents visiting their grandchildren, which is un-Australian.”

Arvind was also disappointed with three other aspects of the new visa. A family must have a high taxable income to qualify as a sponsor, something not mentioned in the election campaign. It can only sponsor one set of parents. And parents must leave Australia for at least three months to renew their visas. (The email from Mr Dutton’s office said they’d need to leave Australia for “a minimum period of four weeks.”)

As Inside Story reported in the run up to the 2019 election, Labor promised to address some of Arvind’s concerns, saying it would remove the annual cap on the existing temporary long-stay parent visas and slash the fees by 75 per cent. The price of the three-year visa would come down to $1250 and a five-year visa to $2500.

After losing in 2019 Labor felt no need to publicly renew its promises ahead of winning the 2022 election, though Arvind says he was privately assured that an Albanese government would honour its earlier commitments. He’s now concerned that he’s seen no action.

“If Labor fails to deliver then migrant communities will have every reason to lose our faith in the Australian political system” he says. “It’s not setting a good example for our kids who just want family time with their grandparents.”

From the start, Arvind and his bus driver colleagues had modest ambitions for their campaign. All they asked for was an extension of existing visitor arrangements to allow parents to stay for up to three years. He doesn’t see why that should be so hard or cost so much extra.

The campaign has been stressful and taken a toll on family life. “If we didn’t have the balance of family test, I never would have done this,” Arvind says. “Just to get a long-stay visa took seven years.” He’d like to put the issue behind him, but he can’t quite let it go. “It’s not just about me,” he says. “So many people had faith in the campaign. They have worked really hard for it, but ultimately they’ve been very disappointed by the end product.”

Misook and her husband Soejun are also in Australia on long-stay parent visas, but their experience is far less happy than David and Tracey’s. They had no trouble with the balance of family test — their only child is an Australian citizen — and their long-stay visa enabled them to stay here while they endure the long wait for their contributory parent visas to be processed.

Misook and Soejun fall into the category of migrants “stuck in permanently temporary limbo,” in the words of home affairs minister Clare O’Neil. The expert review of Australia’s migration program calculated that 90,000 temporary visa holders have already lived in Australia for more than five years, long enough to “lose their connection with their home countries and become embedded in the Australian community.”

“My husband and I have stayed in Australia, legally, for almost eleven years in the hope of living here permanently and becoming Australian citizens,” Misook says.

The South Korean couple and their eighteen-year-old daughter Eun moved to Australia from Seoul in November 2012. Misook’s employer, a global company, sponsored her on a temporary skilled work visa to fill a vacancy in its Australian operations. She believed she would be able to seek permanent residence after being with the company for a year, only to find that this was out of reach due to her age. Applicants under the Employer Nomination Scheme must be under fifty, and Misook was already fifty-one. A possible exemption applied if Misook could stay with the same firm for four years and earn a salary above a very high threshold, but she had to leave her job in 2015 before meeting that condition.

By this time, Eun was at university. Having failed to meet the requirements for sponsorship, Misook and Soejun looked for other ways to stay in Australia with their only child. Since they were now too old to apply for skilled migration, Soejun got a student visa and went back to study.

By 2017, Eun had qualified as a lawyer, started working and become a citizen. This enabled Misook and Soejun to apply for contributory parent visas. Almost six years later, they are still waiting for a decision. In order to remain in Australia while the process drags on, they spent $20,000 to secure sponsored parent (temporary) visas valid for five years. The couple keep themselves engaged by volunteering for their local council, but Misook is frustrated that the visa conditions prevent them from working even when Australian employers are struggling to find qualified staff.

“Actually, my husband and I are healthy and have skill to work here in Australia, but we can’t work due to the ridiculous visa condition,” she says. “I have been suffering from a financial difficulty to pay all living cost due to the long delay of the visa process.”

Misook says she contributed more than $250,000 in taxes while working for the IT company; Soejun also worked and paid tax, and he and Eun paid thousands more in fees to study as international students. Yet they can’t use Medicare or any other government services. With their long-stay visas expiring in December 2024, the family’s anxiety and uncertainty grows.

Despite their generally positive experience, Edward says he and Tracey also have some concerns. The reality that their five-year visas expire in September 2024 is starting to weigh on their minds, and they are preoccupied with securing a second five-year stay. Their biggest worry is that they’ll be forced to leave Australia for at least three months to do so. Once processing times are added in, Edward reckons they could be away from their grandchildren for up to nine months, interrupting those close relationships and disrupting the lives of their son and daughter-in-law, who rely on help with childcare to manage busy professional lives.

Then there’s the cost. Since they have no home to go back to in England, Edward calculates they could be out of pocket $50,000 in accommodation and airfares.

“That’s money that would otherwise be spent here in Australia,” he says, noting that some of it would probably go to Rory and Matilda and their young family to help them weather rising prices and increasing mortgage repayments. “Most grandparents offer financial support to their families especially during today’s worldwide recession,” he says. “I don’t see any downside for the government in allowing us to apply onshore and granting us a bridging visa while our application is processed.”

Edward’s other concern is that he and Tracey won’t be eligible for travel insurance for the journey because they don’t hold Australian visas extending beyond the period of their trip. And once they’re in Britain they face a catch-22: because they’ve been away from that country for more than three months and are no longer considered residents, they can’t access the National Health Service unless they are returning permanently.

Edward has learned from Facebook that some three-year visa holders have been granted a waiver to apply for a renewal onshore because their presence in Australia is vital to enabling their adult children to stay in the workforce. But he’s unsure whether the rules were only relaxed because of Covid travel restrictions and fears he and Tracey may not get the same dispensation.

The rules appear clear cut. The Home Affairs website says permission to apply onshore “may” be approved if the parent is unable to depart Australia due to accident, serious illness or a disaster in the home country, but will not be approved because leaving Australia is inconvenient or the applicant has “sold assets in their home country”.

A letter to immigration minister Andrew Giles from Edward’s local MP brought no joy. The minister fobbed the inquiry off by referring to mandatory conditions applied to temporary visas under the migration regulations. But with its long duration, Edward thinks the sponsored parent (temporary) visa is in a different category to other temporary visas and doesn’t understand why it can’t be renewed in Australia.

“If we applied onshore and were granted the visa it’s not like we’re gaining any extra time on the ten-year limit,” he says.

The reasons for preventing subclass 870 visa holders from applying for a new visa onshore are opaque. It could be a manifestation of the “Genuine Temporary Entry requirement” — a demonstration that temporary parent migrants like Edward and Tracey still have a life elsewhere and aren’t trying to settle permanently. But given that the visa allows a ten-year stay, this is an absurd piece of bureaucratic rigamarole. Perhaps, as one government insider told me privately, “it’s just a very poorly designed visa.”

I have had serious reservations about the sponsored parent (temporary) visa from the outset. When it was first promised at the 2016 election, I described it for Inside Story as Claytons immigration, a reference to the faux whisky marketed in Australia in the 1970s with the tagline “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink.”

The visa offers neither permanent settlement nor a truly temporary stay. It’s a messy political compromise cooked up to appease migrant communities in marginal electorates.

The influence of the “ethnic vote” is not a new phenomenon. Historian Rachel Stevens records that Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government relaxed the requirements for family migration in its second term in “a pragmatic move designed to gain electoral votes from naturalized southern European migrants.” In the 1980s, Labor supported family migration for the same reason. Stevens cites veteran political journalist Michelle Grattan’s view that “without the southern European vote, the ALP would have lost the 1987 federal election by 2 per cent.”

Yet campaign-driven appeals to specific voters in marginal electorates rarely produce well thought out policy. The sponsored parent (temporary) parent visa is a good example. Designed to appeal to overseas born voters in key seats, it is likely to launch chickens that will come home to roost on some future minister’s desk.

What happens, at the end of a ten-year visa, if a parent has become too frail to return to their homeland, or if they no longer have the family or community supports to sustain them there? Human lives are messy and complicated and tend to explode administrative systems and rules, no matter how detailed and prescriptive. In fact, we already see stories like this, because of the absurd processing delays for permanent parent visa.

In 2020, SBS reported that ninety-eight-year-old grandmother Esmeralda Rosario was facing deportation to India after living in Australia on a bridging visa for twelve years. She had arrived on a tourist visa and then applied for an aged parent visa. In 2019 her application was refused because, unsurprisingly, the nonagenarian failed to meet the health requirement and her care was judged likely to impose significant costs on the Australian community.

SBS also documented the similar case of 93-year-old Mollie Manley. She had been living in Australia on a bridging visa for eleven years when her application for permanent residence was refused. The great grandmother had passed all relevant medical tests when she first arrived in Australia, but by the time her application was assessed she was blind and in aged care. She too was slated as a potential burden on the healthcare system.

Cases like these generally end up in drawn-out appeals before they finally land on the desk of the immigration minister with a request to intervene and grant a visa on compassionate grounds. The minister’s public interest powers can only be exercised after every administrative and legal avenue has been exhausted — a stressful, expensive and inefficient process that takes years.

Plenty of similar cases are yet to come. In March 2023, 17,223 parents were living in Australia on bridging visas — a subset of the 137,000 parents in the combined queue for contributory and non-contributory visas. Most of those people will either die waiting for a decision or end up being rejected because they have become too old and frail to meet Australia’s health requirements.

In 2016, I warned that a long stay parent visa could attract a lot of elderly migrants to Australia. At the time, there were already 80,0000 applicants queuing up for permanent visas, and I figured demand would be significantly higher after factoring in people who were put off applying by the cost or the endless delays for a permanent visa, plus those like Arvind’s mother and Edward who had been excluded by the balance-of-family test.

When the Labor opposition promised to remove the cap on numbers and slash the visa fee, the same concerns re-emerged. Migration expert Bob Birrell predicted “at least 200,000 parent applications” in three years if Labor won government. Demographer Peter McDonald estimated that up to two million families could be interested in sponsoring a parent.

So far, the sponsored parent (temporary) visa hasn’t proved anywhere near that popular, and not because the cap of 15,000 places remained in place or because Covid has interrupted travel plans. The likely reason is that the visa is cumbersome and expensive. But the government would be wise to tread carefully in reforming it. If it was cheaper and easier to access, then the ten-year visa may well become as widely used as Birrell and McDonald suggested, and that would invite a range of unintended consequences.

The Clayton’s approach to migration satisfies nobody and simply defers difficult choices. The government should have the courage of its convictions and either commit to parents being considered “close family” with a near automatic right to join their children in Australia, or say, no, sorry, such a policy is not acceptable to most Australian voters and the best we can offer is a genuinely temporary stay of shorter duration. •

This article is adapted from The Parent Conundrum, a narrative exploring Australia’s troubled approach to parent migration commissioned by the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, although the views expressed should not be taken represent its views.

The post The visa that missed its mark appeared first on Inside Story.

Similar scenes were repeated across the peninsula on that Kara Gun (black day), as units of the Soviet internal security forces surrounded Crimean Tatar towns and villages. From there, the captives were sent by rail 3000 kilometres to Central Asia, and mostly unloaded in eastern Uzbekistan. Soon, the entire Crimean Tatar population of nearly 200,000 people had been removed from their homeland.

Nearly 8000 Crimean Tatars died on the weeks-long train journey. The rest were forced to live in abysmal conditions in “special settlements” for the next decade. Tens of thousands — almost half of them, according to the Crimean Tatars — died of hunger, cold or disease during the first few years of exile.

To justify this collective punishment, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin falsely accused the Crimean Tatars of mass collaboration with the Nazi occupation, which had just ended. It’s true that some Tatars did collaborate — as others had in many places during the war — but many more fought bravely in the Red Army and partisan units. Six received Hero of the Soviet Union medals, equivalent to a Victoria Cross.

Shevkiye’s father Dzhemil was one of the men still with the Red Army at the front, fighting the same Nazis his people were accused of aiding.

A more likely explanation for the Soviet move is that the paranoid Stalin wanted to clear his country’s borderlands of Turkic or Islamic peoples in advance of a possible war with Turkey (which never happened). The Crimean Tatars were one of many peoples from the country’s periphery considered suspect and transported en masse to Central Asia or Siberia: others included Chechens, Ingush, Kalmyks, Meskhetian Turks, Balkars and Karachai, as well as ethnic Koreans, Volga Germans and Finns.

The Crimean Tatars’ forced exile was but the latest chapter in a poorly known story that is as bleak and tragic as those experienced by many indigenous peoples following conquest and colonisation. It has rightly been described as genocide, not least by the Russian parliament in the heady, democratic days of 1991. The Tatars’ tale forms a crucial backdrop to understanding the current war in Ukraine, and its possible resolution.

That war really began when Russia invaded Crimea in February 2014. Troops in unmarked uniforms, dubbed “little green men,” fanned out from Russia’s Black Sea Naval Base in Sevastopol (leased from Ukraine) and seized key government buildings and installations. A few weeks later, after a sham referendum, Russia annexed the peninsula. It has been under occupation ever since.

Since Ukraine blunted Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, a big question hangs over whether Ukraine can mount a successful counteroffensive and go as far as retaking Crimea. And if it can’t, will it have to give up Crimea as part of a peace deal? The Tatars’ fate, as an indigenous people recognised by Ukraine and internationally, must be considered in such calculations.

Vladimir Putin portrayed the annexation of Crimea in 2014 as the long-awaited and rightful “return” of the peninsula to its proper home. “In the minds of people,” he said, “Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.” But that was pure fantasy, akin to saying that Australia — or the Irish Republic — always was and will be British.

In fact, Putin’s was the second Russian annexation of Crimea. The first was in 1783, not long before Arthur Phillip’s First Fleet landed on Gadigal country in Sydney Cove. The first Russian annexation followed a series of wars with the Ottoman Empire, whose overlordship was acknowledged by the Tatars’ Crimean Khanate, a state with a rich culture dating back to 1441.

The Crimean Khan’s palace, at Bakhchysarai, circa 1840, as painted by the Swiss-born Italian artist Carlo Bossoli. Wikimedia

Tsar Catherine’s 1783 annexation breached a treaty with the Ottomans that had left Crimea independent, just as the 2014 annexation violated treaties that pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and recognised Crimea as part of Ukraine.

Before the 1783 takeover, the Crimean Tatars formed the vast majority of the peninsula’s population, with hardly a Russian in sight. The core group was made up of Turkic-speaking Kipchaks, who had settled before the Mongol-Tatar conquest in the thirteenth century, which gave them their name. (Crimea comes from a Turkic word Qirim, meaning moat or fortification.) But many descendants of invaders and settlers over nearly two millennia — Scythians, ancient Greeks, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians and others — had merged to form the Tatar ethnicity.

After the takeover, the new Russian masters turned Tatar peasants into serfs, confiscated communal lands, and destroyed centuries-old mosques and bazaars. Almost half the Tatar population left after Tsar Alexander II blamed them for Russia’s defeat in the Crimean war and called for their removal from the peninsula in 1857. Their share of the population fell from nearly 80 per cent in 1850 to around a third by 1900, then to less than 20 per cent by the outbreak of the second world war.

A sense of Tatar nationhood nevertheless put down strong roots. Soon after the 1917 October Revolution in Petrograd, an elected Tatar assembly  proclaimed a Crimean People’s Republic with a vision of a multiethnic “Switzerland” for the region. Its national congress, the Qurultay, was elected by universal suffrage, with women able to vote — a first in the Muslim world and ahead of many Western countries. But the Crimean Republic was suppressed by Bolsheviks, who had emerged as the victors after Russia’s three years of bitter civil war.

Soviet Russia’s first leader, Vladimir Lenin, saw the need to gain the loyalty of the diverse nations of the vast Soviet Union by encouraging their cultures and inclusion in government. Under this “indigenisation” policy, Crimea became an autonomous republic subordinate to the Russian Republic, with Tatars taking leading roles. The communists promoted Crimean Tatar schools, theatres and publishing. Stalin’s purges and forced collectivisation of farms took their toll in Crimea as elsewhere, but Tatars’ sense of nationhood was further cemented.

Following the 1944 deportation, however, evidence of the Crimean Tatars’ presence was largely wiped out. Authorities changed upwards of 2000 Tatar names for towns and villages to Russian names. Shevkiye Dzhemileva’s village of Ayserez was renamed Mezhdurechye (“between the rivers”). The influx of Russian and Ukrainian migrants means that more than 90 per cent of all the current Slavic residents of Crimea now come from families who arrived after the Tatars’ expulsion. Stalinist officials explicitly sought to make “a new Crimea with its own Russian form.”

Deported Crimean Tatars working in a logging camp in Siberia in 1952. Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance/Wikimedia

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Crimean Tatars were banned from returning to their homelands, unlike most of the other Soviet “punished peoples,” such as the Chechens and other Tatar populations, who were fully rehabilitated. The Crimean Tatars embarked on a thirty-five-year campaign for the right to return, the most concerted movement of dissent in the history of the Soviet Union.

The Tatars defied the regime’s efforts to make them assimilate with other Turkic and Muslim peoples in Central Asia. Although it was a thoroughly nonviolent movement, jail sentences were handed out to hundreds of activists. Its foremost leader was Shevkiye’s baby brother, Mustafa Dzhemilev, six months old at the time of the deportation. Dzhemilev was a veritable Nelson Mandela of the movement, imprisoned six times and undertaking a 303-day hunger strike.

This struggle forged an even stronger national identity centred on the trauma of the Sürgünlik (exile) and a yearning for the lost homeland. Other displaced peoples have trod a similar path, including the Jews after the Shoah and the Palestinians following the Nakba (Catastrophe).

The Tatars finally won the right to return in 1989, just as the democratic reforms unleashed by Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev were taking off. Crimea had long before become part of Ukraine, transferred from the Russian republic to Kyiv by Stalin’s heirs under Nikita Khrushchev in 1954.

When Ukraine became independent in 1991 many Crimean Tatars fulfilled their dream of returning to the peninsula. The 2001 Ukrainian census (the most recent) recorded some 240,000 Tatars, or 12 per cent of its population. Many faced numerous obstacles, however, and ended up in poverty, living in shantytowns and unable to reclaim their families’ former houses.

Yet the Crimean Tatars made progress. In 2001 the Ukrainian parliament enacted a consultative role for their representative body, the Mejlis, giving it a status similar to that proposed for Australia’s Voice to Parliament. They became ardent supporters of the newly independent Ukrainian state.

Fifty-six per cent of Crimean residents had supported leaving the Soviet Union in the 1991 independence referendum. Opinion polls over several years leading up to the 2014 annexation showed well under half in favour of leaving Ukraine and joining Russia.

Russia’s sham referendum just eighteen days before the 2014 annexation claimed that a wildly implausible 96 per cent of voters wanted to join Russia.  But even if there were now a majority preferring Moscow over Kyiv, the real history of Crimea undermines any Russian claims to the peninsula based on population. The Russian majority was created on the blood, bones and tears of the Crimean Tatars.

For the Tatars, Russia’s occupation has brought back the bad old days. The United Nations and other organisations have documented arbitrary detentions, torture, expulsions and harassment of Crimean Tatar (and ethnic Ukrainian) activists and protesters. Many have fled Crimea, and Tatar leaders claim that hundreds of thousands of Russians have moved in, contrary to international law on occupied territories.

Muslim communities have been attacked and religious literature burned. Members of the remaining Crimean Tatar population have been pressured to renounce their Ukrainian citizenship. Tatar-language media outlets have been denied re-registration. Tatars have also been subject to forced mobilisation into the Russian army, a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Russian authorities outlawed the Tatar Mejlis as an “extremist” organisation in 2016. The International Court of Justice upheld a challenge to this ban in 2017, but Russia has ignored the verdict.

Ukraine’s much-anticipated counteroffensive during the northern summer will be crucial to its chances of pushing Russian forces out of all or most of its territory. Even if Ukraine succeeds in the east and south, though, Crimea could be a much harder nut to crack. Some fear that Putin’s prestige is so tied up with his seizure of Crimea that he might resort to nuclear weapons rather than lose it.

With such concerns in mind, some pundits argue that Ukraine should or will be forced to make a deal in which Crimea is handed to Russia. But the permanent cession of Crimea would simply be a reward for aggression, an outcome that 141 countries in the UN have already rejected, affirming that “no territorial acquisition resulting from the use of force can be recognised as legal.”

Were Crimea to stay under Russian occupation, either permanently or in a Cyprus-like frozen conflict, it would be a dagger pointed at Ukraine. Its protected position makes it an ideal launchpad for renewed invasions and threatens Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea.

Practical geography also explains why Crimea’s future outside Ukraine would be difficult, as Khrushchev recognised in 1954. The largely arid peninsula relies on water pumped by North Crimea Canal, 100 kilometres from the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River, which supplied 85 per cent of its fresh water before 2014.

The canal’s flow was cut after the annexation, causing severe shortages, but then restored after the 2022 invasion of southern Ukraine launched from Crimea; along with creating a “land bridge” to Russia, the canal was undoubtedly an objective of the invasion. That link was highlighted again by the recent destruction of the Kakhovka dam, which controls the flow to the canal.

An equally strong argument against Russian control is the fate of the Crimean Tatars. After overcoming dispossession, deportation and genocide to slowly re-establish themselves in their homeland, they fear being left once again under the thumb of a Moscow regime they view as a longstanding oppressor.

Are they to be cast aside again in the interests of realpolitik? Should not indigenous people have a casting vote on the fate of their homeland? In the words of Shevkiye’s granddaughter, Elmaz Asan, “Crimea is no bargaining chip in a geopolitical game; it is my homeland and I will not give it up, just like my ancestors did not.” •

The post Crimea’s Tatars and Russia’s war appeared first on Inside Story.

That attitude was by no means universal. Others in Germany had no interest in smooth management of the influx. Some even took to the streets to demand Germany’s borders be closed and asylum seekers already in the country expelled. When it comes to accommodating people seeking Germany’s protection, we in Germany have remained bitterly divided.

Politicians, particularly those on the right, frequently decry a division that extends well beyond attitudes towards refugees and call for policies to reunite Germany. Often, they simply mean that the government ought to give in to their demands: by closing Germany’s borders to migrants (at least to those who hail from outside Europe or are Muslims), for example, or by indefinitely allowing Germans to drive petrol-fuelled cars and rely on oil and gas heaters, or by discontinuing the official use of gender-neutral language, or by appeasing Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The Scholz government has been sufficiently concerned about the electoral impact of the little that’s left of its reformist agenda that it too has vowed to heal the rift bemoaned by the naysayers, whose mantra seems to be: “Wir schaffen das nicht.”

Much less attention has been paid to another fault line that is both imagined and very real: between residents who consider themselves genuine Germans, on the one hand, and those who are, or descend from, migrants, on the other. Even those who said “Wir schaffen das” with Merkel rarely imagined an inclusive “we” that encompassed migrants and non-migrants. The “we” Merkel conjured in her famous line would have included the Germans flocking to railway stations to hand out teddy bears to Syrian children, but not those children and their parents.

In fact, “we” often doesn’t even include migrants who settled in Germany many years ago. They supposedly don’t belong, because they aren’t German citizens, don’t speak “proper” German, are of the wrong faith or don’t look the part.

Or because they don’t share “our” history. At least that perceived shortcoming can be easily remedied. Whether migrants are an integral part of Germany’s history and have played a crucial role in shaping today’s society is a matter of interpretation. All that’s required for a shared history is a persuasive narrative.

Jan Plamper, who previously wrote mainly about twentieth-century Russia — his doctoral dissertation examined Stalin’s personality cult — and the history of emotions, has offered such a narrative. Four years ago he published a book about postwar Germany as a country of immigration, and he has now translated that book into English.

The German edition was titled Das neue Wir: Warum Migration dazugehört — Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen (“The New We: Why Migration Is Part of It — An Alternative History of the Germans”). His English publisher opted for a very different title, which is no less provocative but in my view misses the point of the book: We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany.

No, we in Germany are not all migrants, although many of us emigrated, particularly in the nineteenth century, and although close to one in four of us has at least one parent who wasn’t born a German citizen. Plamper opens with a prologue of sorts about German emigration, but other than that his book begins at the end of the second world war. Was Germany already a multicultural nation in the 1950s? Hardly. Even today, large swathes of rural and regional East Germany are arguably not part of “multicultural Germany.”

We Are All Migrants is not a history of postwar Germany with a particular focus on its migration history. Nor is it a comprehensive chronological account of immigration and of migrants in Germany. Plamper decided to focus on some aspects: the resettlement of ethnic Germans fleeing or expelled from Eastern Europe, including Germany’s former eastern provinces, in the aftermath of the war; labour migration to West Germany; labour migrants in East Germany; the so-called Aussiedler and Spätaussiedler, ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (in the last two decades of the twentieth century alone, more than three million Aussiedler and their families settled in the Federal Republic); Jewish migrants from the Soviet Union and its successor states; and the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. Two additional chapters provide snapshots of Germany in 1945 and 1989 respectively.

Other possible chapters could have featured the Romanians and Bulgarians who accounted for one out of five new immigrants before the intensification of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022, or the 3.8 million citizens of the German Democratic Republic who settled in the Federal Republic between 1949 and 1990, or the Indochinese “boat people” resettled in Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or the Bosnian nurses who helped to keep the German hospitals afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But I’m not taking issue with Plamper’s selection of cases. That it partly reflects his earlier specialisation as a historian of the Soviet Union is appropriate, because We Are All Migrants is also a highly personal book. It mentions Plamper’s father, an ethnic German who was expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1946 and later, after he retired in 2011, taught German to refugees. Plamper’s daughter Olga, who grew up speaking Russian and moved to Germany when she was eleven, features too. When once, while the family was living in Berlin, asked by her father what nationality she identifies with, she replied “Ausländerin natürlich,” meaning “of course” she considered herself a foreigner living in Germany.

We Are All Migrants is also a personal book in the sense that it features the lives of individual migrants. Among them are Hassan Ali Djan, who fled Afghanistan aged sixteen, Ibraimo Alberto, a Mozambique-born former labour migrant in East Germany, and the Spanish “guest worker” Carlos Pérez. Their stories, as well as the author’s own, contribute to the book’s readability. So does its prose.

Often non-fiction suffers when it is rendered into English because long sentences that read well in German can appear convoluted. Not in this case, because Plamper’s German is that of somebody who for many years has worked in an English-speaking environment. His writing is economical and engaging. Both the German original and the English translation are a pleasure to read.

Plamper is optimistic about the viability of what he calls a “New We” made up of both migrants (“PlusGermans”) and non-migrants. I suspect two factors contribute to his optimism: the impression left by the Willkommenskultur, Germany’s welcoming culture of 2015, was still fresh when he completed Das neue Wir, and he wrote as an outsider who hadn’t lived in Germany for many years and was teaching in Britain. I found his optimism endearing and the vision of a new Germany informed by it appealing.

In the English edition, too, Plamper lets his history end in 2018. I suppose the past five years would have provided him with more grounds for optimism. Since February 2022, Germany has accommodated more than a million refugees from Ukraine without much fuss. Optimism helps us to envision alternative futures, and that may be reason enough to focus on success stories. Yet I don’t entirely share Plamper’s optimism — for four reasons.

First, he may underestimate the disillusionment of “PlusGermans” about the willingness of non-migrant Germans and government institutions to respect and protect migrants. True, hundreds of thousands of people attended the candle-lit demonstrations against xenophobia held in 1992 and 1993 after migrants had died in arson attacks, but these rallies weren’t able to stop the racist violence. Nor were they accompanied by legislation to allow all long-term residents to vote and make it easier for migrants to become citizens.

When the terrorist group National Socialist Underground, or NSU, murdered a policewoman and nine migrants between 2000 and 2006, the police focused their suspicions on associates and family rather than far-right terrorists. Only after two of the perpetrators committed suicide did the police conclude that the murders were related and had all been motivated by racist hatred.

Only last month, in the city-state of Hamburg, the ruling Social Democrats and Greens once again decided against setting up a parliamentary inquiry into the handling of the investigation into the murder of the Hamburg greengrocer Süleyman Taşköprü by members of the NSU in 2001. The response to the NSU murders, by the state but also by society at large, has disabused many migrants of the idea that it’s easy to become part of Germany.

Second, Merkel’s departure paved the way for the return of conservative ideologues who argue that migrants need to adapt to German values. Her Christian Democrats are now led by Friedrich Merz, who in 2000 had initiated a debate about the need for migrants to adhere to a Leitkultur, a set of allegedly essential German values and principles. Merz’s resurrection marks not only a shift to the right by Germany’s largest party but also a validation of an ethno-nationalism that pretends to be culturally determined, and a return to debates about parallel societies and migrants as welfare bludgers.

Third, the demand for more rights and the discourse against racism are now too often couched in the terms of identity politics — which, incidentally, also inform far-right discourses about Germanness. Calls for social justice seem to have gone out of fashion. And the focus is too often on symbolic gestures. What’s the point of avoiding terms with racist connotations when the historical injustice they represent is not dealt with?

Fourth, migrants remain disadvantaged. It’s true that it is now easier for them to take out German citizenship than it was, say, thirty years ago. It also true that the immigration of large numbers of Syrians since 2014 and Ukrainians since 2022 has not met with the same hysterical response as the arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. And yes, migrants do play an increasingly prominent role in Germany, even in German politics. But Plamper’s “PlusGermans” tend to be poorer than non-migrant Germans and, even more concerning, second-generation migrants still typically lag behind their non-migrant peers.

In their 2015 book Strangers No More, Richard Alba and Nancy Foner compared the long-term disadvantages of people with a migrant history in Canada, the United States, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany. Germany’s report card was particularly poor, even when compared with the three other European countries. Alba and Foner found that “the chance of a German native obtaining some level of post-secondary education was about three times that of a youth from a Turkish immigrant family.” That’s not least because the highly stratified German school system favours children from native German-speaking families.

This is where another recent book, Betiel Berhe’s Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht (“No Longer Quiet: The New Migrant Middle Class”), comes in. Berhe, the daughter of Eritrean refugees, grew up in West Germany. Her book is concerned with class prejudices and class-based structural inequalities as well as with racism. She knows from first-hand experience how rarely migrant children are promoted to the Gymnasium, the German high school, and how the school system reproduces inequality.

Berhe is impatient and angry. She has little time for a well-meaning white middle class unwilling to give up its privileges, and she mounts a spirited defence of identity politics. But she also concedes that the issue is not whether identity politics divides society, but what kind of identity politics produces a more just society in which everybody has the chance to participate meaningfully. Such a society, she says, would eventually make identity politics redundant.

She is sick and tired of being invited to “sit at the table,” for that table no longer fits. “True change will only happen,” she writes, “if we smash the old table that’s much too small, to make room for a new large table that can accommodate everyone.”

Nie Mehr Leise is a reality check for Plamper’s “success story.” But Berhe too is an optimist. And, like Plamper, she imagines a new “we.” Her starting point is not an imagined community of non-migrants and “PlusGermans”; it is those “who feel how I feel.” And that’s not where the story ought to end, she says: “We: that’s all those who demand that all forms of structural discrimination, repression and exploitation are abolished.”

Berhe’s book is trying to lay the groundwork for the formation of a new “we” by enabling Germans other than women of colour to empathise and extend their solidarity — and not to stop there: “True solidarity would mean that we demand a distinctly different society for everybody, us included.”

Plamper and Berhe occupy privileged positions in the knowledge economy. He holds the chair of history at the University of Limerick; she is an economist who, according to the bio in her book, “gives talks, runs workshops and provides advice about issues of migration, (anti-)racism, diversity and education.” The author of a third recent book has never attended high school, is a poet and trained mechanic, and owns a small publishing company that he subsidises by working occasionally as a forklift driver.

Dinçer Güçyeter’s book Unser Deutschlandmärchen (which means “Our Fairytale about Germany” more than “Our German Fairytale”) has just won the Leipzig Book Fair’s prize for fiction, one of Germany’s most highly regarded literary awards. And while some observers were surprised by the shortlisting of a book from a publisher hardly anybody knew about, and written by an author who thus far had only published poetry, those who have read the book have expressed nothing but praise.

“The novel… lets the words soar into the sky, but is also attentive to the humiliations on the ground,” the judges of the Leipzig award wrote. “Dinçer Güçyeter catches stories with a net that’s more finely woven than a butterfly net… and has gifted us a polyphonic novel whose poetic chorus will reverberate.“

Please note the first person plural pronoun in the title of Güçyeter’s book, too. It refers to just two people: the author and his mother Fatma, a Turkish-born woman who in 1965 joined her husband, a Turkish labour migrant, in Germany, where their son Dinçer was born fourteen years later. The book is the story of Fatma’s and Dinçer’s lives, told by an author impersonating both of his characters.

“You have always shrouded your longing in silence. You thought that way nobody could see through you, nobody could hurt you,” Dinçer tells Fatma. “You see, years later your son tries to turn your silence into literature, ponders, rages, searches, loses…” Güçyeter is generous enough to share with his readers not just the result of his searches but also the searching. And we also learn about his anger — an anger that at times appears even more deep-seated than Berhe’s.

But Unser Deutschlandmärchen is not an angry book. It is often heartbreakingly sad but told in a way that makes sometimes make the reader laugh, albeit uneasily. This contradiction is in the nature of fairytales, which often hide unspeakable violence inside an enchanted world where all live happily ever after.

Güçyeter’s novel is a story of coming to terms: with living in a strange country (in the case of Fatma); with growing up and not conforming to society’s expectations of masculinity (in the case of Dinçer). Neither the author nor his mother always copes well with the challenges thrown in their paths. But then, it’s just a fairy tale, where bad things happen and all ends well.

The book is unusual because of Güçyeter’s mastery of poetic language. It’s also unusual because of its format: a novel that’s not fiction, illustrated by — unfortunately poorly reproduced — photographs that make it resemble a family album, with the author writing in the first person, with that person being at times a guy named Dinçer and sometimes a woman named Fatma.

In his conclusion to We Are All Migrants, Jan Plamper writes that he used to assume, as “an internationalist of the Left,” that a collective national identity was unnecessary. He has since changed his mind. His book is a “plea for a collective identity.” He advocates a “national New We” because he believes it’s important to have an “effective emotional glue” and thereby meet the demand for a national German identity from non-migrants and migrants alike.

I still cringe when either of my nations’ national anthem (the German “Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit” or “Advance Australia Fair”) is played, and I am uncomfortable when I see others deeply moved by the display of national symbols. Mind you, I happily barrack for the German football team — for the women’s, not the men’s — though not because they are Germans but because they play such an attractive brand of football. And yes, I did cheer on the men’s team once, but that was when Mesut Özil and Miroslav Klose were its stars — not because they were PlusGermans but because I was seduced by their artistry, their ability to read the game and their skill in befuddling their opponents.

“What it means to be German remains a blank, is still missing something elementary — new terms, concepts, and stories,” Plamper claims. Not only do I think that shouldn’t alarm us. I’m also not sure that Plamper’s diagnosis is correct — unless of course the sense of being German is necessarily tied up with a territorially bounded nation-state.

I am emotionally attached to certain German landscapes, to some German music and, particularly, to some writing in German, including Unser Deutschlandmärchen. I was moved by Güçyeter’s book. I loved the rhythm and timbre of its language. It took me to places I had never visited. The book is part of a distinctly German universe I admire and cherish, a universe so much larger than the German nation. And wouldn’t an emotional attachment to a German nation inevitably entail an attachment to the German nation-state?

Plamper embraces what he calls the “open border position.” As a historian he also knows that there is nothing natural about what the anthropologist Liisa Malkki once referred to as the “national order of things. “One day national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch, much like slavery or the exclusion of women from general elections do in the Western world,” Plamper writes. “There will be a truly universal right, a human right, of freedom of movement.”

In the meantime, for strategic reasons, ought we nurture an emotional attachment to a German nation? To offer an alternative for the Turkish Germans who, come 14 May, may save Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s bacon because they are emotionally attached to the nationalism he offers? Or to offer a less fraught option for those following PEGIDA, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West, to stop them from shouting “Absaufen! Absaufen! Absaufen!” (“Drown! Drown! Drown!”), as happened when a speaker at one of their demonstrations in 2018 referred to the German NGO Mission Lifeline, which has operated a search-and-rescue ship in the Mediterranean?

The PEGIDA followers are hardly going to be attracted by a “New We” that includes PlusGermans like Berhe and Güçyeter. They have shown little interest in defining and periodically redefining national collective identity through democratic processes — unless of course, they are promised that these processes will reflect their idea of an ethnically, if not racially, defined, homogenous nation. But let them pontificate about “we Germans” — and let us assure the targets of their racist vitriol that we in Germany do not wish to distinguish between citizens and non-citizens, nor between native and non-native speakers of the language of Goethe and Güçyeter.

I am not so worried about the rift between those who demand that Germany close its borders and those who believe we ought to respond to new arrivals with hospitality and solidarity. I can’t think of a compromise position that would allow Germany to uphold the human rights of migrants and at the same time exclude people seeking its protection.

I expect that “we Germans” are deeply concerned about the nation’s apparent lack of a unity of purpose. “We in Germany,” I would like to think, are more concerned about the fact that migrants are left to drown in the Mediterranean.

Unlike Jan Plamper, I fail when trying to envisage a day when “national borders will seem like a remnant from a bygone epoch.” But after having read his book, and Berhe’s and Güçyeter’s, I too am cautiously optimistic.

Over to Dinçer Güçyeter for the last word: “We will combine the past with what’s still to come and write our own fairy tale, mother.” •

We Are All Migrants: A History of Multicultural Germany
By Jan Plamper | Cambridge University Press | $43.95 | 274 pages

Nie mehr leise: Die neue migrantische Mittelschicht
By Betiel Berhe | Aufbau | €22.00 | 205 pages

Unser Deutschlandmärchen
By Dinçer Güçyeter | mikrotext | €25.00 | 213 pages

The post We in Germany appeared first on Inside Story.

It might sound like the minister wants to go back to the future, and revert to a twentieth-century model in which permanent settlement was the norm and temporary migration the exception. But O’Neil has no intention of returning to the past — and that would be impossible anyway for an Australia that depends on visa holders to pick our fruit, process our meat, deliver our takeaway, care for our sick and fund our universities.

What the minister wants to do is to build a simpler, more efficient and fairer migration system that simultaneously boosts productivity, fills pressing skills gaps in the labour market and delivers greater benefits to business. She envisages a streamlined visa system with pathways to permanent residence, and eventually citizenship, for temporary migrants who want to stay and whose skills are in high demand.

In the process, she hopes to end workplace abuse and release long-term visa holders from the limbo state of being “permanently temporary.” Australia, she says, needs “a skilled worker program, not a guest worker program.”

The aims are laudable, but balancing the competing interests won’t be easy.

To take one example, O’Neil promises simpler, faster pathways to permanent residence for international students who, after graduation, possess the qualifications and capabilities Australia needs. Yet she also wants to improve the integrity of international education by “tightening the requirements for international students studying in Australia” to ensure that students are here to study rather than work.

Stricter visa rules for international students would hit the bottom line of universities and vocational colleges, who have come to rely on those students’ fees to fund their operations. They would also reduce the supply of international students to stack supermarket shelves, serve in restaurants, staff late-night convenience stores and much else besides. These are low-paid jobs, and in an already tight labour market they won’t be easy to fill with local workers.

The government’s approach is predicated on an understanding that Australia is in an increasingly intense global competition for talent. We are facing off against other migration countries — Canada is often mentioned — in a race to attract the best and brightest to our shores.

Rather than the postwar impulse to “populate or perish,” the twenty-first-century challenge is to “skill up or sink.” A simplified visa system, clear routes to permanent residency, and a crackdown on workplace exploitation are presented as the keys to success.

The government has already taken three decisive and welcome steps. The first two tackle the limbo experienced by two groups of temporary visa holders. The third seeks to “skill up” temporary migration.

Step one, in February, was to begin the process of enabling refugees on temporary protection visas to become permanent residents, fulfilling an election promise and easing the distress for people who arrived in Australia by boat and have been living with uncertainty for a decade.

Then, just before Anzac Day, step two brought a straightforward pathway to citizenship for New Zealanders who live in Australia long-term. New Zealanders have long had the right to stay in Australia permanently. But the Howard government amended the definition of “Australian resident” in social security laws to block their access to most government services and payments.

New Zealanders who arrived after that 2001 change might “settle” and build lives here but they would remain on a special category visa and never become legally “resident.” While they could work and get Medicare, they were denied most other forms of public assistance. In hard times, for instance, they weren’t entitled to unemployment benefits or other income support.

Howard’s change also had flow-on effects in some states and territories. In some places, New Zealanders might be denied emergency housing or find that their children were not eligibility for disability services. When the National Disability Insurance Scheme was introduced, New Zealanders were required to pay the levy but weren’t eligible for support.

And the only way New Zealanders could become permanent residents was by applying for another visa, usually a skilled visa. That was impossible for many, and expensive for all, with the result that hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders were permanently marginal.

Long-term campaigners for a better deal for New Zealanders were surprised and elated by the Labor government’s new pathway to citizenship, which exceeded their expectations. It not only resolves a longstanding irritant in trans-Tasman relations by treating New Zealanders much more fairly but also enhances Australia’s democracy. Hundreds of thousands of long-term residents who were previously unrepresented in our political system can now join the electoral role, cast a vote and lobby their MPs as citizens.

Then came the third step, announced by Clare O’Neil in her address to the National Press Club: a sharp increase in the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold, or TSMIT. This is the minimum income that an employer must pay if it wants to bring a migrant worker to Australia on a temporary skilled visa.

The Abbott government froze the TSMIT at $53,900 in July 2013. In the decade since then, it has not risen in line with inflation or wages and has fallen far below what most full-time workers earn. From 1 July this year, it will jump to $70,000.

The new threshold follows a recommendation by the Grattan Institute, which argued that the frozen TSMIT “allowed employers to sponsor a growing number of low-wage workers with fewer skills” and left them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Grattan says these low-paid workers also lacked the bargaining power to secure wage rises. In O’Neil’s words, it allowed a skilled worker program to become a guest worker program.

For many migrants and their employers, this change will make no difference. According to the most recent data, the average nominated base salary for temporary skilled workers is already above $100,000, and it’s even higher in sectors like finance, IT, healthcare, mining and construction. More likely to be affected are sectors like hospitality, retail and agriculture, where the average nominated salary for temporary migrant workers is much lower.

More than 1000 cooks are in Australia on temporary skilled visas, for example, and they are regularly included in the top fifteen professions nominated by employers. Yet Seek reports that the average wage for a cook is between $55,000 and $65,000. How commercial kitchens will fill these jobs after 1 July remains to be seen, but a sudden rush of Australians into this hard, low-paid work seems unlikely.

Lifting the Temporary Skilled Migration Income Threshold is the government’s first response to the review of the migration program by the former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, and migration experts Joanna Howe and John Azarias.

The government has also released the outline of a migration strategy indicating the direction it will take in responding more fully to the review.

Key initiatives include:

• A simplification of the welter of highly specific visa subclasses that create a “bureaucratic nightmare” for migrants, employers and government, and force a heavy reliance on the professional services of migration agents for even straightforward applications.

• A redesign of the points test, which tabulates factors such as age, English-language proficiency and qualifications to determine whether a skilled migrant is granted a permanent visa.

• A formal role in the migration system for the government’s arm’s-length advisory agency Jobs and Skills Australiato determine the extent and location of skills shortages. Drawing on advice from government, business and unions, this process will replace the cumbersome, complex and inflexible “skilled occupation lists” currently used to decide which occupations are eligible for visas. O’Neil says the aim is for Jobs and Skills Australia to integrate the migration system and the education and training system when it comes to meeting labour market needs.

• Better coordination between the Commonwealth and the states and territories on the impacts of migration and population growth (for example, demand for housing).

Labor’s renewed focus on Australia’s migration system is long overdue. With its obsessive focus on boats and border security, the previous government downgraded the role of migration in nation-building and social inclusion. And by profiling minority groups — remember the “African gangs” that made Victorians feel unsafe to go out at night — it undermined the ethos of Australia as a cohesive, multicultural society.

The Coalition allowed processing times to blow out, stranding hundreds of thousands of people on bridging visas for months and then years (a backlog the new government has been working hard to address). Despite consistent and mounting evidence of labour exploitation, the Coalition did next to nothing to address the workplace abuse of temporary visa holders. And when Covid-19 hit, prime minister Scott Morrison simply told them to go home.

Yet O’Neil’s claim that Australia’s skilled worker program “morphed into a guest worker program” while Peter Dutton was in charge of immigration is partisan hyperbole. The permanent shift towards temporary migration began long before Dutton’s reign and runs much deeper.

It was the Hawke government that began internationalising the education sector by allowing Australian universities to accept full-fee international students. By 1996, the immigration department was already granting more than 100,000 student visas each year and education was on the way to becoming a major export industry.

The first temporary skilled worker visa (the 457 visa) was an initiative of the Keating government, although it only came to fruition under John Howard. In 2005, when the agricultural sector was losing workers to the booming mining sector, Amanda Vanstone enticed backpackers to pick fruit by transforming the working holiday scheme from a predominantly “cultural” visa into a labour market program.

It was the Rudd government that trialled and then implemented the seasonal workers program for Pacific Islanders in 2009, and it was the Gillard government that established it as an ongoing program three years later. It was Gillard, too, who introduced the 485 post-study work visa that enabled international students to stay and work in Australia after graduation, though not necessarily in the field for which they had studied. Around 167,000 of these visa holders are in Australia at the moment, almost all of whom will end up spending at least five years here without necessarily qualifying for a visa as a skilled migrant.

The shift in emphasis from permanent to temporary migration is not the result of bureaucratic bungling by the previous government. It is a long-term trend in response to global economic change and demographic forces.

The government has signalled a pushback, at least when it comes to skilled workers. The greater emphasis on pathways to permanent residency is the right thing to do and will make Australia a more attractive destination for young, highly qualified professionals who can help build the nation’s economy and contribute in other ways to society.

Yet big questions remain, particularly about how the government will manage the demand for lower-skilled workers.

Take the example of health and aged care. “Our ageing population will demand more workers in health and aged care than our domestic population can supply,” O’Neil said yesterday. That’s true, though many of those jobs won’t be classified as skilled and attract salaries over $70,000.

O’Neil added that we need “to create proper, capped, safe, tripartite pathways for workers in key sectors, such as care.” But what this means is unclear. Will low-paid caring roles be reclassified as skilled and have a route to permanent residency?

If so, this would run counter to government programs like the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme, which specifically targets the aged care sector as a potential employer. The PALM scheme recruits workers from Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste to fill “unskilled, low-skilled and semi-skilled positions” but limits a migrant’s stay in Australia to a maximum of four years, with no prospect of settlement. It is a guest worker scheme by another name.

The same issues arise when it comes to filling lower-paid jobs in childcare, disability care, horticulture, meat processing, tourism and many other sectors.

If the government is determined not to have a class of guest workers, then the big question arising out of its reform of the migration system is how Australia fills those low-skilled gaps in the labour market. And how how does it do that without resorting to a system of temporary visas that offer no prospect of a transition to permanent residency and a shadow workforce of international students and other temporary visa holders “who bounce from visa to visa” and end up being permanently temporary.

Clare O’Neil says she wants a conversation about migration that is “direct and honest.” There are more difficult discussions to come. •

The post Skill up or sink appeared first on Inside Story.

Let me start with the good stuff — the connections. Australia–India relations have had enthusiastic moments in the past, but the visit of prime minister Anthony Albanese this month, coinciding with a cricket tour, made the biggest splash by an Australian PM since Bob Hawke’s bromance with Rajiv Gandhi in the late 1980s.

Albanese’s Australian companions included leaders from education, business and government. The Quad — the strategic engagement between the United States, Australia, Japan and India — was tactfully discussed, and two Australian universities bravely proposed to set up campuses in India. Albanese rocked gracefully in the decorated golf cart that carried him and Modi around Ahmedabad’s vast cricket stadium for the Indian prime minister’s lap of honour on his home turf.

What was underplayed in the commentary was the third pillar of a dynamic relationship: people. The other two pillars — shared economic and strategic interests — are already there in burgeoning trade and the enthusiasm for the Quad.

But the permanent ingredient is people — people going back and forth between India and Australia every day for family, business and professional reasons. When Bob Hawke and Rajiv Gandhi were courting in the 1980s, fewer than 20,000 Australian residents had been born in India; today people of Indian origin number closer to a million. And that’s excluding people from India’s South Asian neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan.

The arrival of Indian-origin Australians in public life will gain enhanced national attention now Labor’s election in New South Wales has resulted in Daniel Mookhey’s becoming treasurer. Mookhey is the nephew of someone I taught in years 6 and 7 in the Boys’ Basic High School in Chandigarh. His uncle and late father came to Australia in the 1970s.

The list of recognised high achievers is growing rapidly. The NSW Australian of the Year in 2022 was Veena Sahajwalla, a professor of materials science. The Victorian Australian of the Year in 2023 is Angraj Khillan, a medical doctor, and the NSW Australian Local Hero is Amar Singh, founder of the charity Turbans 4 Australia. You’ll find similarly talented people throughout business, medicine, law, education and the public service, all of them in addition to the thousands of young people making a start in Australia by doing some of the tough jobs, most visibly in transport.

This growing presence brings assets Australia urgently needs: initiative, talent and youth. But the assets come with challenges. People from other places invariably bring beliefs and ideas that can prove a puzzle to the new country.

Prime minister Modi identified one such challenge when he admonished Albanese for not preventing hostile graffiti on Hindu places of worship in Melbourne and Brisbane.

The graffiti are part of an international attempt, made easier in a world of Twitter and its many cousins, to revive the fifteen-year Khalistan insurgency that subsided bloodily thirty years ago. “Khalistan” was the demand for a sovereign state for Sikhs, who form a majority in the Indian state of Punjab and are a large component of the Indian diaspora in Britain, Canada, the United States and Australia.

The secessionist movement of forty years ago grew out of political upheaval in India and its neighbours in the late 1970s. It was compounded by a sense that Sikhs had long been taken for granted and by a lack of employment in Punjab, where green-revolution agriculture brought a margin of prosperity but a decline in the need for labour. The fact that some of those conditions are still noticeable helps to explain the recent aggressive Khalistan demonstrations in Britain, the United States and Canada.

The notion of Khalistan is likely to puzzle most Australians. Those bloody days in north India and overseas had largely disappeared from international media by the mid 1990s, but many wounds remain. Australia’s current high commissioner to India says he’d not encountered the term “Khalistan” until he arrived in India.

Modi’s Khalistan reprimand highlights the need for broader understanding within all Australian institutions of the pulls and pressures the diaspora may face.

Other issues also require recognition of both political sensitivity and enduring scars. An example is the different suppositions about marriage and family that prevail in India and Australia. The subtitle of Manjula O’Connor’s recent book, Daughters of Durga: Dowries, Gender Violence and Family in Australia, captures some of the strains faced by migrants, and by people who work with them.

A third issue is caste. Caste discrimination is illegal under the Indian constitution, but still widely encountered. Prejudice against Dalits (formerly disparaged as “untouchables”) now shows up sufficiently in Britain and the United States for Seattle’s city council to pass a motion banning it. A bill to ban such discrimination in California has also been introduced in that state’s senate.

Finally, Australian governments and institutions need to decide how they deal with Narendra Modi’s government. There would be much to admire in Modi’s life story and in the political and social apparatus he has helped to build. But the scaffolding rests on the founding principles of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, the Hindu-supremacist organisation Modi joined as an adolescent and made his career in. The RSS was inspired by the racial-superiority movements of interwar Europe.

The leader of today’s RSS captured aspects of this outlook in an interview in January. “Hindu society has been at war for 1000 years,” he said, and “this fight has been going against foreign aggressions, foreign influences and foreign conspiracies… This war [today] is not against an enemy outside, but against an enemy within… Foreign invaders are no longer there, but foreign influences and foreign conspiracies have continued.”

Modi’s India steers towards a narrow authoritarianism, demanding conformity to an RSS vision of what it is to be a Hindu. International media organisations like the BBC are held up as examples of the “foreignness” that needs expunging. A BBC documentary reflecting poorly on Modi when he was chief minister of Gujarat during fearful riots in 2002 was banned in India earlier this year.

The ban was followed by “surveys” (not “raids,” the government said) of BBC offices in New Delhi and Mumbai looking for financial violations, and outrage at George Soros’s suggestion a few weeks later that “Modi is no democrat.” Soros pointed out that Modi and business figure Gautam Adani, whose vast holdings have suffered since a critical report by a US-based short-selling specialist, have been close over twenty years and Modi “will have to answer questions from foreign investors and in parliament.”

Questions in parliament are looking less likely since the speakers of both houses have effectively closed off discussion. Rahul Gandhi, the most prominent of the opposition MPs, has been expelled from parliament and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment on charges of “criminal defamation.” (If the same grounds for defamation prevailed in Australia, the prison system would need expanding.)

None of these internationally publicised incidents touches on the everyday harassment that many Muslims, Christians and even Dalits experience at the hands of grassroots zealots implicitly encouraged by their leaders.

Most Australians don’t share “values” such as these. In future, Australian speakers at bilateral occasions, when they feel the need to praise India, might choose to endorse the words written in capital letters in the prologue to India’s 1950 constitution: JUSTICE, LIBERTY, EQUALITYand FRATERNITY. Give “democracy” a rhetorical rest. •

The post The Quad couple: India and Australia appeared first on Inside Story.

Michel was born at Château de Vroncourt in northeastern France, where her mother worked as a domestic servant and her father was reputedly one of the aristocratic owner’s sons. “I am what is known as a bastard,” she wrote, “but those who bestowed upon me the sorry gift of life did so freely; they loved each other.”

The suffering of Paris’s poorest deepened after Napoleon III declared war on Prussia fourteen years later. As part of her valiant attempt to keep her students fed, Michel joined one of the city’s socialist cooperatives. She was already an ardent feminist, and was delighted to find that socialist men, unlike many of her countrymen, didn’t discriminate against women. “They didn’t define duty according to your sex,” she wrote. “That stupid question was finally done with.”

The Franco-German war ended in ignominious defeat for Napoleon III. Captured on the battlefield, he was forced to take refuge in Britain, leaving Otto von Bismarck’s newly united Germany more powerful than ever.

In Paris, events were moving with a revolution’s rapidity. The Second Republic was overthrown, replaced by a provisional government that surrendered almost immediately and left the ragtag National Guard to defend the capital. When Adolphe Thiers, the first president of the Third Republic, signed an armistice with Bismarck, the socialists seized their moment. The Paris Commune was born.

As government forces attempted to retake the city, Michel threw herself into defending the Commune and became widely known for her fearlessness. At first an ambulancière, caring for the wounded, within a month she was wielding a Remington carbine. When government troops swarmed the city, she fought with characteristic verve. But the government’s response, as vicious as it was disproportionate, resulted in rape, torture and unimaginable slaughter. Eventually the Commune was defeated.

An estimated 35,000 or more Parisians died during the crackdown, far exceeding the deaths in the 1793–94 Terror or the June Days of 1848 as a proportion of the Parisian population. “Shells tore the air, marking the time like a clock,” Michel wrote in her memoirs. Bodies clogged the streets. Many survivors were summarily executed; others awaited imprisonment or worse.

To those around her, Michel seemed totally undaunted. Court-martialled as a prisoner of war, she braced herself for execution. Instead, she was given a civilian trial.

Her demeanour as she conducted her own defence did little to assuage her accusers. “She-wolf” was the mildest of their epithets, and the characterisations were laced with a predictable misogyny. Most damning in their eyes was her “arrogance.” Unmarried, never denying her birth to an unmarried housemaid, “mannish” in her behaviour and careless of her appearance — here was the living antithesis of what conservative Frenchmen demanded of their womenfolk. And an unrepentant socialist at that. Although she denounced capital punishment, Michel approved of violence in the service of justice; facing incarceration and possible deportation, she further confounded the prosecution by stating her preference for death.

She didn’t get her wish. In 1873, along with over 4000 other Communards, Michel was shipped on the frigate Virginie to New Caledonia, the newest of France’s Pacific colonies. Napoleon Bonaparte had initiated penal colonisation earlier in the century, when French convicts were transported to Louisiana. The idea, all too familiar to Australians, was to colonise France’s imperial possessions while getting rid of its indigent and criminal elements. Exile to New Caledonia, otherwise known as Grande Terre, began in 1865, eight years before Michel and her comrades landed in its capital, Noumea.

Largely unknown outside the country of her birth, Louise Michel is today celebrated by the French. It’s not hard to understand why. By any measure, she was a remarkable woman — in a way, a latter-day Jeanne d’Arc.

As I read about Michel in British writer William Atkins’s new book, Exiles: Three Island Journeys, the adjective that repeatedly came to mind was resilient. On the long voyage to her destination Michel was homesick not for Paris but for the France around Vroncourt, where she had grown up. She had loved the wildness of the Haute-Marne countryside and had a particular affinity with its animals. She had been an imaginative, talented child, and in exile would draw on these resources to open herself up to the strange but beautiful land in which she found herself.

“We heard the waves beating eternally on the reefs,” she would write, “and above us we saw the cracked mountain peaks from which torrents of water poured noisily down to the sea during the frequent great rains. At sunset we watched the sun disappear into the sea, and in the valley the twisted white trunks of the niaoulis [the native trees] glowed with a silver phosphorescence.”

It wasn’t only the landscape and the plant life that appealed; she was also interested in the archipelago’s peoples, who called themselves Kanaks, after kanaky, their word for the land. (It was James Cook who named the island group New Caledonia because its largest island reminded him of Scotland. For the French, Kanak became a term of abuse, as it would when it was applied to all indentured Pacific people.)

Prevented from living with the Kanaks as she wished, Michel nonetheless studied their language and traditions and supported their 1878 revolt, advising them on how to sever the telegraph wires the colonials depended on for their counterinsurgency. To the French assertion that they were mere savages, Michel replied that she had always thought herself “savage.” Yet many of her fellow transported Communards took up arms against the rebellion.

In 1880, after seven years in exile, Michel set sail for Europe. Her time in Kanaky had changed her. She had shed her republican sympathies to become a passionate anarchist. Home was no longer a corner of eastern France or even the city from which she had been expelled. In her own mind she was now a global citizen. With borders now meaningless to her, she would travel as often as she could.

She visited Sydney and Melbourne before returning to Europe, where she took up a life of writing, lecturing and political activism, and was reunited with her mother. For centuries London had been a refuge for foreign dissidents, and Michel followed the tradition by spending ten years there. The United States wasn’t as receptive and wouldn’t grant her a visa. Back in France, she had more spells in prison, and was nearly assassinated, but only the thought of being separated from her mother could dampen her indomitable spirit, and only when her mother died did she feel herself adrift rather than free.

Exile: is there a more redolent word? It derives from the old French term essillier — to banish, expel or drive off — but its meaning has expanded to embrace a range of other interpretations. For one thing, it’s a noun as well as a verb, and that alone adds immeasurably to its ambit.

I’ve been thinking about the wealth of literature inspired by exile. In the very beginning — at least in Judeo-Christian mythology — we have those two hapless mortals expelled from Eden by Yahweh. Homer’s Odysseus was a wanderer until he finally made it home. For the Romans the exile was Ulysses. Ovid wrote his most moving poetry living on the Black Sea coast. Only in exile could James Joyce write about Dublin, though it wasn’t the authorities who drove him away but the constrained life in an Ireland still under Britain’s heel and the costive Catholicism of his day. Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s Jewish modern Ulysses, belonged to a group the Romans ousted from their homeland in 70 CE.

And so it goes. There’s displacement, the inevitable result of war and colonisation, and the fate of countless multitudes and source of endless stories. So too migration, generally considered voluntary but often with elements of exile. Exile is a potent term capturing the myriad aspects of our mortal existence. Yet all through Atkins’s Exiles a certain phrase kept coming to me — An exile is occurring. A creature cried in the night, under soft port lights — beating through my brain. I couldn’t remember where I’d read it or why it was so persistent.

William Atkins, whose earlier books, The Moor and The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places, received wide acclaim for their captivating blend of biography, history and geography, is the best kind of travel writer. He began thinking about Exiles when anti-immigration sentiment in Europe and America was rapidly accelerating in 2016. In the course of exploring the refugees’ flights, he stumbled on the empire connection.

“It occurred to me,” he writes, “that the lives of an earlier kind of displaced person, political deportees sent to a designated location, could show me things that accounts of migrancy, banishment or confinement alone could not: about the word ‘home,’ and the behaviour of empires, and the conflict between leaving and staying that seems to animate the world.”

Not counting his own travels researching the book, he documents three journeys in Exiles — Michel’s transportation to Kanaky, the Russian revolutionary Lev Shternberg’s imprisonment on Sakhalin Island, and the forced exile of Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, the last king of Zululand, on St Helena. All three were being punished for political crimes, but their degree of privation differed, as did the legacy of their experience and how each of them fared when permitted to return home.

Michel, Shternberg and Dinuzulu were nineteenth-century victims of what Atkins calls penal colonialism. This was standard operating procedure for the era’s imperial powers, at least until the cost proved too burdensome, as it did in Australia.

Like Michel, Shternberg returned enriched by exile — indeed, as Atkins writes, “of the exiles I have described none was more elevated by the experience.” Born and raised in Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement, and confronted by the tsarist regime’s deep anti-Semitism, Shternberg had been drawn like many Jews to revolutionary socialism. For belonging to a “proscribed organisation” he spent three years in an Odessa prison before being exiled to Sakhalin Island.

Shternberg suffered greatly in both places but equalled Michel in resourcefulness. His studies of the social organisation and traditions of the island’s Nivkh people made a seminal contribution to Russian ethnography, leading to a distinguished academic career in St Petersburg in the years following his release.

Dinuzulu had quite different experiences. The British invaded his homeland in 1871, when he was a boy of ten, sacking his father’s homestead and seizing his cattle. More than a thousand Zulus died during what was a reprisal sortie for the deaths of 1300 British and colonial troops during the Battle of Isandlwana six months before — what Atkins calls “Britain’s greatest military disaster in nearly a century” — at the hands of the Zulu army.

Further assaults in South Africa’s complicated version of the frontier wars had Dinuzulu, now proclaimed king, fighting alongside the Boers to restore his realm and avenge his father’s death. He was captured, tried and convicted of high treason. It was risky to execute him, so the British sent him and members of his retinue to St Helena, Napoleon’s isle of exile.

Although the climate didn’t suit them, Dinuzulu and his party lived in relative comfort compared with Michel and Shternberg. He even assumed the dress of an English gentleman and was given a piano to play. But his withering spirit manifested in an increasingly cranky disposition and a grossly swollen body brought on by a worsening kidney disease. As Atkins writes, “to dictate your enemy’s whereabouts on the planet, as if they were a chess piece, as if they were dust, is to flaunt a frightening and demoralising imperial supremacy.”

Nor was there a home for him to return to. Stripped of both his land and his title, he returned to a Zululand dismantled by the British. His cattle herds were devastated by disease; a hut tax forced his men into wage labour. Yet Dinuzulu himself, deemed a government induna, or tribal headman, and quartered in a house a hundred miles from his ancestral home, was still a king to the Zulu, who continued fighting the British. And so, for the second time, he was convicted of high treason and moved again. “What is grievous to me is to be killed and yet alive,” he wrote to a friend before he died in 1913 of the nephritis he’d developed on St Helena.

“Death in life — the exile’s ubiquitous lament,” writes Atkins. Death stalks the pages of his book. The quashed rebellions and their casualties, the implacable executions, the deaths from disease and starvation, and the body counts of the wars between nations. The life stories Atkins explores all end in death, and as his narratives unfold he alludes at least once to the notion that death itself is exile. Exiles is a beautiful, utterly engrossing book, but by the end of it I was left with a profound sense of the cruelty and suffering that has marked our human existence. Where can it lead, if not to more pain and misery? As the exiled writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “Life is beautiful. Life is sad. That’s all you need to know.”

By that time, too, I happened on the source of that quote mentioned earlier in this review — An exile is occurring. A creature cried in the night, under soft port lights. Imagine my disconcerted surprise on discovering it in a novel I’d written myself. “Exile” appears more than once in the surrounding passage, a resounding refrain that describes not a death but a birth, the light that greets the infant, newly expelled from his mother’s womb, glowing in a hospital delivery room. The baby (in this instance, a boy) screws up his face and, as a sign of his robust health, yells his tiny lungs out. And why wouldn’t he? Or any one of us embarking on such a perilous journey? Yet walk the road he will. •

Exiles: Three Island Journeys
By William Atkins | Faber & Faber | $39.99 | 336 pages

The post Life is beautiful. Life is sad appeared first on Inside Story.

The anniversary well-wishers included German foreign minister Heiko Maas, who said the convention “was drawn up in view of the immeasurable suffering that millions of people were forced to endure during and after the second world war. Its clear aim was to ensure that this could never happen again.” He also reminded us that more than eighty million people are currency displaced — a fact that made the convention “indispensable today.”

With these words, Maas conjured two sets of images. His “never again” was clearly a reference to the Holocaust, perhaps evoking the black-and-white photographs of emaciated survivors taken by the Allies immediately upon the liberation of the concentration camps. And his mention of today’s displaced people would have reminded his audience of televised footage showing thousands of predominantly Syrian refugees making their way through Hungary and Austria in the summer of 2015, or masses of people living in squalid conditions in refugee camps in Africa or Asia.

Neither of these sets of images has much to do with the origins of the Refugee Convention. Yes, two major refugee crises in the second half of the 1940s produced images akin to those that we might see today depicting refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Venezuela. But neither of those early postwar crises — the Nakba, which displaced some 700,000 Palestinians, and the Partition of India, when more than ten million people fled or were driven from their homes — were much discussed among those negotiating the Refugee Convention.

Instead, their attention was focused on what were known as “DPs,” or displaced persons. Millions of people had found themselves outside their country of origin at the end of the war. Most of them had been swiftly repatriated — some, against their will, to the Soviet Union. But by 1946, about a million DPs were still stuck, most of them in the French, British and American zones of occupied Germany.

Despite the war still being fresh in their minds, the drafters of the convention had set out to tackle the consequences rather than the causes of mass displacement. They wanted a convention that defined the status of displaced people rather than dealt with their “immeasurable suffering.” Resettlement wasn’t even designed solely for their benefit. When Eleanor Roosevelt warned the UN General Assembly in December 1946 that the DPs’ presence was delaying “the restoration of peace and order in the world,” her chief concern may well have been to prevent a potentially volatile situation in the DPs’ host societies, particularly in Germany and Austria.

Most of the DPs were from Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and other countries in Eastern Europe. Most were stranded in Germany and Austria because that’s where they had been taken as prisoners of war or forced labourers during the war. Some were in Italy, the Middle East, East Africa, India and China, and some were Jewish survivors of the concentration camps.

In other words, today’s international refugee regime originated not in the refugee crises in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent in the second half of the 1940s, and not in the Holocaust (or in the earlier failure of nation-states to provide a refuge for European Jews). It lay in the anxiety provoked by DPs in the second half of the 1940s and the early 1950s, and in the effort to resettle the “last million” — initially to countries in Western Europe, but soon to Israel, Australia and the Americas.

The role of the “last million” in international discussions about the attributes and rights of refugees and in the making of international law is a key reason why studies of the DPs are so relevant to today’s debates. Much has already been written about the International Refugee Organization, or IRO, which was given the job of facilitating the resettlement of DPs, and much about the resettlement of DPs in Australia and other countries. Ruth Balint’s immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to that scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience.

Most importantly, Balint shows how the question of who ought to be counted as a refugee played out not just in the conferences where diplomats and international lawyers haggled over the definition used by the IRO and the terms of the draft Refugee Convention, but also in submissions by DPs, in interviews with DPs and, more generally, in the autobiographical narratives DPs fashioned to bolster their identity as refugees. The question, what were the grounds for a DP’s eligibility as a refugee?, runs like a thread through the book’s seven chapters.

Balint is less interested in the content of policies than in how they were implemented and how much wriggle room they provided. Drawing on dozens of cases, she explores not only how policies and practices affected the lives of individuals, but also how individuals negotiated their way around existing rules.

The cases featured in Destination Elsewhere are complex. Among them is that of Arthur W., a non-Jewish German married to a Jewish woman who had survived the Holocaust — not least, I imagine, because she was protected by his having resisted the pressure to divorce her. Arthur himself had been imprisoned in a concentration camp from 1944 until the end of the war, and was initially classified as a refugee, which would have allowed the couple to emigrate to join their son, who had left Germany ahead of them. But just as they were about to embark to the United States, the IRO realised it had made a mistake. Like other non-Jewish husbands of refugees, and unlike the wives of eligible refugees, Arthur was deemed ineligible for IRO assistance.

Also ineligible, but for very different reasons, was a couple whose son Gabor had a disability. Their application to settle in Australia was rejected, according to their emigration file, “because the child is a mongolian idiot.” The IRO advised the parents to leave Gabor behind. They separated over the issue, with the father emigrating after their divorce and the mother remaining with their son. A year later, the mother changed her mind and consented to separate from Gabor permanently.

Or consider the case of Gregor L., aka Michael Kolossov, a Red Army officer who defected in 1945 and was then advised by an official in the American zone to conceal his Russian identity. Changing his name, date of birth and nationality (and now claiming to be of Polish Ukrainian origin), he, his wife and their two children lived for four years as DPs in the city of Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, until they were accepted for resettlement in Australia. There, Gregor came clean, telling the authorities of his former identity, because, he said later, “I wanted to show that I was honest and loyal.”

A 1946 cartoon illustrating the obstacles impeding the emigration of displaced persons to the United States. The DP camp depicted in the background is identified as Wentdorf. Gedenkstaette Bergen-Belsen

The Australian authorities were “less interested in protecting Communist defectors than they were in sheltering Nazi ones,” as Balint dryly notes, and promptly declared him a security threat. His case received sympathetic attention in the Australian press, but he was deported back to Germany. Because the Australians told the IRO that they suspected him of having worked for Stalin’s secret police, the Americans kept him under close surveillance in Germany as a possible Soviet agent while inviting him to participate in the Harvard Project, an attempt to gather intelligence about the Soviet Union by interviewing refugees. The researchers much valued Kolossov’s assistance, with one of them later praising his “sincerity” and “objectivity.”

Concerning this last case, Balint tells us that the family may have lived in Germany until 1955 and then emigrated to Canada, but concedes that “even this is unclear.” In most other cases, we don’t learn what eventually happened to her protagonists. As a reader, I found the fragmentary nature of these accounts of DPs’ lives intensely frustrating. What became of Arthur W.’s family? Were they eventually resettled? If they weren’t, how did they fare in the country where they had been persecuted? Did their son return to Germany? And what about Gabor? Were his parents able to make a new start?

Arthur W.’s story also raises the question of whether he provided the IRO with a truthful account. Had he really been imprisoned in a concentration camp? If so, on what grounds? Such questions suggest themselves even more so in Gregor L.’s case. Was he also “sincere” and “objective” when it came to retelling his life? Was he identical with Michael Kolossov, or was L., as the Australians claimed, someone else altogether?

Of course this was not meant to be a book about the life histories of refugees. And the effort involved in comprehensively researching that many lives would have been considerable and, given the focus of the book, unreasonable. In fact — on second thoughts — I suspect that it may be the individual stories’ open-endedness that makes the text strangely intriguing and prompted me to read on. At the same time, the lack of closure focused my attention on the issues that the cases were meant to illustrate.

Historians trying to turn the past into a narrative tend to be influenced by at least three factors: their own present, the availability of sources, and what I would like to call the course of history. No historian is immune from these influences. But how they shape a historical narrative depends also on how much the historian is aware of, and able to respond to, them.

As Balint has demonstrated in her other books (most recently in Smuggled, which she co-wrote with Julie Kalman and which also came out this year), she is what the French call an écrivaine engagée, a writer who is perturbed and at the same time motivated by her own present, not least by its injustices. She is troubled by the categorical and seemingly unproblematic distinction between political refugees and economic migrants today, and aware of how much a person’s recognition as a legitimate refugee depends on their ability to offer a convincing narrative about their life. She knows that the more truthful the narrative the more convincing it is — but that here “truth” is in the eyes of the beholder, and depends on what seems credible to somebody else: for example, a person working for the UNHCR, an immigration officer or a judge.

Balint is appalled by the fact that the response of her own country, Australia, to people seeking its protection often doesn’t reflect the international treaties it has ratified, be it the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, or the Convention on the Rights of the Child. “Australia’s immigration laws still require all migrants to be screened for medical conditions, so as to prove they will not be an economic burden on the community,” she writes. “This affects children most of all.” In October, Australian Paralympic athlete Jaryd Clifford recalled the case of Pakistani refugee Shiraz Kiane, who twenty years ago set himself on fire outside Parliament House because the immigration department objected to his family’s joining him in Australia on the grounds that his daughter’s medical treatment would be too expensive.

“The book is a work of history concerned with the present,” Balint writes. Because she, like Clifford, is troubled by the present, she is particularly sensitive to instances in the past in which the present is prefigured. As she avoids any moralising, this honing in on historical issues to which she is particularly attuned adds a degree of passion to her text that contributes to its readability.

Balint is acutely aware of the second factor shaping her narrative, the limitations of her archive. Her book “began with a chance visit” to the International Tracing Services archives in Germany, which holds records relating to seventeen million people and had only recently been opened to researchers. This visit appears to have prompted her to consult the IRO’s records, which are held at the National Archives in Paris. And there she discovered the decisions of the IRO Review Board, which became a main source for her project.

Because of the richness of the review board’s files, the cases featured in her book tend to be complex and were contested at the time. But the majority of refugee status determinations involving DPs were presumably comparatively straightforward, which means that they didn’t leave an extensive paper trail. Balint’s reliance on the records of the review board partly explains why she was rarely able to say what eventually happened to people like Arthur W. and Gregor L.; for obvious reasons, the review board took no further interest in the fates of individuals once it had arrived at a decision.

The fact that archives are not merely repositories that can be mined to answer the historian’s questions is not peculiar to Balint’s project, but I wish she had taken her reflections about the peculiar archival further —that may be a suggestion for another text, however, one that engages with the peculiar challenges posed by archival research about refugees. In Destination Elsewhere, Balint seems to take shelter behind fellow historians Carolyn Steedman and Natalie Zemon Davis, who have both reflected on the historian’s reliance on and engagement with archival sources. “Nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there,” Steedman writes. “You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.”

Finally, the narratives produced by historians are informed by a presumed course of history. When looked at it with the benefit of hindsight, the so-called DP problem seems to have come about because many Eastern European DPs could not or did not want to be repatriated, and it was largely solved when a handful of countries of immigration — most prominent among them the United States, Australia and Israel — offered to resettle hundreds of thousands of people stuck in Central Europe. That outcome was in the interests of the Allies, who were responsible for looking after the DPs; of the IRO, naturally; of host countries Germany, Austria and Italy, much of whose infrastructure was in ruins and some of whose people were starving; of countries of resettlement, like Australia, that were experiencing a labour shortage; and of the DPs themselves, who often wanted to get away from Europe.

But it was by no means self-evident that resettlement would be the answer to displacement. I can think of only two other instances in which people who were displaced because they fled, or otherwise found themselves outside, their home, were swiftly resettled. One concerns refugees who fled Hungary to Austria or Yugoslavia after the failed 1956 uprising and ended up in pretty much the same countries that had accommodated DPs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The other relates to concerted international efforts to resettle Indochinese “boat people” stranded in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

But both before, during and after the second half of the 1940s, comprehensive resettlement schemes were the exception. Think of the Armenians in the early twentieth century, for example, or of the Palestinians in the late 1940s, or of Eritreans, Afghans and Syrians today, not to mention Jews desperate to leave Central Europe in the late 1930s. Resettlement was rarely an option for them. And when Polish or Latvian DPs first decided that they did not want to return home, they could not yet know that resettlement outside Europe would be the alternative to repatriation. Initially at least, they had to assume that they would have to remain in Europe, if not in Germany.

Only the course of history encourages us to think of the DPs’ lives in postwar Germany in the context of a trajectory that culminates in a country of resettlement. The course of history encourages us to focus on the DPs’ “quest to leave postwar Europe,” to quote the subtitle of Balint’s book. But not knowing that they might soon settle in the United States or Australia, DPs busily created social networks unrelated to their emigration.

Adam Seipp’s Strangers in the Wild Place, which I reviewed for Inside Story some years ago, illustrates the varied contacts of residents of the Wildflecken DP camp. Outside the camps, DPs interacted not only with members of the Allied occupation authorities but also with locals. In the camps, they carved out spaces where they could be in charge of their own affairs. In some camps, they elected representatives and staffed administrative bodies. They supported a vibrant cultural life. Most important, they created formal and informal networks of compatriots-in-exile and strengthened such networks and associated multiple identities through the publication of periodicals. In Germany’s American zone alone, twenty-nine newspapers and thirty-nine magazines published by and for DPs were counted in December 1947.

The course of history encourages us to think of resettlement as the norm for DPs. In places like Australia, history evidently continued. The arrival of a large number of DPs changed Australian society and helped to prepare it for a multicultural future. By contrast, the fact that a sizeable number of DPs could not be resettled and had to remain in Germany and Austria appears as a dead end. But these remaining DPs too made history. Categorised as heimatlose Ausländer (“homeless foreigners”) in West Germany and generally referred to as the “hard core” by the UNHCR and aid agencies, they acquired many of the rights usually reserved for German citizens but were nevertheless relegated to the margins of society.

From the perspective of 2021, the heimatlose Ausländer seem at least as representative of the modern refugee as Arthur Calwell’s “beautiful Balts.” And much like the experience of the “last million” tells us something about the origins of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the modern refugee regime, the lives and narratives of their “hard core” remnant, and their interactions within German society, ought to be indispensable reference points for a history of the Federal Republic.

Ruth Balint’s book is about the making of history by DPs in the sense that the period in the late 1940s and early 1950s that saw the resettlement of most of them “had a lasting impact on the definition of the refugee, the development of international law, and the creation of a modern, bureaucratic refugee regime.”

Her book is also about the crafting of histories by people who realised that the IRO and prospective resettlement countries were less interested in their wartime suffering, and more in a perceived Red menace, which led DPs to “[articulate] a narrative of persecution and [to valorise] their predicament in line with Western anti-communism.” That narrative established their credentials as refugees. Whether or not the histories that emerged in submissions and interviews were factually true is often impossible to establish. But that’s beside the point, at least as far as the argument in this excellent book is concerned. •

The post Becoming refugees appeared first on Inside Story.

I rode up an escalator from Somerset station into a small park shaded with trees — another thing Singapore does well. In the distance I saw an old man standing on a path, holding up a pile of books for sale. As I got closer, I recognised him: Singapore’s long-time opposition leader, J.B. Jeyaretnam. Bankrupted and driven out of parliament by repeated defamation suits from the Lee family rubber-stamped by compliant courts, the former London-trained barrister was now reduced to selling his own books in a park. Thank God Australia’s not like this, I thought.

Twenty years on, I found myself in Singapore again, a tourist seeking to escape Australia’s long lockdown and rejoin the world. We’re free to fly anywhere, but in fact there are fewer than fifty flights a day out of Australia, and almost a third of them are Singapore Airlines and its budget carrier Scoot flying to and from Singapore. Well, I thought, why not? The Covid paperwork was demanding but not oppressive, and everything we’ve come to like about Singapore is still there: the sheer efficiency of the place, the buzz of modernity in its architecture and technology, the trees everywhere deflecting the heat, the range of experiences on offer, great food and even great coffee just around the corner.

I had a ball. But my mind kept coming back to the place itself: it must have changed, but how? It’s thirty-one years since its formative leader, the bullying genius Lee Kuan Yew, stepped aside to become “senior minister” to his successor, Goh Chok Tong. In 2004 Goh in turn stepped down for Lee’s eldest son, Lee Hsien Loong, who remains Singapore’s leader today.

The Lee dynasty will end with him. The mere suggestion of a third generation evoked so much opposition that his children (all of whom spell their names Li) ruled out careers in politics. But rule by the People’s Action Party appears set to continue indefinitely. It has not lost an election since 1955, and it has no intention of allowing that to happen anytime again.

Singapore, writes commentator Cherian George, is still a country where you have to weigh up the potential consequences for your career before expressing opposition to any government action. (And George speaks from experience: his own criticisms of the government led to his being repeatedly rejected for permanency at the prestigious Nanyang Technological University.)

It is not feasible for a tourist to organise interviews while on a trip, so books became my way of discovering how Singapore has changed. Interesting to note that Singapore’s government allows itself to be criticised in books, but not on film. You can find books on the political opponents monstered by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore’s bookstores, but a much-praised film interviewing some of them, To Singapore, with Love, remains banned. The rationale? Ordinary people don’t read books on politics, but they do watch films.

Four books came home with me: three by people who want Singapore to be more open and  democratic, and one examining how Singapore got many things right by doing them its own way.

Jeevan Vasagar, a British journalist of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, was the Financial Times correspondent in Singapore, and his Lion City: Singapore and the Invention of Modern Asia is an excellent introduction to today’s Singapore. Chua Mui Hoong, a columnist for Singapore’s main paper, the Straits Times, is a wary social critic whose Singapore, Disrupted brings together some of her favourite columns. And Cherian George, once her colleague, has recently published a collection of more substantial essays as Air-conditioned Nation Revisited. (Lee Kuan Yew once famously said that the air conditioner was the greatest twentieth-century invention because it allowed people in the tropics to keep working rather than fall asleep in the heat.)

Within Singapore’s establishment, legal academic and diplomat Tommy Koh is a prominent figure at the liberal reformist end of the spectrum. In editing Fifty Secrets of Singapore’s Success, he celebrates things Singapore has done well: from monetary policy to its national airline, fighting corruption, the Singaporean maths system, parks, public toilets, Changi airport… There’s a long list, all worthy, even if some chapters are superficial.

Singapore has a lot to celebrate. It also has a lot that needs changing. Its rulers have a great appetite for celebrations, but very little appetite for political reform.

Singapore in 2021 is a richer version of Singapore in 1981. Economic success cohabits with political repression. Its economic choices have become more complex as it has become a rich nation, but it remains a stand-out performer. Yet there has been little growth in social and political freedom, where it is a stand-out non-performer, lagging far behind its potential.

Take the economy first. On the usual measure for comparing countries, real GDP per head, Singapore sure is a stand-out: the International Monetary Fund ranks its GDP per head, adjusted for price differences, as the second-highest in the world, behind only Luxembourg, and twice Australia’s.

But that is meaningless. The scale of corporate profit-shifting means tax havens now dominate the top of that IMF ranking — and Singapore is one of them. Comparisons of household consumption per head, though imperfect, are a better measure of real living standards.

On the World Bank’s measure, Singapore in 2020 enjoyed the seventh-highest consumption of goods and services per head of any country, in real terms, behind the United States (first) and just ahead of Australia (ninth). I’d take that with a grain of salt too, but there is no question that what was once an impoverished colony has become a rich country, and is on track to become one of the richest.

The title of an old book on how Singapore did it, Strategic Pragmatism, sums it up well. Rather than follow the precepts of eighteenth-century economic liberalism, Singapore has carved out its own way, testing what works and designing its own solutions. Taxes are low, but as Vasagar puts it, whereas in Hong Kong the tycoons used to dictate to the government, “it is the government that is supreme in Singapore.” Through its investment arm, Temasek Holdings, it is the major shareholder in a third of the companies on Singapore’s Straits Times index. And its reach is everywhere.

You want to buy a home? Well, the vast majority of Singapore’s housing is owned by the government and simply leased out to buyers. You can buy a home, but only for the remaining length of its ninety-nine-year lease, and then you have to surrender it to the government. (At least that’s the official line: it will be interesting to see whether they stick to it when the crunch comes.)

Singapore has 5.5 million people on an island of just 729 square kilometres, so 95 per cent of homes are apartments. If you want to buy one, you need to check first that doing so would not disturb the racial balance of the apartment complex. Apart from its worker dormitories for those it calls “non-residents” (we’ll come to them), Singapore enforces a racial mix in every block, to break down racial stereotypes and prevent ghettos forming.

You want to buy a car? Well, you’ll have to bid for a licence to own one. That alone will set you back around $50,000 (the Singapore dollar currently is virtually on par with the Aussie) because the government enforces a quota on car ownership. That effectively means only the well-off can own a car. Again, it’s for good reasons: roads already occupy too much of Singapore’s limited space, so the government has invested to create world-class train and bus services instead.

You want to go on strike for a wage rise? Think again: Vasagar tells us the last legal strike was in 1986. Singapore’s core economic strategy has been to make itself a haven for foreign investment. It has tailored its economic policies to make itself irresistibly attractive as an operational centre for global players. Allowing strikes, or rapid wage rises, doesn’t fit with that goal.

It is true that Singapore practises small government in one sense: there are few welfare payments — no pensions, no unemployment benefits — and healthcare is basically user-pays unless you run into really big hospital bills.

But the government can avoid those costs because it requires workers to put 20 per cent of their modest salaries into the government-run Central Provident Fund. You can dip into those savings, on certain conditions, to buy a home or pay hospital bills. The system also originally served a second goal by providing the government with cheap funds for its large infrastructure agenda, but gradually the focus has shifted more towards meeting the saver’s needs.

The common thread in all of this is that government plays the central role. Since it was divorced by Malaysia in 1965, Singapore’s government has established or expanded centralised systems to deal with issue after issue. It runs one of the world’s most activist industry policies: it decides which industries it wants and what it will offer to get them, and then pursues the big global players to get them to locate some of their operations in Singapore.

Initially, the focus was on establishing Singapore as a base for manufactured exports, and that remains a core part of its policy. Singapore’s manufacturing output has swollen threefold since the turn of the century, whereas Australia’s has grown barely at all. Singapore remains a big producer of semiconductors and other IT and electronics goods, a huge centre of oil refining and petrochemicals, and a growing global pharmaceuticals hub. Manufacturing still comprises 20 per cent of Singapore’s economy, whereas it has shrunk to just 6 per cent of Australia’s.

But over time, Singapore’s focus has expanded to logistics and services. Having inherited a great seaport from the British, Singapore has kept investing heavily to expand and modernise the port to make it the best in the world. It applied the same attitude in reclaiming coastal land at Changi, building a new airport and constantly upgrading it to keep it the world’s best.

The books by Vasagar and Koh explain well how its leaders realised in the mid 1980s that manufacturing alone was not enough; Singapore must equally become a leader in service industries. Its traditional role as the commercial hub of Southeast Asia was expanded to make it one of the logistics centres of the world. It wooed global service companies as keenly as it had sought manufacturers, offering tax holidays and permanently low taxes if they set up regional operations centres in Singapore. (That’s the policy that led to its becoming a tax haven.) And it set out to make Singapore the financial centre of Asia.

Another crucial decision Singapore made around that time was to change the goal and methods of its monetary policy. At a time when countries like Australia were allowing financial markets to set the value of their currency, and telling their central banks to target low inflation, Singapore went in the opposite direction. It decided its monetary policy should aim to provide stable exchange rates, reducing the risks for industries competing in global markets. The Monetary Authority of Singapore built up a large war chest it could use to prevent the markets taking the dollar outside its comfort zone.

It is the polar opposite of the policy successive Australian governments and the Reserve Bank adopted when they allowed the mining booms to send the Aussie dollar skyrocketing, at the cost of firms competing in global markets. From the start of the first mining boom in 2004, Australia’s manufacturing output per head slumped by an astonishing 25 per cent over the next fourteen years, as the inflated dollar made otherwise viable firms uncompetitive.

Even now, on the IMF’s estimates, Australia’s price level is the seventh-highest in the world, comparable to prices in Scandinavia and remote Pacific islands. By contrast, Singapore’s dollar has been held at levels that keep down production costs. The US dollar buys 83 per cent more goods and services in Singapore than it does in Australia.

This did not happen by accident. The best chapters in Koh’s book — including Peter Wilson’s chapter on monetary policy, and Gopinath Menon’s on transport policy — provide a quick sketch of the choices policymakers faced, and why they chose the policies they did. I wish the book had fewer, longer chapters that might have explained the same process in other areas; some former policymakers who contributed chapters used their pages simply to pat themselves on the back.

Vasagar sums up lessons from Singapore’s success that we should never forget. “Singapore works because it appoints diligent and talented people to positions of leadership,” he concluded. “The system roots out corruption. Its leaders are unabashed about stealing effective ideas from elsewhere… There is a strong emphasis on managerial ability rather than effectiveness at campaigning or winning battles of ideas.”

And that is the link between Singapore’s advanced economy and its retarded democracy. Its ministers don’t need to worry about campaigning or trying to win the popular argument, because the system makes them electorally invulnerable. And so, as Lee Kuan Yew put it memorably in his 1986 National Day speech, “We decide what is right — never mind what the people think.”

The common theme of the books by Vasagar, George and Chua is that Singapore’s leaders need to cast off that mindset. The rule of Goh Chok Tong and Lee Hsien Loong has softened the way Singapore’s authoritarianism is applied, but without changing its fundamental role. The state is just as powerful as it was twenty years ago. The people are just as powerless.

Every institution with power in Singapore is effectively an arm of the government. There is no free press: the media is either government-owned or controlled by the government’s right to appoint its boards, and the opposition has little access to it. There is no independent judiciary; no minister has ever lost a defamation case in Singapore’s courts. There are no trade unions independent of government. The relatively few NGOs must operate warily to avoid incurring the wrath of the ministers and officials whose decisions they comment on.

There is no right of assembly: to hold a meeting of five or more people requires a permit from the police. There is no ombudsman, no charter of human rights, no freedom of information legislation. Singapore has world-class engineering infrastructure, but little of the infrastructure of democracy as we know it.

It does have free elections. But even they are held on boundaries drawn up by the government to maximise its chances, including a strange system of dividing most of the city into seventeen winner-take-all wards electing four or five candidates on a single ticket. (That partly backfired at last year’s election when the Workers’ Party won two of the wards, and opposition slates came close in two others.) And those elections are held in an environment in which the government has all the power, and has shown ruthlessness in using it to maintain its control.

Cherian George cites a telling example. In Europe, Australia and elsewhere, governments have been grappling with ways to deal with fake news and baseless slanders on the internet. Singapore has acted — but solely to give the government the right to require Facebook and the rest either to post its response to any online posts it considers inaccurate alongside the original comment, or to remove the posts. Only the government is protected against fake news, and only it can decide what is fake news.

Initially, the government allowed debate on the fake-news legislation. But when it appeared it was losing the argument — with even the publishers of the Straits Times urging that an independent regulator rule on disputes — it cracked down. The debate suddenly ended, critics were shut out of the media, and their patriotism was questioned by government MPs. George adds: “Such nationalist dog whistles unleashed troll attacks, in a style reminiscent of… populist movements overseas.”

Why doesn’t the government trust Singaporeans with the freedoms people have in countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the democracies of Europe, America and the South Pacific? George argues that most Singaporeans would re-elect it anyway, because they think it’s mostly doing a good job. Perhaps it is the lack of crisis that explains its refusal to open up: since it likes having all the power, and faces no threat of defeat, why bother with popular reforms?

George cites another example: the succession. Lee Hsien Loong will turn seventy in February, and has had serious health issues. In the previous parliament, one of his two deputy prime ministers was a widely admired Tamil economist-turned-politician, Tharman Shanmugaratnam. Chosen by his global peers to chair the ministerial committee overseeing the International Monetary Fund from 2011 to 2015, Tharman was seen by Singaporeans as a progressive reformer. A poll in 2016 found 69 per cent of Singaporeans would support him to be prime minister, twice as much as any other candidate. Why not do so?

“Tharman is uniquely equipped to guide Singapore,” George writes. “He is a world-class policy wonk who also happens to be extremely popular. He has won over the public, not with empty rhetoric or simplistic solutions, but through his palpable sincerity in wanting to build a country where people are treated with dignity and (their needs met), whether those needs are economic or more intangible.”

But to appoint a Tamil as prime minister of a predominantly Chinese country? It was too much for the People’s Action Party. In late 2018, Lee announced that Tharman, then just sixty-one, would step down to become senior minister, and the new deputy prime minister — effectively the heir apparent — would be fellow minister Heng Swee Keat. Too honest for his own good, Heng later told a university forum that the older generation was not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister.

It was a near-fatal misreading of a proudly multiracial people. At the 2020 election, Heng almost lost his seat, while Tharman’s slate won the highest vote in the country. A year later, Heng stepped down, and the succession is now unclear. Another opportunity to move forward was lost.

Let’s close by noting three interrelated issues confronting Singapore’s society and government.

The first is common to all the new rich countries of Asia: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and even China. The workaholic culture and rising expectations that have fostered their economic success have also seriously eroded their fertility rate — so much that Chinese Singaporean women now give birth at the rate of just 0.94 babies over their lifetimes, and Indian Singaporeans 0.96. (Malay Singaporeans, who tend to be less well-off, have a far higher fertility rate of 1.82.)

The overall fertility rate of 1.10 is barely half the rate needed for zero population growth. It comes despite a hefty baby bonus: $8000 for the first two children of a marriage, $10,000 for subsequent ones. Falling fertility is a problem in Australia too, but at least our rate is 1.58 — a record low, but far higher than in any of our rich neighbours.

Doubtless other factors contribute. Singapore is far from having gender equality, low wages surely deter some would-be parents, and politicians and society frown on anyone having children outside marriage. But when women feel forced to choose between having a career and having children, increasingly they are giving priority to their career.

For Singapore, the risk of a falling population is exacerbated by a dirty little secret: the city hosts a vast underclass of “non-resident” workers on temporary visas. Some are in well-paid jobs (and resented by locals for that), but many others do dangerous or low-status jobs as construction labourers, factory hands and domestic servants.

There are about 1.5 million of them among Singapore’s 5.5 million people, more than a quarter of the population. But that was all I could find about them in the statistics. These workers reside in Singapore — the labouring men and factory workers often in crowded dormitories that have become an ideal environment for spreading Covid-19 — but they have no path to permanent residency and are expected to return to their home country when the job ends.

Vasagar tells us these temporary workers, mostly men from China, India and Bangladesh, and women from Indonesia and the Philippines, make up three-quarters of the construction workforce that builds Singapore’s world-class transport infrastructure and apartment towers, and most of the workers on its factory lines: relatively low-paid jobs that Singaporeans don’t want. The migrants the locals resent are the skilled ones who take the well-paid jobs they do want.

But as Chua Mui Hoong points out in Singapore, Disrupted, even the low-income workers put downward pressure on wages for locals in the lower half of the income range. She too wants a more democratic Singapore, and keeps trying to persuade ministers that giving the people more power would not see the country collapse. But she also crusades against what she sees as rising inequality in a once-egalitarian land where almost everyone lived in government-built flats, relied on public transport, sent their kids to the local school and had similar incomes.

That is not the Singapore of today. The government’s latest statistics show median wages for full-time workers range from $14,167 a month (including superannuation) for in-house legal counsel down to $2000 for factory hands and shop assistants, $1535 for baristas, $1400 for waiters and $1300 for office cleaners and the assistants at food and drink stalls. And that’s monthly pay, for full-time work, with 20 per cent of it going straight to your super account. It’s not much to live on.

Australia has its versions of these problems: the workaholic culture, the plunging birth rate, a policy of importing temporary workers rather than raising wages, and low incomes in many jobs. Singapore has excelled in devising solutions to economic problems. But political stagnation may be impeding its ability to solve social problems requiring subtle and flexible minds. •

Postscript: The prime ministerial succession became clearer in June 2022 when Lawrence Wong — profiled for Inside Story by Michael Barr — was named as Lee Hsien Loong’s successor.

The post The Singapore grip appeared first on Inside Story.

This and similar claims are based on five enduring myths:

Myth #1: The Australian government’s response to the Tampa determined the outcome of the November 2001 federal election.

No doubt, the government’s handling of the Tampa’s arrival persuaded many of those who three years earlier had voted for Pauline Hanson to return to the Liberal–National fold. But pre-election polls and analyses of the 2001 Australian Election Study strongly suggest that the 9/11 terrorist attacks played a greater role in the re-election of the Howard government.

Myth #2: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex constituted a radical departure from Australia’s established asylum seeker policies.

The introduction of extraterritorial incarceration and processing as part of the Pacific Solution and of pushbacks during Operation Relex were indeed new. But they followed a long succession of ever more draconian measures to punish people who had sought Australia’s protection, including the introduction of temporary protection visas and the isolation of asylum seekers in remote camps. Extraterritorial incarceration and pushbacks were simply the logical extension of policies of exclusion and deterrence that went back at least to the Keating government’s introduction of mandatory detention nine years earlier, if not to the Whitlam government’s resolve in 1975 to disembark Vietnamese boat arrivals into custody to be able to return them to their boat “for the purpose of departing them from Australia.”

Myth #3: The Pacific Solution and Operation Relex were innovative responses to irregularised migrants, in Australia and internationally.

The government’s response was not unprecedented. Other states had tried, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to prevent refugees and other irregularised migrants from entering their territory by deporting them to places where they were out of sight and beyond the reach of supporters and domestic courts. In 1940, Britain deported more than 1500 Jewish refugees who had tried to settle in Palestine to the British colony of Mauritius, where they were detained for several years at the Beau Bassin prison. The British government toyed with a similar approach in 1972, when it briefly considered deporting people of South Asian ancestry, who had been expelled by Uganda’s Idi Amin, to the Solomon Islands.

But Australian policymakers in 2001 probably looked for inspiration not to Britain but to the United States, and to its policy of interdiction, in the 1980s, and then of interdiction and offshore detention, in the early 1990s. This policy was mainly directed at Haitians trying to reach the American mainland. From 1991, those interdicted by the US authorities in the Caribbean were incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.

Myth #4: Australia’s response to asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa’s arrival has served as a blueprint for European asylum seeker policies.

Over the past twenty years, the Australian government has promoted its “solution” in Europe, with senior bureaucrats regularly trying to convince their European counterparts of its advantages. In some instances, the arguments were well received.

Some European politicians have tried to persuade their governments and the European Union to establish processing and detention facilities in other countries. Advocates of policies reminiscent of the Australian approach have included, among others, the German interior minister Otto Schily, a Social Democrat who in 2004 proposed to establish extraterritorial camps for asylum seekers, and the Danish Social Democrats, who since 2018 have sought to introduce laws to transfer all asylum seekers arriving in Denmark to a third country.

Pushbacks, too, have occurred at the European Union’s external borders, most recently in Poland, Croatia and Greece. And on 1 December, the European Commission put forward proposals for a temporary suspension of established asylum procedures at the borders of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

But although currently all European governments bar three —Germany’s, Portugal’s and Luxembourg’s — would like the European Union to adopt harsher measures to stop prospective asylum seekers from reaching Europe, Australia’s response has thus far not been emulated. This is because European governments are bound by domestic and European refugee and human rights law that prevents them from copying outright Australia’s flouting of international law. Or at least, it means that when European governments do violate the rights of irregularised migrants, they risk being called to account, if not in domestic courts, then in the European Court of Human Rights. In 2012, for example, the court found in the landmark Hirsi case that Italy had violated European law by turning back some 200 Somali and Eritrean irregularised migrants to Libya.

In Australia, by contrast, the absence of constitutionally enshrined human rights has allowed the government to introduce legislative changes whenever domestic courts, including the High Court, have objected to the country’s punitive asylum regime.

It’s worth noting that those who want European governments to follow the Australian example all the way tend to belong to the far right. Katie Hopkins, rather than Otto Schily, is representative of those suggesting that the Australian “solution” ought to be copied. From a European perspective, the Australian government’s response to irregularised migrants arriving by boat is extremist — and baffling even for many of those on the political right.

Myth #5: The cruel treatment of asylum seekers in Nauru and on Manus effectively deterred potential sea-borne arrivals.

The policies of deterrence caused great harm to the detained asylum seekers, were extremely costly — and were largely ineffectual in terms of their ostensible aim. Boats with asylum seekers continued to arrive after those rescued by the Tampa had been deported to Nauru. But the Howard government must have known that deterrence on its own does not work, since it had tried for several years and without much success to deter prospective asylum seekers by turning detention centres on the Australian mainland into veritable hell-holes. It was only when customs and navy ships physically prevented asylum seekers from reaching Australia that the boats stopped coming. Similarly, it was the Abbott government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, rather than the reopening of Nauru and Manus, that persuaded irregularised migrants of the futility of boarding a boat bound for Australia.

But the policies of deterrence were also successful in that they served to appease an anxious Australian public. And arguably that has been their main rationale all along.

The Tampa affair is nevertheless extraordinarily significant — not because it represented a turning point back then, twenty years ago, but because of how it has been remembered — indeed because it has been remembered as a turning point.

Turning points in history — the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, for example, or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 — are seemingly singular events. In the most extreme case, that event is reduced to a single shot, as if the broader context were a distraction that needed to be blotted out. Thus the fact that Gavrilo Princip killed not only the Austrian heir presumptive, but also his wife Sophie, has been largely erased from collective memory. Even more important, what happened before becomes part of an amorphous pre-history that cannot compete with the era heralded by such pivotal events.

The focus on a singular event is problematic when we try to understand what caused the first world war, for instance. But it is even more problematic when the significance of a particular event is overstated.

Because we remember the moment the Tampa sailed into Australian waters as a new beginning that delineated a pre-historical past from our present, we tend to forget that pre-2001 policies of exclusion reach back to the early days of the Australian nation-state. We also tend to pay too little attention to the history of mandatory and potentially indefinite immigration detention that began under the Labor government in the early 1990s.

We don’t remember that in the 1960s Australia pushed back refugees from Indonesian-controlled West Papua across the border of the Territory of Papua and New Guinea without allowing them to lodge an application for protection, and that those who were permitted to remain in the Australian territory were only given temporary protection visas. We don’t remember that some of those permissive residents were isolated in a camp on Manus in the late 1960s.

We don’t remember that the mantra “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” far from being invented by John Howard, consistently accompanied twentieth-century Australian politics. In 1934, for example, Robert Menzies, then attorney-general in the Lyons government, declared in parliament: “We have, as an independent country, a perfect right to indicate whether an alien shall or shall not be admitted within these shores.”

We don’t remember that the 2001 election campaign was not the first in which a major party tried to appeal to, and stoke, Australian fears of seaborne arrivals. In 1977, the Labor Party tried to use the spectre of Vietnamese “boat people” to gain an electoral advantage. It was then that the term “queue jumper” made its first appearance, employed by none other than Gough Whitlam. Labor’s scare campaign was unsuccessful — but who is to say that Howard would have been successful in 2001 if it hadn’t been for the threat of terrorism?

The Howard government’s response to the Tampa is widely considered a cynical ploy to win the November 2001 election. The decision to board the Norwegian container ship may indeed have been informed by the government’s poor performance in the polls. But there is more to the Tampa affair’s historical context than the Newspoll results of July and August 2001.

That context also includes the screening of the Four Corners documentary “The Inside Story” on 8 August. It showed footage shot with a camera smuggled into the Villawood detention centre. The footage, which featured Shayan Badraie, a deeply traumatised Iranian child, had a huge impact at the time, and immigration minister Philip Ruddock was initially unable to say anything that would counter it. The government risked losing control of the narrative about asylum seekers and border protection. The response to the Tampa — and, even more so, the children overboard affair — were also attempts to regain that control.

The Tampa affair has been significant because the five myths that surround it have been so enduring. The idea that the Tampa’s arrival decided the 2001 election has served as an excuse for Labor to go along with the Coalition’s policies for most of the past twenty years. Maybe key Labor leaders really have been convinced that asylum seekers are always foremost on voters’ minds when they cast their vote; certainly this “myth that grips a nation” has allowed Labor leaders who are comfortable with the Coalition’s border policies to say that they would have adopted a different stance but could not because it would have resulted in electoral suicide.

If the boarding of the Tampa by Australian special forces on 29 August 2001 was not as significant an event as is commonly assumed, then it makes sense to ask: was there anything else, in terms of Australian responses to migrants in general and refugees and asylum seekers in particular, that was more significant?

Yes, there was. Here is my selection of six days that shaped the nation.

The most pivotal date is 1 January 1901, the day the Australian Constitution entered into force — not because of what the Constitution says, but because of what it does not include: a bill of rights. Australia’s lack of such an instrument has determined not only refugee and asylum seeker policies but also the public discourse about these policies.

Australia embarked on a particular trajectory right after Federation, with the passage of two pieces of legislation on 12 December 1901: the Pacific Island Labourers Bill, which provided for the deportation of Pacific Islanders who had been brought to Queensland as indentured labourers to work on the cane fields, and the Immigration Restriction Bill, designed to ensure that only Europeans would migrate to Australia, which became the legal cornerstone of the White Australia Policy.

These were not the only pieces of legislation intended to deport certain Australian residents and exclude particular groups of prospective immigrants. The Labor Party’s first major contribution was the Wartime Refugee Removal Act 1949, which provided for the deportation of non-European refugees brought to Australia during the second world war, regardless of whether they had Australian families. And then, of course, came the numerous amendments to the Migration Act under Labor and Liberal prime ministers over the past thirty years.

The introduction of mandatory detention was another key moment. But the Migration Amendment Act 1992 was but one of many legislative changes designed to ensure that unwanted arrivals could be detained and then deported. So let me opt for another, less well-known piece of legislation that predated the introduction of mandatory detention: on 21 June 1991 parliament passed the Migration Amendment Bill 1991, which allowed the authorities, among other things, to indefinitely detain one particular individual: a Cuban refugee it had deported earlier that year but had to accept back into Australia because no other country was willing to take him.

But Australia’s response to forced migrants has been contradictory — and that too is often forgotten when we imagine Australian history as going one way until August 2001 and another way thereafter. Here are three dates that could anchor an alternative narrative: On 22 August 1945 Arthur Calwell — the same Calwell who was later responsible for the Wartime Refugee Removal Act and who in 1972 objected to Australia’s accepting a handful of refugees from Uganda because they had the wrong skin colour — decided that Jews who had survived the Holocaust and who had relatives in Australia were welcome to settle there even if they did not meet the usual entry requirements.

On 19 June 1975 Gough Whitlam — the same Whitlam who did not want Vietnamese “boat people” to enter Australia because they were supposedly jumping a queue — announced that Australia had selected Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong for resettlement. What he did not say was that this selection represented a new beginning because for the first time Australia took in refugees foremost on humanitarian grounds.

On 29 July 2008 then immigration minister Chris Evans gave a talk at the ANU in which he outlined the Rudd government’s far-reaching changes to the way it would respond to asylum seekers. Admittedly, these changes were shortlived. But they are worth mentioning, not least to debunk the idea that our present began in August 2001 and has seamlessly continued since the day the Tampa appeared off Christmas Island. •

This is an extended version of a talk delivered on 2 December at the 2021 Australian Historical Association conference.

The post Fake history appeared first on Inside Story.

In one sense, this view has underpinned a foreign policy that is overtly committed to advancing human rights through multilateral institutions and bilateral dialogues, and that views human rights both as intrinsic goods and as a foundation on which peace and prosperity are built. It is a foreign policy that ultimately saw Australia win election to the Human Rights Council (2018–20), engage as an enthusiastic participant in assessing the human rights performance of member states through its Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, process and emerge as a vocal advocate for a range of issues including gender equality, abolition of the death penalty, freedom of expression, and the establishment of strong national human rights institutions.

Yet Australian foreign policy is also marked by a deep reluctance to impose values on others, to take consistent and decisive action against countries that systematically violate their populations’ human rights, or to speak up against some of the world’s most egregious abuses. Preferring quiet diplomacy to overt criticism, Australia’s self-avowed pragmatism has earned it a reputation for being soft on human rights, for letting economic interests override democratic principles, and for signalling tacit acceptance of repressive regimes that routinely violate human rights. It has been accused of “losing its voice” on critical issues heard the Human Rights Council, such as the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya population of Myanmar, where it recognised the “complex challenges” faced by Myanmar while other states openly condemned the actions as appalling human rights violations.

Partway through its tenure on the Human Rights Council, Foreign Minister Marise Payne reiterated Australia’s democratic commitment to human rights in its foreign policy: “Democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom and the right to all to dignity and respect — these values have guided Australians for generations. And these are the values which Australia as sought to promote as a member of the UN Human Rights Council.”

The response from much of the human rights community, including Human Rights Watch, was not exactly complimentary. As its Australian director, Elaine Pearson, argued, “Australia should treat its membership in the UN Human Rights Council as both an opportunity and a responsibility to be a leader in defending human rights abroad and at home… Promoting human rights values includes publicly raising issues with foreign leaders, not just making generic statements of concern in Geneva.”

Yet, as Australia’s term was coming to a close, it was to generic statements that Payne turned once again, highlighting the “gravity of the challenges posed to the international human rights system” and raising concerns over the treatment of minorities in Xinjiang, as well as human rights violations in North Korea or Myanmar’s Rakhine State, and national security laws in Hong Kong, Venezuela, Syria, and Yemen. Notably, these situations were all posed as issues still in need of redress, presumably by the new incoming members of the Human Rights Council. Her comments also came as Australia was facing significant criticisms for its own human rights record.

Australia’s most recent UPR in 2021 provided a decidedly mixed assessment of its human rights performance. On the positive side, the Human Rights Council working group welcomed “progress made in the realisation of human rights” in Australia since its 2015 review, highlighting its ratification of the Optional Protocol on the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2017 and, more recently, the development of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

More critically, however, the UPR also raised concerns over Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, First Nations peoples, and children. Among its key recommendations were: ending the mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers to meet Australia’s obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention; raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from ten to at least fourteen, in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and promoting the rights of Indigenous people, reducing discrimination and inequality, and taking measures to address the high rate of incarceration among First Nations people.

In response, the Australian government accepted many of the working group’s recommendations “to reduce the overrepresentation of First Nations people in the criminal justice system” but roundly rejected calls to end mandatory detention of asylum seekers and to prohibit the detention of refugee and asylum seeker children. It noted that the age of criminal responsibility is an issue on which the states must also have a say, referring to Australia’s federal political structure to deflect and defer the matter. It also rejected recommendations for the ratification of several international human rights instruments, including the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and their Families, the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and the Optional Protocol on the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. These recommendations had previously been made and rejected during the 2015 UPR process.

Despite its active commitment to monitoring other states’ human rights practices through multilateral institutions, Australia has been reluctant to implement recommendations made by those same institutions concerning its own performance. After its first UPR in 2011, the Australian Human Rights Commission reported that although the Australian government accepted the vast majority of recommendations issued, less than 10 per cent of them were actually implemented in the required timeframe. With a similar response to its second UPR in 2015, the UN Human Rights Committee castigated Australia for its “chronic non-compliance” with the committee’s recommendations and criticised its habit of picking and choosing which international human rights laws and treaties to follow. The committee’s vice-chair, Yuval Shany remarked in this regard that Australia’s behaviour is “incredible for a country that claims to have a leading role in global human rights.”

What explains Australia’s at times contradictory, often hypocritical, and perennially uncomfortable engagement with the global human rights regime? Why is Australia so uptight and uncomfortable about human rights? And what can Australia do to improve its international human rights reputation and relationships?

Uptight and uncomfortable

In 1996, Prime Minister John Howard revealed his wish for Australians to be comfortable and relaxed about three things: their history, their present and their future. Two decades on from his year 2000 deadline, this continues not to be the case. Where human rights are concerned, Australia is deeply uncomfortable about all three. And that is as it should be. Australia should not be relaxed or comfortable about its past, present or, given its current trajectory, future human rights performance.

This is not to suggest that Australia has not made many positive contributions to the global human rights regime or that its human rights record has been consistently abominable. It is also not to overlook the incredible contributions that many well-respected Australians have made to the development and management of the international human rights regime. But it is to suggest that past and present injustices that Australia fails to acknowledge and fails to address shape its engagement with the international human rights regime and are likely to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Those injustices have tended to centre on issues of immigration, whether by migrant workers or asylum seekers, and the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous population. In this sense, Australia’s most recent UPR simply echoes concerns about its human rights practices that have been raised in the international community and at home since the middle of the nineteenth century.

The reason for this sense of discomfort can be explained, at least in part, in the overriding dominance of two key concerns that underpin Australia’s understanding of human rights, its engagement with other members of the international community and with the international human rights regime: unity and prosperity. These concerns emerged in the settler colonial politics and foreign affairs of the 1830s and, although they have at times worked in concert and at others sat in tension with one another, they continue to mark Australia’s foreign policy and engagement with human rights.

The past

Two among many similar issues demonstrate how these dual concerns helped lay the foundations of Australia’s engagement with human rights in its foreign affairs: the so-called “Chinese question,” centred on the influx of Chinese immigrants to try their luck on the Australian goldfields and, later, make inroads into trades like cabinetmaking; and the importation of South Sea islanders to work as indentured labourers, primarily in Queensland’s sugar industry. In both cases, basic early ideas of human rights, which centred on liberty, freedom of movement, free will and benevolence (freedom from harm) came into direct contention with the pursuit of national unity and prosperity. In both cases arguments in favour of immigration restriction centred on fears that increased non-white immigration would be detrimental to white wages and businesses, as well as the idea that social and cultural unity required racial homogeneity.

In the Chinese case, supporters of immigration restriction who cast aside arguments defending the human rights of Chinese migrants found themselves labelled as “enemies of human rights.” Yet, even then, tensions between human rights and other priorities remained. As an article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 9 October 1860 explained:

[W]e believe the colony is… outraging humanity by its treatment of this race; but we see far less injustice in telling them that they shall not dig for gold… We believe there are sacred rights which belong to human beings, among them is the right to go anywhere in search of honest subsistence… [W]e wish there were not a Chinese in the colony… But in our opinion the defence of the rights of a persecuted race is the sacred duty of every enlightened man, and especially of every advocate of liberty.

In short, while even some supporters of human rights were reluctant to extend those rights to Chinese immigrants, the dominant position in the Australian colonies maintained that economic and social interests overrode the universal application of human rights.

Where the importation of South Sea islander labourers was concerned, arguments on both sides of the debate afforded economic interests a prominent place. While critics of the practice argued that the establishment of a cheap labour force would have a detrimental effect on white wages and employment opportunities, supporters maintained that cheap labour was necessary to guarantee the viability of the burgeoning sugar industry. Human rights also formed part of the debate. Replicating arguments used by British abolitionists to campaign against unjust labour practices after the formal abolition of slavery, local and international critics routinely cast the Pacific Islands labour trade as a form of “incipient slavery” because of the prevalence of kidnapping and deception among recruiters, physical abuse suffered by recruited islanders, and disregard for their right to liberty.

The right to liberty formed a key part of the judgement tendered by Justice Lutwyche in one of the few blackbirding cases (R v Coath) to be heard in a court of law. The case centred on the actions of John Coath, captain of the recruitment ship Jason, which was sent out from Maryborough to procure workers for the Maryborough Sugar Company. As an article published in both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Courier on 15 March 1871 detailed, several Presbyterian missionaries stationed in the New Hebrides had accused Coath of engaging in slavery, taking young men and boys by force and, on at least one occasion, purchasing them from their chief.

Coath was duly charged with kidnapping and assault. His defence rested on the claim that he had not kidnapped the trafficked men, but had “saved” them by taking them from “islands inhabited by a savage and barbarous people” and bringing them “within the protection of English law.” Justice Lutwyche did not agree. “[W]hether they are civilized or not matters not,” Lutwyche wrote, in a judgement described as a “singular precedent,” “they have a right to liberty, which is inherent in all human beings.”

Yet for much of the nineteenth century the idea that Pacific islanders held the same universal human rights as the white settler population was swept aside in favour of arguments supporting the practice as a means of ensuring the cheap labour that was necessary to guarantee the prosperity of the sugar industry. At the turn of the century, as a fall in the sugar price and the movement toward federation saw the force of this argument begin to wane, it was overtaken, not by an ascendant notion of human rights but an overriding emphasis on social unity.

This idea was articulated most prominently by prime minister Edmund Barton in debate over the 1901 Immigration Restriction Bill, the centrepiece of the White Australia policy, in which he stated, “I do not think either that the doctrine of equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is basic inequality.”

This argument stood alongside perennial concerns over the economic impact of a potential influx of cheap Asian labour, and claims, such as that articulated by future prime minister Alfred Deakin, that “Unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia.”

This understanding of human rights did not only apply to would-be immigrants but was felt most acutely by Australia’s First Nations, who suffered well-documented violence, dispossession, discrimination and dehumanisation at the hands of the white settler community, actions for which the settler population faced criticism from as early as the 1830s. The ramifications of those abuses continue to be felt by successive generations of Indigenous Australians and, as its most recent UPR demonstrates, reverberate in Australia’s engagement with the contemporary international human rights regime. Along with Australia’s past immigration policies and treatment of South Sea islanders, these actions form part of a past that, inadequately acknowledged and redressed, limits Australia’s ability to lead on matters of human rights.

The present

Abundant evidence shows that the pursuit of unity and prosperity still shapes Australia’s engagement with the international human rights regime. One obvious place we find it is in the federal government’s 2017 foreign policy white paper. Across a range of issues, the white paper mentions prosperity a staggering eighty-seven times. While prosperity is often viewed as an end in itself, it is also coupled with other foreign policy objectives, including security, peace and human rights. Human rights, we are told, “underpin peace and prosperity.” While the paper professes Australia’s commitment to “advancing human rights globally” and acknowledges, again in the most generic of terms, that “[m]en, women and children have the right to fundamental freedoms and to live their lives with dignity,” the value proposition is posed in terms of stability, security and prosperity.

Unity is viewed through a slightly different lens than it has been in the past. The term itself has been replaced by the idea of social cohesion and coupled with multiculturalism in place of earlier views on race now deemed unacceptable. What has not changed is its close relationship with prosperity. The white paper tells us that “[b]y generating more and better paying jobs, a strong and flexible economy reinforces the social cohesion and resilience of Australian society.” It also continues to inform Australia’s approach to issues of migration and criticisms of its treatment of asylum seekers: “Without a well-managed migration program, the cohesion of our society could be damaged and community support for our humanitarian program would be unsustainable.” This argument was replicated in Australia’s response to the 2020 UPR, in which it rejected recommendations to bring its asylum seeker policies in line with its obligations under the Refugee Convention.

The future

So, what of the future? What can Australia do to improve its international human rights reputation and relationships?

First, Australia needs to confront its past. At the very least, this should entail making meaningful, considered and concerted efforts to acknowledge and redress the abuses and atrocities committed against South Sea islander and Aboriginal populations, under the direction of affected communities themselves. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for Australia to be a credible leader in the international human rights regime. This is not to say that only those countries that boast unblemished human rights records can comment on rights violations. For one thing, such countries do not exist. Rather, it is to point out that when a country like Australia professes to take on a leadership role in the global human rights regime while doggedly refusing to address the egregious injustices of its past or present, it undermines its own credibility.

Second, Australia must stop picking and choosing which human rights agreements, treaties and recommendations to uphold. As Human Rights Watch argues, it must deal with abuses raised in its most recent UPR, especially those related to its treatment of refugees, children and Indigenous people. Instead of “doubling down on policies that have caused immense harm to asylum seekers and have been repeatedly condemned by UN officials and other governments,” Pearson argues, Australia must uphold its responsibilities towards these people. It must also make serious efforts to reduce the rate of incarceration among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and stop hiding behind federalism to avoid assuming leadership on raising the age of criminal responsibility across all Australian jurisdictions. It should also stop dragging its feet on the ratification of international human rights treaties and agreements.

Third, Australia needs to take a long, hard look at the core underlying principles that direct its engagement with the international human rights regime. Is prosperity really its core national interest? And if it is, should it be? Perhaps more pointedly, is Australia’s perpetual pursuit of prosperity simply a way of justifying or sanitising greed? And if it is, how well does that sit with its professed commitment to universal human rights?

What do we mean by social cohesion? Does it signify a coming together or simply justify exclusion, marginalisation, the stifling of debate and the quashing of dissent? And does social cohesion require the sorts of policies it is said to justify? Would the humane treatment of asylum seekers in accordance with Australia’s international obligations really be damaging to social cohesion? And is that a society we actually want to be part of?

In short, improving Australia’s engagement with the international human rights regime means, first and foremost, taking a hard look at ourselves, at our past and our present, at who we are, what we value, and what sort of society we want to be. •

This is an extended version of a talk delivered on 22 November at a symposium to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Hamburg’s Polish Jews were part of a larger group of long-term German residents deported during what was called the Polenaktion. The Nazi authorities were responding to a law passed in Poland in March 1938 — and brought into force in October — that cancelled the citizenship of Polish nationals who had been living abroad continuously for five years or more. While it didn’t specify who those Polish citizens were and where they lived, it was clearly directed at Polish Jews living in Germany and Austria who, the Polish government feared, would move to Poland if their persecution by the Nazis intensified.

About 18,000 Polish Jews were expelled from Germany in late October 1938. Because the German authorities reasoned that the breadwinners’ deportation would compel their families to follow, the majority of them were men. Most deportees were taken to the Neu-Bentschen railway station, a few kilometres from the border, and then forced to walk to the Polish border town of Zbąszyń. “We were warned not to look back, but we heard the rattling of machine guns in the rear. The SS men threatened to shoot if anyone tried to stay behind,” a woman from Hamburg told a New York Times correspondent a couple of days after her deportation.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, rifle shots broke the silence. The people ran or dropped to the ground, where they were beaten and trod on by guards. Many were injured during the stampede. I lost my baggage, as did many others. There was no time to recover it.

The worst happened when we came to a ditch right on the frontier. There was a barbed-wire fence on the other side. We were pushed across it carrying children and those who could not move.

Far from welcoming its citizens, the Polish government protested against their expulsion and initially refused to accommodate them. Thousands of them, variously referred to as deportees or refugees, remained stuck in Zbąszyń, a town of fewer than 5000 people ill-equipped to handle such a large number of arrivals. Some were put up in barns and stables, others slept in open fields. A month after the expulsions, the New York Times correspondent observed their “strange, comfortless existence at Poland’s front gate and Germany’s back door — unable to move in either direction.”

Polish Jews after their arrival in Zbaszyn on 29 October 1938. Alamy

The Zbąszyń refugee camp stayed open until August 1939. A couple of weeks after that, the German army invaded Poland. Some of those deported in October 1938 were lucky, because they had been able to leave Poland before the war. They included a handful of unaccompanied minors who were allowed to migrate to Australia. Most of the deportees who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust.

The German government of 1938 wasn’t the last to try to inconvenience, if not destabilise, a neighbour by swamping it with refugees. Think, for example, of the incident in 1980 that became known as the Mariel boatlift, when Fidel Castro’s government encouraged — and in some cases compelled — about 125,000 Cubans unhappy with its rule and their own circumstances to leave for the United States. They included people considered to be socially undesirable —because they were gay, for example, or lived in psychiatric institutions or had been convicted of criminal offences.

The Mariel boatlift was designed to create problems for US president Jimmy Carter, who was committed to rescuing people from the clutches of communism but unprepared to accommodate such a large number of arrivals in a relatively short time and unwilling to resettle people who were considered socially undesirable from a US perspective.

Or think of Turkish autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attempt in February and March 2020 to put pressure on the European Union by bussing thousands of refugees living in Turkey to the Turkish–Greek border, where border guards told them to cross over into Greece. His ploy largely failed because the Greeks temporarily suspended the country’s asylum regime and deployed their military at the border to prevent refugees from crossing. The Greek government had the backing of the European Union, with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen declaring that Greece was Europe’s ασπίδα, or shield, gesturing towards its efforts to resist an Asian invasion of Europe 2500 years earlier.

Erdoğan’s use of irregular migrants to unsettle and blackmail a more powerful opponent — namely the European Union, for Greece was just the incidental target — was soon identified as an instance of “hybrid warfare.” For the US military analyst Frank G. Hoffman, who coined the term in 2007, hybrid warfare means the “blurring of modes of war, the blurring of who fights, and what technologies are brought to bear,” which “produces a wide range of variety and complexity.”

Vladimir Putin is a master of hybrid warfare. Employing mercenaries in one conflict, unleashing hackers or spreading fake news in another, the Russian government has become expert in using an array of non-conventional means to make life difficult for its adversaries. It, too, has used irregular migrants to put pressure on the West: in 2015 and early 2016 it encouraged refugees to enter the European Union via the Russian–Norwegian and Russian–Finnish borders, prompting US general Philip Breedlove, supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, to tell the US Senate’s Armed Services Committee: “Together Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.”

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, a Russian vassal, has emulated some of Putin’s tactics. Responding to sanctions imposed on members of his regime by the European Union, his government has opened up a route for irregular migrants to enter the EU via Belarus. Iraqis who had arrived in Minsk by plane from Baghdad began turning up at the Lithuanian border in June, ferried there by Belarusian authorities. By early August, some 4000 refugees had crossed the border. In mid August, Lithuanian border guards caught red-handed twelve members of the Belarusian security forces in riot gear who had crossed over into Lithuanian territory while they were pushing migrants across the border. When Lithuania fortified the crossing, Belarus began targeting Latvia and Poland.

People smugglers were quick to see the business opportunities created by the Belarusian government, and offered their services to desperate people hoping to be able to seek protection in the European Union. Those entering the EU via Belarus now include irregular migrants from Afghanistan, Syria, the Republic of Congo and other refugee-producing countries.

Passing by the memorial for Hamburg’s Polish Jews a couple of days ago, I was reminded that Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare hasn’t just had geopolitical repercussions but has also had an impact on the migrants he has “weaponised,” just as Germany’s actions had on the migrants forced to live in squalid conditions in Zbąszyń in 1938 and 1939. “The situation is undoubtedly complex, but it is hard to forget about the group of human beings stuck in no-man’s land,” Justyna Kajta wrote recently about the situation at the Polish–Belarusian border. “The unanswered question is: what will happen to them, and when?”

Hamburg’s monument to the 800 Polish Jews deported on 28 October 1938. Klaus Neumann

Much like Poland in 1938, the three EU member states that share a border with Belarus have resisted admitting people pushed across the border by the Belarusian authorities. All three have declared states of emergency, erected fences and deployed additional security forces at the border. Lithuanian and Polish border guards have also been accused of forcing irregular migrants back to Belarus before they can make asylum claims.

The focus in recent weeks has been on the border between Poland and Belarus. With police and border guards from both countries stopping people from leaving the immediate area, groups of migrants have been stuck in no-man’s land, without access to shelter, food, clean water or medical aid. At least four people have died, presumably from hypothermia.

In 1938 the world soon found out what was going on at Zbąszyń; in 2021, although we live in the age of mobile phones and citizen journalists, we know little about what’s happening at the Polish border. That’s because Poland has declared a three-kilometre exclusion zone around its border with Belarus, preventing journalists, lawyers and the representatives of refugee advocacy groups from talking to the people stuck there. We have only a sketchy impression of how many people have managed to slip into Poland, the circumstances of those caught between Poland and Belarus, and the means used by the security forces of the two countries to stop migrants crossing into Poland or going back to Belarus.

On 30 September, Amnesty International said that it had used “spatial reconstruction techniques” to track a group of thirty-two people from Afghanistan — twenty-seven men, four women and a fifteen-year-old girl — who crossed the Polish border on 8 August. Its analysis suggests that the group had camped on the Polish side of the border but been illegally pushed back to the Belarusian side. In each case, while they were technically in Poland or Belarus, they remained in no-man’s land.

The case of the thirty-two Afghan nationals had been brought to the attention of the European Court of Human Rights on 20 August. Five days later, in an exceptional interim ruling, the court told the Polish government to provide them with food, water, clothing, adequate medical care and, if possible, temporary shelter. But although the court told the Polish government that failure to comply with its interim measures might constitute a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, Poland has so far stuck to its guns, quite literally.

Poland has just extended its state of emergency — the first since the end of state socialism — for another sixty days. Defending the decision, the Polish government claimed that it had evidence of terrorists masquerading as refugees and had found a video stored on a migrant’s phone that depicted a sexual act involving a naked man and a cow. It subsequently transpired that the video has been circulating online for years.

The governments of all three EU member states have boasted of their ability to keep out potential asylum seekers. The Latvian authorities claim that they have turned back some 1400 migrants since 10 August and allowed only thirty-eight to enter. The Lithuanian authorities pride themselves on having repelled twice as many. On 28 and 29 September alone, Poland recorded 786 attempts to enter the country from Belarus, all of them unsuccessful.

The term “no-man’s land” acquired its prominence and much of its present-day meaning during the first world war, when it denoted the stretch of land between enemy trench lines. Having been shelled repeatedly, it was devoid of trees and buildings, making attempts to cross it hazardous. But it could also be a space where the war was temporarily suspended; at night, the warring sides occasionally allowed each other to retrieve the bodies of the wounded and dead. It could even, as in Victor Trivas’s 1931 film Niemandsland, be imagined as a utopian space where peace becomes possible.

But the no-man’s land occupied by the thirty-two migrants from Afghanistan tracked by Amnesty International has little in common with the space between the trenches in wartime:

In peace, No-man’s Lands are strips of field between the frontiers of the European countries, haunted by the living. No one crawls to the barbed wire at night, to fetch a dead comrade back. There is no comradeship among the survivors of this peace.

In this peace, Europe traces its lines of barbed wire through fields and hearts. Into this land between the frontiers the continent pushes the men it has no use for.

These are lines from Renée Brand’s novel Niemandsland, published in the original German in Switzerland in 1940 and then, a year later, as Short Days Ago in New York. Brand acknowledges no-man’s land’s connotations at the time while highlighting how different her Niemandsland — a literal rendering of “no-man’s land” — is from the wasteland between the trenches of the first world war.

Brand’s novel is set in the late 1930s, not long before the outbreak of the second world war. It features a motley group of people — “ministers and physicians, teachers and engineers, painters, writers, mothers, people in love, children” — stranded on a field between Germany and an unnamed European country. “This field is No-man’s Land,” the narrator explains; it is “outside.” The people inhabiting the Niemandsland are referred to as Niemandsleute — “No-man’s people” in the published English translation.

The group includes seven men, four women and eight children, one of them born in the no-man’s land. Some of them have been deported to this piece of land, others have made their own way there. Some have been persecuted as Jews, others have left or been deported from Germany for other reasons. Some were “simply men with some responsibility, the kind of men who were what we had always thought men should be.” They have in common that the unnamed European country outside whose borders they are camped refuses to admit them, and that they can’t or don’t want to return to Germany.

While Niemandsland’s protagonists don’t yearn for a lost home, they are not projecting all their hopes onto life in a country of refuge either. They simply want to be somewhere (rather than in the nowhere of no-man’s land), and don’t harbour any particular expectations about life on the other side of the border.

Brand drew on her own experience of being a refugee. Born in 1900 in Berlin, she studied in that city and in Freiburg but quit her studies when she married in 1922. When the Nazi party assumed power in Germany, Brand and her seven-year-old son emigrated to France. They moved to Switzerland in 1934, and from there, in 1941, to the United States. While in Switzerland, Brand returned to university, and completed a doctorate in German literature. In the United States, she reinvented herself, studying psychology and eventually practising as a Jungian psychoanalyst.

Niemandsland is Brand’s only published work of fiction. Its Swiss publisher thought the novel’s literary qualities raised it above most of the literature produced by émigré writers at the time, and it was well received when it first appeared in 1940. But in the mid 1940 the Swiss censorship authorities banned any displaying, advertising or reviewing of the book, presumably out of concern that Germany might consider it provocative. The ban was only lifted in August 1945. The novel’s English-language edition attracted favourable reviews — a reviewer in the Los Angeles Times marvelled that “Wonder is aroused that such lyrical intensity, such universal passion and pity and beauty could be encompassed in so brief a tale” — but has long since been forgotten.

The widely reported deportation of Polish Jews in late October 1938 may well have informed Brand’s narrative, if not prompted her fiction. But other groups of Jews, expelled from one country but unable to enter the country they were deported to, also found themselves stuck in no-man’s land. In late 1938, about 2000 Jews expelled from Slovakia to Hungary became marooned at the Slovakian–Hungarian border for several months. Earlier in 1938, sixty-eight Jews expelled from Austria’s Burgenland to Czechoslovakia had been confined for several months on a tugboat on the Hungarian side of the Danube River — an episode that inspired the 1938 play Das Schiff auf der Donau by the German writer Friedrich Wolf, who at the time was living in exile in France.

Both because of its literary qualities and because it hasn’t dated, Brand’s novel is in a different league from Wolf’s rather didactic play. It also brilliantly analyses the essential qualities of the kind of no-man’s land inhabited by forced migrants: it is no terra nullius, it isn’t fiercely contested (as in war) and its status is not fixed. It is a no-man’s land only for the Niemandsleute: only they are confined there.

As three examples show, refugees and stateless people are often stuck in no-man’s land. In an infamous case in 1992, Israel deported 415 Palestinians from the Occupied Territories to a no-man’s land at the Israeli–Lebanese border. In 2001, authorities in Uzbekistan deported more than one hundred ethnic Uzbeks who had fled their native Tajikistan in the course of that country’s 1992 civil war; when Tajikistan refused to admit them, in the words of reporter Bruce Pannier, they became “trapped in a small stretch of land between the two countries.” In 2016, Amnesty International drew attention to the plight of 75,000 Syrians who were said to be stranded at the Syrian–Jordanian border.

The space that housed Palestinian deportees at the border between Israel and Lebanon, or the ships adrift in the Andaman Sea in 2015 because no country wanted to accommodate their Rohingya passengers became no-man’s land because their inhabitants had been deprived of rights. No-man’s land isn’t sitting waiting: it only comes into being once people are abandoned to it and enclosed on it.

Brand puts it like this: “Between [Germany’s] far-flung frontiers it has become narrow, so that one has had to invent a No-man’s Land for those who have no room in there.” She highlights the transformation of refugees and deportees into Niemandsleute. “Only former people here,” one of her characters says, “Former ministerial counsellor, former judge. Former mothers, fiancées, sweethearts. And look: our former children are running along to get their soup. Former all of them. Former human beings.”

Brand’s novel was directed at a specific audience: “Americans and Europeans of the twentieth century.” She suggests that the book’s readers have been compromised, if only because they are unable to imagine what is happening to those banished from Germany, and are unwilling to raise their voices. Addressing the reader directly, she writes: “This face at the window, behind the curtain, doesn’t it strike you as familiar? Do you not recognise your own face, well hidden behind curtains, prying through panes as yet unbroken?”

Brand doesn’t allow her readers to be distant observers. Instead she implicates them in the novel’s events and thereby encourages them to take sides. As soon as they identify the predicament of the novel’s characters with that faced by forcibly displaced people today, today’s readers are similarly called to account. They too are prompted to ask themselves: am I not hiding behind my curtain, witnessing injustices without intervening? And if so, is it not my responsibility to act?

At the Belarusian–Polish border, some bystanders have been quick to lambast the Lukashenko regime for ferrying refugees to that no-man’s land. Individual European governments and the European Commission blame the government in Minsk for the migrants’ plight. On 29 September, the commission published a communication about a “renewed EU action plan against migrant smuggling,” and used it to condemn the role of “State actors in artificially creating and facilitating irregular migration, using migratory flows as a tool for political purposes.”

But there is little the European Commission can do to stop Belarus’s weaponisation of irregular migration. On 30 September, the EU partially suspended the visa facilitation agreement with Belarus, yet it’s doubtful that this will hurt a regime whose key members are already barred from entering the European Union.

Rather than demonstrating their outrage at Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare, the European Commission ought to concern itself with the illegal practices of its member states, including Poland. Von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners may be reluctant to do so not because of a likely backlash from the Polish government but, first, because other EU members have not done nearly enough to provide credible assurances to Lithuania, Latvia and Poland that the three countries won’t be left alone to deal with any migrants seeking asylum, and, second, because Poland is by no means the only EU member state accused of pushing back irregular migrants and violating human rights.

EU member countries that don’t share a land border with a non-EU country and can’t be easily accessed by sea from outside the EU have shown no sign of being prepared to accommodate people entering Lithuania, Latvia or Poland in search of protection. If they had, then those three Eastern European countries would have had little incentive to violate international and EU law and force migrants back across the Belarusian border, confine them in no-man’s land at the border, and restrict access to them.

Any condemnation of Polish practices would be hypocritical if it did not imply a condemnation of such practices in principle. Other EU member states too have been guilty of pushbacks and of violating the human rights of people trying to seek asylum. They include Croatia, Greece and Italy, not to mention the sordid saga of the EU’s collaboration with the Libyan “coast guard” to stop migrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

It’s little wonder that the European Commission has reserved its outrage for Lukashenko and approached the governments in Warsaw and Vilnius with kid gloves. Asked repeatedly during a press conference on 29 September how the commission viewed Poland’s pushbacks, EU home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson was only prepared to say that “the commission has several question marks.”

The following day, Johansson met with Polish foreign minister Mariusz Kamiński. If her tweets after the meeting are any guide, then the two sides agreed to disagree. He did not seem to be troubled by whatever question the commissioner put to him. “We agreed that Belarus’s actions must meet with a firm response from the member states,” he tweeted after the meeting. He assured Johansson that “Poland grants international protection to people whose life and health are at risk.”

“Europe… is this field here Europe? Or what continent is it?” asks one of Renée Brand’s protagonists, whereupon another responds: “There is no Europe any more. It has become a lie. Could it be true that men live as we live in the heart of Europe?”

No matter how you look at the Niemandsland, it is outside, Brand explains in the opening pages of her book. “Outside of moon and earth: in the sphere of total indifference.” Later, she seemingly allows her readers to object to the charges of indifference, of hiding their face behind the curtains, only to expose their hypocrisy:

You protest. No, you say, this is not your face. You intervened wherever it was possible. How did you intervene?

With both hands you have reinforced the boundaries against which the waves of despair were surging. You appointed committees to confer on how to relieve the stricken. Honorable men and women exerted themselves. Conferences were in session for days and days. Misery is in session for nights and nights.

And maybe fifty years from now, there’ll be a memorial for those who froze to death at the European Union’s eastern border. •

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Despite coming from a nation that prides itself on hard borders, many Australians have experienced the world as a porous and relatively borderless place. Until eighteen months ago, it was unfathomable that Australian citizens and permanent residents would be prevented from re-entering their own country. Or, indeed, that we would be prohibited from leaving it. Still more unthinkable was the idea of hard borders between states and territories.

For the many people whose families, lives and livelihoods crisscross internal and international borders, these new obstacles offer a glimpse of the experience of those who flee persecution or serious harm in their home countries and are blocked from reaching safety by administrative and legal barriers — barriers that can seem unfair, opaque, arbitrary, ever-changing and unresponsive to personal circumstances.

If we hadn’t realised it before, we now know that borders aren’t physical or geographic. They are legal and administrative constructs, created and controlled by governments. We also know that border closures don’t always benefit those for whom they are purportedly enacted.

As we have already seen this year in Myanmar, Hong Kong and now Afghanistan, conflict and persecution continue to shape patterns of movement in our region, just as Covid-19 has. So too, increasingly, will a changing climate and related disasters. To set our border policies as if these are not Australia’s problems, and can be pushed back indefinitely, is short-sighted and dangerous.

Somehow, we need to start preparing public sentiment for the introduction of more appropriate policies. The Covid-19 pandemic may provide the opportunity to do so.

For many Australians, the coincidence of disturbing footage from Afghanistan and the twenty-year anniversary of the “Tampa affair” has been particularly unsettling. It was back then, in August 2001, that the Howard government began building the most draconian asylum policy yet seen in Australia. Parts of our territory were “excised” from the migration zone to prevent people from claiming asylum; offshore processing was introduced; and the military was given new orders to intercept and turn back boats.

Since then, Australia has pushed back boats with little regard for the circumstances to which the people on board are returned. We have left people to languish in Nauru and Papua New Guinea until they disintegrate physically and mentally. We have detained people in prison-like conditions in Australia, despite the availability of less restrictive alternatives. And the “lucky” ones — those who are recognised as refugees and permitted to live in the Australian community — have been condemned to a life of rolling temporary visas shown to cause and exacerbate anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly in children.

This physical and psychological harm has been meticulously documented by private contractors, doctors and trauma counsellors. It has been noted with growing alarm by every independent human rights body to review Australian asylum practice. It has even been referred to the International Criminal Court — six times since 2014 — as amounting to crimes against humanity.

Increasingly, though, ordinary people are horrified, or at least discomforted, by where Tampa politics have led us. Nowhere is this more evident than in the national groundswell of support for the Murugappan family, driven by an unlikely source: the rural Queensland town of Biloela, where the family members lived until they were ripped from their home in a dawn raid.

The Murugappans’ young girls, both born in Australia but deemed “unlawful non-citizens” once their mother’s visa lapsed, have since grown up in detention. The youngest, Tharnicaa, was just eight months old when she was first detained. By the time she was two, four of her teeth were rotten and required surgical removal, apparently because of a lack of fresh food and sunlight in detention. Shortly before her fourth birthday, she was again rushed to hospital, this time with a suspected life-threatening infection. Many Australians, even those who have reservations about immigration, were disturbed by images of this child crying on a hospital bed as her older sister Kopika, herself just six, tried to comfort her.

As the support for the Murugappans makes clear, it is not a matter of “left” versus “right,” “idealists” versus “pragmatists,” or supporters versus opponents of refugees. Good people across the political spectrum and from all walks of life are speaking out about how Australia’s treatment of vulnerable people offends their sense of decency.

But the political space for reasoned debate on refugee protection has all but vanished. Battle lines have been drawn and the topic remains bitterly divisive. For many years, the outlook for a more humane approach has been bleak.

Or at least it was until Covid-19. The pandemic is the most significant global disruption to occur since the seismic political and social shifts that followed the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Just as those shifts shaped Australia’s handling of the Tampa affair and its aftermath, this pandemic may provide an opportunity to shape how we will approach asylum issues in the future.

In an election speech a few weeks after Tampa, John Howard delivered the refrain that has haunted Australian asylum policy for decades: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” It was bold, powerful, and yet untrue. Prior to the pandemic, no country had ever been able to totally control who arrived at its borders, or their mode of travel. But facts are not where the power of Howard’s statement lay. It lay in the concept — sold to and readily accepted by many — that our border needed to be “protected” and “defended” with an iron fist rather than simply managed in an orderly and humane way.

By using wartime language, enmeshing asylum policy with national security, and singling out asylum seekers arriving by boat, this approach framed maritime migration as a threat to be feared. It gave a false impression that there are two categories of non-citizens entering Australia: those who enter at airports and seaports with correct documentation and, by reason of having “done the right thing” administratively, pose no inherent national security threat; and those who arrive by boat without prior approval and without the proper paperwork.

Is this distinction accurate? Before 2020, thousands of people flew in and out of Australia every day with little or no active government decision-making. They did so because they were fortunate enough to hold the right passport. With eGates and other new technology, some may have entered and left Australia without a single word to a border official. The government would have no record of their background and circumstances, why they were here, or what they did during their stay.

By contrast, asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat are among the most closely vetted groups of non-citizens. In the words of Malcolm Turnbull, “We know exactly everything about them.” We scour their backgrounds and plumb the depths of their traumas as they undergo rigorous screening and refugee status processes. As they await decisions on their claims, almost every aspect of their lives is monitored and controlled by the government.

Where the individuals themselves can’t be found to pose a threat, attention shifts to the risk that would arise if “everyone” came. This fear of invading masses goes back a century or more, but in the past twenty years it has become accepted as truth, even by moderates and progressives. Across the political spectrum, there is a shared view that steps must be taken to deter people from making their own way to safety in Australia.

The reality is much more complex. Almost 60 per cent of the 82.4 million people displaced in 2020 remained within their own countries. Most of the rest are unlikely ever to end up on a boat to Australia, regardless of our policies, because we are too far away or they have already found a safe haven. The overwhelming majority of refugees stay close to home, in neighbouring countries and among other displaced compatriots.

For those who do seek safety further abroad, the risks inherent in being smugg-led across the sea are a powerful deterrent. And if they do reach Australian soil, they face a rigorous legal process to determine whether they meet the strict criteria for protection. The idea that deterrent policies are the only thing holding millions of people at bay doesn’t match the reality of displacement.

Nor does the humanitarian trump card that offshore processing has “saved lives at sea.” Cruel policies are justified as necessary to prevent people from getting on boats and potentially drowning, but there is little evidentiary basis for this defence. We know that offshore detention, for example, didn’t stop boats or save lives. Boat turnbacks may reduce drownings, but only to expose people to risks of death and serious harm elsewhere. The militant secrecy surrounding these operations makes it impossible to assess the full extent of the dangers to which people are returned, but we do know that people have been turned back only to face persecution and flee again.

Finally, drownings can’t be attributed only to the treachery of the sea and smugglers. Some governments delay complying with their obligations to render assistance to people in distress at sea in an attempt to avoid responsibility for looking after rescued asylum seekers. Journalist David Marr recently described how Australia did just that with the Palapa 1 (the passengers of which were rescued by the Tampa), with potentially fatal consequences. Australian navy officers have described to the ABC how unseaworthy asylum seeker vessels were left to founder because of pressure from Canberra. One incident resulted in “a line about seventy miles long of bodies” in the sea. Yet we rarely hear about the role Australian government decision-making plays in exacerbating the risks of maritime migration.

We don’t need to find new and workable “solutions” to the problem of boat arrivals. We need to dislodge boats from the centre of the debate and neutralise their political potency.

The best way to stop people from travelling via dangerous routes is to establish safe and legal pathways. Sufficiently large and targeted resettlement programs, together with generous support for the countries hosting large numbers of refugees in affected regions are the most effective ways to reduce the number of people risking their lives in search of safety.

Australia could establish protected entry procedures and expand the processing capacity of Australian officials abroad. And we could implement simpler meas-ures immediately. As Peter Mares wrote recently online in Inside Story, “border protection proceeds bureaucratically and out of sight.” Many people are denied visas if officials suspect they might apply for asylum after arriving in Australia. If that criterion had been removed, at-risk Afghan students and workers might have been able to fly safely into Australia long ago, rather than being caught in the chaos and violence engulfing Kabul airport and the rest of the country.

Even then, people might still arrive at the Australian border, by sea or by air, without seeking prior approval. So long as such arrivals are not spun for political gain, Australia could — with strong leadership — manage them in an orderly and humane way. We have the capacity to process large numbers of people fairly and efficiently, and to settle anyone entitled to protection. If arrivals by sea or air did happen to spike temporarily and put pressure on the system, assistance could be sought from other governments and global agencies.

Rather than punishing people already in Australia, we might audit existing asylum policies to see where changes need to be made. Critically, this would need to be an agile system, strengthened by its flexibility in the face of emerging challenges and ever-shifting international dynamics.

These suggestions may seem radical, but as the Kaldor Centre Principles for Australian Refugee Policy demonstrates, a renewed commitment to our international legal obligations would both improve Australia’s reputation as a good international citizen and a leader in human rights, and provide a stronger basis for cooperation between Australia and other countries on refugee protection issues, within the Asia-Pacific region and globally. Such an approach is feasible, and could be modelled on good practice from abroad and Australia’s own past experience. It is also in the national interest. Human mobility and displacement are realities that we should be able to manage in a sustainable way.

Other lessons can be drawn from the pandemic. Many millions of Australians have experienced hard lockdowns and are likely to have a newfound appreciation for the value of liberty. While some returned travellers lamented fourteen-day stays in relatively well-appointed hotel quarantine facilities, sick refugees were held for more than a year in close quarters in hotels and motels that weren’t designed for this purpose. In fact, Australia broke with international trends by increasing its immigration detention population by nearly 12 per cent in the first six months of pandemic.

Australians have also been separated from family members and friends abroad or interstate, or indeed in the same city, for indeterminate periods, not unlike the refugees who make it to Australia only to be told they will never be able to bring their spouses, children, siblings or parents to join them.

And the indiscriminate nature of Covid-19 is a reminder that we are all in this together. The wellbeing of our society as a whole depends on that of each individual member and group. Viruses do not differentiate on the basis of immigration status or background, and developments elsewhere — particularly new Covid-19 variants — can directly affect daily life here. Our reinforced interconnectedness reveals that isolationist tendencies are no longer appropriate or sustainable, if ever they were.  Unfortunately, recent statements from the prime minister and his ministers indicate that they have no interest in using these pandemic lessons to rethink Australia’s refugee policies. While the internet was awash with frantic scenes from Kabul airport, we saw Scott Morrison admonishing Afghans who didn’t come to Australia “the right way” and sending “a very clear message to people smugglers in the region that nothing has changed.”

Until our leaders are ready to catch up, the rest of Australia might consider slowly, tentatively, starting to unpick the Tampa’s legacy and chart a better way forward. If managed properly, this “once-in-a-lifetime” pandemic could offer a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a new approach to refugee policy — one that is not only more humane and just, but also more orderly and sustainable as we tackle the challenges of a post-pandemic world. •

The post Unpicking the legacy of the Tampa appeared first on Inside Story.

On the morning of Sunday 26 August 2001 the Tampa, a Norwegian freighter, diverted from its route from Fremantle to Singapore to go to the aid of a small Indonesian boat, the Palapa 1, adrift in heavy seas with a failed engine. The Tampa had been alerted to the boat’s plight by the Rescue Coordination Centre at the Australian Maritime Safety Authority in Canberra, and was guided most of the way to the scene by a plane from Coastwatch, the surveillance arm of the Australian Customs Service.

By the time the Tampa reached the wooden vessel it was breaking up in the swell. Australian authorities had warned the Norwegian vessel to expect to find eighty or more people aboard. But by the time the dangerous high-seas rescue was complete, the Tampa’s twenty-seven crew members had been joined by another 438 people — 433 asylum seekers, all but nine of them from Afghanistan, and the Palapa’s five Indonesian crew.

In responding to Australia’s call, captain Arne Rinnan and his crew not only demonstrated great courage, they also observed a foundational principle of seafaring enshrined in the Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea — “a general obligation for masters to proceed to the assistance of those in distress.” Yet they got no thanks from the government in Canberra.

When the Tampa reached the Palapa, it was only about four hours from Christmas Island. But with the distressed boat technically in the Indonesian maritime rescue zone, Captain Arne Rinnan was directed to land the rescued asylum seekers at the Indonesian port of Merak, more than twelve hours away. As he steered towards Java, an agitated delegation came to see him. The five men were threatening that people could jump overboard or riot if the Tampa did not change course. Recalling the moment in a feature to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tampa affair for Radio National’s The History Listen, the vessel’s chief officer, Christian Maltau, described the men as rude and very aggressive: “We never felt really threatened, but everything on board was very confusing.”

Concerned for the safety of all on board, Rinnan consulted Australia’s search and rescue authorities. He was advised that, as master, it was up do him to decide what to do. This is another key plank of the international convention: “the role of the Master in exercising his professional judgement over decisions necessary to maintain the security of the ship.”

Erring on the side of caution, Rinnan opted to make for the closest port, on Christmas Island. Maltau told the History Listen that it was effectively a declaration that the Tampa was “not seaworthy” — that it wasn’t safe for the cargo ship to cross a large stretch of ocean equipped with lifeboats and equipment for just thirty crew and twelve passengers when there were more than ten times that number of people on board.

As the Tampa neared Australian territory, Rinnan was again contacted by Canberra. This time it wasn’t the rescue authorities on the line but an immigration department official, who warned Rinnan that he risked prosecution for people smuggling if he brought the asylum seekers to Australian territory. The captain maintained his course for Christmas Island but stopped outside the twelve nautical mile limit that demarcates Australian waters. A stand-off ensued. At a lunchtime media conference on Monday 27 August, prime minister John Howard announced that the Tampa would not be permitted to land. Rinnan did not test this declaration but stayed put, requesting medical care for his rescued passengers.

The following day, having spoken to Rinnan, Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service assessed that there was a “mass situation medical crisis” on board and that “medical attention was urgently required.” Many people were dehydrated, and fifteen were unconscious, but the ship had depleted its supplies of intravenous fluids. There were women in the later stages of pregnancy, and some adults were on a hunger strike and suffering diarrhoea and abdominal pains. Among the sick was a child, a person with a broken leg, and many people with open sores and skin infections.

By that evening, with no help in sight, Rinnan renewed his appeal, this time signalling medical distress on board in the form of a “pan-pan” emergency call. The next morning, Wednesday 29 August, he repeated the call. Still no help came.

Finally, three days after the rescue, the master of the Tampa defied Canberra’s warnings and sailed towards Flying Fish Cove at Christmas Island. Prime minister John Howard despatched Australian Special Air Service commandos to take control of his ship, insisting that “it is in Australia’s national interest that we draw a line on… an uncontrollable number of illegal arrivals in this country.”

These were the events that gave rise to Australia’s policy of offshore detention for asylum seekers arriving by boat. Despite repeated assertions of Australia’s overall generosity towards refugees, the approach has been endorsed by both major parties for all but four of the past twenty years.

The Coalition was in office when the Tampa sailed into Australia’s political waters in 2001, but Labor backed the government’s actions at almost every turn, declaring it would not be “a carping opposition” in circumstances that required a bipartisan approach. Kim Beazley, opposition leader at the time, might recently have claimed that it was “a no-brainer intellectually and morally” to do everything possible to stop people embarking on such dangerous voyages, but the motivation had less to do with safety than with preserving Australian sovereignty. Howard captured the bipartisan mood in his ringing election declaration: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.”

The prominence of the argument that the offshore detention policy saved lives is more recent, and follows a series of tragedies including the drowning of fifty people in 2010 after their boat smashed into rocks off Christmas Island.

In hindsight, John Howard’s stand against the Tampa is seen as a political masterstroke that enabled him to overcome poor polling and guide the Coalition to a third successive election victory. Offshore processing is widely credited with “stopping the boats,” and the Tampa affair is remembered as a fundamental break with past policy. But none of these interpretations is entirely accurate.

Let’s start with the idea that Howard’s response to the Tampa won the election. He was behind in the polls at the time but had already clawed back considerable ground through the course of 2001 with targeted spending in marginal electorates, cuts to petrol excise, and generous handouts to retirees.

This is not to suggest that Howard’s stand against the Tampa wasn’t popular. Egged on by tabloid newspapers and talkback radio, a large majority of Australians supported his refusal to allow Rinnan to disembark the asylum seekers at Christmas Island, not least because, just prior to the rescue, three asylum boats carrying almost 1000 people between them had arrived within the space of six days.

So while it’s true that the sense of crisis and the polarising effect of Howard’s response to the Tampa worked to his electoral advantage, polling suggests that issues like health, education and jobs would have proved more decisive at the ballot box.

If any single factor sealed Howard’s electoral victory it was more likely to have been the 11 September terror attacks in New York and Washington. This is certainly the view put by defeated opposition leader Kim Beazley in The History Listen. As we have seen during the pandemic, moments of national crisis tend to benefit incumbent governments.

To scour media reports from the time is also to be reminded that Howard, whose instincts were aligned to the popular mood, was acting without a script and his improvised lines failed to find a receptive audience with much-needed international partners.

Australia first tried to send the Tampa and its rescued passengers back to Indonesia, but the plan was made public without even a preparatory phone call to Jakarta. Not surprisingly, Indonesia accused Canberra of megaphone diplomacy. In any case, there was no way that Rinnan could have sailed his freighter to Merak after arriving at Christmas Island. Rescuing the asylum seekers and continuing straight to Indonesia might have been an option, but setting out on a new voyage from a safe harbour was not. Even resupplied with food, water and medicines, the Tampa was neither equipped nor insured to make the journey with so many people on board.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, offered a compromise. If Canberra disembarked the asylum seekers and processed their claims in Australia then it would find countries willing to resettle anyone in need of protection as a refugee. (New Zealand and Norway agreed to help, and Britain and Canada were being consulted.) Australia rejected the offer.

Meanwhile human rights lawyers were preparing action in the Federal Court that could force the government to bring the asylum seekers ashore. In the first instance, Justice Tony North ordered the government to do just this, invoking the “ancient power of the Court… to protect people against detention without lawful authority.” The judgement was handed down on 11 September, hours before the attacks in New York and Washington. It was later overturned on appeal and never tested in the High Court. As with other details from the time, the litigation has largely slipped from view.

A week after the rescue, the headline in the Sunday Age read “Refugee Deal a Shambles.” In the Weekend Australian the previous day, Paul Kelly described the government’s handling of the Tampa as an “inept saga of crisis management” and expressed astonishment that John Howard went in “without any exit strategy.”

Yet the government was still exploring options and, Kelly noted, Australia’s diplomatic resources had been “fully mobilised.” Heads of missions around the region had been instructed to ask their host governments about the possibility of detaining and processing the asylum seekers on Australia’s behalf. This was the fix that became known as “the Pacific solution.”

At the time, Sue Boyd was high commissioner to Fiji, which was still working its way through the repercussions of a coup the previous year. In her recent memoir, Not Always Diplomatic, Boyd describes the government’s response to the Tampa as “an opportunistic and racist move” designed to win votes at the pending election. She says implementing the government’s directive caused her and her staff great distress. “I did not agree with the policy and was extremely reluctant to put the request to the poorer governments of Fiji, Tuvalu and Nauru,” she writes. “I also found the Pacific solution internationally embarrassing.”

Informal approaches were also made to Kiribati, Palau and even a recently traumatised East Timor, which had held its first-ever free elections under UN supervision on 30 August.

Defence minister Peter Reith eventually sealed an agreement with bankrupt Nauru, sweetened by $20 million in development assistance. Nauru didn’t even rate a separate line item in the Australian aid budget prior to the deal, instead sharing an annual sum of $10 million with five other small island states. New Zealand also offered support, agreeing to accept families and several unaccompanied teenage boys from the Tampa — a total of 132 people.

The assertion that offshore processing “stopped the boats” also falters when it runs up against reality. After the Tampa, a further twelve suspected illegal entry vessels, or SIEVs, arrived in Australian waters carrying 2126 passengers between them. A thirteenth — the so-called SIEV-X — tragically sank en route, with 353 lives lost.

It’s conceivable that news of the Tampa affair, detention on Nauru and the SIEV-X disaster helped to deter some asylum seekers in Indonesia from risking a boat journey to Australia. Indonesia also intensified its efforts to break the smuggling rackets and the Taliban were soon driven from power in Kabul, opening the prospect of displaced Afghans returning to their homeland.

But close reading of the Senate select committee report on A Certain Maritime Incident (better known as the children overboard affair) suggests that the decisive factor in deterring boats was Operation Relex — the deployment of naval vessels to force asylum seekers back to Indonesia. Between the arrival of the Tampa and the end of 2001, four vessels carrying a total of 502 people were returned. This news would have circulated quickly among asylum seekers contemplating the journey and would have undermined the promises of people smugglers.

This analysis is supported by research by Madeline Gleeson and Natasha Yacoub at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law. They show that Labor’s reintroduction of offshore processing in 2012 — designed to “send a message” to asylum seekers and people smugglers in Indonesia — failed to halt arrivals. The boats continued even after Kevin Rudd doubled down in July 2013, declaring that asylum seekers arriving by sea would have “no chance” whatsoever of settling in Australia as refugees.

As Gleeson and Yacoub conclude, the dramatic drop in boat arrivals came only “after Australia began maritime interceptions.” In short, they attribute the success in deterring boats to “changes in Australia’s engagement with vessels at sea” — namely “turnbacks and takebacks” — implemented under Operation Sovereign Borders, Tony Abbott’s equivalent of Howard’s Operation Relex.

The turnback operation remains active, with home affairs minister Karen Andrews declaring, in a video posted just eight days after the fall of Kabul, that the Australian government “is responding to the security situation in Afghanistan” and “Australia’s strong border protection policies have not — and will not — change.” Andrews warns asylum seekers not to attempt a boat journey to Australia: “You have zero chance of success.”

If turnbacks and takebacks are what stops boats, and the policy of interception remains in place, then there is no reason to keep refugees in Nauru or Manus. Offering permanent settlement in Australia or New Zealand would not restart the boats. The same can be said of refugees who have been transferred from Manus and Nauru to Australia on medical grounds, and for the thousands of refugees living indefinitely on temporary protection visas. As Robert Manne concluded years ago, while the naval blockade remains in place, the continuation of such policies amounts to “purposeless cruelty.”

The Tampa affair was undoubtedly a decisive moment in Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. But it didn’t so much overturn past approaches as build on them. I’ve described this elsewhere as a shift from a policy of deterrence by example to a policy of deterrence by force.

Mandatory detention, formalised by a Labor government in 1992, was a key plank of deterrence by example. Locking people up indefinitely in places like Woomera, Curtin and Port Hedland was meant to warn asylum seekers off travel to Australia. So were temporary protection visas, first introduced in October 1999, nearly two years before the Tampa.

The Pacific solution was simply an extension of the belief that restricting refugees’ rights would make Australia a less attractive destination. You might eventually have your case heard and find safe haven, but the process would be slow, circuitous, legally dubious, highly uncertain and very, very unpleasant. The decisive shift to deterrence by force came when the navy was deployed not just to intercept boats, but to turn or take them back to Indonesia.

This was not unprecedented internationally. The United States had used its coast guard to intercept and return “boat people” from Haiti.

With these policies, Australia contributes to ensuring that the vast bulk of refugees attempt to eke out an existence in the countries neighbouring their homelands, which often have the least capacity to provide for them. Pakistan and Iran can both anticipate new refugee flows from Afghanistan, and while we’ve all but forgotten about the 1.2 million refugees sheltering in camps around Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, this week marks the fourth anniversary of the mass exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar.

Meanwhile, countries like Australia continue to build higher fences, though the mechanisms are rarely as crude as sending out the navy. Generally, border protection proceeds bureaucratically and out of sight: visas are refused to anyone deemed likely to claim asylum; airline counter checks prevent travellers without a visa from getting on a plane; any airline that lands an inadequately documented traveller on Australian soil is penalised. It is these measures that drive vulnerable people to undertake dangerous journeys by boat.

If the Howard government hadn’t intervened on the Tampa, the boats would have kept coming, and probably in growing numbers. The increase in arrivals under Rudd and Gillard is evidence of that. This presents a dilemma for governments of any stripe — they are elected to serve the people, and voters want them to secure Australia’s borders and maintain an orderly migration program. Yet leaders could make a greater effort to explain that Australia’s obligations under the international refugee convention don’t disappear simply because they are inconvenient.

On the other hand, to argue that we should simply deal compassionately with anyone who manages to make landfall in Australia is to risk lives at sea and let money and smuggling networks determine who gets protection and who does not. If we were to go down that route, then we would be better to fly refugees from Indonesia to Australia by plane — but that would encourage more and more desperate people to move there.

The choices aren’t simple. But we do know that interception and turnback doesn’t solve the refugee challenge; it simply pushes it elsewhere and forces people to take other risks or endure lives in limbo. The policy depends for its success on Jakarta’s goodwill and would be unsustainable if the asylum seekers were Indonesian citizens fleeing a despotic regime or an upsurge in communal violence.

The real challenge is to work harder to build a coordinated regional response to refugee flows that treats displaced people with dignity and respect. If we committed the $1 billion-plus dollars a year we spend on offshore detention to supporting efforts in that direction, then who knows what we might achieve? •

The post A line in the water appeared first on Inside Story.

In the circumstances, it was a gratuitous comment. It was the policy of turning boats back, not temporary protection visas, that long ago stopped the people smugglers’ trade. But the prime minister was no doubt counting on his remarks playing well with voters.

On the ground in Afghanistan, Australia’s policies are having real-life affects. Amanda Hodge reported in the Weekend Australian on a conversation with a locally engaged agent of the Australian Border Force who spent four years persuading Afghans not to try to use the services of people smugglers to come to Australia. He is now in hiding from both the Taliban and dozens of angry and frightened men who followed his advice. His attempts over months to contact the Australian government for help have failed.

The Australian government’s role in perpetuating this “misery” is a reminder of the utter hypocrisy of Australia’s bipartisan refugee policy. Its rationale has always been to do what was popular, not what was right. This involved creating multiple myths that have unfortunately become embedded in public opinion.

One is that asylum seekers are a threat if they come by boat, yet no problem at all if they’re among the many more who come by air. The true difference is that the first attract media attention, while the second are largely invisible. The government calls the first illegals but not the second, but there is no such distinction under the Refugee Convention to which we purport to subscribe. And most of those who came by boat have been assessed as genuine refugees, desperate to flee despite the risks involved, as opposed to those who fly here and apply for asylum.

Another myth, exploded by the turmoil in Afghanistan, is that asylum seekers should form an orderly queue and wait patiently to have their cases considered by Australia. There has never been a queue, let alone an orderly one.

Few people in fear of their lives from the Taliban have the option of making it to a refugee camp in another country. Even if they could, their chances of being assessed, let alone accepted, are minuscule. Afghans can’t ask the Australian embassy for help — we have closed it.

Most of the Afghans who made it to Australia are Hazara. Long a persecuted minority in Afghanistan, they are ethnically distinct, and therefore visible, and mostly Shiite Muslims. They have been treated particularly brutally by the Taliban, who follow their own extreme brand of Sunni Islam.

One practice the Taliban adopted during the long war was to kidnap young Hazara men and conscript them into their fighting force. On occasions they would use them as human mine detectors, forcing them to walk ahead into landmined areas until they were blown up.

Is it any wonder that parents were so desperate for these men to escape that they pooled the life savings of extended families to pay people smugglers? The justification for Australia taking this trade away was that the smugglers extorted large payments from their customers and carried them in unseaworthy boats that regularly sank, drowning their occupants. Yet despite the well-known risks, the demand for their services never went away.

By stopping the people smugglers, the government boasts that it stopped the deaths. It didn’t: it simply wiped its hands of the problem and moved it elsewhere. People in fear of their life — which, by the way, is one of the criteria for being assessed as a refugee — will take any option available. When they were stopped from coming to Australia, some headed for Europe. Some drowned on the way, some suffocated to death in containers or trucks. Others remained stuck in Afghanistan, where they now await their fate.

Having joined the United States in prosecuting a twenty-year war that we lost, we should feel some moral responsibility for these people. Rather than condemning the evil trade of people smuggling, we should look for alternatives.

In the wake of the Vietnam war, where we had a similar obligation, Southeast Asian countries agreed to stop pushing Vietnamese boats with asylum seekers back out to sea in return for the United States, Canada and Australia accepting those assessed as refugees and Vietnam and Laos taking back those who were not. The result was that the vast majority of refugees were resettled and asylum seeker boats stopped coming to Australia.

It was not a popular move: we had not long before abolished the White Australia policy and had accepted few Asian immigrants. But the Fraser government accepted its responsibility anyway and secured the support of the Labor opposition. All the fearmongering about Asian ghettos and crime gangs turned out to be wrong or exaggerated.

There are no such signs of generosity of spirit this time. We are not expanding the existing refugee intake but instead offering to reserve 3000 places for Afghans, with the vague possibility of more in the future. Britain and Canada have offered to take 20,000 each.

The government’s default position is to accentuate the negative. Morrison muscled up to the people smugglers and presumably expects asylum seekers to wait in line at Kabul airport’s check-in counter. Defence minister Peter Dutton is in no greater hurry to help, suggesting some Afghans who worked with Australian forces could pose a security threat. ASIO can take months, if not years, to grant security clearances.

The government has ruled out allowing Afghan refugees in Australia the right to stay permanently. Instead, they will remain on temporary protection visas, meaning they have to reapply every three years, cannot travel overseas (or if they do they cannot return to Australia) and cannot apply to bring family members to Australia.

This is part of the cruel suite of policies meant to deter asylum seekers. Yet they are pointless: it has been demonstrated repeatedly that the progressively harsher treatment of those who made it here made no difference until the defence force started turning boats back. •

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Howard introduced his “border protection” regime on 29 August 2001, after the Norwegian freight ship Tampa had rescued 433 Afghan asylum seekers from a sinking vessel in the Indian Ocean. Arne Rinnan, the Tampa’s captain, asked to land them on Australian territory. With an election pending, and his Coalition government trailing Labor in opinion polls, Howard ordered forty-five Australian SAS soldiers to board the Tampa and thwart Rinnan’s bid.

Within days, the government had struck deals with Nauru and PNG to host Australian detention camps. The hapless Tampa refugees became their first inmates, and later boatloads entering Australian waters were sent there too. Howard called his action the Pacific Solution.

Labor closed the offshore camps in 2008 after Kevin Rudd defeated Howard, only to open them again four years later. For both sides, the political justification was that this harsh regime would deter more “boat people” from risking the journey. But Madeline Gleeson, of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of NSW, says, “We’ve been mired in this policy for so long for purely political reasons.”

Indeed, to many Australians its sheer longevity suggests that offshore detention has always been this country’s way of dealing with asylum seekers. But the policy is facing its own crisis, and apparently crumbling from within, with no sign of a fresh, more humane and less expensive approach from either main political party.

In late June I travelled to Albion Park, south of Sydney, for a different milestone — one that offered an insight into how Australia once reacted to boat arrivals.

About 250 people had gathered at the HARS Aviation Museum to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Australian navy’s rescue of ninety-nine Vietnamese asylum seekers on 21 June 1981. Known as the “MG99” (for “Melbourne Group”), they were among millions of people who fled Vietnam and neighbouring countries after the end of the Vietnam war in 1975. Some started arriving on Australia’s shores in 1976, with more over following years, giving Australia its first experience of dealing with boat-borne refugees. Another Liberal, Malcolm Fraser, was prime minister at the time.

The contrast with Howard’s approach could not have been more striking. Claire Higgins of the Kaldor Centre explains it: “The immigration department considered several ideas, but the Fraser government rejected the options of turning back boats and potentially indefinite immigration detention, because they would be inhumane, damaging to Australia’s international reputation and would not provide a lasting solution for people forced to flee.” Higgins says Fraser government decision-makers recognised that such options were “harsh and ill-conceived from the start.”

Australia also worked with the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, in a bid to find a genuine regional approach, and with other resettlement countries such as the United States and Canada. Australia admitted over 65,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia over seven years to 1982, many from regional refugee camps.

“There was a sense that Australia and America had a moral duty to do something because we’d been involved in the Vietnam war,” says Madeline Gleeson. “We also had political leadership then of a kind that we haven’t had for a long time.” Fraser had his opponents within the governing Coalition, but his policy prevailed.

On military exercises in the South China Sea in June 1981, the Royal Australian Navy aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne rescued the MG99 refugees after a Tracker surveillance aircraft spotted their leaking boat. All ninety-nine, including nineteen children, were hauled safely up the side of the vessel at night. The ship landed the refugees in Singapore, where UN and Australian officials processed them in a refugee camp. The Melbourne asked the Fraser government to resettle seventy-seven. They arrived on a Qantas flight in Australia a month after their rescue.

At the Albion Park anniversary, former navy people involved in the rescue, and some of those they saved, made speeches. The Tracker aircraft that found them rested near the stage as a museum exhibit. The late Mike Hudson, then commander of the Melbourne, was recalled as saying, “The MG99 rescue was the highlight of my career.” The contrast with John Howard’s use of military commandos on the Tampa twenty years later was sharp.

Stephen Nguyen, aged twenty when he was rescued, later told me how his life unfolded in Australia. “It wasn’t easy at first with barriers of language, loneliness and no relatives,” he said. “For my generation it was very hard.” He taught himself English, worked in factories and started a food shop business in western Sydney so he could support younger siblings who followed him to Australia.

Two of those siblings became doctors, another an electronic technician. Another brother later worked for the State Library of NSW. Nguyen now has four children, three of them at university.

The first boat arrivals from Vietnam and neighbouring countries were assessed for refugee status in Australia. Then, under an international agreement struck to handle the continuing flow, the UN refugee agency assessed them in camps in Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines for resettlement in the West — avoiding their need to risk perilous journeys by boat that later claimed many lives.

I asked Nguyen his view of Australia’s offshore policy, under which people have been detained indefinitely. He paused. “You can’t treat them as prisoners, as abandoned people,” he said. “To me the offshore policy is a horrible policy. You have to treat people like humans, and to make the screening process faster in a humanitarian way. The Tampa story has tarnished Australia.”

Where does the Tampa policy stand after twenty years? Government figures show Australia sent 1637 asylum seekers to Manus Island and Nauru in the seven years between when Howard opened the camps in 2001 and when Kevin Rudd’s Labor government closed them. Despite Howard’s claim that the Tampa drama was about keeping “boat people” out, most were resettled in Australia and New Zealand.

Another 4180 people have been sent to the offshore camps since Julia Gillard’s government reopened them in late 2012, making a total of almost 6000 people detained in both places. When Rudd usurped Gillard briefly as prime minister before the 2013 election, he sought to out-tough the Coalition by declaring that no island detainees would ever settle in Australia. And when Tony Abbott won the election, he out-toughed Rudd, reverting to Howard’s militarisation of asylum policy by creating Operation Sovereign Borders and using the navy to turn back boats.

Australia hasn’t sent detainees to the islands since 2014 — mainly, it seems, because boats have been turned back and some asylum seekers have been deported to their countries of origin. Many others have been quietly transferred to Australia for medical help and to remove children from Nauru. They’ve been left in detention centres here or on six-month bridging visas in the community, with no indication of where they’ll end up, or when. A Senate committee was told in March that this group could number more than 1200. Another 137 asylum seekers are still in PNG and 123 in Nauru. Onshore or offshore, the government sticks to its line that they will never settle in Australia.

But if island detainee numbers have fallen, the policy’s financial cost has only soared. Governments have kept secret the precise burden on Australian taxpayers, but parliamentary and think tank researchers have assembled credible figures from budget papers and other sources. They paint a staggering picture.

Madeline Gleeson told Britain’s House of Commons home affairs committee late last year that offshore processing at a “conservative estimate” costs Australia roughly $1 billion a year. Building camps in such remote places, outsourcing their management (often without adequate cost controls) to private companies, and funding charter flights and healthcare are just some of the costs. Australia also pays Nauru visa fees of $2000 per refugee per month, bringing total visa costs to $26 million in 2016–17 alone.

Gleeson says offshore processing’s real cost “consistently exceeds” government projections. In 2017–18, it cost Australia $1.5 billion, more than twice the estimate of a year earlier. Even with smaller offshore numbers, the government forecast spending $1.2 billion on offshore processing in 2020–21.

The government’s undisclosed legal fees, defending challenges to its treatment of asylum seekers, would inflate the bill even more. Last March the Australian Lawyers Alliance sent a freedom of information request for claims lodged by and compensation paid to asylum seekers for wrongful detention and personal injury in Australia, PNG and Nauru over the decade to 2021. It asked for similar information on personal injury applications by detention centre staff. The home affairs department claimed it had no relevant documents in its possession.

Drawing on costings by the consultancy firm Equity Economics, a 2019 report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Save the Children and GetUp! estimated that offshore detention and processing had cost $9 billion between 2016 and 2020. It built on an earlier report by Save the Children and UNICEF that estimated offshore processing and boat turnback costs of $9.6 billion between 2013 and 2016.

Even allowing for the onshore detention component of these figures, they suggest that the offshore policy cost taxpayers the best part of $19 billion from 2013 to 2020. Assuming Gleeson’s conservative estimate of $1 billion a year also applied to the Pacific Solution from 2001 to 2008, the offshore policy appears to have cost Australians about $26 billion, in both its versions, since 2001.

The psychological cost for detainees kept offshore for years is bad enough. But could Australia have also saved money with a different approach?

The 2019 report argues it could. It calculates that keeping asylum seekers offshore costs $573,000 per detainee per year. If asylum seekers were dealt with more speedily in Australia instead, the costs would fall sharply: to $346,000 per detainee in onshore mandatory detention per year, and to $10,221 a year for each detainee living in the community on a bridging visa. The report calls the cost of keeping people offshore since the Pacific Solution restarted in 2013 “enormous both economically and morally.”

Apart from the 1200 or so people the government has transferred to Australia from Manus and Nauru, about 30,000 asylum seekers who arrived by boat during the last years of the former Labor government are still living in Australia. Coalition governments have called them the “legacy caseload,” banning them from lodging visa applications for up to four years and receiving legal aid. They can’t apply for permanent residency, just for three- or five-year temporary visas. The UN Refugee Agency brands these as “punitive measures” imposed “largely for political reasons.” Australia, it says, could be violating its obligations under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.

Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary of the immigration department, argues that these people are unlikely to be deported. “I think the present government’s policy is just to ignore them,” he says. “That’s bad policy. Australia had always had a just policy that if you were in Australia you’re either on a pathway to permanent residency or to be sent back if you’re not eligible as a refugee. Ignoring them is more American policy.”

Then there’s what Rizvi calls a “fifth wave” of asylum seekers who started arriving about six years ago. These people aren’t brought by people smugglers; they arrive by air on visitor visas. Typically from Malaysia and China, they then apply for asylum through agents here and overseas who’ve arranged their trips; this gives them work rights, usually on farms, while they wait. Rizvi estimates about 27,000 such people whose asylum applications have been refused are still in Australia, and growing at about 500 a month. He says the applicants are being exploited by employers and agents, and some have probably been injured, or even died, but their plight is rarely reported. Rizvi calls this wave a “scam” and “the biggest asylum seeker wave we’ve ever had.”

Taken together, the “legacy caseload,” the “fifth wave,” the transfer to Australia of detainees from the islands, and the release of asylum seekers who were brought to Australia for medical treatment under the repealed medevac law sends a message about a government that once boasted credentials of “strong border protection” and never allowing “unauthorised” arrivals in.

Rizvi’s conclusion is damning. “I’d say our borders have never been more permeable and never managed so badly than under Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton [the former home affairs and now defence minister],” he says. “The borders are being used by scam organisers of the fifth wave. And the medevac releases show the government has given up. It knows these people aren’t going to leave.”

Labor under Paul Keating’s government pioneered detention centres onshore. But Rizvi speculates the offshore policy that Howard started with Tampa would not have happened under other postwar leaders, including Robert Menzies, the Liberal Party’s founder: “If this question had been put to Menzies he’d have found a different pathway to residency for those who’re eligible. He was much more conscious of social cohesion, as were Bob Hawke, Malcolm Fraser and Paul Keating.”

One political notion has largely driven Australia’s offshore policy: refuse people on boats entry to Australia. The problem with such a narrow approach is that it eventually leaves governments stranded. As Madeline Gleeson of the Kaldor Centre points out, it has no “exit strategy”: what to do with people once they’ve been found to be refugees.

At times, governments have desperately tried to find a way of dealing with these people caught in limbo. The Abbott and Turnbull governments struck deals with Cambodia and the United States respectively to take refugees from offshore camps. Just seven in Nauru agreed to resettle in Cambodia, at a reported cost to Australia of $55 million; four later returned voluntarily to their countries of origin rather than stay there. A Senate committee was told in March that 890 refugees have been resettled in America. That country, not Australia, now benefits from the initiatives that newly settled refugees like the MG99 group usually bring to immigrant countries.

Since the Taliban’s taking power in Afghanistan, the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany and others have signalled plans to take in thousands of Afghan refugees. So far, the Morrison government seems to be sticking to its line that Afghans on temporary visas in Australia should stay that way. Marise Payne, the foreign affairs minister, says they won’t be asked to return to Afghanistan “at this stage.” Such an approach is mired in the past. The crisis is bound to trigger more boat refugees from Afghanistan, and it should challenge the government to emulate the Fraser government’s response to another humiliating military finale, in Vietnam.

Gleeson thinks that the offshore detention policy is winding down by default. “It’s been winding down slowly since 2014, the last time new boat arrivals were sent offshore,” she says. “It’s an admission by the government that it’s not a long-term policy, and that it’s never going to work. It was meant to deter people from arriving by boat, but it didn’t.” •

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We know about the bushman’s interest in Balzac, Flaubert and Hugo because it was recorded, no doubt with satisfaction, by Paul Maistre, the French consul in Melbourne at the time. A career diplomat, Maistre dabbled in poetry and cherished his time away from work. In this instance he was using his spare time to explore the region east of Melbourne.

Maistre was one of the figures I encountered after I moved to Australia in 2007 and started reading about the French men and women who had made l’Australie their home (in his case, for nearly twenty years). I read about the peasants who migrated from regions like Aquitaine, the wine growers, the dynasties of wool buyers from Roubaix and Tourcoing, the courtesan-cum-countess who lived on the goldfields, and the cabin boy who lived for seventeen years with an Aboriginal family on the Cape York Peninsula. I was looking for a genealogy of belonging to create a place for myself in this new country.

Some of these people, ordinary and extraordinary, went back to France; others disappeared quickly into the population, leaving only faint traces: an exotic-sounding surname, perhaps, or an intriguing family legend of sometimes dubious aristocratic origins. In all, though, the stories of these migrants never quite crossed over that illusory line that separates strangers, and the French largely remained adjuncts to Australian history.

In my new book, French Connection: Australia’s Cosmopolitan Ambitions, I try to bring the strands together: the bushman and his treasured miniature book, the wool buyers and their families, the migrants who stayed, and a cast of other Australian characters. I do this by focusing not on the French as a migrant group but rather on the idea of Frenchness as performance, a doing rather than a being.

I ask why a connection to France and French culture mattered not only to French migrants but also to colonial Australians, and how they used it in their social lives. Did reading or simply owning a French book make you look chic and worldly? A Parisian dress, sophisticated? I wanted to put my finger on that elusive je ne sais quoi. Could a French connection mean more than personal distinction in a set of settler colonies on the cusp of federation? What role, I wondered, did the French empire in the Pacific play in all this? And what did the French themselves in Australia make of it all?

What struck me most as I dug into the archives was how French culture had, by the nineteenth century, become a global culture that could exist without the French.

As the historian Inga Clendinnen once wrote, “particular cases” are “where the action is.” I focus on those encounters and moments of conflict where different understandings of Frenchness are most salient. And so we start with the Australian artist Norman Lindsay surreptitiously watching two female lovers at Paris’s Olympia Café. We dwell on the decade-long conflict that pitted Melbourne women of the colonial bourgeoisie against the French consul in a battle for control of the Alliance Française, and watch colonial governments trying to demonise French convicts from New Caledonia in the push for federation. And in the end, the book considers the changing nature of an attachment to France for immigrants themselves, as they gradually become Australian.

These interconnected stories are an invitation to consider how Australia has always been fashioned by international influences. I chose to focus on the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century because of the influence those years of national formation continue to have on our national psyche. The “Australian legend” — of white egalitarianism, mateship, irreverence for authority, and the rugged manliness that culminated in the bloody sacrifice at Gallipoli — has become what the historian Pierre Nora calls a lieu de mémoire, or a site of memory, an almost unshakable foundational myth. As a foreigner wanting to belong, the legend did not give me a way in, so I tried to retell the story, looking for other cultural and material ways in which Australia and Australians were connected to the world outside the British empire.

As we continue to struggle with a global pandemic, the temptation for parochial protectionism is strong. But the idea of “Fortress Australia” is nothing new, and now might be the ideal time to reflect on how cosmopolitan our history truly is, and how much we owe to strangers — even the French. •

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But there is a dark side to the region’s history, of course. The fields were cleared of volcanic rocks in the late colonial years by some of the 62,000 Pacific islanders brought here and to other sugar towns by the infamous “blackbirders.” Most of the forced labourers came from islands in what are now Vanuatu and the Solomons.

Behind the little wooden church that serves Bundaberg’s remaining descendants of those islanders is a memorial engraved with hundreds of names, mostly of young men from islands like Tanna and Malaita, who died more than a century ago of overwork and illness. The deaths were registered at the time, but the graves were outside the town cemetery and unmarked. The dry stone walls these “Kanakas” built from the rocks, and probably many of the graves, are now being cleared for more extensive farming.

The history still echoes. On land near the Hummock I saw the orange high-vis vests of workers planting sweet potato seedlings in a vast field. Three days later this work gang from Tonga was over near the road, their work almost completed at a Stakhanovite pace.

Talk to Pacific islander seasonal workers like these, and to the young foreign working holiday-makers in the area’s hostels, and you often hear the term “modern-day slavery.” Accounts abound of picking, planting and pruning paid at piece rates rather than the per-hour rates specified by the industry award, and of wages clawed back by excessive charges for poor-quality housing and other levies.

Bundaberg is not an isolated case, or even the worst. The same stories are heard in many other horticultural regions around Australia. The industry relies on a vulnerable, largely non-unionised pool of casual workers, some of them islanders brought here from nine neighbouring countries under the federal government’s Seasonal Worker Programme, a lot more of them foreign backpackers needing their eighty-eight days of farm work to renew their visas for a second year (or six months for a third year).

In a third category of exploitable labour are the mostly Asian workers variously called “overstayers” and “undocumented” who come into Australia on visitor visas and then either apply for refugee status — a process that can take three years while they go out and work — or go off the radar. An estimated 70,000 of them are working in rural Australia. Some were visible in a strawberry field I passed near Childers, a town inland from Bundaberg, and they moved nervously behind a line of trees when they noticed Geoff Smith and me looking at them.

“What’s the difference between 160 years ago and now?” says Smith, a retired construction worker and union delegate. With his wife Jane, granddaughter of a cane worker kidnapped as a boy from Tanna island in what is now Vanuatu, he provides pro bono pastoral care and advocacy for the many workers from Vanuatu among Bundaberg’s seasonal labour force.

Smith answers his own question: “It’s the aeroplane, rather than the schooner.” That’s an exaggeration, of course, but with a kernel of truth.

According to Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary in the immigration department, exploitation of foreign workers has been on the rise in Australia. That has happened despite federal parliament’s passing the Modern Slavery Act in 2018, which requires employers with turnover of $100 million or more to report any such slavery in their supply chains.

“The issue is not just confined to undocumented workers but extends to migrant workers brought to Australia under a range of visas,” Rizvi writes in a book he’s finalising for publication. “Over the last six years, there has been a major increase in the misuse of visitor visas and the asylum system to bring in migrant workers, effectively as indentured labour.” Employers and labour hire companies are unlikely to be caught, he adds, and the penalties are comparatively minor. “The rewards from exploitation of migrant workers are substantial; the risks are small.”

But the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted this modern system of exploitation. With the numbers of foreign backpackers in the country down to about 50,000 from the usual 140,000, and with seasonal workers reduced to about 7000 from the pre-Covid 12,000, Bundaberg is sharing in a nationwide shortage of farm labour. At least temporarily, bargaining power has been reversed.

“There’s not enough workers to go round,” says a Bundaberg grower I’ll call Dudley. (He asked that his real name not be used.) “Once all this bullshit’s over and all the backpackers come back, the boot’ll be on the other foot. Now the boot’s on their foot, kicking our arses.”

Anecdotal evidence points to a lift in wages. “I had a bloke ring me the other day, and he’s whingeing that some other prick’s paying his workers a couple of dollars a bucket more than what he is,” Dudley tells me. “I said, mate, I was telling you this was going to happen.” A labour recruiter in Bundaberg tells of a sweet potato grower offering a bonus of $2 on top of the $24.90 hourly award rate, to be paid retrospectively if the worker stays at least five weeks.

The same recruiter says some growers are even willing to consider hiring local Australian workers. He has placed a few, including some with disabilities. Bundaberg has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, 11 per cent in the December quarter, but the recruiter says it’s hard to induce young people off the steady, if low, lifeline of JobSeeker for work that has a reputation of being short-term and brutally demanding.

“They have been shut out from the unskilled labour force and are now entrenched in the Centrelink system,” says the recruiter. “Some are only interested in putting down that they applied for our jobs, and 50 per cent don’t turn up if they are given positions. But it’s getting better, and we are committed to the 50 per cent who do turn up.”

The growers’ association’s Bree Grima says farmers increasingly rely on local workers. But the federal government’s offer of $6000 relocation assistance has not helped much in bringing in workers from elsewhere in Australia, she says, with only a 0.3 per cent vacancy rate in Bundaberg’s rental housing.

The labour shortage has allowed workers to bargain down charges in backpacker hostels, which are often tied to labour hire companies, or move to independent accommodation in motels. They can also pick the more congenial work — picking avocados, macadamias and passionfruit, for instance, rather than collecting sweet potatoes or watermelons in vast unshaded fields.

“I’m up on my cherry picker among the avocado trees,” says one British backpacker taking a break from his finance sector job back home. “I don’t have to talk to anyone and I can smoke weed all day.”

The islanders face more uncertainty. They’re here under the Seasonal Worker Programme, administered by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, or DESE, or are among the 2500 or so unskilled and semiskilled workers in the parallel Pacific Labour Scheme, run by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which targets a wider range of industries.

Coming from Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Nauru, Tuvalu and Timor-Leste, they are normally tied to one employer — the seasonal workers for up to two consecutive six-month periods, the Pacific labour staff for one to three years. With the Covid crisis, workers have been allowed to stay in Australia after their visas expire. They are free to change jobs as they wish, though some seem unaware of this rule and others fear being dubbed absconders or unsatisfactory workers — and sent home — if they complain or seek a new job.

Two workers from Vanuatu I meet have worked around the Queensland towns of Emerald, Maryborough, Childers and Bundaberg, picking grapes, oranges and mandarins, watermelons and avocados. They’ve paid up to $230 a week for accommodation, sometimes for bunk space so tight they couldn’t sit up.

They mention “ethical” employers, naming one big avocado grower, and others who don’t fit that description. “One never explained the piece rate,” says one of them. “He changed it so it equalled the hourly rate for the fastest worker. The rest got lower. You didn’t have a choice.”

Both now have work with a grower who hopes to keep them long-term, one earning about $1500 a week on piece rates, the other around $1000 a week on the hourly award rate. They worry about illness, and whether the insurance the employer says it has taken out will actually cover them. “It would be better if we had proper healthcare like the Australians have,” one says. “We work here the same way, and pay tax — why not?”

According to ANU Pacific affairs experts Richard Curtain and Stephen Howes, some 48 per cent of seasonal workers are employed by four labour hire companies, and the rest by smaller labour recruiters or approved growers. The reliance on intermediaries creates a gulf between the islanders and farmers that contrasts with the goals of New Zealand’s longer-running Recognised Seasonal Employer scheme, which makes a greater effort to incorporate pastoral care for visiting workers.

Under the NZ scheme, island workers return repeatedly to the same farms and vineyards, and in some cases employers visit them in their home villages in the off-season. The aim is to build a group of workers “who keep coming back,” says Jill Biddington, an organiser with Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA in Sydney, who monitors Pacific island workers in Australia. “Australia just wants cheap labour. I’ve never seen an Australian farmer over there.”

In many cases, labour hire companies in rural Australia work closely with hostel owners, or operate hostels themselves. Until the pandemic, in fact, the hostels were the only channels for employment. Seasonal worker papers or a foreign passport were prerequisites and, says Geoff Smith, “locals didn’t get a look-in.”

One such hostel in an inland town is essentially a collection of temporary cabins, with gas burners in semi-enclosed spaces for cooking and a central block of toilets and showers. It was raining when I visited, and a group of backpackers sat out unpaid downtime looking at their computers and phones. One young woman pointed to a square camping tent for which she was charged $110 a week. Down the hill, two young men from Vanuatu pointed to a long corrugated iron shed where they live four to a room.

At my motel in Bundaberg, Aurora Garcia, a Spanish-Canadian backpacker, tells me she had paid $215 a week for a bunk bed at the inland hostel for several months early last year. The rooms were stifling hot in summer and frigidly cold in winter. The flammable walls meant that heaters weren’t allowed. The washroom was an open walk away, with three toilet cubicles and three showers for forty or fifty women, and the same ratio for men. When everyone returned from work late in the afternoon, the shower queue stretched across the compound. Then, eight people per gas burner, they tried to cook dinner.

“When I went down the hill to talk with one of the Vanuatu guys I met out picking, the manager came and ordered me back, and threatened to kick me out,” says Garcia. “It was like racial segregation: white backpackers up here, islanders down there, and no mixing allowed.”

She worked next at an avocado farm whose product was recently featured by a major national supermarket chain. There, she says, the supervisor exercised discipline fit for a military drill squad, ordering pickers who fell behind to do star jumps and push-ups as punishment.

Until February this year, a converted pub in Bundaberg housed nearly one hundred seasonal workers and backpackers, each paying $200 a week for a bunk bed, with up to twelve to a room. Some had been brought there when the owners, operating as an unauthorised recruiter, drove a bus out to Childers and recruited seasonal workers with the promise of better pay. According to Smith, they were delivered to growers nearer town and told that, as “absconders,” they were at risk of deportation if they complained.

Then, in February, the owners told the workers to move out, for reasons that are not clear. The move roughly coincided with a visit by Vanuatu’s high commissioner, Samson Vilvil Fare, who was told the exodus was to allow for renovations. When I went into the hotel to enquire, I was met by a young man who, in a menacing manner, ordered me to leave.

Vilvil Fare didn’t consider that the hostels he saw in Childers and Bundaberg met the standards he would expect from a “first world” country. “When I’m visiting those areas I am having lots of questions raised — I’m also dumbfounded, I’m shocked, I’m worried,” he tells me. Media reports about the conditions seem to have had no impact, and nor has academic fieldwork. “Since I’ve been here I haven’t seen much change when it comes to welfare for our people.”

Backpackers don’t usually have to endure these conditions for more than a few months; they aren’t generally saving money for their families; and they often have parental credit cards to fall back on. But Pacific islanders are much more culturally adrift and financially constrained.

Many don’t have the command of English needed to understand contracts, payslips, superannuation deductions, bank accounts, medical insurance, tax return requirements or avenues for complaints. Geoff Smith has to check they’ve cut off recurring subscriptions for phones, streaming services and so on before they leave, so that refunds of tax and super are not eaten up when they are eventually paid. Employers don’t explain how costs like airfares can be recovered. Young workers from the Polynesian islands in particular can have unrealistic expectations of how much money they’ll be able to send back for church projects as well as their own families.

Gouging is rife. The Bundaberg recruiter tells me of workers being charged $400 each for transport from work on the Sunshine Coast to a new workplace in Bundaberg. (A train fare is around $35.) “The contractors rip them off,” says Dudley, the grower. “Then the farmer gets the bad name for not paying the worker properly.” He now refuses to use labour hire companies, hiring individual staff himself.

The inclusion of female workers in the schemes has added the new problem of sexual coercion and assault. Geoff Smith says he’s been told of several cases where male islander team leaders tell women in their work gang, “You are my woman while we are here.” Smith says the problem is largely ignored. “The women don’t want to make a fuss. They have a fear of being sent home.”

Islanders unused to driving conditions in Australia are sometimes expected to drive work vehicles, or buy old cars to get to their workplaces, despite having experienced only the slow and sparse traffic back home. So far, says DESE, twenty-five seasonal workers have died in Australia since its scheme started in 2012, mostly as a result of car accidents or “pre-existing” illnesses. No one I met can remember any inquests. “Twenty-five is just extraordinary for such a small visa,” says Abul Rizvi.

Both of the federal departments administering the labour schemes are reluctant to comment on how they exercise pastoral care and enforce regulations. DESE says it is in the process of appointing “up to nineteen” “mobility officers” to carry out these roles, but it seems they will be located in state capitals. Last October the department announced that $9 million would be spent on seasonal worker welfare, and this April it gave $1 million to the Salvation Army for pastoral care.

Geoff Smith says he has only seen DESE officials when Vanuatu’s high commissioner came to look around Childers and Bundaberg, and after Bundaberg’s Federal hostel burnt down in July last year (without loss of life). Jill Biddington says she has never seen any DESE officers in the field and suspects most are satisfied with photos sent by hostel operators. “No one is enforcing standards,” she says. “It’s all self-regulation, tick-a-box stuff.”

The Fair Work Ombudsman’s office says it pays special attention to complaints by the vulnerable migrant workers, and has an agreement with the Department of Home Affairs that they won’t be subject to visa action for complaining. In 2019–20, it says, 44 per cent of matters it took to court involved visa-holder workers. The total amount recovered for these foreign workers was $1.7 million, while the ombudsman also won nearly $3 million in court-awarded penalties. Only 12 per cent of the cases the ombudsman acted on were in agriculture, forestry and fishing. Rizvi’s observations about the odds of getting caught and penalised, or even exposed, seem to hold.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade set up a Pacific Labour Facility to administer its Pacific Labour Scheme in October 2018. At some point the facility was outsourced to the international private aid-management company Palladium. Its office in Brisbane refers media queries to the department. Former foreign minister Julie Bishop, who supervised the disbanding of the widely admired AusAID agency within her portfolio and a huge reduction in Australia’s foreign aid program, joined Palladium’s board soon after she left politics in 2019.

Amid widespread criticism that the Pacific and backpacker schemes lack proper supervision at ground level, calls are being made for responsibility to be shifted. Union Aid Abroad–APHEDA’s Biddington suggests the Seasonal Worker Programme be shifted from DESE to Foreign Affairs. “DESE just fails to have the sensitivity needed for working with people from different cultures,” she tells me.

No one is suggesting that the two Pacific island worker schemes should be scrapped. When they work well, they allow villagers from nine Pacific nations to learn new skills and work practices, and to save up several thousand dollars to invest in small businesses, cyclone-proof housing or higher education for their children. While much official aid gets consumed by urban political elites or recycled back to Australia, the two schemes direct money from Australia to productive, grassroots use. They also build people-to-people contacts between Australia and its inner ring of neighbours.

But the behaviour of some labour hire companies and farmers risks tainting some Australian products — meat, fruit, vegetables and wine — with the modern slavery label, and denying them certification as ethically sourced. This would be a propaganda gift to countries smarting under criticism for their own forced labour. China and Xinjiang leap to mind. Trade sanctions could follow.

With the federal government now predicting international travel will not open up until mid 2022, regions like Bundaberg face another year of labour shortage. Rather than waiting and hoping for the old conditions to return, Australia could seize the opportunity for structural change in the regional labour supply, and implement measures to disperse backpackers around a wider range of sectors, increase opportunities for workers from the Pacific, and get Australians into the farm work from which they have been effectively excluded. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Bitter harvest appeared first on Inside Story.

Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film — or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.

Any biography is shaped by the letters, diaries and other sources available to the biographer. In Kaufmann’s case, much could be made of the thick files created by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in the 1950s, and those of ASIO’s East German equivalent, the Stasi, between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Even more might be made of Kaufmann’s own writings, including at least a dozen books that could be classified as either autobiographical fiction or memoir. But the life depicted by oneself is not necessarily any more accurate than the life that can be winnowed from the observations of outsiders, who in Kaufmann’s case included spies and informers. And in a life spanning nearly ten decades, many aspects won’t have been recorded by other people or deemed worth remembering by the subject himself.

The omissions start with Kaufmann’s early life. He was born Jizchak Schmeidler (or perhaps Sally Jizchak Schmeidler) on 19 January 1924 in Berlin’s Scheunenviertel, a neighbourhood dominated by Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. His mother Rachela, originally from Poland, was among them. Aged seventeen when Jizchak was born, she was working as a shop assistant at a department store. That’s all we know about her; when Jizchak was three, she gave him up for adoption. We can only guess why.

His new parents were a couple from far-flung Duisburg, a city in the Ruhr Valley in the west of Germany. His adoptive father, Sally Kaufmann, had fought and been decorated in the first world war and afterwards practised as a lawyer and notary. Sally’s wife Johanna had been to art school, but her dreams of becoming an artist remained unfulfilled. Jizchak had no siblings, but later in life speculated that he may have been adopted not because his adoptive parents were childless but because Sally was also his biological father. But we simply don’t know why and how young Jizchak and his mother entered the Kaufmanns’ lives.

Jizchak, who became Walter upon his adoption, grew up in a well-to-do bourgeois household. Like his biological mother, his adoptive parents were Jewish. The family observed the high holidays, young Walter was required to take Hebrew classes, and Sally for many years chaired Duisburg’s Jewish congregation. Like many German Jews, though, the Kaufmanns were not overly religious.

The anti-Semitism of the Nazis, which would have such an impact on Walter’s life, didn’t come out of nowhere. A pogrom had occurred in the Scheunenviertel only a couple of months before Walter was born there, with Jews assaulted (and one of them killed) and their businesses looted. But the systematic discrimination against Jews, and their exclusion from public life in Nazi Germany would have come as a shock to the Kaufmanns. In early November 1938, during the so-called Reichskristallnacht pogroms, Sally Kaufmann was taken for a time to the Dachau concentration camp and the Kaufmanns’ house was ransacked while Walter and his mother hid in the basement.

The violence convinced the Kaufmanns that Walter, at least, needed to be sent to safety, and in January 1939, on his fifteenth birthday, he left on a Kindertransport to England. There he attended the New Herrlingen boarding school in Faversham, Kent. In June 1940, when the Battle of Dunkirk forced the British government to prepare the country for a German invasion, sixteen-year-old Walter was among the many recently arrived “enemy aliens” to be arrested. Then, together with more than 2000 other German and Austrian refugees, he was sent to Australia on the infamous Dunera and interned in a camp in the western NSW town of Hay. Under “reason for internment,” the dossier created by the Australian military authorities stated incongruously: “Enemy Alien — Refugee from Nazi oppression.”

Released from Hay in March 1942, Kaufmann joined the Australian army — or rather, the 8th Employment Company, which provided an opportunity for “refugee aliens” to contribute to the war effort. Still with the army, he applied for an Australian entry permit for his parents; by then, however, they had been deported, first to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and then to Auschwitz, where they were killed. They shared the fate of the hundreds of Jews from Duisburg who became the victims of Nazi persecution. (The letters Johanna and Sally Kaufmann wrote to their son in England and in Australia are about to be published as a book.)

In 1944 Kaufmann married Tasmanian-born Barbara Dyer, who was eleven years older than him. They had met while she was working as an officer for army intelligence — a job she lost because of the relationship. (Kaufmann may have been in the army, but he was still an alien from Germany.) He was naturalised after the war was over, in 1946.

Kaufmann had begun to write fiction, in English, while he was still with the army, and by the end of the war was already a published author. In 1944, his short story “The Simple Things” won him the first of many literary prizes. He joined the Melbourne Realist Writers Group, a group of left-wing authors, and became friends with Frank Hardy and David Martin, the latter himself a Jewish refugee who had fled Germany in 1934. Martin in particular encouraged him to write about his experiences in Nazi Germany.

Kaufmann’s first novel, Voices in the Storm, an account of anti-fascist resistance and the coming of age of a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany, was published in 1953 by the Australasian Book Company, which had been set up by a group of like-minded authors. He later recalled that he himself sold 2000 copies of the book by hawking it at wharfs, mines and other workplaces during fifteen-minute stop-work meetings.

While he continued to write, Kaufmann worked in a wide range of jobs, including as a wedding photographer and a seaman. In 1955, the Seamen’s Union sent him to the Fifth World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw. There he met an East German publisher who convinced him that his writings, including Voices in the Storm, would find a receptive audience in communist East Germany — the German Democratic Republic, to give it its formal name, or GDR. Travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he not only met fellow writers at a GDR writers’ congress, but also searched unsuccessfully for his biological mother.

Walter Kaufmann (third from left, standing) with other members of the Australian delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw in 1955. National Archives of Australia

Kaufmann found himself attracted to the prospect of becoming a writer in a country where people tried to live according to the philosophy he and his Australian comrades were preaching. For the first time since 1939, a return to Germany presented itself as an option. But first he went back to Australia as an attaché with the German team that attended the Melbourne Olympic Games.

After a lecture tour in which Kaufmann talked about his European travels (which had also led him to the Soviet Union), he and his wife moved to East Germany — or, in his words, he “returned home to foreign parts.” Unlike another Australian who migrated to East Germany at around the same time, the anthropologist Fred Rose, Kaufmann didn’t leave Australia because he felt victimised for his political convictions. (All he shared with Rose was a tendency to philander.)

The secretary of the GDR writers’ association had told him that he could be more useful in the West than in the East, but a short visit to his home town on his first trip back to Europe had convinced him that he wasn’t welcome there. His parents’ house was now occupied by strangers who did not even ask him inside.

By the time he arrived in East Berlin, however, the deal that had initially attracted him to East Germany had fallen through. The East German authorities deemed parts of the plot of Voices in the Storm to be against the party line and demanded that he rewrite the book. Kaufmann refused. But he used some of the autobiographical material that informed his first novel to write another book, which was allowed to be published. And despite this early setback, he could be a professional writer in the GDR, something that would not have been possible in Australia.

Back in Australia, Kaufmann had been a member of the Communist Party, but he later recalled neither wanting nor being able to join East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party. One prerequisite would have been taking out GDR citizenship, which he declined to do. Retaining his Australian citizenship meant he could travel the world.

And he did: to Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, including several times to the United States. As a roving reporter, he covered the Cuban revolution and the court case against the American civil rights activist Angela Davis in the early 1970s. His journeying provided him with the material that helped him become arguably East Germany’s most widely read travel writer.

Much of his writing about foreign places is reportage in the tradition of the “racing reporter” of the 1920s and 1930s, Egon Erwin Kisch. Although probably not as accomplished a writer as Kisch, Kaufmann too married social critique with travelogues. And his occupation as a travel writer and foreign correspondent at large was also an opportunity to escape, albeit only temporarily, the confines of East Germany’s insularity. He let his readers share in these escapes, and they loved him for it.

He also wrote short stories, novels and books for children. By the time the Berlin Wall came down, Kaufmann had published twenty-six books in German and was part of the country’s literary establishment. His standing is evident in the fact that in 1984 he was able to publish Flucht, a book about a medical doctor who left the GDR for West Germany.

When all his publishers went out of business after reunification, the sixty-six-year-old Kaufmann began a new career, as a German, rather than an East German, writer. He must also have realised that he had to move on from the travel writing that had made him a household name; with air travel now possible and affordable, his readers no longer needed the window on the world that he had been able to provide.

Much of Kaufmann’s post-1990 writing is autobiographical. There was a market for that too, but he didn’t enjoy the same success that had marked his career in the GDR. And although he began to publish books with West German publishers, he also contributed regularly to two daily newspapers that have acted as reminders of a bygone era, and of a state that ceased to exist in 1990: the Neues Deutschland, formerly the paper of the Socialist Unity Party, and the Junge Welt, which used to be published by the Free German Youth, the GDR’s official youth organisation. Kaufmann’s last Junge Welt article, a review of a book of poems by another nonagenarian, the East German writer Gisela Steineckert, appeared about a month before his death.

Kaufmann had felt less at home in the GDR than in Australia. But, he told an interviewer, the GDR “became my home when it had gone.” He reasoned that this was because he felt he had been taken care of there, both as a person and as a writer.

A Jew in Nazi Germany, an enemy alien in wartime England, a communist in Robert Menzies’s Australia, an Australian in East Germany, and somebody with a GDR identity in the reunified Germany: throughout his life, Kaufmann didn’t quite belong. Sometimes that was because he had been excluded; at other times, it was because he cultivated the sense of detachment that also characterises some of his writing.

For most of his life in East Germany, he wasn’t a foreigner just because of his Australian passport. Initially, he even spoke German with an Australian accent. And he continued to write in English. All the books he published in his first twenty years in Germany had to be translated. The way he tells the story, he eventually taught himself to write in German after a Melbourne publisher reissued Voices in the Storm in the early 1970s. When he took the opportunity to submit the book again for publication in the GDR, the text was approved without changes — with the proviso that it be translated by the author himself. Stimmen im Sturm, published in 1977, thus became the first book he wrote in German. He recalled that it was hard work to turn his English prose into German, but by the end of it, he had graduated from a German writer of English to a writer of German.

His German writing retained an Australian touch, though. He privileged unadorned and succinct prose, and an uncomplicated syntax. “My German has become like English,” he told an interviewer.

Three of his books were published in English by an East German publisher, but Voices in the Storm remained the only one of his books to be published in Australia. He may have identified as an Australian writer for much of his life, but the Australian reading public didn’t warm to him, despite his writing frequently about Australian topics, such as the Maralinga atomic tests, and despite much of his autobiographical fiction being set in Australia. I hope that Australians will one day discover one of their own — although in order to do so, they might have to rely on translations, as he wrote some of his more interesting autobiographical prose in German.

Biographies are not only shaped by the material on which a biographer can draw; they are also informed by broader narratives. The website advertising the forthcoming film about Kaufmann, for example, says, “For us filmmakers, this is the main content of Walter Kaufmann’s life: the catastrophic consequences of National Socialism; the legendary trial of Angela Davis; the revolution in Cuba; the discussion about Stalinism; the impact of the atomic bomb in Japan; the never-ending history of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the collapse of the GDR; the return of nationalist, anti-Semitic tendencies in Germany.” It’s not hard to anticipate the film’s drift.

Often biographies try to fit the life of an individual into a national story, or relate it to the life of a more famous person. That’s what happened to Kaufmann; in Germany he will also be remembered as the man who — albeit unwittingly and indirectly — ruined the reputation of East Germany’s most famous writer, and arguably its best, Christa Wolf.

Like Fred Rose, Kaufmann was a communist and therefore a person of interest to ASIO. Unlike Rose, Kaufmann did not become a spy himself when he moved to East Germany. On the contrary, the East German Stasi was as interested in Kaufmann as ASIO had been. Although he had chosen life in the communist East over life in the capitalist West, Kaufmann was not trusted. For good reason: while he remained faithful to socialism, including the perverted variety practised in the GDR, blind conformism was not his thing.

In the 1990s, Kaufmann’s Stasi file became the subject of a German literary controversy when it was revealed that Wolf had been among those reporting to the Stasi about Kaufmann (and, to a lesser extent, others). She was pilloried in much of the German media, including in a damning piece in the magazine Spiegel, even though Kaufmann, to whom she apologised, took her side. He did that not only because her transgressions were comparatively minor, but also because he was not somebody to hold grudges. When asked eight years ago to sum up his life, he said, “Life has been good to me. I’m not a victim. And I don’t feel like a victim.”

In Australia, Kaufmann may be remembered in the context of the uplifting and decidedly patriotic Dunera story, not least because he didn’t identify as a victim there either. Like many of those who later became known as the Dunera Boys, Kaufmann was appalled by the treatment meted out to the internees aboard the British ship but remembered fondly his first encounters with Australian soldiers, who escorted him and his fellow inmates to an internment camp in Hay. (He recalled his first impressions of Australia and Australians in a piece of autobiographical fiction published in Meanjin in 1954.)

When he interviewed Kaufmann on Late Night Live in 2014, Phillip Adams marvelled at the Dunera Boys as “the most extraordinary refugees we received” and described their contribution to Australia as “beyond parallel.” Kaufmann happily played along, referring to his stint in Hay as the “formative time of my life.” •

The post The life of an exile appeared first on Inside Story.

Accounts of the multicultural experience typically relate how each ethnic group made its distinctive contribution to the Australian mosaic. The story begins with dislocation and the shock of arriving in a distant, unfamiliar setting, and recounts how the new arrivals settled in with the help of compatriots and maintained old customs to complement the new. Australia’s migrant history thus becomes an accumulation of journeys, from the First Nations to the most recent arrivals, in an affirmation of inclusiveness.

This celebratory story has some obvious problems. It overlooks the parallel process of exclusion, whether through the White Australia policy, or the system of permits and landing fees for non-British subjects, or the current regimen of incarcerating refugees. It sets aside the barriers — from overt discrimination and prejudice to blank indifference — faced by new entrants. And it oversimplifies the affinity of successive generations of settlers who share nationality but very little else.

Take, for example, the young German men who came to Australia from the late 1940s to the early 1950s under a Special Projects scheme. It was similar to the much larger postwar program of resettling “displaced persons,” or DPs — for which these Germans were not eligible — and involved a two-year agreement to work as directed, which in practice meant manual labour in isolated settings. In South Australia the Lutheran Church made a special effort to minister to these Germans but found them disappointingly unresponsive. In contrast to the close-knit rural settlements of earlier German settlers, their experience was urban. Having spent their childhood in the Nazi youth movement and survived the trauma of war and defeat, they couldn’t share the piety of the pastors who ministered to them. There was a gulf that ethnicity could not bridge.

These reflections are stimulated by reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s new book on the Russians who migrated to Australia after the second world war (reviewed for Inside Story by Phillip Deery). White Russians, Red Peril is subtitled A Cold War History of Migration to Australia and forms the capstone of a collaborative project she initiated some years after she returned to Australia from the United States. It involved her longstanding research partner, Mark Edele, and younger Sydney-based scholars. One of them, Jayne Persian, has already published Beautiful Balts, an accomplished history of the scheme that brought 170,000 DPs from camps in Europe to Australia from 1947 to 1952. Another, Ruth Balint, has researched the China Russians. Ebony Nilsson, one of Sheila’s postgraduate students, has examined a small subgroup, former Soviet citizens with left-wing views.

Strictly, Soviet citizens were not eligible for resettlement. Under an agreement struck in February 1945 as German resistance crumbled, the three principal Allies — Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union — agreed that all Soviet citizens liberated by American and British forces would be held in camps until they could be handed over to the Soviet authorities — just as British and American prisoners of war in areas liberated by the Red Army would be returned to their homelands. Millions of Soviet citizens were held in Germany, including some two million prisoners of war, five million forced labourers and a significant minority who had served in the Wehrmacht.

Not all of them were Russians, for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics incorporated other Slavic peoples, as well as Cossacks and Muslim ethnic groups. Along with these subjects of the old tsarist empire, the Soviet Union had acquired (or regained) others in the course of the war, notably in the Baltic states and Eastern Poland. For understandable reasons, many of these people had no desire to be repatriated; and the same was true of many Russians once Stalin made clear that even prisoners of war were traitors who would be punished.

In the immediate aftermath of victory the Allies forcibly sent these prisoners of war and forced labourers back to the Soviet Union, though the United States and Britain didn’t accept the Soviet claim for citizens of the Baltic states and, less consistently, West Ukrainians and West Belorussians. Then, as the cold war took hold, they resisted further Soviet claims, including for those who had served the German war effort and staffed the concentration camps. Russians frequently adopted another European nationality in the process. Furthermore, as the original United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration gave way to the US-controlled International Refugee Organization, the policy shifted from restoring these DPs to their European country of origin to resettlement outside Europe.

Australia was one of the principal participants in this DPs scheme. The arrangement allowed the government to select those who applied to come here, subject to an agreement that they would work as directed for two years. Jayne Persian provides the fullest and best-informed account of what this meant, but it needs to be emphasised that humanitarianism played little part in the decision to take such large numbers of continental Europeans. Put simply, Australia had a desperate shortage of labour and couldn’t wait for British migration to resume.

Perhaps Fitzpatrick’s most startling revelation is that Russians made up some 20,000 of the 170,000 DPs who chose Australia. They included so-called White Russians who had left Russia following the 1917 revolution and subsequent civil war. Strictly these were refugees rather than DPs, though the change of regimes in liberated Europe uprooted many of them, as the Chinese revolution of 1949 did Russians living in Harbin and Shanghai, 5000 of whom settled here in the 1950s.

Drawing on Russian as well as Australian archives, Fitzpatrick reveals the complex composition of these exiles in vivid detail. Among the 50,000 or so Russians living in Harbin in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, were White generals still working to restore the ancien régime, Russian Jews with bitter memories of how it had treated them, members of the Russian Orthodox Church, technicians working for the Manchurian continuation of the Trans-Siberian Railway, fascists who collaborated with the Japanese occupation and patriots who followed the fortunes of the Red Army.

Russians were largely invisible in Australia’s postwar migration story. That was partly because they concealed their nationality as a condition of entry and partly to avoid the attention of Australian and Soviet security agencies. Working from the Soviet embassy, security officers sought to persuade their compatriots to return, with minimal success. From the outset the Australian government sought to screen out potential Russian spies and play down the presence of war criminals. Yet even on the voyage to Australia, the newcomers accused each other of communist and Nazi allegiance.

Anti-communism was the dominant creed, though Fitzpatrick notes that Russians lost out in the cold war contest for attention to other national groups who had the additional advantage that they could claim to represent “captive nations.” Her book is also a reminder that ethnic identities never encompass all migrants with a common nationality. As the Russian example makes clear, such identities are embedded in history and subject to politics. •

The post Invisible arrivals appeared first on Inside Story.

The first boatload arrived in November 1947; the last in 1952. They included a great many people who had altered their names and nationality. Masking their Soviet citizenship, they claimed they were Polish, Latvian or Belorussian, or simply “stateless,” claims that immigration officials were often unable to verify or invalidate. Disguising identity meant avoiding repatriation to the Soviet Union. Some also masked the fact that they were Wehrmacht volunteers rather than “forced labourers,” as they claimed. Immigration minister Arthur Calwell might have wished to discourage professionals, intellectuals and Jewish DPs, preferring “horny-handed toilers,” but, as Fitzpatrick wryly notes, many sailed to Australia under false colours and then “underwent a remarkable transformation from proletarian to educated middle class.” This dissembling extended to former Nazis entering Australia (some of whom removed SS tattoos), an issue sidestepped or denied by Calwell’s department.

Sheila Fitzpatrick brings to this remarkable cold war story of migration her prodigious skills as a historian and her international reputation as a distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union, especially the Stalin period. (There is even a “Fitzpatrick school” of Sovietologists in the United States.) Her Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (1999) was path-breaking and her On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (2015) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-fiction in 2016.

With White Russians, Red Peril, her tenth monograph, Fitzpatrick draws on research in archives in Australia, China, France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States. Her familiarity with the State Archive of the Russian Federation, recounted in the wonderful A Spy in the Archives (2013), enabled unique access — through repatriation reports from an undercover Soviet agent in Australia — to poignant accounts of desperately unhappy Russian DPs in Australia. Her use of Russian-language newspapers and periodicals in Australia permits insights into, among other things, obscure right-wing organisations such as the Russian Anti-Communist Centre, which from 1950 held their “Day of Irreconcilability” celebrations on 7 November to coincide with the Bolshevik seizure of power.

Anti-communism is a recurring theme of the book. The broader cold war environment in Australia is only fleetingly examined, although she notes the potent influence of anti-communism in explaining, for instance, the otherwise astonishing readiness of the Returned Soldiers’ League to support the entry of former German combatants. Rather, the emphasis is on “White” Russians — a slippery term that embraced first-wave prewar émigrés as well as Belorussians — for whom the cold war transformed disaffection with the Soviet Union into an anti-communist crusade. The superb opening chapter, “Displacement,” provides a historical context to a White Russian community that was far from homogeneous. Indeed, the serendipitous choices and complexities of fates and identities (evidenced here and in Fitzpatrick’s 2013 Mischka’s War) make generalisations impossible beyond three distinguishing features: commitment to the Russian Orthodox Church, concealment of national identity and wartime collaboration, and strident anti-communism.

Part two of the book concerns “China” Russians, centred in Harbin and Shanghai, the bulk of whom resettled in Australia from 1952 to the early 1960s. Prewar, Harbin was a thriving quasi-Russian city, with Shanghai home to 20,000 Russians. Very few were pro-Soviet. With the occupation of Manchuria, a minority became active collaborators with the Japanese forces or members of the Russian Fascist Party. In describing their wartime lives, postwar departures and resettlement experiences, Fitzpatrick here relies more heavily on secondary sources. But the narrative, as elsewhere throughout the book, is illuminated by an array of vivid biographical vignettes. These bring alive the lived experience (and memories) of individuals caught up in larger historical upheavals. Thus we hear Natalia Melnikov, fresh from Harbin, who spoke for the many who felt isolated and alien in 1950s Australia, plaintively asking, “So this is Australia… How does one get used to it?”

But for both European and Chinese Russians, the Orthodox Church was a comforting haven in this new country. Despite its internal fractiousness, its role in absorbing migrants into the Russian community was pivotal. It also played a part in espionage. Fitzpatrick has identified, again from the Russian archives, at least two Orthodox priests who were Soviet agents, and plausibly suggests that ASIO sought to recruit other priests as informants.

ASIO features in part three of the book, “Resettlement in Australia.” Numerous White Russians offered their services to ASIO, as did activists in the militantly anti-communist National Labour Union. These overtures were mostly rejected by ASIO, which continued to see Russians, whatever their political complexion, as potentially the most dangerous group of migrants. In the early 1950s the possibility of a third world war seemed real. The foe would be the Soviet Union and local Russians its fifth column. Having a White Russian monarchist father who had been decorated by the tsar and had fought the Reds in the Russian civil war didn’t shield Nina Christesen (née Maximov) from interrogation by Australia’s royal commission on espionage or subsequent suspicions of communist sympathies.

No history of Russians in cold war Australia would be complete without the Petrovs. Fitzpatrick confirms what Vladimir Petrov told the royal commission in 1954: that his brief as a colonel in the KGB was to cultivate a network of Soviet penetration agents within the White Russian community. Fitzpatrick is correct to say that Petrov was singularly unsuccessful (unless one counts, as he did, his apparent recruitment of double agent Michael Bialoguski or the ambiguous Lydia Mokras, both habitués of the Russian Social Club).

But Evdokia Petrov, a captain in the KGB, may have achieved more. A forthcoming article will suggest that she recruited an anti-communist Latvian who collaborated with the Nazis and arrived on the first boatload of DPs in 1947. ASIO was unaware of this but was, of course, aware of White Russians’ noisy presence at Mascot airport when Soviet couriers dragged Evdokia towards a Moscow-bound plane, and their demonstrations outside the royal commission when she testified.

White Russians, Red Peril is full of fascinating detail. Some examples: the first marriage of a future Whitlam government minister, “Diamond Jim” McClelland, then a Trotskyist, was to a pro-Stalinist Russian; Jennie George, a future ACTU president, was born Eugenie Sinicki to Russian parents in a DP camp; Labor MP Les Haylen dobbed in suspected communists (not Nazis) working on the Snowy Mountains scheme; and a shadowy White Russian organisation was exotically titled Federation of Zealots of the Sacred Memory of the Tsar.

This is an engagingly written book, sweeping in scope and erudite in analysis. It will stand alongside Fitzpatrick’s previous work as one of her finest accomplishments. The last five pages — on how Russian migrants balanced accommodation to Australia while retaining a sense of Russianness — are a model of wise judgement and shrewd synthesis. For anyone connected to the Russian diaspora, as well as historians of the cold war and migration studies, this is an essential read. •

The post How does one get used to it? appeared first on Inside Story.

Prime minister Bob Hawke and Keating, his treasurer and successor, won support for tough reforms — holding down wages and instead giving workers universal healthcare and superannuation, subjecting once-universal welfare benefits to income and asset tests — because Australians felt themselves to be economically vulnerable. Being a big agricultural exporter was no longer a ticket to wealth. The elites of left and right agreed: we had to reform, work harder, change our game.

Ross Garnaut was at the forefront of that reform surge. He was Hawke’s economic adviser, then Australian ambassador to China and, from a prestigious base at the Australian National University, an influential advocate for free trade and enmeshing Australia in the Asia-Pacific. His 1989 report advocating scrapping tariff protection for manufacturing to make other industries more globally competitive was crucial to the government’s decision to do just that, which saw 130,000 manufacturing jobs wiped out.

At the 1996 election, John Howard swept Keating away, pledging to make Australians “relaxed and comfortable.” He led one last big reform, the introduction of the GST, and that was it. Reform gave way to media management, giveaways to voters, culture wars designed to wedge opponents, and help for vested interests. In this century the only big economic reform worth the name came when the crossbenches forced the Gillard government to adopt a carbon price, which the Coalition then scrapped on coming to office.

Garnaut played a key role in that reform too, after Kevin Rudd (one of his junior diplomats in Beijing days) asked him to write a report weighing up Australia’s climate change options and Julia Gillard brought him into the final negotiations on how to make a carbon price work. But the return of the Coalition in 2013 saw him back on the outer, as any prospect of serious economic reform disappeared.

While Bill Shorten’s period as leader raised hopes that Labor in government could renew its zeal for reform, a government led by Anthony Albanese looks no more likely to take tough decisions than a Coalition one. Those who see urgent need for reforms seem to be talking to ourselves; those able to do anything about them are simply not interested.

Ross Garnaut is undeterred. His new book, Reset: Restoring Australia after the Pandemic Recession, is a wide-ranging almanac of reform proposals to give Australia a better future: on economic, social and environmental fronts. At times, he seems to be talking directly to the Morrison government, as if hoping that it has Australia’s long-term interests at heart, despite evidence to the contrary, and could be persuaded to embark on politically difficult reforms to secure them.

Appeals to revive the spirit of the Hawke–Keating government under this government frankly seem like a waste of breath. But it is the fate of reformers to debate reform options in their own minds and with those they respect, and Garnaut’s book is full of them, all focused on creating an Australia with full employment — as soon as possible — rising standards of living, sustainable finances, and world-leading new industries based on renewable energy.

Most of the media coverage of the book has focused on Garnaut’s proposals for macroeconomic reform: lifting the growth rate by reshaping and reducing taxes, and financing those changes by issuing new government bonds bought directly by the Reserve Bank. This would further increase the federal deficit, at least initially, and loosen monetary policy to levels comparable to other Western countries, leading indirectly to a lower Australian dollar, and a more competitive economy.

Restoring full employment by transforming our international competitiveness is one of the two key themes of the book. But the other is equally central: to achieve this will require business and government to rapidly develop Australia’s new international competitive advantage in renewable energy and the products dependent on it: the hydrogen economy, ammonia and fertilisers, metal refining, and downstream processing in products such as steel and aluminium.

The macroeconomic agenda is the logical place to start. And for an economist known as a voice of orthodoxy, Garnaut’s proposals show how far that orthodoxy has moved since 2008.

He cuts through the spin we hear about Australia’s economic performance in the past decade, in what Garnaut likes to call the “Dog Days.” As I too have argued, it was unimpressive, whether compared with our past experience or with our international peers. Unemployment stalled above 5 per cent, underemployment swelled, real wages stagnated as never before, and GDP growth rates looked okay only because they were inflated by high immigration.

Without a policy reset, Garnaut argues, that past is what Australia risks going back to as we emerge from this recession. He gives the government high marks for dropping its deficit fetish after Covid-19 struck, when it successfully pumped money into households and business to stimulate spending. But like other economists, he argues it switched its focus too quickly to reining in future deficits when the bigger job is to get people back to work.

He boldly, and rightly, assails the misuse by the Reserve Bank, Treasury and others of the concept of the NAIRU (the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment”), an estimate of how low unemployment can fall without causing rising inflation. The NAIRU makes good theoretical sense but in reality is impossible to calculate accurately when no such events happen. In 2012 the US Federal Reserve estimated the limit for the United States was 5.5 per cent. Yet by 2019 unemployment was 3.5 per cent and inflation almost non-existent.

Except for Western Australia during the labour shortage of the first resources boom, wage growth has not driven up inflation in Australia since the 1980s. Treasury’s estimate of the NAIRU as 5 per cent, and the Reserve Bank’s estimate of “4-point-something” are equally phoney. As Garnaut says, “We simply don’t know, and we won’t know until unemployment falls to a level at which wages rise at an accelerating rate.” He suggests aiming for a 3.5 per cent unemployment rate, and then lower unless inflation is “accelerating dangerously out of the top of the Reserve Bank’s target range.”

To get to 3.5 per cent unemployment by 2025, he estimates that Australia needs to create 1.2 million new jobs in just four years. That is a huge task, considering the headwinds we face: “the huge legacy of public debt, a smaller capital stock per person (because of low business investment)… major losses in export industries… reduced productivity… the effects of climate change, an ageing population… [and] lower population and workforce growth.”

Garnaut makes a second bold but correct call: don’t return to high immigration levels. In the past decade or two, net overseas migration has averaged 1 per cent of the nation’s population every year, mostly from people coming (or staying on) here to work, and taking jobs that in the past went to school leavers or graduates, whether in service stations or in IT and the like.

I have written about this several times. Between 2008 and 2016, roughly three-quarters of all net growth in full-time jobs went to new migrants. Of the 474,000 full-time jobs added in that time, only 74,000 went to workers born in Australia, while 168,000 went to workers born on the Indian subcontinent. Treasury looked at a different set of years and found similar numbers.

“Immigration now lowers the incomes and employment prospects of low-income Australians,” Garnaut concludes. “Integration into a global labour market [has]… contributed to persistent unemployment, rising underemployment… stagnant real wages [and]… a historic shift in the distribution of income from wages to profits.” Temporary worker migration in reality is not focused on solving skill shortages, as promised, and migrant workers are frequently exploited, as Age journalist Adele Ferguson has shown.

Garnaut argues for halving the annual net immigration rate to 0.5 per cent: in round figures, 125,000 a year rather than 250,000. Of all his reform proposals, it is one of the most viable politically.

To create those 1.2 million jobs by 2025, both fiscal and monetary policy must be set unambiguously to expansion. The Reserve Bank, Garnaut says, needs to accelerate as hard as most other central banks in the West are doing to bring the dollar down and make Australian producers more competitive. (He notes that Australia might still be making cars had the Reserve understood the damage it was doing to our competitiveness by failing to halt the dollar’s rise during the resources boom. In the new age of electric vehicles, there is no one left here to make them.)

I would add one caution, however. We can’t ask the Reserve to correct the damage from bad government policies: only governments can do that, and none of our recent governments has wanted to. So low interest rates once again are igniting an explosion of tax-driven investment in rental property that will deprive growing numbers of Australians of the chance to own their own home, perhaps forever.

On budget policy, Garnaut empathises with the Coalition’s desire to start reducing the deficit to minimise the debt it will bequeath to future governments — but concludes that this is not the time for it. The government, like the Reserve, should still have its foot on the accelerator, not the brake, and he has two big ideas on how to go about it:

• The complex tax and welfare system should be simplified to (mostly) one flat tax rate and one big welfare payment. The payment would be what is variously called a universal basic income or negative income tax — Garnaut prefers to call it the Australian Income Security, or AIS — which would guarantee all Australian citizens (except those too rich to qualify) a tax-free payment of about $15,000 a year, topped up with further payments for those who are aged, disabled, unemployed or parents with dependent children.

Conversely, all income from the first dollar would be taxed at the rate of 37 per cent up to $180,000, and 45 per cent above that. The combination of the AIS and the tax would make this more egalitarian than it might appear. Garnaut argues that it would provide a stronger welfare net, provide greater incentive to work, simplify tax and welfare administration, and provide an immediate (but temporary) boost to demand.

• Business taxation would no longer be levied on profits, but on cashflow. This would make all investment spending immediately deductible against tax, providing a permanent incentive to higher investment. But interest payments and financing costs would no longer be deductible, except for banks and financial firms, and payments overseas for royalties, marketing and management fees would be deductible only if they were incurred directly in producing the firm’s output.

Conversely, however, companies with a negative cashflow would receive a cash credit, effectively paid for by other taxpayers. For those other taxpayers, that is a risky part of the design. A similar promise of a blank cheque for losses was one factor in the downfall of the Rudd government’s mining tax in 2010.

Garnaut argues that a cashflow tax would provide an incentive to investment, especially on risky projects. (BHP’s plan to build a fast rail line between Melbourne and Sydney in the early 1990s fell over when the Keating government declined to give it such tax treatment.) He also claims that removing deductions for interest payments and payments for imported intellectual property (often to a related company) would remove “the main opportunities for corporate tax avoidance and evasion.”

It’s an idea that’s been around a long time without any country adopting it. The Republicans in Washington flirted with a version of it a few years ago, but Donald Trump killed that idea.

• Garnaut also raises a third suggestion that is much easier to implement and could provide the right sort of stimulus: dump the convention that requires cost–benefit studies of infrastructure projects to use a discount rate of 7 per cent per annum above inflation to estimate the future value of projects in today’s dollars. At one time, that vaguely matched reality, but it was long ago. In an age of minimal interest rates, the convention is inaccurate, unscientific and harmful to good decision-making.

Frankly, it seems unlikely that any Australian government will implement either of Garnaut’s two big tax and welfare reforms in the near term. The Morrison government’s derisory cup-of-coffee-a-day increase to Newstart despite widespread bipartisan support for real reform shows its aversion to tackling the hard work of economic restructuring. Anthony Albanese seems to want people to like him, above all, and thus to avoid conflict — which unfortunately is an inevitable by-product of reform.

In Garnaut’s view, the Australian economy is facing so many headwinds that business as usual will not generate the jobs required to restore full employment. We need to try a new tack: to rephrase Ken Henry’s famous advice to the Rudd government: “Go hard, go early, go renewables.”

As he spelt out in his 2019 book Superpower: Australia’s Low-Carbon Opportunity, Garnaut sees Australia’s vast land mass and solar radiation as a resource that no other country can match in the dawning age of renewable energy. Just as our coal and gas resources gave us a huge competitive advantage until we began pricing them at global parity, we can produce solar and wind energy more cheaply and plentifully than any comparable country. This could become our leading export industry of the future, as coal exports diminish and gas exports flatline. In his words:

There is no comparable opportunity for profitable expansion of business investment in other trade-exposed industries. Getting carbon right becomes an integral part of getting economic policy right.

The transformation should begin on a large scale now… It is feasible now to replace most of Australia’s large imports of ammonia-based products (such as fertilisers). Building supply from new plants in rural and provincial Australia that rely on renewable energy and hydrogen — at prices competitive with high-emission alternatives — can happen in time to contribute to full employment in 2025.

Zero-emissions electricity at prices within the range required to keep established mainland aluminium smelters alive is possible now. By contrast, aluminium smelting at Gladstone, Newcastle and Portland would not survive through the 2020s with continuous coal-based power supply.

[With budget subsidies]… the first commercial-scale hydrogen-based iron-making plant can be built as part of the movement to full employment. Make a start on commercial-scale plants, and more business investment will follow.

In Garnaut’s view, the hydrogen economy is not for the distant future, it is something we should start creating now. British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta, with whom he has worked, last month launched a feasibility study for an industrial-scale hydrogen-fuelled steel plant at Dunkirk. Three separate consortia are progressing plans to build renewables-powered hydrogen plants in the Pilbara to supply domestic and Asian markets. He sees traditional coal and gas centres like Gladstone becoming centres of hydrogen production and metal refining using renewable energy.

Not all agree. The day Garnaut’s book was released, BlueScope’s chief executive, Mark Vassella, said it plans to use old technology to update its Port Kembla steelworks, warning that “green steel” might not become mainstream for another twenty years.

But many of Australia’s heavy industrial plants will not last that long. And as the laggard of the Western world in reducing greenhouse emissions from industry, Australia now faces the prospect of tariffs in Europe and North America to force it to speed up its transition.

Garnaut argues that green steel, green aluminium and green fertilisers will command premium prices in the renewable era. Australia should be a first mover in using its wind and solar resources to produce them.

He is practical, not religious, in his outlook. Unlike the green lobby, he sees gas playing a prominent role in Australia’s future, backed by carbon capture and storage in areas where that is geologically feasible. But renewables, not gas, are the main game — and our economic flagship of the future.

One subject that appears rarely in this book is China. When Garnaut has been one of Australia’s foremost experts on China for almost four decades, that is surprising, but also a sign that we live in dangerous times.

When he does touch on China, he is careful but clear-eyed. He advises Australian firms to look to develop other markets, especially in Southeast Asia, and warns that ultimately China will look for other sources of iron ore, and of so much else that it once bought from us.

The one passage in which he does address Sino-Australian relations directly is, in my opinion, worth thinking carefully about:

There does not seem to be any early prospect of the restrictions in Sino-Australian trade lifting to leave clear air. There are real issues of Australian security to be managed. There are real Chinese responses to Australian initiatives. Australia and China will respond from time to time in ways that are influenced by the shifting dynamics of US politics and international engagement.

What might be possible is a narrowing of restriction to the minimum necessary for meeting clearly defined and essential security interests, as analysis and the passing of time causes us to see them. This will make heavy demands on Australian knowledge and analysis. It will take subtle and intense diplomacy.

It will require Australians to adjust to the realities of living in a perilous world, in which peace and prosperity, and our effective sovereignty, depend on understanding the world as it is and not as we wish it to be.

This is a world that has been inhabited by other countries of modest size alongside great powers since the beginning of the nation state. It is a world that is understood from history by our Western Pacific neighbours South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand — and by the neighbours of great powers in Europe and Central and North America.

There is pain and wisdom in these words. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The revival of the governess and the accompanying debate about privilege and educational advantage gives historian Patricia Clarke’s new book more contemporary resonance than its 1985 edition, The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862–1882. This revised version of that book is also exquisitely illustrated with nineteenth-century landscapes, lithographs and cartoons that further enliven a forgotten yet suddenly relevant subject.

Beyond governesses, Clarke’s oeuvre has pushed Australian female writers into the biographical canon, especially her invaluable history of women’s journalism in the nineteenth century, Pen Portraits (1988); biographies of novelists Rosa Praed (1999) and Jessie Couvreur (1994), journalist Louisa Atkinson (1990) and feminist Eilean Giblin (2013); her edition of Judith Wright’s memoir, Half a Lifetime (1999); and the book she co-edited with Dale Spender, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (1992). Her eye for archival life writing that reveals hidden histories is similarly evident in Great Expectations, which is drawn from governesses’ letters to the Female Middle Class Emigration Society, or FMCES, the organisation that funded their passage to Australia between 1861 to 1886.

While today’s governesses (or the male equivalent, “governors”) presumably have a teaching degree, Clarke’s young women were characters straight from Bridgerton who offered their students little more than basic literacy and numeracy, possibly with art, French and music, and a posh accent that hid their genteel poverty. Along with their books and other luggage, they packed the rigid English class system, and before they even embarked they were complaining about travelling second-class, an early warning of the trouble ahead.

Those who found work with a family complained about the colonial children: “[They are] wild and impetuous,” wrote one. “The floor is the place for everything and it is no use making yourself unhappy because they will not acquire English manners for they do not like them.” They also struggled with the colonial mothers, who, they opined, were far too interested in their children, “do not like to be made to feel inferior” and were “indolent and untidy.”

Clarke responds empathetically to the entitled but naive women who arrived in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, blinded by the southern light and the reality of their new situation. She argues that they were lured down the colonial garden path by promises that were clearly at odds with news reaching the FMCES’s founder, Maria Rye, that the colonies didn’t need more governesses.

By the 1860s, in a colonial version of the skilled occupation list, colonial governments assisted only those whose skills were in demand: artisans, labourers and domestic servants. To overcome this hurdle the FMCES offered loans that covered a governess’s expenses, to be repaid once she secured employment as a governess in the colonies. But getting a job was becoming increasingly difficult as school systems created expectations of education outside the home. In this respect, Great Expectations offers a history of the efforts — at the governesses’ cost — to establish formal private and public schooling in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Despite warnings, Rye believed that dumping more of England’s problems on the colonies was a good idea — if no longer convicts, why not single women? In Clarke’s telling, she is a tunnel-visioned, anti-Catholic evangelist who wilfully ignores her scheme’s problematic premise to the detriment of more than 300 young women. Great Expectations is as much about Rye’s great illusions as the governesses who experienced her scheme’s great disillusionment.

Through extracts from their letters to the FMCES, Clarke gives voice to the governesses’ culture shock and isolation. They expected to be met by FMCES contacts, but most found little help. As late as 1874 — a decade after the scheme began — Ellen Ollard wrote to the FMCES that “never while I live, shall I forget the feeling of despair that took possession of me” on arriving alone in Melbourne. They competed for the few available governess jobs and by and large found themselves to be no more than glamorised servants, especially if they couldn’t teach music. Those who were willing — or more often compelled by a lack of work in the city — travelled hundreds of kilometres to remote stations.

Some of the more resilient, adventurous governesses adapted; some of the entrepreneurial began their own schools; a few married, which was another lure of the scheme that had been nicknamed the Export Wife Trade by the Saturday Review back in London. Clarke quotes Rye — “Teach your protégées to emigrate; send them where the men want wives, the mothers want governesses” — and then, like a Twitter moderator, flags another false promise: the colonies were already fine on the marriage front.

Placed in Clarke’s wider context, the governesses’ struggle to adjust reveals the women to be more than haughty and hapless snobs. Great Expectations is written in a clear if brisk style that will appeal to a wide, non-specialist readership. Where possible, Clarke provides brief details of the governesses’ lives and employers using archival information beyond their letters, but sometimes I wanted to linger with some of these women and more fully understand, as much as factually possible, the situations they found themselves in and the people they found themselves among.

After recurring references to her “friendlessness,” we do learn more about the miserable Rosa Phayne, begging for help to return to England from her rural station post. Her last letter to the FMCES is in 1872: an appeal for help finding work in London, written as she was about to board a ship home. It’s to be hoped that present-day pandemic “governesses” and “governors” are writing about their lived experiences for a future historian to continue Clarke’s work. •

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It’s not hard to see why Germany’s leaders opted for a new hard lockdown. The “lockdown light” that has been in place since 2 November has failed to reduce the number of daily infections. On Friday, the Robert Koch Institute, the agency that tracks infectious diseases, reported 29,875 new infections and 598 new fatalities, the highest daily figures since the pandemic began. According to the DIVI register, which monitors hospital capacity, more than 4500 Covid-19 patients are in intensive care and some hospitals can no longer accept new patients. Most alarmingly, perhaps, the number of clusters of cases in aged care homes is rising rapidly.

“After a temporary stabilisation of case numbers at a higher level in late August and early September, a steep increase in case numbers ensued in October in all federal states,” the Koch Institute reported last Friday. Measures introduced at the beginning of November had failed to cut new cases significantly, with numbers “sharply increasing” over the previous week.

Until recently, Germany had managed the pandemic reasonably well — not as well as East Asian countries but certainly better than its European neighbours. Even as late as the end of September, after infections started to climb again, Germany’s numbers were not particularly alarming compared with those elsewhere in Europe.

On 30 September, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, Germany’s cumulative number of cases per 100,000 people over fourteen days was just over thirty, better than each of Germany’s eight neighbouring fellow EU members. Apart from Poland, all had recorded figures in excess of 120.

A month later, Germany’s figure had risen to 195.6 — but even then the country was still doing better than all of its neighbours except Denmark, with the rates in three of them (the Czech Republic, Belgium and Luxembourg) exceeding 1000, and France and the Netherlands both recording a fourteen-day cumulative total of about 750 per 100,000.

By Sunday, though, Germany’s figure had climbed to 334.9, significantly worse than the equivalent figures for France and Belgium. Immunologists agree about the success of the far-reaching restrictions introduced by France and Belgium, like those of other European countries that experienced exponential rises of infections in September and October. By contrast, Germany’s restrictions during November were too weak: while bars and restaurants, and cinemas and theatres were closed, shops remained open, as did schools and childcare centres.

Angela Merkel can’t be blamed for those half-hearted measures. She has long argued that the coronavirus needs to be taken seriously and reportedly wanted stricter restrictions as soon as it became clear that the “lockdown light” hadn’t had the desired effect. She was uncharacteristically emotional last Wednesday when she warned in parliament that too many contacts over the following fortnight might make the coming festive season “the last Christmas with the grandparents.”

Part of the explanation for the slow response to the latest surge lies in the country’s federal system of government. Although Merkel wanted tougher measures, she had failed to convince all of the state premiers. It is their governments that are responsible for imposing and, with local councils, implementing such measures, and they preside over different infection rates and intensive care capacities. The fact that the premiers of the most populous states, Markus Söder of Bavaria and Armin Laschet of North-Rhine Westphalia, have championed diverging approaches throughout the pandemic — not least because they are both vying to succeed Merkel as chancellor — hasn’t helped.

But state–state and federal–state rivalries don’t entirely explain the dithering. The state governments’ fear has been that stricter measures would be met with popular anger.

At first sight, such an explanation seems counterintuitive. Most Germans have long supported a decisive response to the pandemic and have endorsed the government’s handling of the crisis, including the imposition of a strict lockdown earlier in the year. An opinion poll conducted last Thursday, three days before the announcement of tougher measures, showed that 49 per cent of those surveyed wanted more restrictions while only 13 per cent considered existing restrictions excessive. And Merkel’s popularity, and the approval rate for her Christian Democrats, has been exceptionally high since the beginning of the pandemic.

At the same time, polls suggest that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, which has opposed all measures to contain the virus, would fall short of its performance in the 2017 federal election (when it scored 12.6 per cent of the national vote), never mind attract the kind of support it enjoyed a year ago, when one in five surveyed Germans said they would vote for it.

To understand why federal and state governments didn’t heed the almost unanimous advice of the medical experts and impose more drastic measures earlier, we need to go back to the Merkel government’s response to the influx of refugees from Syria in 2015. Or rather, we need to look at how that crisis is remembered, particularly within Merkel’s party, but also among other German politicians outside the AfD.

A powerful narrative says that it was a mistake to open the country’s borders that year, thereby alienating a sizeable minority of Germans opposed to an ethnically and culturally diverse Germany while irritating a majority who didn’t think that the loosening of border controls was justified. For those who have embraced this narrative, polarisation and the rise of the AfD — which in 2017 became the first party of the far right since 1953 to be represented in the Bundestag — have been more traumatic than any other event in reunified Germany’s short history.

This account tends to overlook three facts. First, the government didn’t open Germany’s borders in 2015; rather, it decided not to close them (and not to defend them in any way that echoed the pre-1989 German Democratic Republic’s defence of its border with West Germany by shooting people trying to cross it). Second, polls at the time revealed that a majority of Germans approved of the Merkel government’s response to the refugees. Many may later have changed their minds, but a clear majority still agrees that Germany has an obligation to provide sanctuary for people fleeing war or persecution. Finally, those who voted for the AfD in 2017 hadn’t suddenly become opposed to migration, or to living in a multicultural society, and hadn’t suddenly developed a longing for an authoritarian political leader. Rather, in 2017, it made sense to them to vote for a party that seemed to represent their views.

But whether the facts get in the way of the story is irrelevant. The key thing is that it is held to be true. For many of those who believe the narrative, a repeat or prolongation of the trauma associated with the rise of the AfD must be avoided.

You might imagine that Christian Democrats would want to solve this dilemma by adopting the policy positions of the AfD to try to make it disappear. But Germany’s post-Auschwitz identity works against a rapprochement between centre-right conservatives and the AfD because large sections of the latter are considered ideologically close to the Nazis. This contrasts with countries like Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, where centre-right or centre-left politicians have espoused positions on refugees and migration that were previously owned by the far right.

Also working against any rapprochement is the fact that past attempts by the Christian Democrats to neutralise a far-right party by adopting its vocabulary or policies have backfired. Ahead of the 1992 state election in Baden-Württemberg, for example, the Christian Democrats moved to the right to attract potential voters from the extremist Republikaner, a precursor of the AfD. The strategy failed miserably: the Republikaner won 10.9 per cent of the vote and the Christian Democrats shed 9.4 percentage points of support compared with the previous state election.

More recently, ahead of the Bavarian state elections in 2018, the Bavarian sister party of the Christian Democrats, the Markus Söder–led Christian Social Union, or CSU, attempted to mimic the AfD’s rhetoric, particularly in relation to asylum seekers. But Söder soon realised that he risked losing more votes to the Greens (because many Christian conservatives were appalled by that kind of rhetoric) than could be gained from potential AfD voters. He changed tack, won the election, and is now a good bet to be the next chancellor, leading a coalition of Christian Democrats and Greens.

This leaves Christian Democrats, in particular, in a quandary. They would like to keep the AfD small (or ideally make it disappear altogether) by wooing potential AfD voters, but without appearing to embrace AfD positions. So they have made do with telling AfD supporters that their concerns are legitimate and are being taken seriously, hoping to thereby avoid provoking the anger of the people who responded so strongly to the refugees.

For the AfD, the pandemic has been disastrous in the sense that it has pushed asylum seekers, who were no longer front-page news anyway, further into the background. But the current crisis has also provided an opportunity for the party. Having initially criticised the government for doing too little, too late, the AfD proceeded to lambast the government for doing too much.

The change of heart had much to do with the emergence during spring of a motley bunch of groups — New Agers, anti-vaxxers and others — that considered the government’s measures an overreaction and didn’t accept the science that informed them. The AfD and other groups on the far right tried, often very successfully, to harness this growing movement. AfD politicians ridiculed face masks, argued against closing schools and businesses, suggested Covid-19 was no worse than the flu, alleged that the government would force the entire population to vaccinate, claimed that restrictions to halt the disease amounted to a suspension of civil liberties and a breach of privacy, and organised demonstrations to channel fear and anger.

The government was taken by surprise when thousands — and sometimes tens of thousands — protested. Because the anger was reminiscent of the anger of people decrying the accommodation of asylum seekers in their neighbourhoods, federal and state governments generally handled the protesters with kid gloves, bending over backwards to convince them that their concerns — which often turned out to be based on anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — were being taken seriously.

Although a largely silent majority of Germans would have supported earlier and tougher measures to keep infections low, it was this loud, even shrill, minority whose views informed decision-making. That was particularly the case in the East German states, where the far right is comparatively strong — and perhaps nowhere more so than in Saxony, where the AfD won 27 per cent of the vote in the 2017 Bundestag elections and a shade more in the state elections two years later. Saxony’s premier, Michael Kretschmer, repeatedly met with protesters and listened to their concerns, no matter how absurd they were. He also criticised harsher measures adopted in other states, saying that Saxonians could be trusted to behave responsibly without threats of sanctions.

In rural and regional Saxony, in particular, discontent about the federal government’s handling of Covid-19 was widespread and conspiracy theories gathered followers. People often refused to wear masks, even on public transport. But the East German states generally did well during the pandemic’s first wave, with the number of reported infections lower than in West Germany.

During the second wave, though, East Germany has been particularly hard-hit, and Saxony worst of all. Although the state was hardly touched in spring, it now has the highest number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants nationally. On Sunday, its infection rate was twice as high as the national average and more than four times higher than in the West German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein.

But the state government’s hesitant approach and the influence of the AfD can’t be blamed entirely for Saxony’s catastrophic numbers. The state shares borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which were hit hard, and early, by the pandemic’s second wave. Unlike in spring, the borders remained open, and Poles and Czechs continued to commute to Saxony for work, shopping and leisure. (But they were able to do so also because Saxony’s government was reluctant to resort to border controls, lest its own people grow even more restless.)

The influence of the popular movement against coronavirus restrictions, fostered if not orchestrated by AfD politicians, can’t be discounted either. Rural Saxony has been for Germany what the Dakotas have been for the United States. It’s no accident that the districts where the AfD enjoys particularly strong support have been hardest-hit by the virus, while the city of Leipzig, where the AfD does comparatively badly, has an infection rate of about a third of the state average.

One other recent example of the impact of the 2015 refugee narrative is worth mentioning.

Germany’s public broadcasters are funded by a monthly fee payable by households. Last set in 2015, it amounts to €17.50 (A$28) per month for households with a television set. Earlier this year, the sixteen state premiers agreed to a moderate fee rise, to €18.36, effective from January 2021.

The plan attracted some opposition. The AfD in particular has long claimed that journalists with the public broadcasters tend to be left-wingers who use publicly funded programs to promote their views, and the fee is thus misspent. Much like Donald Trump has done in the United States, Germany’s far-right politicians have targeted journalists as “enemies of the people.” At rallies organised by far-right organisations, including protests against coronavirus restrictions, journalists are frequently abused and sometimes assaulted. But the protesters represent but a very small minority; most Germans trust the public broadcasters and value their programs.

The fee rise must be ratified by all sixteen state parliaments. Ordinarily, this would be a formality when the premiers have already reached unanimous agreement. But in the small East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, which is governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens, Christian Democrat parliamentarians defied their own party’s state premier and declared they would vote against the rise. With the AfD, which also opposes the rise, the Christian Democrats command a majority of seats; the government’s motion would therefore have been lost.

That vote would have been the end of the governing coalition. Neither Greens nor Social Democrats would continue to work with a party that makes common cause with the far right. In the end, the state premier, himself a Christian Democrat, averted the fall of his government by sacking his interior minister, the ringleader of the revolt, and then electing not to put the fee rise to a vote, which means that it won’t go ahead as planned, either in Saxony-Anhalt or in the rest of Germany.

When it comes to the funding of Germany’s public broadcasters, the Christian Democrats’ fears about provoking extremists in Saxony-Anhalt will probably be inconsequential in the long run. The public broadcasters will take their case for a funding increase to the High Court, and they are confident of winning the case. The rise will come, albeit with a slight delay.

The dithering about new measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus is a far more serious matter. I concluded an earlier Inside Story article, in May this year, by declaring that “it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent.” The government might not have made concessions as such, but its approach has been unduly influenced by the protests and the exponential rise in infections is one of the results.

Premier Michael Kretschmer seems to have realised that his earlier decision to trust all Saxonians to act responsibly was wrong. Even before Sunday’s emergency meeting his government opted for a full lockdown starting on 14 December. Blaming a minority of Saxonians for the catastrophically high incidence of Covid-19 infections, he opted for an uncompromising stance. People have had long discussions about this issue, he told Spiegel, but now “we’re done with that… Anyone who wants to can still have a different opinion and question our measures, that’s the way it is in a free country. But that’s no longer crucial, these people now have to step aside… After all, opinions aren’t facts.” Elsewhere, he said that what was now required were “authoritarian measures by the state.”

Not only do these statements smack of a spurned lover’s revenge, the vocabulary is also grist to the mill for the AfD, which claims that the state is hell-bent on eroding personal freedoms. But it’s good to hear even Kretschmer now telling conspiracy theorists to get lost.

By resisting both the €0.86 fee rise and measures to curb the coronavirus, a small minority has exercised undue influence by being loud and, even more importantly, because the noise is reminiscent of the anti-refugee protests of the recent past. Members of the German majority have received less consideration because they have behaved meekly and their support is taken for granted.

It would be disastrous if the government paid too much attention to loudmouths orchestrated by the far right when it formulates its polices in other key areas — climate change, a challenge that dwarfs Covid-19, chief among them. When Germans are again able to focus their attention on that issue, the majority needs to make itself heard, and “these people” might then again be asked “to step aside.” •

The post Enemies of the people appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a fitting motif in a text that leaves no doubt about the butterfly effect. The Next Great Migration uncovers a living, moving, evolving planet in which all organisms are — and always have been — far more interconnected than believed. The smallest of changes sets in motion events that radically transform life on the other side of the world, or effects that are still felt centuries later.

Sonia Shah meticulously teases out these transformations and interconnections, taking readers not just to the science but to the very sources of scientific knowledge. The acclaimed author of Pandemic and The Fever, she is a veteran investigator of matters of history and science. Here, she turns her lens on two of the greatest challenges our future holds: climate change and migration. The result is a fascinating, sweeping and at times confronting audit of movement and survival — both human and “wild” — through history.

Shah’s central thesis is that movement is an inherent, constant and unstoppable feature of life on this planet. Movement isn’t an “anomaly,” an “aberration,” an “exception,” a “catastrophe” or a “violation of the natural order”; it is essential, and provides possibly our best and only chance at surviving the impending effects of a warming earth. It is potentially life-saving, not just for those who move but also for those receiving migrants into their midst.

The book’s greatest strength lies in how its stories, human and wild, are juxtaposed and interwoven. After opening with a series of vignettes depicting plants and animals on the move, Shah shifts her focus to migrants, refugees and people driven from their homes by disasters and climate. While the movements of wild species are constrained primarily by their own biological capacities and the geographic features they encounter on their journeys, the paths of human migrants are shaped (and often blocked) by abstractions — legal and political barriers to movement rooted, often, in historical racism and xenophobia.

Shah’s vivid storytelling brings to life enthralling revelations. Coral reefs, “literally stone walls,” are moving northward at a speed of fourteen kilometres per year. Forests are steadily climbing the Himalayas of their own accord, at a rate of nineteen metres each decade; their march brought the first known mosquitos to Tibet in 2009.

Other revelations will be more unsettling, even for the most enlightened of readers. Shah discredits much of the underlying work that has led to the classification of living things as being “from” certain places, debunking any notion of stability or stagnation among wild species. She also draws from science to argue that the arrival of “alien” species in established habitats can be positive, promoting biodiversity and filling “gaps” in existing ecosystems rather than destroying their delicate balances as once feared.

But the results of Shah’s investigation of anti-migrant sentiment make for the book’s most disturbing moments. She takes familiar narratives of migrants as national security threats, health risks, violent criminals and purveyors of social destruction and methodically debunks them. In doing so, she reveals how these narratives managed to take root in the first place. Her conclusions would be troubling at any time but are especially so in the “fake news” era. She demonstrates not only that such narratives run far wider and deeper than the populist Trump administration but also that they are the direct successors of a long line of bogus claims, dressed up as some of history’s most respected scientific truths.

As Shah traces the origins of scientific thought from eighteenth-century European naturalists through to their twentieth-century descendants, much of what she describes is grotesque. The abuse of African bodies in the name of “science” is appalling, particularly where it involved preoccupation with the sex organs of African women. Even after the focus shifts from “race” to global population control, the shocking stories continue, including one in which Indian police threatened to massacre a village of mostly poor Muslim families in the 1970s if the men and boys did not surrender themselves for forced vasectomies.

The common thread through the centuries is a crazed search for proof that humans can be divided into distinct groups, some biologically superior to others. Readers who don’t subscribe to such notions may be shocked to learn how certain words and concepts common to our modern vocabulary derive from these views. These insights are deliberately discomforting, forcing readers to acknowledge the extent to which apparently outdated notions of racial difference and disproven science still shape our lives in various ways.

In exposing the racist roots of anti-migrant sentiment and presenting scientific evidence that living creatures have always moved, Shah’s treatment of her subject matter is not always entirely dispassionate. At times she seems to be downplaying the very real threats that migration can pose. Moreover, some tensions between what she uncovers and prevailing beliefs about migration remain unresolved. Past and present attempts to classify all living creatures as from a fixed place and to stifle movement may be flawed, but that does not negate the fact that people, plants and animals are “from” certain places, and some migrations are exactly as destructively catastrophic as feared. Shah does not provide easy answers, and in some cases the existential and intellectual challenge she sets for her readers is compelling. But this tension is one with which an Australian readership in particular may feel unease.

Much of Australia’s native flora and fauna is unique, and a source of national pride. Far from promoting biodiversity, the introduction of “alien” species such as rabbits and cane toads has previously wrought great harm on our native ecosystems. Moving from the wild to the human, the attempt to uncouple people from specific places becomes outright problematic. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are from Australian lands, deriving from them identity, history and culture. Meanwhile, this country is still marred by the destructive legacy of British migration to Australia. Far from promoting biodiversity, that great migration resulted in genocide, the loss of language, culture and knowledge that can never be restored, and critical ongoing disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Nor do generalisations about migrant demographics hold true the world over, and certain aspects of Shah’s critique of barriers to human movement are misdirected. She is unduly disparaging of the Refugee Convention, and her explanation of its refugee definition is not entirely accurate. The book also makes only fleeting mention of the world’s 45.7 million internally displaced people, despite the fact that they far outstrip the number of refugees worldwide and potentially belie some of Shah’s conclusions about human movement.

But my biggest reservation relates to Shah’s engagement with the titular subject matter. “The next great migration is upon us,” she declares, early in the piece, but it is not until the second-last chapter that we get some idea of what that might be. Whereas human migration historically “flowed more rapidly from east to west,” Shah predicts that the pattern will “switch” in the new era, “flowing from south to north along the gradient of our warming planet.” The pace will be faster, she claims, with migrations unfolding over years and decades rather than centuries and millennia.

The evidentiary bases for these claims are neither articulated nor supported by reference material. Earlier, Shah writes that “a wild exodus has begun,” as animals and plants migrate towards the poles in search of cooler lands and waters. It is possible that she has extrapolated the future trajectory of human movement from scientific observations of other species. But even those movements are only northwards in the northern hemisphere. Surely, if humans were to follow our “wild cousins,” that would mean migration in both directions away from the equator.

Even then, does it necessarily follow that humans would move along the same routes, or deploy the same survival strategies, as other living creatures? As Shah herself documents, humans have long lived in and adapted to seemingly inhospitable climates and forbidding landscapes. Before modern political and physical barriers to movement were erected, all of humanity didn’t try to crowd into the most temperate patches of the earth’s surface.

With the adverse impacts of disasters and climate change intensifying, adaptation strategies must include mobility options; but, as Shah rightly explains, some of this mobility will involve temporary or seasonal movements, or follow opportunities for work rather than a cardinal direction. Preventative mitigation measures might even limit the need for migration at all and should be pursued as a priority for those communities that wish to remain in their homes as long as possible.

A massive and relatively fast displacement of human populations into the “Global North” in response to a warming planet is by no means a foregone conclusion. Nor is it in keeping with the recent history of forced migration, which has consistently seen displaced people remain close to home, overwhelmingly accommodated in developing countries.

But this failure to fully identify or provide supporting evidence for the “next great migration” doesn’t undermine the book’s value, for despite her title Shah’s purpose is to challenge readers to reflect deeply on the fundamental beliefs and supposedly incontrovertible “truths” that shape how we understand the living world more broadly. In this, she undoubtedly succeeds.

The “next great migration” may never eventuate, or not in the shape Shah predicts. But no readers will walk away from this book without a profound shift in their relationship with the world around them. •

The post World in motion appeared first on Inside Story.

But Australia’s success comes with a major asterisk. It has been achieved at the expense of the overseas Australians and their families who have fallen victim to the government’s harsh border policies. They have been denied access to their own country in a manner without global or historical precedent, and their numbers are much greater than the government admits.

While a single local infection makes headline news, infections and deaths among overseas Australians are neither systematically collected nor reported. They have been overlooked economically, too. Australians resident here during 2020 have qualified for up to $26,700 in JobKeeper or almost $19,400 in JobSeeker payments since March, or have been entitled, at a minimum, to some combination of tax cuts, rent relief and spending vouchers. Those stuck abroad are left to fend for themselves. Few countries extend social welfare to foreigners, and those Australians lucky enough to have found a way home could easily have spent just as much on flights, quarantine and temporary accommodation as their peers received in government help. Tales of hardship have made occasional headlines but, strangely, haven’t engendered widespread anger about the inequitable treatment of fellow Australians.

The predicament of overseas Australians was foreseeable and avoidable. A migration specialist at ANU, my colleague Stewart Nixon, warned back in September that the government’s arrival cap was woefully inadequate and would leave tens of thousands stranded. His detailed estimates were at odds with the government’s reliance on registration data; with an additional three months of ABS data since then, he has been thoroughly vindicated.

The analysis was straightforward. Nixon looked at how many long-term residents return to Australia in normal conditions and compared that with how many returned from March to September 2020. The shortfall was more than 52,000 people. That’s 52,000 people who would normally have come home over that period compared with how many actually did, which is over 40 per cent more than the government’s estimate of 36,875. And that’s just the long-term resident baseline — Australians abroad for less than twelve months are returning at a rate of 3.5 times the number of long-term residents. Applying this ratio suggests more than 200,000 stranded Australians.

Why is the government’s estimate so far off? Well, rather than using historical evidence, it simply added up the number of Australians who had registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Predictably, only a small number of Australians have done that, making the government’s estimate far short of reality.

Perversely, the government is also allowing the numbers to grow. Short-term resident departures increased dramatically in the first three months after the arrival caps were introduced, with 16,450 more Australians leaving on short-term trips than arrived home. The share of Australians in total arrivals has also declined to its lowest level since the pandemic began, with non-Australian family members and exempt foreign visitors contributing more than a third of September returnees.

Worse still, Nixon’s assumption of a constant number of would-be returnees is likely to be conservative. With a global pandemic on the loose, economies crashing around the world and unemployment rising sharply in countries with social safety nets nowhere near as generous as Australia’s, the actual number of Australians wanting to return home would be substantially higher than in normal times.

Another way to estimate those actively trying to return is to adjust the number of people who have registered with DFAT using the number who haven’t. According to DFAT, only 14,000 of the 35,000 returnees since mid September (40 per cent) had been registered. If this is still true, there could easily be another 55,312 on top of the 36,875 on DFAT’s list. Even under this narrow definition, the real number of abandoned Australians could easily exceed 90,000.

These figures show that Scott Morrison’s promise to have everyone home by Christmas wasn’t backed up by a credible plan. When the government first made its Christmas commitment, Nixon calculated that a two-month repatriation blitz of 70,000 people a week would be needed from 24 October to clear the true backlog and meet total forward demand (from Australians plus families, essential workers and other eligible people). The government’s response was a mere 2500 people a week.

Armed with a better understanding of return demand, what might governments do to safely increase quarantine capacity? Suggestions like Woomera and Christmas Island only highlight the depressing nature of the current debate; transporting returnees to and from these facilities would materially increase infection risk and reduce treatment access for severe cases. Home quarantine has been suggested, but such an approach spreads medical and testing resources more thinly. Australian cities have no shortage of hotel rooms that could be requisitioned but this too may rest on increasing the availability of medical workers. The focus should be on facilities — existing or purpose-built — near major airports, where population density is lower and transport time is minimised.

Correcting one of the most consequential and significant government failures in recent memory is critical. Repatriating Australian citizens is a national effort and responsibility, yet the states have been lumped with operating and paying for a system for which costs will never be recovered. Only if the federal government accepts its responsibility for funding and operating an expanded system can hundreds of thousands of Australians have any hope of getting home before vaccination becomes widespread, let alone before Christmas.

“Keeping Australians safe is my number one priority” has been Scott Morrison’s repeated pledge. But does this apply to all Australians? The evidence suggests otherwise. •

The post Overlooked, undercounted and over there appeared first on Inside Story.

Born Salama bint Said in 1844 in Zanzibar, she was the daughter of Said bin Sultan Al-Said, the Sultan of Zanzibar and Oman, and Jilfidan, a Circassian woman who had been abducted by slave traders as a child and bought by the sultan to join his harem. Although her mother was not the sultan’s principal wife, Salama benefited from being part of the island’s ruling family. As one of her father’s thirty-six children, she inherited a plantation and residence upon his death, and a further three plantations when her mother died.

In her early twenties, Sayyida Salme (Princess Salama), as she was later known, was living in the Zanzibar capital, Stone Town. A love affair with her neighbour, the German merchant Rudolph Heinrich Ruete, resulted in her falling pregnant. Conscious that her relatives wouldn’t countenance marriage to an infidel, she fled to Aden aboard HMS Highflyer with the help of the wife of a British consular official. There she converted, took the name Emily and married Ruete, who had followed her under less dramatic circumstances. The couple moved to Rudolf Heinrich’s native Hamburg, where they had three more children (her first child had died in Aden). The marriage was short-lived, however; in 1870, aged thirty-one, Rudolph Heinrich was killed in a tram accident.

Although Hamburg law prevented Emily Ruete from claiming her late husband’s estate, she and her children initially remained in Germany — not least because her return to Zanzibar was vetoed by her half-brother, the then sultan. Occasionally she taught Arabic to make ends meet. In 1886 she published a part memoir, part ethnography of Zanzibar, Memoiren einer arabischen Prinzessin, that would be reprinted numerous times and translated into English (under the title Memoirs of an Arabian Princess), French, Arabic and other languages. In 1889 she left Germany and settled in Beirut. When the first world war broke out, she returned to Germany to live with one of her daughters in Jena, where she died in 1924.

“Model immigrant”: Emily Ruete (Sayyida Salme), Princess of Zanzibar. Undated photo by unknown photographer/Alamy

Emily Ruete was buried in her husband’s family plot in Ohlsdorf, Hamburg’s main cemetery. The grave is considered historically significant and has been preserved. In 2007, during the European Year of Equal Opportunities for All, her life was commemorated with a memorial in the cemetery’s Garden of Women. Two years later, her story featured in an exhibition at Hamburg’s town hall. Over the past twelve years, her life has also been the subject of three works of fiction: the rather conventional biographical novels Sterne über Sansibar (2011) by Nicole Vosseler and Abschied von Sansibar (2013) by Lukas Hartmann, and Sansibar Blues (2008), a piece of postcolonial metafiction by acclaimed writer Hans Christoph Buch.

Given this background, it’s not surprising that a local resident suggested naming a park in Hamburg-Nord, one of Hamburg’s seven districts, after Emily Ruete. In a submission to the district assembly five years ago, he argued that the park, adjacent to a waterway and not far from a mosque and the Ruetes’ former residence, was reminiscent of Zanzibar. The idea was again on the assembly’s agenda in 2017, this time supported by the argument that present-day refugee movements made it appropriate to honour “Emily Ruete aka Princess Salme” as a “model immigrant of her time.” On neither occasion did the idea attract sufficient backing.

Events started to move more quickly in February last year. A newly created square needed a name, and this time the Social Democrats and the Greens, who together hold the majority of seats in the assembly, proposed memorialising Ruete, with the Greens arguing that she was a “strong and intriguing” historical figure. Local residents attending the meeting at which the plan was considered commented that the name didn’t matter to them; they were more concerned that street furniture be installed to make the square more inviting. When the motion was put to a vote, the Christian Democrats opposed it — not because they objected to memorialising Ruete, but because they believed the process of naming the square lacked transparency.

Later last year, Hamburg-Nord Council advised the district assembly that the square’s name had been gazetted and street signs delivered. The council suggested that an information panel about Ruete’s life be erected and her descendants invited to attend its unveiling, and in February 2020 €4400 (A$7200) was allocated to commissioning a local history workshop to create the panel.

Here, the story took its controversial turn. The workshop’s research found that Ruete had not only defended slavery during her lifetime but also made racist remarks in her 1886 memoir. The workshop’s findings drew on an intervention by a member of Hamburg Postkolonial, a network of individuals interested in Hamburg’s colonial legacy, who may well have been the first person to take an interest in the naming of the square and read Ruete’s 1886 book closely.

In September this year the Greens and the Social Democrats moved successfully to reverse the assembly’s earlier decision. “In 2020, to name a square after Emily Ruete is not an option,” the minutes of the meeting record a Greens representative saying. “It would be inconsistent with the [two parties’] stance against exclusion and inhumanity.” Rather than naming the square after someone else, the district assembly decided to leave it nameless for the time being, presumably to avoid having Ruete’s name remain in place during the search for a substitute. Immediately after the assembly’s decision, council workers removed the offending street signs.

Matthias Iken and others who criticised the change of heart bemoaned the fact that a nineteenth-century woman was being judged against the standards of the twenty-first century. A representative of the Free Democratic Party, who voted against the unnaming of the square, argued that Ruete’s book was “an authentic non-European source” about the history of East Africa, which had otherwise been told from a “colonial point of view.” Ruete had commented on the Germany of the time from a non-European perspective, he pointed out, and had exposed the hypocrisy of her European contemporaries in Zanzibar, who decried the institution of slavery but were themselves slave owners.

By the time Ruete’s book was published, slavery had long been formally abolished in Europe and North America: in Britain, for instance, in 1834; in France in 1848; and in the United States in 1865. But Emily Ruete, herself the daughter of a former slave, had known Zanzibar only as a place where slavery was largely uncontested. In the mid nineteenth century, the island had been a hub of the Arab slave trade, with possibly as many as 50,000 slaves passing through its port annually. The political clout of Emily Ruete’s father, the sultan, was based not least on his prominent involvement in that trade. Slavery was formally abolished in Zanzibar in the 1870s but continued until the early twentieth century, despite the island’s becoming a British protectorate in 1890.

The September 2020 backflip was not the first time Hamburg politicians have had second thoughts about streets named after people whose views or deeds are now considered repugnant. In recent years, Hamburg’s state government has become particularly concerned by the possibility that some streets and public buildings might be named after people who were Nazis, supported the Nazis or advocated anti-Semitic or racist ideas.

In several instances, streets have been renamed; on two occasions their names were retained but the reference changed. Weygandt Street, for example, was originally named after the Hamburg psychiatrist Wilhelm Weygandt (1870–1939), who was interested in eugenics and sympathised with the Nazis. Now it is named after somebody with no connection to Hamburg: Friedrich Weygandt, a public official in Mainz who was executed because he had been a vocal critic of the local archbishop during the peasants’ war of 1525. New proposals for street names are now routinely vetted by the Hamburg State Archives.

In 2017, the archives commissioned historian David Templin to investigate fifty-eight historical figures whose names featured on street signs, or were likely to do so sometime soon, and develop criteria for deciding whether to rename particular streets. One person on the list was Gustav Gründgens, a famous actor and director whose life is explored in Klaus Mann’s controversial novel Mephisto and the acclaimed István Szabó film of the same name, winner of the 1981 Oscar for the best foreign-language film. So far Gründgens, who was the protégé of Nazi strongman Hermann Göring and played a prominent role in Nazi Germany’s cultural life, has not been deemed sufficiently compromised to warrant a renaming of the street carrying his name.

Compromised? Gustav Gründgens as Hamlet in January 1936. Wikimedia

While until very recently the archives’ vetting process focused on links to the Nazi regime or ideology, Nazism is but one of at least two dark chapters in Germany’s past whose legacies endure. Another is colonialism. Because Hamburg has long been Germany’s most important port, many of the city’s businesses and individuals played a significant role in colonial endeavours, including during the short period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when Germany had colonies in Africa and the Pacific.

Demands to engage critically with Hamburg’s colonial past go back a long way. In 1967, and again in 1968, student protesters toppled a bronze statue of Hermann von Wissmann, a former commander of German colonial troops and governor of German East Africa, resulting in that memorial’s permanent removal. But it was only in 2014, after sustained pressure from civil society groups, that the state government agreed to tackle the city’s colonial legacy.

Compared with efforts to draw attention to the Nazi past and remove references to Nazi perpetrators and their accomplices from public view, official moves to expose Hamburg’s colonial links have been slow. (This was partly because, as Thomas Laqueur noted when recently comparing German Vergangenheitsbewältigung and American attempts to come to terms with slavery, the Nazi past was “brief and circumscribed.”) In fact, when the state archives looked into the naming of Emily Ruete Square last year in the course of its routine vetting procedure, the proposal didn’t raise any concerns. Yes, a memorial for prominent merchant — and notorious slave trader — Heinrich Carl von Schimmelmann (1724–82) was removed in 2008, but demands to rename three Hamburg streets that carry his name — Schimmelmannstraße, Schimmelmannallee and Schimmelmannstieg — have so far been unsuccessful.

Besides, the government’s decision in 2014 focused on how the city’s colonial past was being represented publicly, and how Hamburg could distance itself symbolically from that past. The decision made no reference to demands for reparations to tackle historic injustices. In the past twenty years, such demands have focused on Germany’s genocidal 1904–08 war against the Herero and Nama in what was then German South West Africa (today’s Namibia); most recently, Namibia rejected Germany’s offer of a one-off €10 million compensation payment and an unreserved apology as inadequate. But the issue of symbolic and material reparations is not limited to Namibia, and given the extent to which Hamburg has been a beneficiary of colonialism, this issue should not only be a matter for the federal government.

Also absent from the state government’s decision were references to present-day injustices. German colonialism did not end when Germany lost its colonies after the first world war, nor when German attempts to colonise Eastern Europe came to a crushing halt in the course of the second world war. Hamburg businesses and Hamburg consumers continue to be implicated in colonial practices — something that is easily forgotten when the focus is on a past that is seemingly over and done with.

Hamburg-Nord’s decision to rescind the honouring of Emily Ruete didn’t, however, reflect a gradually growing awareness of wider historical injustices. It came about suddenly — in fact, it’s possible to pinpoint a specific day on which the wheels were set in motion: 25 May 2020, the day a white police officer killed George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis.

The death, and the consequent surge in the Black Lives Matter movement, provoked a rethink of the memorialisation of individuals implicated in slavery, or in colonialism more generally. In the United States, numerous monuments commemorating the Confederacy, for example, were toppled or, having been targeted by protesters, removed by the authorities. In the British city of Bristol, protesters toppled the bronze statue of English slave trader and Tory member of parliament Edward Colston (1636–1721) and dumped it into the harbour. Having recovered the statue, the authorities took it to a “secure location.”

In this context, the dispute over Emily Ruete Square was a small skirmish. Public interest died down quickly. Ruete was, after all, a minor historical figure — and there have been more obvious and prominent targets in Hamburg.

None has been more prominent than Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), the preeminent political leader of nineteenth-century Germany. As prime minister of the militarily and politically dominant German state of Prussia, he engineered the unification of Germany in 1871 and served as its first chancellor. An ardent defender of the monarchy, he had the support of Prussia’s landed gentry; in turn he ensured that their privileges remained untouched.

Bismarck’s time as chancellor was marked by two momentous conflicts. They pitted Bismarck first against the Catholic Church and then against the socialist labour movement, both of which he believed posed threats to the status quo. Having largely lost the Kulturkampf (culture war) against the Catholic Church, he formed an alliance with the party representing Catholics in parliament to take on the socialists. He had more success on that front, not least by introducing compulsory sickness, disability, accident and retirement insurance schemes, making imperial Germany something of a pioneer of welfare capitalism and at the same time reminding the socialists’ prospective supporters that their interests were well served by the government.

Unlike Ruete, Bismarck was no slave owner. Nor did he defend the institution of slavery. That he nevertheless became a target was because, as German chancellor, he hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 that eventually led to the divvying up of most of Africa among the European colonial powers. He also oversaw Germany’s acquisition of colonies in west, southwest and east Africa and in the Pacific, including New Guinea, Samoa and Micronesia. Although he initially opposed Germany’s becoming a colonial power, he later took a hands-on approach to furthering its interests in Africa and the Pacific. He even enlisted Emily Ruete in diplomatic manoeuvres to secure Germany’s influence over Zanzibar (which Germany later traded with Britain for Helgoland, a small island off the German coast).

Making the case for German colonial rule in Africa, Bismarck’s government drew on arguments provided by Christian abolitionists. Germany’s late nineteenth-century colonial ventures thus became precursors of the Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq in 1991, the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and other modern-day humanitarian interventions. But although Bismarck’s government tried to justify German colonialism on humanitarian grounds, it condoned slavery and forced labour in its African colonies.

After his resignation in 1890, Bismarck was venerated as unified Germany’s founding father, not only during the remaining twenty-eight years of the monarchy but also, albeit less emphatically, in the Weimar Republic, in Nazi Germany and in the Federal Republic. Throughout Germany, numerous Bismarck statues are testament to the admiration. Hamburg has three. His memorialisation even went beyond Germany; the capital of the US state of North Dakota, for example, is named after him.

Contested: another of Hamburg’s Bismarck memorials, after cleaning. Klaus Neumann

By far the largest of Hamburg’s Bismarck statues, and the best known nationally, sits on the edge of the red light district of St Pauli and overlooks the river Elbe. Made of one hundred blocks of granite, it is more than thirty-four metres high and weighs more than 600 tonnes. Unveiled in 1906 after three years’ construction, it depicts Bismarck as a medieval knight holding a sword. It was listed on the cultural heritage register in 1960.

The monument has long been the focus of protests. It attracted controversy even during the planning phase. Sculptor Hugo Lederer and architect Johann Emil Schaudt’s design was criticised for portraying a seemingly unapproachable leader, prompting art historian Aby Warburg to deride its critics as anti-modernists. In the latter years of the Weimar Republic, German nationalists who celebrated Bismarck’s birthday at the memorial regularly clashed with left-wing demonstrators. In 1990, on the day of German reunification, unknown climbers covered Bismarck’s head with a Helmut Kohl mask, which inspired Stephanie Bart’s 2009 novel Goodbye Bismarck. In 2015, the monument was repurposed for another ephemeral work of art, “Capricorn Two,” when an ibex was mounted on Bismarck’s head.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold in Germany, Bismarck memorials were among its first targets. On 14 June, a week after Colston’s statue was dumped in Bristol Harbour, activists daubed one of the smaller Bismarck statues in Hamburg with red paint. The larger statue was spared the same fate only because it was concealed behind fences and scaffolding. In 2014, the federal government budgeted €6.5 million to restore the crumbling memorial, with the proviso that the state government match that amount to rebuild the surrounding park. Later, the overall amount budgeted for memorial and park was increased to €15.4 million. It was ironic that work on the monument began shortly before the repercussions of George Floyd’s killing reached Germany.

The decision to spend so much on restoring the Bismarck monument attracted criticism well before May 2020. Since January, a group that calls itself Intervention Bismarck-Denkmal has demanded via Twitter that the renovation work stop immediately. But the criticism was amplified following Floyd’s death, with new groups, such as Bismarck’s Critical Neighbours, adding their voice. When demonstrators demanded a halt to the project on 28 June, the Social Democrats and Greens, who have been in power in Hamburg since 2015, found themselves in a quandary. They were committed to restoring the monument but didn’t want to be seen defending what it was increasingly associated with: colonialism and racism. The state government therefore proposed to hold consultations to determine how the site could be repurposed without removing the monument. (They will kick off this Thursday, 19 November, with an online panel discussion, “Recontextualising Bismarck.”)

Proposals advanced thus far include a memorial museum inside the base of the monument to document Hamburg’s colonial past, and a counter-memorial adjacent to the statue. A Hamburg precedent exists for the latter: in 1982, rather than removing a controversial war memorial in the centre of the city, the state government commissioned the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka to create a counter-memorial right next to it. Ideas less likely to be adopted include turning Bismarck on his head or replacing his granite sword with an illuminated Star Wars–type lightsabre.

Are the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square and demands for the removal of Bismarck statues evidence that Germany is heading towards an Orwellian dystopia where anything not deemed politically correct will be suppressed? No — if only because the “cancel culture” has been accompanied by loud protests (such as Iken’s) and authorities haven’t rushed to get rid of street names honouring the slave trader Schimmelmann or the opportunist Gründgens.

Prominent in the debate about what to do with the hundreds of Bismarck memorials in Germany is opposition to any form of Black Lives Matter–inspired iconoclasm. More often than not, the defenders of the monuments have spoken out against iconoclasm as such, rather than in defence of Bismarck as a historical figure. But that is likely to reflect strategic choices rather than any kind of censorship.

Iken and others nevertheless have a point. During the district assembly committee’s debate, Free Democrat Lars Jessen said he was “astonished” by the proposal to unname Emily Ruete Square because it was “incomprehensible” that Ruete’s views had only now become known. But the issue is not so much that the Greens and Social Democrats belatedly discovered Ruete’s racism; it’s that they didn’t care to engage with her life before suggesting a square be named after her.

Ruete’s 1886 memoir was reissued in 1989, accompanied by an editorial essay that contextualises her text, and republished by different publishers in 1998, 2007 and 2013. It is still in print and is available in several Hamburg libraries. I suspect the fact that Ruete was a woman of colour in nineteenth-century Germany was considered sufficient grounds for honouring her — in the same way that, a year later, her comments about slavery were sufficient grounds to withdraw the honour.

The complexity that makes Ruete such an intriguing historical figure has been in plain view, but was recognised only briefly during the discussions about the square. This complexity has not yet received the attention it warrants. Once the history workshop had produced evidence of her views about slavery and Black Africans, other aspects of her persona no longer mattered. Yes, she was an apologist for slavery. But she was also an astute observer of the hypocritical stance of European humanitarians in Zanzibar. She had only contempt for the British anti-slavery campaigners who took no interest in the welfare of people who had been freed: at best, she commented sarcastically in her memoir, European humanitarians were knitting woollen socks for the former slaves.

Complications: the Monument to Slaves in Stone Town, Zanzibar. Wikimedia

That it is possible to engage with Ruete while criticising her views on slavery and her role as a slave owner was demonstrated in 2009, when the Hamburg-based artist HM Jokinen created the performance “An Maria Ernestina,” an artistic intervention designed to disrupt the exhibition about Ruete at the Hamburg town hall. “I welcome the exhibition about Sayyida Salme, daughter of a slave,” the artist wrote at the time. “But I reject the honouring of a princess who accepted as normal the services of slaves and who profited from them.”

Ruete was also a perceptive observer of racism in Germany and the colonial gaze to which she herself was subjected: “At social events, in the theatre and at concerts, I had the feeling that I was constantly being looked at — something that I found most annoying,” she recalled in her second book, Briefe nach der Heimat. “One day, as my husband and I were out for a stroll, a couple of ladies in an equipage went by. Not only did they stare at us when they went past; but, when I accidentally turned around, I noticed the two ladies kneeling on the back seat in order to be able to observe us more closely.”

It is telling that the first German edition of Briefe nach der Heimat, in which Ruete writes about the first years of her life in Germany, was published only in 1999, six years after its English translation, and has never been reissued. Doesn’t the unnaming of Emily Ruete Square also perpetuate the silencing of Ruete’s critical views about Hamburg society?

I too have misgivings about the readiness with which Emily Ruete Square was unnamed, but mine are different from those articulated by Matthias Iken and aren’t specific to memorials tainted by Hamburg’s colonial past. Germany is still a country of perpetrators, accomplices, bystanders and their direct descendants. Memorialising the lives of the victims of Nazi Germany (or of German colonialism, for that matter) while removing from public view any references to the lives of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders risks obscuring that fact.

Over the past twenty-eight years, the artist Gunter Demnig has laid more than 75,000 Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”): concrete cubes with brass plates inscribed with the name of a victim of Nazi persecution. The overwhelming majority of Stolpersteine are in Germany. This is undoubtedly an effective means of helping Germans to remember the Holocaust and honour the many ordinary people who became its victims, but shouldn’t Germans also be compelled to stumble across the names of perpetrators and accomplices, lest the complicity of ordinary Germans is forgotten?

Or, as I proposed some twenty years ago, might it not be appropriate for Hamburg residents to perform a public reading not only of the names of the thousands of Hamburg Jews who were killed in the Holocaust but also of the names in the 1943 Adressbuch, the last directory of all the heads of all households registered in Hamburg, which was published during the second world war?

Bismarck is in good company. Other historical figures — Immanuel Kant among them — have been exposed as apologists for colonialism or as racists. Postcolonial and anti-racist iconoclasts would be very busy indeed if we decided to no longer commemorate the lives of individuals who used the “n” word, denigrated people of colour or were implicated in German colonial ventures. Which is not to say that Kant’s writings about “races,” for example, don’t deserve more critical attention than they have received thus far.

Nor are the demands to raze controversial memorials unprecedented. After 1989, East Germans were often only too ready to expunge all traces of the German Democratic Republic by renaming streets and schools and removing memorials. Sometimes the desire to draw a line under the past even led to the targeting of people like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who happened to be communists but who could not be held responsible for Stalinist repression. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that attempts to expunge all references to East Germany’s communist regime have been counterproductive and ill-conceived.

But when it comes to German debates about memorials today, I don’t see a cancel culture at work. Rather, I detect attempts to neutralise, if not sanitise, the past. Complementing a restored and cleaned-up Bismarck monument with an exhibition about Hamburg’s colonial past and with a counter-memorial, however worthy that may be in itself, could encourage Hamburg residents to wash their hands of the legacies of colonialism. Rather than letting the past intrude into the present, a counter-memorial on its own might put the past to rest. But the thirty-four-metre high Bismarck monument would stand in the way of such memorial hygiene.

Sure, it could be regarded as an eyesore. But because it is so monumental and ugly, it can’t be easily ignored. It could therefore serve as an awkward reminder of Germany’s dark pasts, and their legacies and continuation into the present. Something like that happened in 2004–05 when the Wissmann statue, which had been put into storage in 1968, was re-erected for fourteen months in the context of HM Jokinen’s afrika-hamburg.de art project.

Like the Hamburg war memorial, whose message was meant to be neutralised by Hrdlicka’s counter-memorial, the granite Bismarck should remain a beacon for protests and a canvas for graffiti and other ephemeral art, notwithstanding any adjacent counter-memorial. Let’s hope that the authorities don’t take the view that a counter-memorial is a substitute for anti-memorial graffiti and that the statue therefore needs to be kept spotlessly clean.

The Hrdlicka memorial is not enough to counter Hamburg’s most obnoxious war memorial: traces of red paint, and of countless attempts to remove that paint, have done at least as much to call the war memorial’s raison d’être into question. The head of the district of Hamburg-Altona, which is responsible for one of the smaller Bismarck statues, had a good point when she announced after it was defaced that council workers were not expected to clean it up immediately.

Bismarck has been a controversial historical figure not only because of his role in German colonialism but also because he was an anti-democrat, because he tried to repress the organised labour movement and because of his anti-Semitism. He was also the founder of Germany as a political entity. Critically engaging with his memory could prompt a reassessment not just of the kind of aggressive nineteenth-century nationalism that informed the 1870–71 Franco-Prussian war, which led to the unification of Germany, but also of the idea of the nation that suffuses today’s understanding of what it means to be German.

I hope the Bismarck colossus overlooking the river Elbe will stick around to catalyse discussions that go beyond a distancing from recognisably dark pasts and instead engage with seemingly unproblematic presents. I also hope that closer attention to the experiences of Emily Ruete will facilitate a public conversation about everyday racism and the lives of people of colour in Hamburg, be it in the late nineteenth or in the early twenty-first century.

Some weeks ago, the state archives created a new position to investigate the colonial dimensions of street names in Hamburg. Obviously the authorities are hoping to avoid in future the kind of embarrassment that was caused by the naming of Emily Ruete Square. But what might actually be needed to get people in Hamburg to engage with the complexity that made Ruete such an intriguing historical figure is a (non-official) effort to rename that square in Hamburg-Nord. •

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Last month the Refugee Council of Australia warned premier Daniel Andrews that 164 people in his state were set to be moved from community detention, with no provision for ongoing housing or support. Sixty had already been removed in New South Wales, seventy-six in Queensland, thirty in South Australia and twenty-two in Western Australia.

Home Affairs officials confirmed on Monday that the numbers have since increased in all states but Western Australia. In response to a question from senator Nick McKim at a Senate committee hearing, they confirmed that it is the department’s “intention” to include Victorian cases among another 300 community detainees targeted for removal.

As the department describes it, the removal process gives people three weeks of “transitional support,” during which time they can stay in their current government-provided housing and receive their last income payment. Once the transitional period is over, they have the right to work (though no guarantee of a job) and to Medicare, but have lost their accommodation and government benefit.

Senator McKim expressed surprise that the move was proceeding during a pandemic and recession. Were people in Victoria on hold, he asked, or had “a decision been taken that, once a certain thing happens, then the people in Victoria can start receiving these [bridging visa] grants?”

“No decision has been taken on what that milestone would be,” replied the department’s Justine Jones.

The government provides a six-month final departure bridging visa to people being moved on from community detention, by the end of which they are expected to have left Australia, either for their home country or to return to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Having vacated their homes and lost their government-funded income payments, they are expected to find housing and provide for themselves.

The current community-detention cohort of more than 570 people are not allowed to work or study, and so must rely on the government for their housing and a monthly allowance. They can move about during the day but must be at their assigned accommodation each night. Children can go to school, but school camps, for example, are off-limits without written permission from authorities.

As refugee advocate Pamela Curr points out, these people have had no chance to prepare themselves for work. “Their chances of finding jobs to fully support themselves and, in some cases, their children would be tough at the best of times. To require that of them when unemployment is higher than it has been for decades is a test of Olympian proportions.”

Curr’s assessment is backed by Sister Brigid Arthur, joint coordinator of the Brigidine Asylum Seeker Project, which has been providing emergency funds, food and other material aid to refugees and people seeking asylum since 2001. The project is a Melbourne-based initiative of the Brigidine Sisters.

“We are preparing for a crisis to hit,” says Arthur. “We estimate that we need to find another one hundred accommodation units to house families and individuals likely to find themselves homeless within the coming month.” Adding to the difficulty, she says, is the fact that agencies like hers must deal with a “climate of secrecy and lack of any rationale which would allow us to understand exactly what is about to happen and why it is happening.”

The Australian Border Force is responsible for immigration detention, including community detention of those previously held on Nauru or PNG who were brought to Australia for medical treatment, mostly in the years before the since-repealed medevac legislation came into effect. Management of the people in community detention and their needs is contracted out to organisations including AMES and Life Without Barriers in Victoria. Other church and community welfare agencies are among the contracted providers in other states.

The Border Force, led by commissioner Michael Outram, is an operationally independent statutory authority within Peter Dutton’s home affairs portfolio. The published organisational structures of the department and the Border Force don’t make clear to whom Mr Outram reports, so it is assumed to be Minister Dutton. This makes it difficult to say whether the decisions and actions of Border Force fit into any coherent implementation of refugee policy or ministerial priorities.

“Having had seven years to find a solution to the dilemma of what to do with refugees covered by a ‘never, ever’ ban on settling in Australia, we say that this is a proven policy failure,” Curr says. “But we don’t want to criticise without offering a better way.”

Curr and Arthur have offered an alternative process that would see the Morrison government move people from community detention to a new community protection visa with full work and study rights, and access to Medicare, JobSeeker and continuing housing and income, until they are securely supporting themselves.

Arthur believes there is time to avoid the crisis about to hit in Victoria if the federal government willingly works with those who are concerned, informed by experience and well connected in the refugee support sector.

Advocates like Arthur and Curr may well be among the “informed citizenry” Mike Pezzullo had in mind when he addressed the National Security College at the ANU last week. Summarising his vision of national security as a “positive and unifying force,” he said that it should not entail the administration of fearful and anxious subjects.

“Security should be contested by an informed citizenry who share a common horizon of threat awareness and agency in relation to risk and opportunity,” he continued. “On this reading, security is a dialectic between the state’s mandate and capacity to act, and the population’s collective specification of the trade-offs and the costs that it is willing to bear in the name of protection and survival.”

This suggests a shift in the national security narrative. Since prime minister John Howard declared in 2001 that “we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come,” refugee policy has been framed as a border security issue. It was further entrenched in security debates by the actions of prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

After two decades, the trade-off in Australia’s current refugee policy is indeed contested. Refugee advocates see many costs — denial of human rights, trauma compounding harm, punitive treatment of people seeking protection — but no greater sense of security.

Figures in this month’s federal budget indicate that the government is continuing its push to reduce the cost of support for asylum seekers, which commenced in last year’s budget. But with costs reported in a fragmented manner across departmental programs, it is difficult for interested citizens to assess the full picture. With the department’s broadbrush response to my detailed questions shedding no new light, it can’t be said definitively whether the move to evict people from community detention is a cost-saving measure or a response to other, possibly political imperatives. Decisions on removing people from community detention are put directly to the minister on a case-by-case basis.

There is, however, clear provision in the budget for a further $55.6 million to “reactivate” the Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island, which was placed on a contingency setting last year. The Kaldor Centre’s analysis of the budget finds that “onshore compliance and detention” expenditure in 2020–21, set at $1 billion, includes voluntary return packages and the management of onshore detention facilities.

These facilities include traditional fenced-and-locked facilities as well as the hotels and motels where around 160 men medevaced from PNG and Nauru in 2019 are being held. So far, these men — in the Kangaroo Point Central Hotel in Brisbane and the Mantra Bell City motel in suburban Melbourne — have not been included among the proposed evictions from community detention. Neither have those who still have a chance of resettlement in the United States. According to the home affairs department, “The US government continues to progress cases under the resettlement arrangement. Those actively engaged in the US resettlement process are able to continue with this process.”

Many of those in Victoria who are expected to be moved out of community detention in coming weeks are aware of what has happened in other states. “Everybody is talking about it,” one resident told me. “But our immigration case worker has said nothing. We don’t know. We are just waiting. We are always waiting.” •

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Inglis achieved both national and international eminence, and acknowledged that he had lived a privileged professional life. But when the choice was between defending the weak or barracking for the strong, he never had to spend any time pondering which side to take. One of his early books, The Stuart Case, along with his journalism on the same subject, probably helped save the life of an Aboriginal man accused of raping and murdering a child in a society that did not, and could not, give him a fair trial. Inglis thought it more likely than not that the accused man had done it, but that did not hinder his desire for justice to be dispensed fairly.

Rather than passing the middle years of his career enjoying the pleasant life of a professor of history in the nation’s increasingly comfortable capital city — a life to which his talents and achievements had given him entree at a still-young age — he went to Port Moresby to help make a university and a nation. He would eventually serve as vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea, before returning to the Australian National University as a research professor in the mid 1970s.

Inglis’s own scholarship was formidable, ranging over the history of the media — he wrote two major histories of the ABC — religion, national days and celebrations, colonial social life, and the social and cultural history of Australians at war. He was the originator and leader of the massive, multi-volume bicentennial history project, Australians: A Historical Library.

His major interests were less fashionable in their day than they have become, a marker of both his foresight and his influence. It was in the field of war history, especially through his groundbreaking work on memorials, that Inglis acquired an international reputation and perhaps also exercised his most enduring influence on Australian public culture. He was a key figure in Australia’s rediscovery and reinvention of Anzac.

This was all delivered in elegant but unpretentious and accessible prose that served as a constant reminder that Inglis had early aspirations to become a journalist. He was a cautious, modest scholar despite his great gifts, or perhaps because of them. He knew that there was always much more to learn. I may be permitted, I think, to use language that would have been familiar enough to Inglis who, as I did forty years later, grew up in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. He didn’t have tickets on himself.

And so why did he turn to the history of the 2800 men, women and children who came to Australia in September 1940 on the Dunera, from England, and the Queen Mary, from Singapore, as the final historical project of his life?

As his collaborators explain in Dunera Lives: Profiles, Inglis offered several explanations for his decision. This volume and its predecessor reveal how the lives of some of the men of the Dunera intersected with his own at various points in his life. Franz Philipp, the art historian, tutored the young Inglis at the University of Melbourne and, after recognising his ability in an essay on Machiavelli, asked him, “Why not consider following an academic career?” Later, Inglis inevitably had much to do with Henry Mayer, the Sydney University politics professor, not least through their common academic interest in the media. He shared a Canberra suburb with the retired diplomat and academic Klaus Loewald.

A seventeen-year-old Fritz Lowenstein (second from the right in front row) on a school trip to Bucknow, east of Berlin. Courtesy of Monica Lee Lowen and Jocelyn Lowen

Inglis’s collaborators on this project came round to the view that Inglis turned to the Dunera as a subject out of “the desire of a modest man to tell the story of a chapter of his early life without writing about himself.” This looks right, and certainly in character. The stories of the Dunera and Queen Mary also gave Inglis the chance to research and write history of a kind with which he was most comfortable. Both volumes — this one and its lavishly illustrated companion, published in 2018 — are essentially biographical, and Dunera Lives: Profiles uses the stories of eighteen of the internees (as well as of two other remarkable men, Captain Edward Broughton and Julian Layton, closely connected with the episode) to tell the larger story of the Dunera.

In doing so, Inglis tells a story of the twentieth century, the era that he himself lived through and that formed the subject of most of his writing. The history of this century, his collaborators explain, seemed to Inglis “more disturbing and bleaker than it was ennobling or enlightening.” While no doubt a fair summation of Inglis’s views, this book is also about the lives that the remarkable Dunera affair would subsequently make possible. It is no tale of woe.

Inglis was keen to avoid the hagiography to which the Dunera story has sometimes seemed prone, but there is much that is ultimately uplifting about the stories told here. The internees have come down to us in collective memory as “The Dunera Boys” — all somewhat Peter Pan-ish — thanks largely to the power of television and of one of that vast number of historical miniseries that graced our screens in the 1980s. Much mythology clings to them. They were Jewish. They were intellectuals and artists. They transformed Australian life.

There is some truth in each of these impressions. Many of those interned by the British authorities and sent to Australia on the Dunera in the wake of the fall of France and the Low Countries in mid 1940 were indeed Jews, although not all; and many of the Jews did not practise their religion or observe Jewish customs. Some conformed to the model of what Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher called a “non-Jewish Jew.” Few were devout. For a good many, their “Jewishness” was a function of Hitler’s racist lawmaking rather than an identity that was meaningful to them.

Quite a few were intellectuals, but there were about 2000 Dunera internees all up, and most clearly were not. A few internees — such as Leonhard Adam, author of Primitive Art (1940), and the Bauhaus artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack — were already significant figures in their fields when they were arrested and interned. Others would soon achieve eminence: by the late 1940s Hans Buchdahl, the theoretical physicist, was attracting the praise of Albert Einstein for his work in Hobart on general relativity.

The Australian camps in which they spent the early part of the war hosted a vibrant intellectual and artistic life behind the wire. The Collegium Taturense — at Tatura internment camp — offered lectures in a wide array of subjects, an average of 113 per week at one stage, given by twenty-three lecturers to 700 students. There was sufficient expertise within the camps to prepare internees for matriculation to the University of Melbourne.

Did the Dunera internees transform Australian life? Even to ask the question embodies the misconception that they made their life here. Most, in fact, did not: about 1300, or two-thirds, left Australia. But for some who went to live elsewhere, the threads were not entirely severed. Klaus Loewald, a US diplomat posted to Vietnam, became disillusioned with his adopted country and later took up an academic post in the history department at the University of New England in Armidale.

In retrospect, these men look like an advance guard for the massive postwar emigration from Europe, even if, like the convicts who founded white Australia, they were “unwilling emigrants.” They brought European sophistication and style to a country that was still meat, bread and three veg. No doubt that was part of their appeal to young Ken Inglis, the product of an Anglo-Australian lower-middle-class upbringing in Melbourne.

Dunera Lives does not aspire to be representative; indeed, it is clear that the biographies are not. “You hear all about the professors and doctors,” complained Roy Thalheimer, “but not about the taxi drivers.” Thalheimer wasn’t a taxi driver, but he was a forest worker and public servant. All the same, his story was remarkable enough: as the son of a leading communist activist and theorist, he had once sat on the knee of Lenin’s widow — “The only thing in my life worth mentioning,” he said. The concentration on the clever and creative worried Inglis, conscientious historian that he was. Was he selecting internees whose lives were closest to the kind of life he had led as a writer and academic? Yes, surely, and in choosing the stories that most interested him, his collaborators have ensured that this remains, as they wanted it to be, “Ken’s book.”

Taken together, the stories reveal much of the Dunera experience, not least because there were so many common elements. There was the shock of arrest and internment in Britain, given that so many of them — although not all — had fled from the Nazis. Then came the unpleasantness of the journey — the British guards behaved brutally, stealing from them and generally being obnoxious and threatening. The relief of arrival in Australia followed — a place they had neither chosen nor understood to be their destination, “the arse of the globe.” The pleasures of the first decent feed on Australian soil made an impression. Several seem to have recalled that first sandwich, along with the fruit that came with it: luxuries compared with shipboard fare. There were the insensitivities and the kindnesses of those they encountered in Australia. At Hay, one internee was surprised when an Australian soldier wished him “Shabbat shalom.” The soldier had served in Palestine, and would later take a message from the internee to his sister in Melbourne to tell her that he was safe.

There was the longing for freedom as they made the best of their incarceration in Hay, Orange and Tatura; the difficulties of deciding whether to stay in Australia — which often meant joining a labour battalion, the 8th Employment Company — or return to Britain; and the lives they made following internment and war. Many realised they had been lucky on the whole, despite their discomforts. So many of their relatives had perished in Nazi concentration camps, and some in similar circumstances to their own had drowned at sea following an encounter with a German torpedo. Life in Australia, dreary as it might have been, was safer than enduring the bombs and, later, rockets landing on British cities.

The professional lives of the internees who figure here would take in art, science, history, anthropology, economics, business, journalism and psychiatry. Some, if not quite household names among Australians of their day, nevertheless led lives as public figures: economist Fred Gruen, political scientist Henry Mayer, furniture maker Fred Lowen, and the flamboyant, exasperating composer Felix Werder. Others were well known in their particular communities and somewhat beyond them: for instance, Erwin Lamm, businessman, conservative Zionist and Jewish community leader.

Henry Mayer in his study at home, c. 1985. Courtesy of Media International Australia © Elaine Mayer

As Glyn Davis, political scientist, former University of Melbourne vice-chancellor and an Inglis PhD student, said at the online launch of this book, it is an act of love. There is Inglis’s love for the Dunera men, and for telling stories — the passion of his professional life. But there is also the love of his friends and collaborators, Bill Gammage, Seumas Spark, Jay Winter and Carol Bunyan, who have seen his project through to completion. Rae Frances, then dean of arts at Monash University, provided the financial support for this remarkable collaboration.

While Inglis’s research notes were substantial, and he had done some drafting, much of the book remained to be written at the time of his death. These accomplished historians have done a splendid job of seeing the project through in a manner that seems, so authentically, to realise Inglis’s vision. Winter, probably the world’s most eminent historian of the first world war, is a Yale University professor now based in Paris. Gammage, a friend of Inglis for more than fifty years and colleague at the University of Papua New Guinea, is one Australia’s leading social historians; with Inglis, he was a major contributor to the modern reappraisal of Australia’s involvement in the first world war, in his case through his book The Broken Years and role as an adviser on Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli. Spark, a younger historian whose work has been mainly on the second world war, began as Inglis’s research assistant but became a full co-author and close friend. And the Canberra-based Bunyan has built up a formidable knowledge of the Dunera affair over many years of painstaking research, work that continues.

Few of us are capable of inspiring the kind of devotion and loyalty that could bring such a team together. The two volumes of Dunera Lives are a remarkable conclusion to a career and a life. Even this second volume is generously illustrated, following its older sibling of 2018, which interpreted the Dunera experience through the visual record. Both are superbly produced by the excellent Monash University Publishing.

At the heart of the book lies Australia: what we were in 1940, and the very different country we would become in the decades that followed. While some of the men, women and children whose stories are told here did leave the country, the book is slanted towards the lives of those who stayed, or at least returned. Not all of those wanted to recall their connection to the Dunera. Henry Mayer did not, whereas Jules Stocky, the scion of a wealthy and well-connected German Catholic businessman, contemplated calling his daughter Dunera when she was born in 1944.

And there are those such as Heinz Schloesser — he would change his surname to Castles — who left Australia but for whom the ties were never quite cut. He returned to England with his wife and children to resume his job as the warden of a youth hostel. Their two sons, Frank and Stephen, Australian-born, would watch the sun set on their winter walks, saying, “It’s going to Australia” — and blow it a kiss before its departure.

Both sons returned to Australia as adults, to build distinguished careers as academic sociologists — one in welfare policy and the other in immigration studies. Frank’s daughter, the author Belinda Castles, has published a novel based on the experiences of her grandparents and their families. Dunera is a tale that continues to unfold, and there are many stories still to be told.

Ken Inglis would like it that way. •

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Before Australia finally shrugged off the White Australia policy in 1973, South Asians were a small minority — a little over 5000 at their peak in the 1890s, as against 29,000 or so Chinese. In scattered numbers on the margins of settlement, they incurred less of the resentment that sometimes erupted into murderous anti-Chinese riots.

Many of these South Asians were here because they had been invited: recruited by colonial authorities and businessmen from the 1860s to build and operate the networks of camel transport that serviced remote mines and grazing runs. They also had the advantage of being British subjects, if second-class ones.

In asserting this imperial identity, according to historian Kama Maclean, Indian Australians separated themselves from “Asiatics” and “Orientials” with some lasting effect. “It is curious that in Britain, many Indian communities have come to identify and be identified as ‘Asian,’” she writes. “In Australia, Indians have largely been thought of as an entirely separate category, not necessarily Asian at all.”

But they suffered calumnies and bureaucratic obstruction enough, as historian Samia Khatun shows in her case studies. And the official exclusion after Federation, when they were lumped in with “Asiatics” under the Immigration Act, was an immense and long-lasting insult to the educated classes of the entire subcontinent, even those who never thought to come here.

White nationalism in the settler colonies was the fly in the ointment London was using to try to soothe India from the mid nineteenth century on. After suppressing the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Queen Victoria had proclaimed that all subjects of the empire would be treated equally. Colonial secretaries chided premiers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa over racial exclusion, but the admonishments were generally batted off as humbug on the part of an empire that embodied a deep racial hierarchy.

Among Australians, images of the subcontinent derived from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who visited Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart in 1891, and from romantic writings about fabulously wealthy maharajas and sultans, the mystical yearnings of Theosophists, and the opinions of resident “old India hands.” The term “Hindoo” was used synonymously with Indian, emphasising “otherness” and “heathen rituals.” Even the few senior politicians with a deeper knowledge of India, among them Alfred Deakin, upheld the White Australia policy.

But some softening of the policy did occur quite early. Persuaded by a new governor-general, Lord Northcote, who had come straight from governing Bombay, the Watson government amended the Immigration Restriction Act in 1904 to let Indian merchants, students and tourist travellers enter for up to twelve months.

Not many took advantage, and deportations of Indian traders like Mool Chand (in his case for having entered Australia under false pretences) raised periodic outcries in India. Meanwhile Deakin, as external affairs minister, was trying to get more Australians into the elite Indian Civil Service, arguing that hardy Australians were just the thing India needed to get organised and open up new fields of development. “In this, Deakin seemed to be imagining an India of mutiny novels and Boy’s Own adventures,” observes Maclean. Indian newspapers saw it as a double standard: let us in, but you stay out.

After diggers fought alongside Indian soldiers in Gallipoli, Palestine and France during the Great War, postwar Australian views moderated a little. Norman Lindsay’s South Asian character “Chunder Loo,” who featured in advertisements for Cobra Boot Polish, was transformed into an amiable, subservient comic figure present at great events. Australian prime minister Billy Hughes and his British counterpart David Lloyd George might have cursed each other in Welsh at times, but at the 1921 Imperial Conference Lloyd George pressed Hughes to agree on a compromise — keep your external barriers, but remove discrimination for those inside — acceptable to the Indians.

As much as Hughes had fought at Versailles against a racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, he also worried about the growing power of the United States, which was drawing Canada closer, and the unrest in Ireland, Egypt and India. It all threatened to break up the empire and threaten Australia’s “lifeline” to Europe.

So imperial duty saw British-Indian residents of Australia — now about 2000 in number — given the vote and the pension. The remnant of the earlier, larger population most widely recalled are the itinerant turban-wearing pedlars who roamed inland settlements in horse-drawn carts, bringing haberdashery and household implements along with a touch of exotic colour to isolated households.

As nationalism deepened in British India, writes Maclean, settler colonies like Australia “inadvertently presented a third front against which the British in India and in London could imagine and claim to be championing Indian causes.” The Balfour Declaration of 1925, which gave equal status to all Britain’s dominions — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa and the Irish Free State — let London off the hook: it could say it had no control over their immigration policies.

Continuing discrimination through the 1930s and 1940s also had the unintended effect of encouraging India’s leaders to reject British offers of eventual dominion status. India would always be a second-class member of the empire, said Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who would be India’s first prime minister. The Bank of England had brought Australia to near bankruptcy in the Great Depression; imagine what it might have done to an Indian dominion.

With the fall of Singapore, India became even more of a lifeline for Australia, and the Indian nationalists had Churchill over a barrel. Eventually, two years after Japan’s surrender, London agreed to India’s independence. Prescient Australians had seen this coming. In September 1942, external affairs minister H.V. Evatt had said that Australia “looked forward to the people of India becoming a truly self-governing nation,” with the rider that it should still be loyal to the King. Canberra and New Delhi exchanged high commissioners during 1943–44.

The appointment of R.G. Casey as governor of Bengal in December 1943 put an Australian at the centre of one of the second world war’s most tragic episodes, the famine that gripped this frontline state during 1943–44 and killed some three million people. Maclean shows us how Australians became aware of the famine through church, business and personal correspondence that got around wartime censorship, and pressured Canberra to release its stockpiles of wheat. The government was prepared to do so if the War Cabinet in London would release the necessary ships. Only in February 1944 did large shipments begin belatedly flowing.

Somehow the glamorous couple, Casey and his wife Maie, floated above this misery. After Casey resigned as governor in June 1945 in order to return to Australia and enter politics, he wrote An Australian in India, a book that took a relatively sympathetic view of Indian nationalism, and distanced himself from the British administration. As an Australian, he claimed, he had gone to India “with no imperial past.”

Casey argued that once it was explained that the White Australia policy was based on economic, not racial, grounds it was “generally accepted” in India. But when the departing British asked Australia to take in some “Anglo-Indians” — the mixed-race and generally well-educated and prosperous children of empire — Canberra agreed only to those who were “predominantly of European blood.”

As external affairs minister for most of the 1950s, Casey shared with his prime minister, Robert Menzies, a somewhat distant relationship with Prime Minister Nehru. According to Maclean, Casey was arguably closer to Pakistan, which was drawn to the Western side as the cold war set in. He continued to play down the White Australia policy rather than try to change it, and urged the Australian press to stop using the term.

And so it went on — and so, to some extent, it continues. Our leaders are puzzled why Indians are so “hypersensitive” about race; they tend to assume all experiences of empire are the same. Multiculturalism has comfortably located racism in the past; events like the Cronulla riot of 2005 and the attacks on Indian students in 2010 are seen as aberrations.

“Many note that Australian attempts to engage with India have gone unrequited,” Maclean says. “Few have tried to appreciate why this might be the case.” Still, the Indian population in Australia grew 30 per cent over 2016–18. Whether Australia can overcome its past is still an open question, she says, but “it is clear that a redefinition of ‘Australian’ is under way.”

Samia Khatun isn’t so sure. She sees cant in how we welcome well-off and highly skilled South Asians, patting ourselves on the back for our openness, while treating undocumented arrivals by boat, many from the same region, so shamefully.

Khatun’s book focuses on the South Asians (having been born in Bangladesh, she is careful to use that term) who came to Australia during that early half-century window. This is an important, eye-opening exploration of their world and its connections, bringing into vivid centrality the “Afghan” cameleers who are auxiliary figures on the periphery of events in mainstream history.

Her “Book of Australia,” as the title translates, began as a doctoral thesis in history at the University of Sydney, and still reads like that in places. But between the thickets of Foucauldian and other theoretical analysis of the “epistemic arrogance of modernist paradigms of thought” is a fascinating detective story.

It began when she read of “an old Quran” found by local historians in the corrugated-iron mosque in Broken Hill. She travelled there, and found the book was actually a compendium of eight books of Sufi poetic legend titled Kasasol Ambia (Stories of the Prophets). How did a book of poetry in Bengali published in 1895, written to be read aloud, come to Broken Hill, when most of the cameleers were from the northwest of undivided India and Afghanistan?

Her quest to find out took her to Calcutta and its busy publishing hubs, to encounters with an irascible scholar of old texts, and to the stories of the men and women who might have picked up the book in Calcutta on their way to Australia.

We learn about characters like Khawajah Muhammad Bux, who became a wealthy Perth-based trader before retiring to Lahore in the 1920s, where he built a mosque and a girl’s school in what became known as Australia Chowk (Australia Bazaar); Bux’s son later founded the one hundred–branch Australasia Bank, now part of Pakistan’s big Allied Bank.

And Hasan Musakhan, a brilliant scholar from Karachi who won a scholarship to Bombay University and then joined a big camel operator in Australia. A follower of the Ahmadi branch of Islam (later declared heretic by the mainstream), he married Sophia Blitz from a German-Jewish family in Adelaide and became active in court cases contesting discriminatory application of the law and a writer of letters to newspapers.

Khatun recounts marriages and other encounters between South Asian men and white and Aboriginal women; brides and wives brought out from India, some in purdah, some not; and jealous shootings and elopements. This richly detailed account culminates in her journeys with descendants of the Aborigines who mixed with the Abigana (Afghans) along the camel routes and railway lines that penetrated inland to places like Marree and Oodnadatta. In this sandy country, she coaxes out the background to some of the perplexing incidents in the written record.

Khatun is not very forgiving of settler Australians and “monolingual” historians attracted to facts and progressive narratives rather than the imagined worlds and dreams she taps into. She has a wonderful ability to capture the landscapes of inland Australia and make its “marginal” people central. In showing us what has been under our noses, Australianama is as good as Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, if not better. •

The post Encountering the subcontinent appeared first on Inside Story.

Sandy’s remarks echo those of “Nino Culotta,” the pseudonymous author of John O’Grady’s novel They’re a Weird Mob, which was published at around the time Humphries first performed this sketch. It tells the story of Italian journalist Nino Culotta’s arrival in Sydney and initiation into the Australian way of life. Until a couple of months after the book’s release, Nino was taken by some to be a real migrant. “Italy was a terrible place,” he comments at one point in the story. “Who would want to go back there?’

Sandy and Nino — one very much an “Old” Australian, the other “New” — could agree, as Nino put it, that “there is no better way of life in the world than that of the Australian.” They’re a Weird Mob and its sequels are crude, if sometimes funny, examples of migrant stereotyping and assimilationist propaganda. O’Grady also stacks the cards in favour of Nino’s successful assimilation: apart from making him educated and bourgeois, he has him come from way up north, in Piedmont. Of all Italian regions, Piedmont was the one most readily associated with both political and economic modernity.

By making Nino Piedmontese, O’Grady deliberately confounded his (mainly Anglo-Celtic) readers’ stereotypes of Italians as short, dark and swarthy. “Perhaps it is a matter of opinion,” Nino explains, “and an Australian would lump us all together and call us ‘bloody dagoes,’ but we didn’t like Meridionali [southerners], and they didn’t like us. Up in my country there were a few of them, and mostly they found themselves being officious in the police force. Perhaps subconsciously that is why we did not like them. Nobody likes police forces.”

Published in 1958, the year after O’Grady’s novel, Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend claimed that hostility to the “officiousness and authority” embodied in the police was a distinguishing trait of the typical Australian. Nino was evidently made for us. But O’Grady’s argument works only by creating an “other” against which Nino’s suitability for full acceptance as an Australian can be set: They’re a Weird Mob is unrelenting in its negative portrayal of “Meridionali.”

When Nino finds himself sharing a train carriage with an abusive, racist and drunken “Old” Australian (who naturally assumes that Nino is also an Australian until our hero opens his mouth) and a group of Meridionali, Nino assures the southerners, in Italian, that he will throw the man off the train if he tries to harm them. Interestingly, one of the drunk’s abusive comments towards the southerners is “Knives all bloody over ’em.” How does O’Grady deal with this racist stereotype? By having one of the Meridionali produce a knife. Nino demands the knife and throws it out the window of the train after having “bumped him on the top of his head.”

My family are Meridionali. Although my parents were born in Australia, my four grandparents were from the Aeolian Islands, a group of seven volcanic islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lipari, my maternal grandparents’ homeland, is the largest; Salina, the original home of my paternal grandparents, is the second largest, and the setting for the film Il Postino (1994), which depicts a stay on the island by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Stromboli is famous for its lively volcano, while Vulcano, which also has a smouldering crater, is admired for its hot springs and mud baths, if not for its overwhelming smell of sulphur.

The Aeolian Islands have for thousands of years been exploited for their volcanic products, including shiny, black obsidian in ancient times and less striking pumice more recently. They also contain orchards, vineyards, market gardens and farms. At the time of my grandparents’ births, around the turn of the twentieth century, other local men fished or worked in the merchant marine. The grape industry was devastated by phylloxera, the marine by the coming of the railway. A history of rapid outward migration — I also have many relatives in the United States — led to drastic depopulation.

Lipari Island, with Vulcano in the background, c. 1900–10. Alamy

For a time, Mussolini’s fascists used these islands as a conveniently out-of-the-way place to exile political prisoners, but today tourism seems to overwhelm all. The local cult is that of the martyr Bartholomew the Apostle, who was flayed alive. Many in my family have his name; in Australia it has often become Bob, but sometimes Bart.

Odysseus was an early visitor. In his travels he once found himself on “the Aiolian island,” “a floating island, the whole enclosed by a rampart of bronze, not to be broken, and the sheer of the cliff [that] runs upward to it.” There, King Aiolos, a favourite of the gods, lived with his wife and twelve children. Conveniently, these were six sons and six daughters, “so he bestowed his daughters on his sons, to be their consorts.”

Aiolos treated Odysseus and his men with hospitality for a month. When they wanted to leave, the king gave Odysseus a bag containing all the winds, and helpfully set it up so that the west wind would take them home. Ten days after they sailed, they came into sight of home, but a “sweet sleep” came across Odysseus. The men, assuming the bag contained gold and silver, opened it to get their share. The ship was blown back to the island, and an angry Aiolos, assuming those on board were hated by the gods, sent them packing.

The Aeolians have been coming to Australia since the nineteenth century. My father’s family were pre–first world war migrants who settled in the Wimmera town of Nhill. I recently found in the National Library of Australia’s Trove database a Nhill Free Press account of my then-teenage great-aunt Katie — I recall her as an elderly woman in Melbourne in the 1970s — singing at public functions during the first world war. Welcoming two local heroes home from Gallipoli, her “Gondola Dreams” was a nice Italian touch; on another occasion, she was raising funds for the French Red Cross.

The impression left by these fragments of reportage from more than a century ago is of a migrant family doing its best to fit in. But this didn’t mean they left their old associations behind. My father used to joke about a relative who would describe himself as “a dinky-di Aussie, proud to be Italian.”

The Melbourne Aeolian Club (Società Mutuo Soccorso Isole Eolie) was established in 1925, inspired by a migrant who had been a member of a Strombolian club in New York, and the name Bongiorno appears in the minutes of its first meeting, as does Santamaria, the most famous Australian name associated with the island group. The staunchly anti-communist Catholic Bob Santamaria’s family migrated in the same wave as my father’s family, and from the same island, Salina.

As Celeste Russo suggests in her 1986 University of Melbourne thesis on the Aeolian Club, although it brought together “Aeolians,” more local identifications probably mattered most to these people. They identified with their family and village, then with their own island and, at a stretch, with the island group. Sicilians and Calabrians were, by comparison, outsiders. “Bloody Calabrese” were words I sometimes recall hearing in my childhood, a neat combination of Australian vernacular and old enmity.

I gave little thought to my Aeolian ancestry until 1996, when the last of my grandparents died. But that year also provided other reasons to reflect on ethnicity, immigration and identity. This was the time of the Pauline Hanson outbreak, and I was living and working in the southeastern Brisbane suburbs, with their large and prosperous Asian population. Even there, the tensions came to the surface. On one occasion, I was standing in a queue at the Griffith University newsagency while a male customer subjected the young Asian-Australian woman behind the counter to a barrage of verbal abuse. She had made a mildly disparaging remark about Pauline Hanson, who was pictured on the cover of the magazine she was selling him.

Hanson’s arguments against Asian immigration and multiculturalism had been heard loudly and often on the political right, especially since the controversy generated by the historian Geoffrey Blainey in 1984 over the pace of Asian immigration to Australia. Australia, Hanson said, was in danger of being “swamped” by Asians. They did not mix with the existing population; they formed ghettos. Europeans did not feature in this argument. Indeed, Hanson’s key adviser and the author of much of her early material was a larger-than-life figure named John Pasquarelli — obviously not an Anglo-Celtic name, though Pasquarelli said he’d been “dewogged.”

I may have been inclined to accept that I, too, had been “dewogged” — but another experience intervened. With my Australian studies students in Brisbane, I was surveying the debates over “suburbia.” We looked at numerous critiques, as well as Hugh Stretton’s famous claim in Ideas for Australian Cities that Australians had adapted the suburb to their own needs, desires and imaginations. I began thinking about the northern Melbourne suburb in which I had grown up, Thornbury, and realised that my own experience of suburbia was different from that described in most social criticism.

I lived in a house with my mother, father and younger sister. To one side of our home lived my mother’s maternal uncle, with his wife. Next door to them lived their own son, with his wife. An opening allowed you to walk between the backyards of those two houses. On the other side of our own home lived my mother’s paternal uncle, with his wife. Behind them lived their daughter and son-in-law, with their young children. Again, a gateway led from the backyard of one home into the other. These arrangements allowed younger people to keep an eye on the ageing Italian-born generation while easily enlisting grandmothers and grandfathers as childminders.

Frank Matisi (left) with an employee outside his shop in High Street, Croxton, c. 1929.

To Hanson, this might have seemed like a ghetto, but those living in it also participated in the wider community. My grandfather’s brother, one of our next-door neighbours, was elected to the Northcote City Council with Labor Party endorsement in 1962, served for more than twenty years and was mayor for three terms. He was active in CO.AS.IT., the Italian welfare organisation, and in Rotary. My mother’s cousin, two doors up from us, was a member of the Aeolian Club, but also active in the Lions Club, as were my parents. The relationship of these Italian Australians to one another and their community could not be captured in the easy clichés of right-wing politicians and conservative professors.

I never imagined that my mother’s family had been able to replicate in Melbourne the “Italy” they had left behind. Yet I also found it implausible that their ethnicity was irrelevant to the world they had made in the Melbourne suburbs, or that — like Nino Culotta and his son — they had slipped quietly into grey suburbia. There had to be an in-between place.

I visited Italy for the first time in 1997; I was in my late twenties. I saw this as a holiday, not a pilgrimage, but I did ensure that the Aeolian Islands were on my itinerary. The day before I left Lipari, I decided to try to find the house where my grandfather had lived. I knew it was in a village above the main port, and I hailed a cab.

At first the driver was incredulous that I wanted to go to this place on a Sunday morning. The village, at the top of a steep hill, seemed deserted, but we eventually spotted a man working in an orange grove. He hadn’t heard of my grandfather but suggested I ask someone over at the church, where mass was being held. I waited outside and when the service was over, the villagers started to emerge. I had little luck finding anyone who could speak English until one man pointed me towards a young woman about my age. “Do you speak English?” I asked. “Yes,” she replied. “I’m from Sydney.”

Once my mission was explained, and with the young woman acting as interpreter, the man to whom I had originally addressed my question quickly took me to the house in which my grandfather had grown up. I recognised it from photos. Very soon, the locals I encountered were able to connect me in their minds with those of my family they knew, either from the islands or in Australia. They knew my great-uncle because, in their eyes, he had become a big man, and because he and his wife had visited from time to time. They gave me coffee, fed me chocolates and presented me with homemade biscuits for the journey to Palermo. But they also insisted on taking me to visit my “family” on the islands.

The mental maps of many of these islanders included bits and pieces of an obscure country on the other side of the world, the Australian suburbs in which they had brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, aunts and uncles and cousins. The great Australian historian of modern Italy, Richard Bosworth, has called this the “Empire of the Italies,” arguing that “for many Italians, the more obvious and decisive frontiers were not located in a printed atlas but wherever their minds or custom advised.”

Nino Culotta’s outsider status when he first arrives in Sydney is based on his inability to comprehend the Australian idiom. His epiphany — which occurs at the blokeyest occasion imaginable, a buck’s party — concerns his ability to think in Australian English. Nino is happy that his own son will be unable to speak Italian, and that he himself will forget how to speak it, and so have trouble conversing with his own parents back in Italy. He brands as “disgraceful” parents he sees in shops “talking to kids in their homeland language, and the kids translating into English.”

I was raised in an English-speaking home by parents who spoke Italian — including the Aeolian dialect — but only used it when dealing with Italians. Yet I do not speak Italian, and neither do the other Italian Australians of my generation in my extended family. This meant we only had outsider status in the Italo-Australian community, and I was always conscious of the cultural differences between myself and the “really” Italian kids (who usually had Italian-born parents) at school.

Other differences came down to whether one’s family was among the relatively small numbers of migrants who had entered Australia before the second world war, or from the mass emigration from the 1950s to the 1970s. Hairstyle, dress, taste in music, whether one liked soccer more than Australian Rules football, accent, whether one spoke Italian: these were all critical markers of identity.

The choices you made, or that your family had made on your behalf, determined the nature of the cultural capital you acquired. Could you plausibly claim the privileges of full membership of the still Anglo-Celtic-dominated community with the cultural power that entailed? Or did you belong to an accepted minority of the kind that had “enriched” Australian life through its spaghetti and soccer? Ghassan Hage has described this process well: it is all about who gets to control the terms on which national space is imagined, entered and experienced.

Assimilationism did influence the life choices of immigrants and their children. Ironically, it may have had a greater impact on the earlier generations than on those who entered under the postwar program and were officially subject to it. Many of the prewar arrivals, a small minority, had suffered persecution in Australia during the second world war, and had every reason to want to blend in after it. Some, including my Uncle Tony, who later became the mayor, were interned as enemy aliens. “Getting on” meant playing by the rules of British Australia. The Aeolian Club in Melbourne had enjoyed a membership of 200 before this war, but only forty-one renewed after it. The club became very dependent on the new postwar waves of immigrants.

The children of migrants had little incentive to ensure that their own children learnt Italian. It was more important to acquire skills that would help you to get on in life. Some likely believed that speaking too much Italian at home would harm their children’s English. My parents avoided giving their children Italian names. I was named after my maternal grandfather, Francesco, but became Francis. My parents would not have seen this as in any way anti-Italian or anti-Aeolian. It was simply about fitting in, adapting to the new.

Many of my own generation of Australian-born Aeolian Australians became quite detached from the cultures of their parents and grandparents, even as they also experienced fragments of these cultures in their daily lives — through food, snatches of the Aeolian dialect and barely articulated habits of mind. And there was the instinctive turn to extended family when you needed or wanted something, and the desire to touch government only with a very long pair of tongs.

Some, like me, entering their twenties, donned backpacks and used the financial rewards from professional jobs of which their grandparents would not have dared dream to visit their ancestral homelands. Now, as we get older, we travel there in more comfort. Relatives on my father’s side of the family assemble on Salina every few years for a family reunion.

Their Australian story has been the familiar one of migrant success, as celebrated in From Volcanoes We Sailed: Connecting Aeolian Generations, an exhibition at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum in 2016. Curated by my cousin, Cristina Neri, the exhibition shows how Aeolian-Australian experience was embodied in business and professional success, cultural continuity and a thriving family life. There was a great deal of nostalgia about food and families, and a sense that modernity and the passing of the migrant generation threaten both. When Russo wrote about the Melbourne Aeolian Club in 1986, she thought its future “precarious,” since the migrant generations were getting old, the community was well integrated and the young seemed little interested in maintaining these connections.

But the club — which sponsored the 2016 exhibition — now seems to be flourishing, and Aeolian identity is being reimagined by migrant descendants, who can happily pick and choose which bits and pieces of culture they embrace. We are free to ignore the patriarchy that consigned many women to inferior educational opportunity and to the home — that belongs to the past, as another country — while celebrating spicchitedda and other delicious treats of the kind made in the well-stocked kitchens ruled by those very same women.

The unrelenting gentrification of Melbourne’s inner suburbs has seen the demolition of the home in which I grew up, replaced in recent years by stylish townhouses. Years ago, newer immigrants — Greeks and Lebanese — moved into other homes on the block that had once been occupied by my family. Soon, most signs of the little world made by this group of Melbourne Aeolians in our street will be gone. But the traces of these islanders have not been so easily obliterated. In an era of globalised identities and easy mobilities, their descendants are reimagining their own “Empire of the Italies” as a reflection of their affluent, progressive and cosmopolitan selves. •

This essay appears in GriffithReview69: The European Exchange, edited by Ashley Hay and Natasha Cica, published in partnership with the Australian National University. Reference can be found there.

The post Island stories appeared first on Inside Story.

Australia is very different from the country I arrived in from the United States sixty-two years ago. But migration at any time, whatever the circumstances, always has its challenges. Ashley Kalagian Blunt’s arrival came fifty-five years after mine, yet her attempts at adjusting, and the obstacles she met with, seem remarkably similar. It was impossible for me to read her story without making constant comparisons; and in a country full of migrants, I’m guessing that a lot of other people will be reading it in much the same way.

Kalagian Blunt comes from Canada, a former British colony, like Australia, that grew into nationhood. “As Canada’s Commonwealth sibling, Australia felt distinct yet familiar,” she writes. The major difference was the weather. What drove her out of Winnipeg were daytime temperatures many degrees below zero in winters that could go on for six months. On one particularly freezing, windswept afternoon she slipped badly on black ice, and that decided her. As soon as she finished university, she was leaving.

Her dream destination was Sydney, a city that had entranced her ever since she saw it televised during the 2000 Olympics, and she finally arrived in February 2011 after sojourns in South Korea, Peru and Mexico. Not only did she land here, she had persuaded her husband to accompany her. While she’d been travelling, Steve had been building a career in accountancy, earning enough in her absence to buy the two of them a home, but he loved her enough to make her siren call his. She had been accepted for a master’s course at Sydney University, with visas that gave them each a year to see how it all panned out.

All the due diligence had done little to prepare them for what they encountered that first February day. There was the incredible jet lag, then the 30°C heat and the fierceness of the sun. Even more concerning was the cost of everything, from bottled water to astronomical rents, combined with the fact that Steve was without a job. Ashley was teaching a course in Winnipeg online, but it was hardly enough for the two of them. They found an apartment in Enmore they could afford, which turned out to be infested with cockroaches, some of them seemingly as big as rats. On top of that, the ceiling over the minute kitchen was patched with cardboard to catch the bird shit dropping through the roof.

Steve spent the next four months job-hunting on his laptop without bagging an interview, while Ashley struggled with her course. All her fellow students were foreigners; Australian postgraduates, she discovered, tended to go straight for PhDs, so she didn’t get to know any, as she would have liked. Nor could she understand the poor marks she was getting, even after explaining to a bafflingly hostile teacher that back in Canada she’d received a gold medal for her journalism degree. Turns out it was just the sort of thing that put her teacher off — the North American earnestness and confidence. A Uruguayan friend, who’d lived all over before enrolling in the Sydney course, explained to her that Australians were unimpressed by anything that smacked of boasting:

“I read about it in a cultural guide to Australia — I’ll lend it to you if you want? My husband has the same problem, except it’s worse — he’s an American. Because of the tall poppy thing, Aussies tend to talk themselves down. Listen for it, you’ll catch on.”

Eventually they made more friends, even Australian ones. One of them steered Steve towards the public service, and he found himself a job with the NSW government. With this they could afford a bigger flat, closer to the uni. They took trips around Sydney and further afield. Things improved to such an extent that they decided to go for permanent residency. Their white First World status didn’t spare them from the many rigid, puzzling demands concocted by our immigration bureaucracy, but after two years of paperwork and clearing all the hurdles, their applications were successful.

Yet, strangely, if ineluctably, their positions had reversed. After months in a cockroach-infested flat punching CVs into his laptop, Steve had been ready to go back to Canada while, for all the obstacles, Ashley was willing to soldier on. But as Steve settled comfortably in employment, with an encouraging string of promotions, Ashley became increasingly, bewilderingly, anxious.

Amid the humour, the reader gets a picture of a woman nearly disabled by a neediness triggered by the mounting fear that Steve would leave her to deal with Australia on her own. It’s as though she couldn’t recognise that Steve had found a slot for himself in this country, and it was she who had come to feel she would never fit in. Crazy as this was, it was all too recognisable — at least to me, and I’d imagine many more. Perhaps all us migrants lose the plot at some point, for one reason or another.

There’s the language — an English like no other — and the constant near misses in communication. There’s the underlying suspicion of foreigners, especially those who are disconcerted by the Australian way of taking the micky out of everyone. There’s the worry about ageing parents back home, the exhausting schlepping back and forth to care for them. There’s the longing for home, the dawning realisation it will never be home again, and the wondering if there is such a place as home.

The promotion for How to Be Australian emphasises its humour, and Kalagian Blunt can certainly be funny, though perhaps not quite as hilarious as some of the commentators have said. Like many outsiders, she takes refuge in one-liners, as when likening Sydney interiors to meat lockers. Having been frozen in such from my arrival, I laughed myself silly here. But at times the book feels like it was composed by a stand-up comic who’s strung all her jokes together without pause for breath.

If Kalagian Blunt is pushing too hard here, anyone who’s gone through the same rite of passage will recognise the need to send up the experience. For those who haven’t, I hope they’ll come away from the book with a greater appreciation of what damn hard work and heartache the adventure of changing countries entails. •

The post Strangers in a strange land appeared first on Inside Story.

Public discussion about migration to Australia tends to simplify a complicated and nuanced reality. Annual permanent migration to Australia stood at 179,085 in 2018–19, made up of approximately 62 per cent in the skilled stream, 27 per cent in the family stream and 11 per cent in the humanitarian stream, which includes refugees. As of 4 April 2020, around 2.17 million people were living in Australia on temporary visas, including roughly 672,000 New Zealanders, 565,000 international students, 203,000 international tourists, 118,000 people on working holiday visas, 139,000 temporary skilled visa holders, and about 90,000 people on temporary graduate visas. This total also includes more than 280,000 people on bridging visas but not the estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people without a visa.

This picture is complex enough without delving into the quagmire of visa categories and conditions that apply to refugees and asylum seekers, depending on how they arrived and where in the immigration process they are.

Rather than focusing on visa categories, though, we want to explore two much more important questions. How can Australia respond to the individual needs of migrants as they settle here, regardless of their visa category? And how can we best support all migrants to participate fully in Australian society and the economy?

Despite the fact that temporary visa holders benefit Australia in many ways, the federal government largely expects temporary migrants to look after themselves while they are here. Yet they bring many benefits. They pay tax; they fill skills gaps and labour shortages in sectors including health and care, logistics and agriculture; and they often live and work in regional locations crying out for residents and workers.

Temporary migrants also support some of our largest industries. The Victorian government estimates that just one group — the 250,000 international students who came to the state last year — contributed $12.6 billion to state revenue. And, while there have been calls to put Australian workers first, studies show that migrants don’t disadvantage local workers, and can actually lift their participation in the workforce.

A new report by Eve Lester has found that the federal government treats migrants predominantly according to their visa status rather than their individual needs. Funding or contractual arrangements often mean that non-government agencies largely follow these government policy and program settings, leaving temporary migrants particularly vulnerable.

Lester stresses that the term “temporary” is in many ways misleading. For many migrants a temporary visa is a step towards permanent residency, although this goal has become increasingly hard to attain. Lester notes the growing underclass of “permanently temporary residents” that live in “a holding pattern that makes them highly exploitable and in which they hover at the margins of socioeconomic engagement.”

The current approach to migrant services “creates cracks through which those in the grey areas will invariably fall,” says Lester. Women on temporary visas who are experiencing intimate partner violence, for instance, often face barriers to seeking help, such as fear of deportation or losing custody of their children, and limited English skills. Most are ineligible for Centrelink financial support or childcare subsidies, and social and community housing is largely inaccessible to them. They often have no option but to remain in a dangerous situation.

While the federal government has funded the Red Cross to provide a small one-off emergency relief payment to temporary visa holders at risk of destitution, the exclusion of temporary migrants from its broader response is only deepening this disadvantage. In the short term, expanding existing pandemic measures to include temporary visa holders in vulnerable situations is vital. Australia could also learn from how other countries are tackling labour shortages in the health sector, including by fast-tracking overseas skills recognition for refugees and new migrants.

All states and territories are now providing grants or other support for international students and/or other temporary migrants unable to return home. Some universities are also filling the gaps with emergency support funds for stranded international students. In each case, this reflects an understanding of not only the short-term imperative of supporting these Australian residents but also the long-term implications of their exclusion.

Nearly 300,000 temporary visa holders are thought to have left Australia since the start of the year. With immigration paused indefinitely, none will be arriving to replace them. This gives us the opportunity to ensure that migrant services are more effective when borders reopen.

Fortunately, we already have the blueprint and tools we need to achieve this. Last year a panel led by former senior public servant Peter Shergold set out a compelling blueprint for improving the settlement experience of humanitarian migrants. Their proposals would link the efforts of Commonwealth, state and local governments to industry and the community sector, reducing the wasteful fragmentation built into the current system. This approach could equally be used to support other vulnerable migrants in Australia.

Their proposals for humanitarian migrants have been endorsed and promoted by the federal government, and many are already in train. For instance, the Department of Home Affairs, where Australia’s immigration programs sit, took over management of settlement services and English-language programs in mid 2019. Alison Larkins has been appointed to the new role of the Commonwealth coordinator-general for migrant services, and a new Refugee and Migrant Services Advisory Council, with members from civil society and the private sector, was announced in February this year.

Reforms are being tested now to ensure the national employment services system, Jobactive, adapts much more effectively to an individual’s journey, employers’ needs and local circumstances. This should mean a far better service for all unemployed and underemployed Australians, and more resources for those with complex needs. More flexible delivery of the Adult Migrant English Program is also slated for testing this year. Experience with JobSeeker and JobKeeper should point the way towards targeted wage subsidies and higher levels of unemployment support for the most disadvantaged jobseekers.

Locally connected, place-based approaches to delivering critical services have been widely commended and are achieving good results. These approaches use local networks to lift social and economic participation. In Victoria, for example, Wyndham City Council and its partners have been running the Wyndham Employment Trial to boost economic participation for young people and humanitarian migrants. Eighteen employers are recruiting, and ninety-four humanitarian migrants have been placed in employment.

Working arrangements built during the trial are helping local organisations to respond in a coordinated way to the challenges of finding work for jobseekers in the wake of Covid-19. The success in Wyndham sheds light on how we can better support refugees and vulnerable migrants to settle in Australia.

Fully implementing the necessary governance and service reforms, and scaling up effective place-based approaches to include broader groups of migrants and others facing disadvantage will ultimately lead to more successful settlement and a more inclusive society.

It has been estimated that greater social and economic inclusion will yield serious economic benefits for Australia. Queensland alone stands to gain $250 million over ten years by making better use of the skills of migrants and refugees. Reducing gaps in participation, employment and income by 25 per cent relative to the average Australian jobseeker for just one annual humanitarian intake could be worth $180 million to the federal budget over ten years as well as $484 million in income for those refugees and their families.

Refugees are known to be Australia’s most entrepreneurial migrants — they are nearly twice as likely as other Australian taxpayers to run businesses — and every 1000 new refugee businesses generates $98 million in annual economic activity and taxes.

The pandemic has exposed Australia’s disjointed approach to migrant support, but it has also inadvertently created a chance to do better — to enhance Australia’s recovery and, at the same time, bed down the reforms we need to harness the full potential of Australia’s migrant population.

A lot of the thinking has already been done, and Canberra has created the necessary governance mechanisms. Now is the time to grasp the opportunity to scale up these initiatives. •

The post A chance to do better for migrants, and for the economy appeared first on Inside Story.

A superior public health infrastructure with a large number of intensive care beds helps explain Germany’s comparatively low mortality rate. At no stage have hospitals been overwhelmed by patients requiring ventilators; in fact, German hospitals have been able to treat patients from Italy, France and the Netherlands. Crucial in keeping the number of infections manageable has been a nationwide lockdown and social distancing rules that have been observed by most people.

Over the past couple of weeks, Germany’s state governments have loosened restrictions. Most shops are back in business, many students have been able to return to school, and museums and art galleries have reopened. In one state, even restaurants are operating, albeit only for local residents.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and the sixteen state premiers met by video last Wednesday to discuss a further easing of the restrictions. Many of the premiers have been pushing for a speedy relaxation of the rules, and Merkel, the ever-cautious trained natural scientist, could do little but acquiesce. The only concession she secured was a commitment to reimpose restrictions locally if the number of new infections topped fifty per 100,000 inhabitants in a particular district. Since Wednesday, this Obergrenze, or upper limit, has been breached in five districts, but the local authorities’ response has been far less consistent than had presumably been envisaged by Merkel and the virologists advising her.

Many commentators have suggested that the rationale for easing restrictions quickly has been the realisation that Germany is reaching a tipping point. Germans overwhelmingly welcomed the lockdown when it was introduced in March, but now many of them are sick and tired of it and demanding a return to life as usual. A sizeable minority want to work, shop and go on holidays exactly as they used to. They are also no longer in favour of wearing the mandatory face masks on public transport and in shops, or of obeying social distancing rules.

The last time an Obergrenze became politically contentious was in late 2015 when the then premier of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, demanded that Germany impose an upper limit on the number of asylum seekers admitted in a given year. This declaration embroiled Seehofer and Merkel in a bitter conflict lasting more than two years, which he eventually won. Now it is Merkel who insists on an upper limit, and again it is doubtful she will prevail.

Talk of an Obergrenze isn’t the only reminder of the so-called refugee crisis. Then, too, many politicians and journalists warned that “die Stimmung kippt” — that Germany was reaching, or had already reached, a tipping point, after which a majority of Germans would reject the refugee policies of the Merkel government. Then and now, those predicting a soon-to-be-reached tipping point could point to opinion polls. In September 2015, a clear majority supported the Merkel government’s decision to admit asylum seekers whose claims should have been processed in Greece or Hungary. Six months later, that was no longer the case. Now, polls suggest that support for the restrictions imposed by federal, state and local governments is declining fast.

Public protests are the most visible evidence of a change of public mood. Since the beginning of the lockdown, local governments have prohibited large public gatherings. But in a country in which rallies have long been an important means of protest, it has proven difficult for the authorities to ban demonstrations altogether.

Take 1 May, a day that’s more than any other associated with noisy rallies. This year the trade unions cancelled their traditional Labour Day marches, but that didn’t stop others. In Hamburg, for example, the authorities issued permits for forty-three public protests, always with the proviso that organisers agreed to an Obergrenze (usually twenty-five demonstrators), a stationary format, everybody wearing masks and a 1.5 metre gap between demonstrators. In almost all cases, protesters obeyed these rules.

Elsewhere, wild protests have taken place without the prior approval of local authorities, along with rallies whose participants haven’t adhered to stipulated conditions. Nearly all of these protests were directed at the lockdown. They have continued even after many of the restrictions were removed.

The first of these protests was in Berlin on 28 March. Protesters gathered on Rosa Luxemburg Square and one of the organisers, the writer Anselm Lenz, handed out copies of the Grundgesetz, Germany’s constitution. In an interview he said that the state had formed an alliance with the pharmaceutical industry and digital technology companies to abolish democracy. Only forty people attended what was later dubbed the first Hygiene-Demo, but the crowds were larger at subsequent rallies. Last Saturday, the police tried to restrict access to the square to ensure that the permitted number of demonstrators — a mere fifty — would not be exceeded, whereupon more than a thousand demonstrators gathered at nearby Alexanderplatz.

The largest demonstrations have been held in Stuttgart, the capital of Baden-Württemberg, in the affluent southwest of the country. There, the first rally took place on 18 April — but only after Germany’s high court had ruled that a ban imposed by the local authorities had to be rescinded. Last Saturday, about 5000 demonstrators gathered at Stuttgart’s Cannstatter Wasen, a large open space that is often used for festivals. Following the court ruling, the Baden-Württemberg authorities have been less restrictive and had granted a permit for a 10,000-strong demonstration.

Some of these demonstrations have been marred by violence. On two occasions, journalists were attacked. On others, there were squabbles between demonstrators and police who tried to enforce the stipulated Obergrenze and social distancing rules.

Similar demonstrations have been held elsewhere: from San Francisco to Melbourne, and from London to Naples. In all these cases, they have attracted a motley bunch of protesters, including, among others, conspiracy theorists, people belonging to far-right fringe groups, anti-vaxxers and civil rights activists. In some instances, populist leaders — most notably Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro — have given them their blessing.

What’s specific to Germany isn’t the much-reported gatherings in Berlin and Stuttgart but the numerous protests in small towns in East Germany. I believe these are the manifestations of the discontent that has made politicians nervous and eager to end the restrictions sooner rather than later.

In Zittau, a town of about 30,000 in the southeast of Saxony, close to the borders with the Czech Republic and Poland, a Facebook group of people critical of the lockdown formed about six weeks ago. On 6 April, the group sent an open letter to the local media. Its twenty-four signatories bemoaned “massive and disproportionate human rights violations.” They claimed that the restrictions represented the kind of totalitarianism that had last been seen thirty years ago. During the weekly rallies in Zittau, demonstrators have shouted, “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people), the catchcry of the civil rights activists who took to the streets during the dying weeks of the German Democratic Republic in 1989.

Pirna is another medium-sized town in the southeast of Saxony. Like Zittau, Pirna is in an electorate where the candidate for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, came first in the 2017 federal elections. There, the first wild protest was organised on 22 April by a police officer who represents the AfD in the local shire parliament.

Last Wednesday, about 250 people turned up for the latest demonstration opposite the town hall. Two days later, Pirna’s mayor, Klaus-Peter Hanke, invited three of the protesters and Saxony’s minister for social cohesion, the Social Democrat Petra Köpping, to join him in a panel discussion live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube.

Köpping did most of the talking, trying to explain the rationale behind her government’s response to the pandemic. At the conclusion of the event, one of the protesters said he much appreciated the fact that the minister had provided a lot of information. Earlier he had complained that the information supplied by the government was contradictory and sometimes incorrect, but also somewhat proudly admitted that for the past few weeks he had stopped paying attention to news related to the pandemic.

Outside of Saxony, Köpping is known as the author of the 2018 book Integriert doch erst mal uns! (You ought to integrate us first!), which argues that many East Germans had been the victims of German reunification, and that their experience, including their humiliation at the hands of West Germans, had never been properly acknowledged. During the panel discussion, she followed the script recommended in her book: she took the protesters’ concerns seriously and implied that they were legitimate, spoke patiently and conveyed empathy.

Only once did Köpping lose her calm. When one of the panellists complained that the police response to the demonstrations in Pirna had been heavy-handed, she said that it had to be seen in the context of a general deterioration of political culture. She talked about the personal abuse directed at her, and then made a reference to the protests against refugees in 2015, suggesting that they and the more recent protests against the lockdown were comparable.

There are indeed parallels between the opposition to government policy in 2015 and the opposition to government policy now. In both cases, the protests were sometimes initiated and at other times instrumentalised by the far right. As happened in 2015, protesters have objected to not being consulted and to being disadvantaged by government policies. Misinformation campaigns, some of them led by Russian state-owned media, fuelled some of the protests in 2015. In 2020, stories that the pandemic is less harmful than the common flu or is a ploy by Bill Gates can be traced back to Russian sources.

In 2015, those opposed to the government’s refugee policy saw themselves (rather than forcibly displaced non-Germans) as victims. In 2020, too, protesters perceive government policy as a means to harm them rather than protect others. (Of course, if the rate of infections were to increase substantially, everybody, and not just people in aged care facilities, would be at great risk of falling victim to the virus.)

Recent polls suggest that the Christian Democrats have benefited from the current crisis. With its support dropping below 10 per cent, the AfD’s efforts to capitalise on any disquiet about the government’s measures have failed. By and large, so have other attempts to connect an anti-migrant message to the concerns about the recent restrictions.

The government’s response to refugees in August and September 2015 is now widely seen as a mistake, and this assessment informs government policy in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic today. About a week ago, Matthias Iken, deputy editor-in-chief of the conservative Hamburger Abendblatt, wrote that the federal government was at risk of repeating its errors from 2015, namely failing to abandon a policy “that was initially called for but which could not be sustained. In the same way in which a country can’t accommodate close to a million refugees within a few months, it can’t be put on ice for weeks.” Favourable approval ratings, a sympathetic media and admiration from Germany’s neighbours would once again turn out to be but a “fleeting blessing.”

This historical analogy implies that Merkel’s policy in 2015 was politically suicidal rather than logistically impossible. After all, eventually Germany met the challenge of accommodating the refugees successfully. The analogy also neglects the fact that the narrative about the refugee policy’s political impossibility may be true for some parts of the country, including the southeast of Saxony (where vehement opposition to that policy began well before Merkel’s approval ratings nose-dived), but incorrect for others. The idea that Germany reached, and then went beyond, a tipping point in late 2015 has been shaped by a focus on what happened in places such as Pirna that were not representative then and are not representative now.

It would be a mistake to assume that local unrest in Pirna and Zittau will be replicated in the rest of the country. Hamburg may be just as unrepresentative as Pirna, but it’s worth noting that of the forty-three protests held in that city on 1 May not one was about the lockdown. While it’s reasonable to weigh up the costs and benefits of measures designed to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, it would make little sense to let government policy be informed by a misplaced fear of popular discontent.

This is not to downplay the significance of the current demonstrations. The protesters may well radicalise, as happened during 2014’s anti-immigration Pegida marches in Dresden and 2015’s anti-refugee protests. But the anger that drives the protests now, particularly in the east of the country, needs to be understood as more than simply a response to the lockdown, in the same way that the anti-immigration protests have never just been about migrants. For that reason alone, it would be wrong to make extensive concessions to the protesters — and in the process perhaps risk Germany’s exposure to the virus increasing exponentially — in the hope of ending the discontent. •

The post Tipping points appeared first on Inside Story.

We’re not very good at talking about these issues. As Abul Rizvi and James Button wrote in the Griffith Review, “government has largely given up making a case for migration as part of building a nation” and Labor has been “cowed into avoiding discussion.” Along the way, Australia — an immigrant nation — has “lost the ability to talk about itself.” The result has been near-silence about the implications of large-scale temporary migration for workers’ rights, democracy, social cohesion and our system of citizenship-based multiculturalism.

But Labor can’t have it both ways. It can’t claim to be encouraging a reasoned discussion about a sensitive and divisive topic while framing the issue in simplistic, binary terms. Senator Keneally called for temporary migration to be reduced to ensure “that Australians get a fair go and a first go at jobs,” but she and her colleagues know that immigration, even temporary migration, is not a straightforward contest between Australian workers and foreign workers. It doesn’t necessarily follow that if “migrants” get jobs here then “our kids” will miss out.

Take international education. If Labor wants to cut temporary migration then student numbers would be the place to start, since they make up the largest cohort of visa holders. In December 2019, before the pandemic hit, more than 480,000 international students were living in Australia and allowed to work for up to forty hours a fortnight. (Around another 90,000 recent graduates can work full-time on a visa class created by Labor prime minister Julia Gillard.) Students are generally young, which suggests they were in Senator Keneally’s sights when she wrote that “the shift to temporary migration means that our migrant intake is younger and lower skilled than it used to be, and this does not help our kids as they join a labour market with 11 per cent youth unemployment.”

Yes, international students work in entry-level jobs stacking supermarket shelves, delivering pizza or attending petrol stations, and in some cases they might out-compete unemployed young Australians for the same positions. But without international students there would be far less work to go around.

International education is Australia’s fourth-largest export industry and supports nearly a quarter of a million jobs. The fees international students pay, and the money they spend on goods and services — including tourism spending by relatives who come to Australia to visit — is worth more than $37 billion to the economy. Without the revenue from international students, as vice-chancellors have made abundantly clear, universities will have to shed staff and abandon research.

Is Senator Keneally referring to international students when she claims that “the shape and size of our migration intake has hurt many Australian workers, contributing to unemployment, underemployment and low wage growth”? It’s not clear, because her article lumps all temporary migrants together in a headline figure of “2.1 million temporary visa holders.” She then goes on to claim that “Australia hosts the second largest migrant workforce in the OECD, second in total number only to the US.”

This figure appears to come from an OECD report on migration, which actually recorded the number of temporary visas issued in different countries rather than the number of migrant workers. Australia does have a high rate of temporary migration, but data elsewhere in the report shows that most Australian visas go to students and working holiday-makers, whereas in the United States (and many other OECD countries) a much bigger share go to “labour migrants.” Since students and working holiday-makers can take up jobs here, that might sound like hair-splitting on my part, but there is nevertheless a difference between dedicated and de facto migrant workers.

It is hardly surprising that on the same day Senator Keneally’s opinion piece was published, ABC radio news bulletins carried a story that morphed her 2.1 million temporary visa holders into 2.1 million foreign workers. This was lazy journalism, but entirely predictable given the message that Keneally was obviously trying to send to an imagined blue-collar Labor base.

The government has also seeded media confusion by using the same 2.1 million figure in a statement about coronavirus and temporary visa holders early last month, but the detail of that media release at least made clear that 200,000 of those people were tourists on visitor visas (with no work rights).

The 2.1 million figure also includes more than 670,000 New Zealanders, who are only temporary in a technical sense, since their special category visa allows them to live and work in Australia indefinitely. Many of those Kiwis arrived before 2001 and are, to all intents and purposes, permanent residents. Others have come for a short period for tourism, business or family visits. To imply that all 670,000 New Zealanders are “foreign workers” is misleading.

Still, if Senator Keneally wants to cut temporary migration, reducing the entry of New Zealanders would be the other obvious place to start. Is she proposing to rip up the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement that has guaranteed free movement between Australia and New Zealand since 1973?

The next-largest cohort of temporary visa holders are on bridging visas. Many are the partners of Australians, and are enduring a long wait for permanent residency because the government has cut the annual migration intake and processing times have blown out as a result. According to official statistics, at the end of last financial year Home Affairs had almost 90,000 partner visa applications on hand (though some of these applicants would be overseas).

Other bridging visa holders are skilled migrants and asylum seekers who have lodged residency applications and are awaiting determination before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. As of April, there were more than 65,000 active cases before the AAT’s migration and refugee division.

Another significant group of temporary visa holders are the 118,000 backpackers on working holiday-maker visas. But Senator Keneally seems less concerned about them when she acknowledges that one benefit of temporary migration is that it “fill gaps in the short term” and “horticulture relies on temporary migration to supply a seasonal workforce.”

So perhaps her real beef is with skilled workers on temporary visas. As she points out, “migrant workers don’t just pick fruit: one in five chefs, one in four cooks, one in six hospitality workers, and one in ten nursing support and personal care workers in Australia hold a temporary visa.”

But there are only 139,000 skilled visa holders in Australia — and this figure includes partners and dependent children, which means the number of these people who are active in the labour market is likely to be fewer than 100,000. And more than half the 65,000 primary visa holders present in Australia as temporary skilled workers in December 2019 held a bachelor degree or higher qualification, so they don’t really fit the “unskilled” profile of “cheap… temporary labour that undercuts wages for Australian workers and takes jobs Australians could do.”

In other words, when you break temporary migration down into its constituent parts, the numbers are no longer so alarming, and it is much harder to conflate “temporary visa holders” with “foreign workers.”

And even when we look at temporary migrant workers at the lower end of the skills range, the problem is more complex than Keneally suggests. Why do so many chefs, cooks and personal care attendants (and we might add childcare workers to this list) hold temporary visas? Because wages and conditions in these jobs are poor and Australian citizens don’t want to fill them (just as they are reluctant to pick grapes or harvest pumpkins).

There are three ways we could encourage Australians to take up this employment.

First, we could pay these workers better, which means paying more for our food and making a bigger tax contribution to fund health, disability services, childcare and aged care.

Second, we could allow the temporary migrant workers who currently fill these jobs to become permanent residents — in other words, allow them to become Australian workers. But then, like other Australians, there’s a risk they would quickly shift to other sectors of the economy that are better rewarded and we’d have to bring in more temporary migrants to fill the gap.

Third, we could boost our dilapidated vocational training and education system, which is the best way of getting marginalised and disadvantaged young Australians into long-term employment.

Despite her confusing message, Kristina Keneally does raise important issues. As other contributors to Inside Story have argued, it is a mistake to assume that migration-fuelled economic growth leaves everyone better off, for the simple reason that if population is growing faster than the economy, then GDP per capita will actually fall. Keneally is right to warn that it is lazy to rely on immigration to fuel economic growth. As we are discovering, it is risky too, just as it is risky to rely on international students to fund higher education.

The senator’s warnings about the exploitation of temporary migrants are well founded, as we know from numerous reports and inquiries. Keneally puts a refreshing emphasis on permanent migration as a nation-building exercise, and she emphasises the importance of skills. She writes, for example, that in industries like cybersecurity “we can’t quickly skill up enough Australians to meet demand.”

But this is dodging the more difficult questions, since it is not always high-skilled, high-paid professionals in city-based jobs who are in shortest supply. Often the labour market gaps are for low-skilled or semi-skilled workers in regional areas or in low-status, low-paid jobs — think fruit pickers, meat processors, aged care attendants, disability carers and childcare workers.

A thorough review of Australia’s migration settings is warranted. Unfortunately, Senator Keneally’s contribution does not kick it off in a constructive way. What is more, the immediate migration challenges are likely to be around having too few migrants rather than too many. As Keneally writes:

COVID-19 has closed our international borders. Temporary migrants are going home. No new migrants are coming for the foreseeable future. Borders are likely to stay closed well after all other restrictions ease. When we re-open the borders — in six, twelve, or twenty-four months — migrants will not return immediately.

When the economy slows, migration falls. Which leaves us with the question, who is going to pick our fruit, keep our universities afloat, care for our elderly and deliver our pizzas? •

The post Labor’s mixed migration message appeared first on Inside Story.

Global integration clearly has its downsides. We are living with them right now. Increased financial integration means more severe financial crises. Increased trade integration means we are more exposed to the economies and policies of other countries. And increased people-to-people links mean one country’s disease can quickly become a global pandemic.

“Remember the good times” is what we tell people when they lose a loved one. We remind them that the decades of good times far outweigh the bad times they are currently experiencing. The same is true for global integration. One or two years of economic pain from Covid-19 does not justify throwing out the decades of uninterrupted prosperity delivered by Australia’s openness to international trade, investment and people.

Those advocating a more closed Australia are quick to talk up the benefits of greater economic independence — the absence of pandemics, global financial crises and trade wars are certainly among them. But those advocating a closed Australia are suspiciously silent about its costs.

Consider trade first. Exports contribute almost $400 billion to the Australian economy each year, or around 21 per cent of our GDP, and are linked to more than 1.5 million Australian jobs. How do those advocating a more closed economy plan to fill this hole? Some suggest that domestic demand could fill the gap through a national Buy Australian campaign. This is a laughable proposition. More than 70 per cent of Australia’s agricultural production is exported. More than 25 per cent of our tourism industry relies on international tourists, to say nothing of universities and mining. The only way domestic demand could absorb this enormous excess supply would be through a catastrophic collapse in prices, sending the vast majority of Australia’s farmers, tourism operators, universities and mining companies into bankruptcy.

The Buy Australian argument is similarly tone deaf to the challenges facing poorer Australians who cannot afford to hold such luxurious opinions. For them, trade has dramatically reduced the cost of living. Compared with a decade earlier, audiovisual and computing equipment is 72 per cent cheaper, cars are 12 per cent cheaper, toys and games are 18 per cent cheaper and clothes are 14 per cent cheaper. Do those advocating a closed Australia honestly believe poorer Australians could afford to see their cost of living rise to this extent?

These huge numbers don’t even come close to the benefits of trade to the Australian economy. The reason we trade is the same reason you don’t perform your own surgeries, service your own car and cut your own hair. Specialisation makes us rich, generalisation makes us poor. Trade has led to enormous productivity gains in Australia by allowing us to specialise in the things we are good at making, earn $400 billion each year selling these things to the world, and use some of this money to import the things we are bad at making. Those who advocate a closed Australia are advocating taking resources away from the sectors in which we excel internationally — agriculture, mining, education — and putting them into sectors where the world leaves us for dead.

Trade is vital to innovation and competition. Australian businesses that actively innovate are more than twice as likely to export than businesses that don’t. This is no coincidence: a closed Australia is a less innovative Australia. Competition creates innovation. Trade in education and tourism are just as vital to Australia’s international image, our commercial links and our influence overseas as they are to our economy: Indonesia’s former vice-president, trade minister and finance minister all studied at the Australian National University. You can’t buy that sort of influence.

Foreign investment is no different. Australians don’t save enough to finance the amount of investment we need at home to maintain our standard of living. In normal times, we come up short by almost $60 billion. That’s $60 billion of extra capital we would need if we were to close up shop. Where would this come from? It would have to come from the pockets of Australian households and businesses via higher interest rates on mortgages, credit cards and business loans.

Foreign investment gets projects and companies off the ground that then employ more people. Little wonder that one in four of the biggest employing businesses in Australia have more than 50 per cent foreign ownership. Foreign investment from Canada, the European Union and the United States alone contributed to employing around 676,000 Australians in 2015.

Immigration is no less important. The Labor Party is now calling for reduced immigration after Covid-19 to give workers a fair go, despite the lack of evidence that immigration reduces local wages in Australia. The question for Labor is the same: how does it plan to pay for this? In recent years, population growth, two-thirds of which has come from migration, has accounted for most of Australia’s economic growth. How does the Labor Party propose to fill this gap? The silence on these questions is deafening.

Over the next few months and years, Australia will continue this conversation about whether we should have a more closed and independent economy. Some are advocating a light touch — stronger domestic capacity to manufacture medical equipment (although a larger national medical stockpile would presumably achieve the same thing at smaller cost to the economy) — while others are advocating something much more severe.

Calls for the latter are nothing more than economic populism, plain and simple. They are arguments by those who, having not done their homework, claim that Australia can have more economic independence without any cost. It is a dishonest argument. Those who push for a more economically independent Australia must answer a simple question: “How do you plan to pay for that?” •

The post The high price of sovereignty appeared first on Inside Story.

By 2100, the United Nations believes, the world’s population — now around eight billion — will be just under 10.9 billion. That’s 300 million fewer people than it forecast in 2017. And even that reduction assumes the decline in fertility in recent decades will slow markedly over the next fifty years.

Source: UN Population Projections, 2019 Revision

The UN’s revision of its population projections largely reflects a continuing decline in the “global fertility rate” — the number of live births per woman across the world. As one recent UN report notes, the global rate declined from 3.2 per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019, with Sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest fertility levels, recording a fall from 6.3 births per woman in 1990 to 4.6 in 2019. Fertility in Northern Africa and Western Asia was down from 4.4 to 2.9, in Central and Southern Asia from 4.3 to 2.4, in East and Southeast Asia from 2.5 to 1.8, and in Latin America and the Caribbean from 3.3 to 2.0.

The UN’s median population projection assumes global fertility will continue to decline to below replacement levels (or just under 2.1 babies per woman) from 2065 onwards. That adds up to a reduction of between 0.4 and 0.5 babies per woman over a period of forty-five years.

What’s striking about that figure is that it is a much slower rate of decline than the decline of  0.7 babies per woman since 1990. If the global fertility rate were to continue falling at the same rate as the past twenty-nine years, it would be well below replacement rate by 2040. After that, the point at which global population starts to decline would depend on age structure.

In other words, the UN is assuming the decline in the global fertility rate will slow down very significantly, and that fertility will actually rise in the world’s major economic and military powers. It’s important to remember, too, that these figures were finalised before the onset of the virus-induced recession.

The case of India illustrates the UN’s assumptions. Its fertility rate has declined from 5.6 babies per woman in 1970 to around 2.24, a fall of almost 3.4 babies per woman. The UN assumes that India’s figure will decline to below the replacement rate by 2030, but much more slowly than over the past fifty years. It assumes a similar trend in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Iran, Turkey, Vietnam, Mexico and to a lesser degree Pakistan.

Of the world’s most populous countries, the UN assumes only Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo will remain at or above replacement levels for all of the twenty-first century. It expects the fertility rate in Ethiopia to remain high until 2050 but to then fall to below replacement levels. Given their relatively young populations, these countries are projected to see continued strong population growth for the rest of the century.

On the other hand, the UN has assumed that the fertility rates in the world’s five main economic and/or military powers (the United States, China, Russia, Japan and Germany) will rise for the rest of the century. That assumption is probably the result of extensive discussions between UN staff and officials in those countries. The question is why those five governments, and hence the UN, expect that rise.

Let’s start with the United States, where the fertility rate has declined in each of the past four years. The 2018 figure of 1.73 babies per woman was the lowest on record for that country, and already substantially below the UN’s estimate of 1.78 for the period 2015–20. The UN doesn’t explain in its latest report why it expects the US fertility rate to rise steadily for the rest of the century.

The United States’s relatively high rate of immigration, projected forwards, means that its population is expected to rise to over 433 million by 2100, an increase of 31 per cent on the 331 million it recorded in 2019. From 1995 to 2000, net migration to the United Sates was a high 0.65 per cent annually, but by 2015–20 that figure had declined to 0.29 per cent. The lower rate is assumed to continue for the rest of the century, and remains a major contributor to the projected increase in the US population. Immigration policy changes being pursued by the Trump administration would of course reduce numbers.

Then there’s China, whose fertility rate the UN assumes will also rise steadily for the rest of the century. In 2019, China recorded its lowest number of births since 1961, when it had a very much smaller population. Birth numbers there have now fallen for three years in a row, and some academics argue that China’s actual fertility rate is much lower than official reports.

Even using official statistics and the rising-fertility assumption adopted by the UN, China’s population is projected to peak in the early 2030s and then continuously fall by around 375 million by the end of the century, a 26 per cent decline.

Partly this reflects an assumed net migration rate of –0.02 per cent per year falling to –0.03 per cent. This effectively assumes that China never joins most developed economies in attracting more people than leave — a highly dubious assumption.

Russia’s fertility rate, meanwhile, hit a low of 1.25 babies per woman in 2000. It has subsequently been rising and was estimated by the UN at 1.82 for the period 2015–20. The UN assumes this gradual rise in fertility will continue, which may be plausible if the official Russian statistics on fertility since 2000 are accurate.

Despite the assumed increase in fertility, though, Russia’s population is projected to decline by 14 per cent, from 146 million in 2020 to 126 million, by the end of the century. This reflects Russia’s older population as well as an assumed fall in net migration to that country.

Net migration to Russia was around 0.32 per cent per year in the period 2005–10 but is estimated to have fallen to 0.13 per cent per year in 2015–20. The UN expects that figure to fall further, to between 0.06 and 0.08 per cent per year, for the rest of the century. That would be consistent with an ongoing weak Russian economy.

Japan’s population is projected to fall from 126 million in 2020 to an astonishing seventy-five million by the end of the century. That represents a 40 per cent reduction in population and relies on the fertility rate rising — yes, rising — from 1.37 babies per woman in 2015–20 to a highly improbable 1.67 babies per woman by the end of the century. Extraordinarily, Japan’s population could decline by much more than 40 per cent by 2100 if its fertility rate remains around current levels, mainly because of its already very aged population.

The UN projections also assume that the increase in net migration to Japan in recent years, rising from a net negative rate in the period 1995–2000 to 0.06 per cent per year in 2015–20, will continue for the rest of the century. Given recent immigration policy changes in Japan, that would seem more plausible than the assumed increase in fertility.

Germany’s population is projected to decline from eighty-four million in 2020 to seventy-five million in 2100, a reduction of around 11 per cent. This relies on fertility rising from 1.59 babies per woman to 1.74 — otherwise the decline would be even more significant.

Germany’s net migration rate is projected to fall from a relatively high 0.66 per cent per year in the period 2015–20 to around 0.20 per cent per year for the rest of the century.

The major economic powers are no doubt concerned about low fertility accelerating the ageing of their populations, with the economic and budgetary consequences that entails.

Globally, 703 million people were aged sixty-five or over in 2019. The UN projects this to rise to 1.55 billion by 2050. The percentage of people in that age group has grown from 6 per cent worldwide in 1990 to 9 per cent in 2019, and is projected to increase to 16 per cent in 2050. These percentages are obviously much higher for developed nations than developing nations, which have higher fertility rates and lower life expectancy.

The number of people aged eighty and over is growing even faster, with the UN projecting this cohort to triple in size to 426 million by 2050.

Even with an assumed (and highly unlikely) increase in fertility rates, the portion of the population aged sixty-five-plus and eighty-plus is projected to rise very significantly in the world’s major economic and/or military powers.

Against the background of rapidly ageing populations, it seems likely that the major powers have encouraged the UN to assume rising fertility rates among their populations for the rest of the century. The question is whether these rates can be achieved, especially given that economic downturns push down fertility rates (and also push down net migration) for sustained periods. The major powers will be acutely conscious of the potential for a coronavirus recession to further drive down fertility rates and thereby accelerate population ageing.

The UN’s next revision of world population prospects, due in 2021, is likely to take account of the impact of the pandemic. Only a very small acceleration of the decline in global fertility rates is needed for the trend in the UN’s recent figures to record negative growth in the latter years of this century rather than the currently projected positive growth. If global fertility rates were to decline at the same rate as the past twenty-nine years, the global population would be sharply in decline well before the end of this century.

There’s one other big population question. If the major powers are unable to increase fertility rates as assumed, will they turn to immigration to slow their rate of ageing?

In 2019, the UN notes:

37 per cent of the 111 responding governments reported having policies to raise levels of immigration through regular channels, while 26 per cent reported policies to maintain current levels. Only 3 per cent had policies to lower their current immigration levels, while 34 per cent had either no policy or no data on such measures… Sixty-eight per cent of the 111 responding governments viewed irregular migration to their country as a major concern; another 25 per cent viewed it as a minor concern; nearly 5 per cent had no information; while nearly 3 per cent did not consider irregular migration to be a matter of concern.

The UN also notes that some 34 per cent of the nations that provided it with information said they have immigration policies to help tackle population ageing. Forty-eight per cent of European and North American nations reported having such policies, but no East or Southeast Asian nations, despite their more rapidly ageing populations.

While the Chinese government, like the Japanese, Russian and German governments, will be reluctant to talk openly about an active immigration policy out of fear of a xenophobic backlash, China won’t sit back and allow its population to age and decline as projected. Indications already suggest it will try to attract back the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its diaspora.

If it’s successful in doing so, what would be the consequences for nations like Australia, where that diaspora currently lives? •

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Successive governments have introduced a range of deterrence measures, some at Australia’s borders and some much further away. Among them are the often-bizarre information campaigns launched in countries asylum seekers are fleeing from, including Iran and Sri Lanka, and in Indonesia and other transit countries. Some campaigns have targeted the fishermen who transport asylum seekers across the ocean, but most have sought to discourage asylum seekers from leaving their home country in the first place. In one recently revealed case, the Australian government distributed fake horoscopes to deter Sri Lankan asylum seekers. According to the entry for Cancer:

Family problems will occur. Luck is not in the cards for you. Do not try to travel illegally to Australia by boat, as you will be stopped and returned. You will lose everything your family owes to debt, and face family problems.

Regardless of whether these campaigns are effective, which is questionable, the number of boats arriving in Australia has decreased dramatically. In 2013, more than 300 vessels transported at least 20,000 people to Australia; a year later, the official number was just one boat with 160 passengers, and there have been no further arrivals since then.

Australian politicians have frequently recommended their formula to other countries, especially the Mediterranean states of the European Union, where thousands of asylum seekers and migrants have arrived by sea. By 2017, according to then immigration minister Peter Dutton, at least six European countries were asking Australia for advice in managing their so-called refugee crisis.

What lies behind this apparent success in stopping the boats? And could it really be replicated by other countries?

Australia’s approach rests on three pillars, all of which are supported by the country’s two main political parties. The first is the mandatory detention of certain asylum seekers under 1992 amendments to the Migration Reform Act. Even though immigration detention is expensive and undoubtedly harms detainees, any person arriving in Australia without a valid visa must be detained by law. Australia’s first detention centres were established in remote corners of the country, often in the outback, in order to evade public scrutiny, but from 2009 the government also made use of detention facilities on Christmas Island. Some 1550 kilometres from Australia’s remote northwest coast, that centre is even further from the scrutiny of independent non-government agencies.

The second pillar is Australia’s system of “offshore processing.” Since 2013, asylum seekers arriving by boat have been prevented from submitting their asylum applications to Australian authorities, and must have their claims processed in Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Under memorandums of understanding with those countries, Australia takes no responsibility for finding a long-term home for asylum seekers even if they are found to be in need of protection. Instead, they must rely on resettlement offers from other countries or on integration into Papua New Guinean society.

Some 4177 people have been sent to Nauru or Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) since 13 August 2012 to be confined there in cruel and degrading conditions. In April 2016, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that the detention of refugees and asylum seekers on Manus Island was illegal. Instead of complying with this ruling, the Australian government resorted to coercive measures, eventually withdrawing all support services for the detention centre in October 2017 in an attempt to force the inhabitants to move to a planned new accommodation site nearer to Lorengau, the island’s main town. Contractors, under instructions from the Australian government, cut power, water, food and medical supplies to the original detention centre, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves by digging wells and making journeys to search for food at night. Those with urgent medical needs, including one person with a serious heart condition, had no access to healthcare services. After years of confinement and exposure to widespread violence, most of the remaining people suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Since February 2014, thirteen people are known to have died in offshore detention facilities or as a result of offshore processing more broadly, including seven known or suspected suicides. Australia refuses to accept responsibility for any of these deaths. Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati was killed in a riot on Manus Island in February 2014 and Hamid Khazaei died of sepsis in September 2014 after he contracted a leg infection in the Manus Island detention centre, for which he did not receive the required medical treatment. Many thousands of other incidents of violence and self-harm have never been reported in the media because of the secrecy that surrounds offshore processing arrangements.

As of late September 2019, 562 people remained in Nauru and in Papua New Guinea. Those found not to be genuine refugees had been repatriated, and 632 had departed for the United States under a refugee resettlement agreement negotiated with Barack Obama and implemented under his successor as president, Donald Trump.

Although conditions in those camps in Nauru and Papua New Guinea are known to be appalling, the evidence suggests they are not the main reason for the decrease in the number of new asylum seekers arriving by boat. The most effective deterrent is the third pillar of Australia’s deterrence model — turnbacks of boats. During the 2013 federal election, the Coalition parties campaigned on their leader Tony Abbott’s “stop the boats” policy, which involved bringing several government agencies under the direct control of the Australian military. After winning the election in September 2013, Abbott initiated the military-led Operation Sovereign Borders, which intercepted at least thirty-six boats with 852 passengers and turned them back to Indonesia, Sri Lanka or Vietnam. Precise statistics are hard to obtain as the Australian government has resisted releasing information about “on-water” operations. On 6 August 2015, immigration minister Peter Dutton announced that twelve months had passed since the last successful people smuggling operation.

Many other asylum seeker journeys may have been deterred at the point of their departure in the countries of origin or of transit. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, since 2013 at least 2525 people have been stopped from boarding boats to Australia as a result of cooperation between Australian authorities and their counterparts in Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and other neighbouring countries, which disrupted seventy-eight people smuggling operations.

UN agencies have criticised turnback and disruption operations on several occasions on the grounds that they may violate fundamental human rights bestowed under refugee and human rights law, as well as the law of the sea. One of the most embarrassing episodes came in June 2015 when media reports revealed that Australian officers had paid six Indonesian fishermen approximately US$30,000 to take asylum seekers back to Indonesia, thus themselves engaging in people smuggling by encouraging clandestine border crossing.

Estimating exactly how much Australian governments have spent on deterrence is no simple task, with many different government agencies having been involved over many years. What is clear, however, is that the hardline policies have been extremely costly. Figures provided to Senate estimates in early 2018 revealed that, in 2016–17 alone, the Australian government spent $4.06 billion, including $1.57 billion for onshore compliance and detention, $1.08 billion for the “offshore management” of “irregular maritime arrivals” and $1.06 billion on border enforcement. To detain a single person in offshore processing facilities in Nauru or Papua New Guinea was costing the Australian government $573,000 a year.

Australia also faces less tangible costs, including the negative impact of the deterrence policy on its relations with its neighbours and a decline in reputation globally. Pushing back boats to Indonesia without the consent of the Indonesian government not only damaged Australia’s relationship with Jakarta but also cemented Australia’s reputation as a regional bully. Paying Cambodia $30 million to accept seven of the refugees Australia refused to resettle in its own territory established Australia’s image as a neocolonial overlord diverting its responsibilities to a poor country with a weak justice system and inadequate human rights protection.

Australia’s reputation has suffered beyond the region, too. No other country has used its connections with small developing nations — in this case, Nauru and Cambodia — to offload its asylum seeker burden. On several occasions the United Nations has criticised Australia for its cruel and inhumane offshore detention practices and for the turnbacks that have put the lives of the passengers at risk. But the criticism has fallen on deaf ears in Canberra; in fact prime minister Tony Abbott responded in 2015 by saying that Australians were “sick of being lectured to by the United Nations.”

Besides the damage done to Australia’s international relations, the lack of transparency in the implementation of the hardline policies of successive governments comes at a significant cost to Australian democracy. Designed as military operations and executed beyond the borders of its own territory, Australia’s deterrence policies are shrouded in secrecy, shielding the government from any meaningful accountability. The number of intercepted boats, the limitations of fast-track assessments of asylum claims at sea, and the conditions in the detention centres remain largely concealed from the public.

More alarming, however, are the restraints on whistleblowers introduced in 2015 under the controversial Australian Border Force Act, which have prevented people from speaking out against injustices done to the asylum seekers, for fear of imprisonment or of losing their jobs. It wasn’t until October 2016 that the government amended the legislation to exempt doctors, nurses, psychologists and other health professionals from prison terms of up to two years if they spoke out about the conditions in immigration detention.

Much of the human cost of Australia’s deterrence model is carried by the asylum seekers immobilised in detention centres or caught in transit countries that haven’t ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and so offer no proper protection. With little or no assistance and no right to earn their living in those countries, asylum seekers and refugees who have been intercepted and returned to Indonesia linger in desperate conditions. Those barred from resettling in Australia, no matter how genuine their refugee claims, face homelessness and destitution in circumstances that give rise to self-harm and depression. They are left with no resolution to their recognised claim for protection.

Many researchers have pointed out that measures to counter people smuggling rarely succeed; instead, they divert the cross-border movements of asylum seekers and migrants, often making their journeys longer and riskier. From this point of view it is not surprising that the number of asylum seekers in Australia has actually increased recently. Instead of arriving by boat, however, asylum seekers are arriving by plane. Figures released by shadow immigration minister Kristina Keneally show that the number of people landing at Australian airports and applying for asylum rocketed to nearly 28,000 in 2017–18 — up from 18,290 in 2016–17 and 9554 in 2015–16.

While the asylum seekers who came to Australia by boat were usually from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia and Vietnam, most of the newcomers hail from China and Malaysia. Unlike earlier asylum seekers, they are able to apply for tourist or student visas and board flights to Australia. They also face much higher rejection rates than pre-2013 asylum seekers whose claims were processed in Australia.

Given the slow processing of asylum applications, newcomers run the risk of exploitation, slavery and sexual servitude. Although only one in six applicants are successful in their claims for asylum, many remain in Australia on bridging visas while they exhaust the appeals process, which can take years. During those years they work on farms, in restaurants and in the sex industry, often underpaid and overworked. And, of course, their vulnerability is even greater during the current pandemic.

The new people smugglers are no longer Indonesian fishermen who ferry asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia, but the middlemen who lure farmers and labourers from Malaysia and China, promise them work and apply for asylum on their behalf, thus exploiting Australia’s self-inflicted visa-processing backlog.

Having demonised the most visible yet least influential participants in people smuggling operations, Australian policymakers have overlooked both the inherent flexibility of the smuggling networks and the enormous costs of human suffering. The inhumane treatment of asylum seekers under Australia’s deterrence model has sent out a message, but clearly to the wrong people. •

The post Sending a message to the wrong people appeared first on Inside Story.

Having come to Melbourne in 2008 on five-year student visas, the pair have been waiting for a decision on their permanent residence visas since 2 January last year. They have lived and worked in Adelaide for the requisite period, and meet the other requirements of the regional migration visa for which they applied. They have paid their taxes and become valuable members of the Adelaide community.

“Sujith is just the loveliest man — a pleasure to work with,” says Friebe. “His dedication to his tasks and his fellow workers is just what any high-performing business needs.”

The visa Sujith is seeking is straightforward and could be processed very quickly, yet the Department of Home Affairs says the waiting time is between twenty-four and twenty-eight months, a bizarre situation given that prime minister Scott Morrison was encouraging migration to places like Adelaide as part of his “congestion busting” population plan in March last year. Interest in these visas was intense, he said, and applicants would be given high priority.

Jimmy, another of Friebe’s staff, is also without work since the restaurant closed. He is on a provisional visa, which means he is ineligible for JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments. After seven years in Australia, initially on a student visa in Melbourne and then on a temporary graduate visa in Adelaide, Jimmy was nominated by the SA government in August last year for a provisional regional visa, pending an application for permanent migration. He was much encouraged by the prime minister’s comments last year.

Just a couple of months ago, Sujith and Jimmy were two of the twenty-five employees of a successful, well-established business. Once the restaurant was forced to close, the JobKeeper payment was a godsend for ten of those employees. Most of the others, who are casual employees, will rely on the JobSeeker payment.

But Jimmy and Sujith are eligible for neither. And the prime minister’s response? “Go home,” he said earlier this month, which scarcely seems fair given that Sujith and his family and Jimmy have tried to do all the federal and state governments have asked of them.

So far, Sujith and Jimmy have been supported by the generosity of Friebe and others, but with the business generating no revenue that cannot continue much longer. Friebe is looking at ways that he and the two men’s fellow workers can continue to help them out.

The treasurer has said businesses like Friebe’s can use the subsidies the government is offering to help temporary entrants such as Sujith and Jimmy.

“The treasurer really doesn’t appear to understand what is involved in putting a business into hibernation,” says Friebe. “The PAYG subsidy will quickly be swallowed up by fixed costs such as creditors, electricity, insurance, phones, security/monitoring. We then need to have the cash to get up and running again on the other side of the crisis.”

He’s angered that the treasurer is suggesting otherwise. “Whilst I appreciate the government are managing a lot in a short period of time to flatten the curve of this pandemic, it shows a complete lack of practical and genuine understanding of the position forced onto millions. Hardworking employees like Jimmy and Sujith will be essential when my restaurant reopens.”

Sujith, Priyanga and Jimmy are just three of more than a million temporary entrants facing destitution if they cannot find a job or get home. Does the government really want to see queues at charities as long as the queues at Centrelink? •

Am earlier version of this article appeared in Pearls and Irritations.

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The allowance will dramatically accelerate the sacking of temporary entrants, of which there are many: around 500,000 overseas students, 140,000 working holiday-makers, 120,000 skilled temporary entrants, 90,000 temporary graduates, more than 200,000 bridging visa holders (most of whom are either partner visa applicants or asylum seekers), and more than 16,000 temporary protection visa holders. Add to that around 60,000 overstayers and the unknown number of the 600,000 people who were in Australia on visitor visas in December 2019 and haven’t gone home.

Remember that very few of these people have any social support to fall back on, even though they have been paying the full rate of income tax. Many will not be able to find a flight home or won’t have the money to pay for one. Some are in genuine fear of persecution if they return home. Unless the government acts soon, it will have created a humanitarian disaster within Australia.

Assuming the government doesn’t wish to extend the JobKeeper allowance to temporary entrants, what should it do?

First, the immigration minister should announce that all temporary entrants (including short-term visitors) whose visas will expire before 30 June 2020 will automatically be given a new visa of the type they currently hold, valid until 31 August 2020.

That date assumes we will have passed the peak of the crisis by then and people will more readily be able to get home. It would significantly reduce the number of temporary entrants making enquiries at departmental offices, thus helping to reduce the spread of the virus.

Second, the health minister should create a new Medicare item enabling all temporary entrants and overstayers to attend a doctor (by telehealth if appropriate) at no cost if they have flu symptoms or may have been in contact with someone who has recently returned from overseas. Where needed, the item should also cover the costs of a coronavirus test and hospital treatment. Overstayers would be given an assurance that they will not be reported to immigration authorities if they contact a doctor.

Once again, the objective would be to reduce the spread of the virus.

Third, the social security minister should extend special benefits to all temporary entrants with work rights (including NZ citizens and visitors required to self-isolate) until 31 July 2020, given that many will lose their jobs and find it difficult to get home.

Access to special benefits requires applicants to establish financial hardship, which will limit take-up. Applications should be taken online and/or over the telephone to minimise risks of further queues at Centrelink offices. Centrelink staff should be able to undertake identity checks in conjunction with the Department of Home Affairs.

Fourth, the social security minister should issue regulations providing a once-off payment equal to the cost of a flight home for temporary entrants (including visitors, overstayers and unsuccessful asylum seekers) who don’t have the necessary funds. The objective would be to prevent these people from becoming destitute. Arrangements should be negotiated with relevant foreign governments to compensate the Australian government for these payments.

Fifth, the treasurer should extend the JobKeeper allowance to any temporary entrant currently working in critical occupations such as health and aged care. At the same time, the immigration minister should introduce a regulation enabling any temporary entrants working in these occupations to secure a further twelve months on a visa of the type they currently hold, with applications to be made online or by telephone free of any application fee.

This would ensure Australia has the staff it needs in these key occupations. Recognising the role they will play in supporting Australians through the crisis, these temporary entrants should be provided with a clear pathway to permanent residence at the end of the twelve months.

Sixth, the immigration minister should increase places available for partners of Australian citizens and permanent residents in the 2019–20 and 2020–21 migration program. This should be possible without increasing overall numbers given there is likely to be a large shortfall because of the coronavirus. Australian citizens and permanent residents should not have to live separated from their partners at this difficult time.

Finally, noting that there will be a shortfall in numbers migrating to Australia under the Offshore Humanitarian Program in 2019–20 and probably in 2020–21, the immigration minister should fast-track permanent protection visas for the 16,000-plus long-term temporary protection visa holders in Australia. It is well beyond time that the government recognised that there is no chance these people will ever be able to go home, and thus no point keeping them on temporary protection visas.

The government needs to move quickly on all these fronts to avoid a humanitarian disaster. •

First published in Pearls and Irritations.

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The reality is quite different. The vast majority of Australia Covid-19 cases acquired overseas had a recent history of travel to Europe or the Americas, or arrived on cruise ships such as the Ruby Princess. Hardly any (in fact none, as far as I can determine) were new migrants to Australia.

It could scarcely be otherwise. Australia (or at least some Australians) welcomed 162,000 migrants in 2019. The same year saw forty-two million passenger arrivals. On average, a Boeing 787 landing in Australia with a full load of 300 passengers contains just one permanent migrant.

This is the contradiction within the thinking of immigration restrictionists. While many like to cast themselves as “left behind” “stayers” — in contrast to “rootless cosmopolitans” — lots of them enjoy international travel. This was strikingly illustrated by the Brexiteers’ attachment to the traditional blue-covered British passports — hardly something that would matter to anyone content to stay in their home country.

More generally, the push to reduce international migration has been matched by all-out efforts to promote tourism. Scott Morrison embodies these contradictions. As managing director of Tourism Australia he famously asked, “Where they bloody hell are you?”, inviting the entire world to enjoy our beaches and charming cities; as prime minister, he cut the immigration intake by 30,000 (about one day’s worth of passenger arrivals) declaring “enough, enough, enough… The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full.” Tourists, of course — who are by definition engaged in travel — use our roads and public transports at least as much as permanent migrants.

It’s not only migration that ethnonationalists have in their sights, but also any kind of international cooperation (unless it involves waging war). Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian and admirer of Hungary, Poland and other anti-democratic regimes, says that “coronavirus is the hunter-killer enemy of globalisation”:

The centre of every citizen’s sense of accountability for this virus is their national government. No one asks: what is the Indian Ocean Regional Association for Co-operation doing about this? They ask: what is Canberra doing?… When the Morrison government first banned direct travel to Australia from China, Beijing was furious. Then a lot of countries did the same.

That was on 18 March. The next day, the sidelining of “Canberra” began, with the premier of Tasmania announcing that the state would effectively be closed to interstate travellers. South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland quickly followed suit, with Queensland introducing an internal border to protect vulnerable Indigenous communities in the Cape York Peninsula.

As the federal government floundered, state governments increasingly disregarded its edicts, closing schools and accelerating the process of locking down the economy. The same was true in the United States, where state governors have responded to federal inaction with increasingly drastic measures of their own.

The absurd, but inescapable, implication of Sheridan’s argument is that we should recognise state difference by unwinding not only globalisation but Federation and breaking Australia up into six to eight separate countries. But the reality is that viruses pay no attention to states, nations and confederations. The appropriate restrictions on travel, and other preventive polices, will be determined by physical realities, whether or not they respect national boundaries.

The other crucial factor is what public policy analysts described as “state capacity.” This is the ability of a government (supranational, national, state or provincial) to formulate a coherent response to a problem, such as a pandemic, and the effectiveness of the tools at its disposal. The coronavirus crisis has revealed huge gaps in capacity at the federal level in Australia. The much touted Border Force, for example, has proved incapable of implementing basic health checks at our borders. (The blame-shifting between Border Force and the NSW health department over the Ruby Princess fiasco is a prime illustration of weak state capacity.) Similar breakdowns are even more evident in the United States.

Inevitably, state-level governments have stepped into the breach, with varying levels of effectiveness. Readers can make their own judgements as to how they have performed. Strikingly, though, a crisis seemingly tailor-made to enhance the power and prestige of national governments has, if anything, done the opposite, even as the need for action by all levels of government has become so much more urgent. •

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Last week the Federal Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns, issued its judgement on what exactly happened when the Strauszes left Hungary. The Australian court’s unlikely interest in events seven decades ago and 16,000 kilometres away was focused on what five-year-old Erica took with her across the border.

We know that two decades later she would give birth to a son, Joshua, in Melbourne. The court’s concern was whether she brought her birth citizenship, first to Austria, then to Australia, and finally into labour. If she was a dual Australian–Hungarian citizen on 17 July 1971, then so is Josh Frydenberg right now. That would leave the federal treasurer ineligible to sit in Australia’s parliament and cabinet during the greatest crisis in most Australians’ lifetimes.

The case of Staindl v Frydenberg is a coda to a minor crisis from simpler days. In the eight months from October 2017 to May 2018, fifteen members of the federal parliament were unseated — six of them permanently — because they were considered dual citizens under section 44 of Australia’s constitution.

At the debacle’s centre was the High Court’s October 2017 ruling that five parliamentarians, including the deputy prime minister, were never elected at all, simply because they were dual citizens. Although politicians had fallen foul of that ban before, this was the first time it was applied to Australians with no adult connection to a foreign country, including two who had no childhood connection either. Fiona Nash, for instance, was disqualified for her British nationality despite being long estranged from her Scottish father and never having been to Britain.

Alas, the national court made its ruling more in anger than sorrow. The seven justices declared that:

while it may be said that it is harsh to apply section 44(i) to disqualify a candidate born in Australia who has never had occasion to consider himself or herself as other than an Australian citizen and exclusively an Australian citizen, nomination for election is manifestly an occasion for serious reflection on this question… It is necessary to bear in mind that the reference by a house of Parliament of a question of disqualification can arise only where the facts which establish the disqualification have been brought forward in Parliament. In the nature of things, those facts must always have been knowable.

These are perhaps the least wise words the seven have ever written.

Frydenberg’s fate in the Court of Disputed Returns was determined by three facts: what Hungarian officials did before the Strauszes crossed the border; what documents the family carried while they crossed; and the fine details of Hungary’s citizenship law at the time. Last week’s decision revealed that neither Frydenberg nor any other Australian ever knew — or even can know — any of these things. The relevant records of Hungary’s secret police were lost in 1956 during the nation’s failed uprising against the Soviets. The Strauszes were either too young — the daughters were eight, five and one — or too old — the adults would have been 108 and 112 today — to testify as to what documents they carried. Most remarkably, Australia’s attorney-general bluntly told the Court of Disputed Returns that “the relevant content of Hungarian law in 1949 is unknowable.”

After they crossed the Iron Curtain, the Strausz family spent two weeks in Vienna, but ended up living at 11 Rue de Deux Gares in Paris’s tenth arrondissement. They were literally and metaphorically between stations. While they already held a landing permit that would allow them to stay in Australia for two years, they needed a Titre d’Identité et de Voyage that allowed them to travel internationally without a passport. Nearly a year passed before they travelled to Genoa to board the SS Surriento, bound for Fremantle and Sydney. They reached their new home on the second-last day of 1950.

Did they bring anything from their old home? The Strauszes described themselves as stateless, but a Sydney boarding officer wrote “Hungarian” as their “nationality” in a letter to immigration officials. His interest in the family’s homeland probably wasn’t idle. Australia in 1950 was awash with fears of communist infiltration via immigrants, seemingly even ones with every reason to flee Europe.

Similar irrational fears underlie section 44 of the constitution. The High Court has repeatedly identified the purpose of the ban on electing dual citizens as being “to ensure that members of the Parliament do not have split allegiance” with a foreign country.

It was the other thing the boarding officer noted in his letter — that the family were “in possession of Valid Passport” — that was especially dangerous for Josh Frydenberg. If Erica Strausz held a valid Hungarian passport in 1950, then everyone agreed that her son was ineligible to be elected in 2019. The law of Hungary, like that of so many overseas countries, bestows citizenship by descent, even to children whose parents had left their home country, took up another country’s citizenship and married a non-citizen. It is this combination of foreign countries’ generosity in bestowing citizenship and Australian constitutional law’s suspicion of the recipients of such gifts that caused last term’s debacle.

Before the election, I predicted that a perfect storm — widespread dual citizenship in Australia, the High Court’s strict ruling, the murkiness of the constitutional text and new constraints on late electoral cases — would lead to a rush of challenges immediately after Labor’s expected tight victory. But the rush (like the Labor win) never came. Instead, Frydenberg will very likely be the lone challenged member of the current parliament. His challenger, climate activist Michael Staindl, was motivated not by Frydenberg’s foreign allegiances, but rather by his political ones, and specifically his party’s climate policy.

Staindl’s challenge could proceed, despite the unknowability of what transpired seventy years ago, because any Australian politician can be unseated by uncertain facts. All that Staindl had to prove was that it was more likely than not that Erica Strausz was still a citizen of Hungary when Frydenberg was born. Because the Court of Disputed Returns isn’t bound by the rules of evidence, Staindl could rely on the border officer’s letter. But the letter wasn’t his main argument.

Instead, he argued that Erica Strausz’s continuing Hungarian citizenship was much more likely than not, because the Strauszes had no reason to renounce their citizenship and every reason not to. Staindl found a Hungarian lawyer who explained that renouncing citizenship in 1949 would have required permission from (or denunciation by) the secret police. Given that an ordinary passport (albeit probably obtained unlawfully) was needed to cross the border, telling the Hungarian police that they wanted out would be the last thing the Strauszes would have done. Nor, he added, was there any reason for them to contact the Hungarian authorities for favours after they left (oblivious as the Strauszes, like nearly everyone else, were about section 44 of their new homeland’s constitution).

Staindl’s case crawled until late last year, when the High Court of Australia sent it to the next court down in the hierarchy, over the objections of the treasurer and the attorney-general. In the Federal Court, Frydenberg produced a report from an Australian historian who had studied postwar immigration. She wrote that Australian border officials in the 1950s were more interested in new arrivals’ ethnicity than their citizenship and that “Valid Passport” was simply their shorthand for any legal travelling document, including a Titre d’Identité et de Voyage. Frydenberg’s Hungarian lawyers produced a book by Péter Bencsik, a historian specialising in mid-century central European travel documents, who wrote that the communist secret police in the late 1940s could and did issue “one-way” passports to emigrants who wanted to quit Hungary for good.

In short, the sole surviving records proved nothing either way. Staindl conceded that the Strauszes probably left Hungary with the secret police’s permission on one-way passports. But that didn’t resolve the real question: whether or not they left their citizenship behind. Instead, Frydenberg’s fate was resolved by the Federal Court contemplating what actually counts as “law” in a totalitarian state.

“I just want to say something about Josh Frydenberg”, said then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a week after the High Court’s 2017 decision. “Josh Frydenberg’s mother Erica Strauss was born in 1943 in the Budapest ghetto. That’s where the fascists had pushed all of the Jews in together as a prelude to sending them to the gas chamber. She wasn’t a Hungarian citizen when she was born and neither were her parents. You know why? The Hungarian fascist government, allied with Hitler, stripped the Jews of all of their rights. The right to citizenship and the right to life.”

But the Federal Court did not so hold. Indeed, no one asked them to.

The court’s judgement charts the grim facts of Jewish life and death in Hungary after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire. First came the pogroms of the White Terror that installed an ex-admiral in power. Then, as Hungary allied with the Germans and Japanese in the second world war, came three anti-Jewish laws, imposing quotas on Jewish professionals, barring Jewish public service and criminalising sex or marriage with non-Jews. Finally, Nazi occupation brought Hitler’s Final Solution to Hungary, sending nearly half a million to Auschwitz. The Jewish population of Budapest, once almost a million, had shrunk to just 100,000 by the time the Hungarian government surrendered to the Soviets.

But Hungary had no equivalent of Hitler’s Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their citizenship. And, unlike many countries (including Australia), Hungary’s various citizenship laws didn’t automatically convert into aliens people who transgressed in specified ways (by joining the enemy, for example) or took up another country’s citizenship. Rather, the communists’ laws gave Hungary exclusive control over each citizen’s citizenship. If you wanted to stop being Hungarian, you needed to ask for and get permission from the police. The government could “divest” you of your citizenship involuntarily, but only if it published that decision (and it didn’t in relation to any of the Strauszes.)

These grim facts of life in Hungary in the 1940s also cast a shadow over Frydenberg’s eligibility to be elected in Australia in the 2010s. If the Strauszes couldn’t rid themselves of their birth citizenships without Hungary’s permission, then nor could Frydenberg.

What saved the treasurer’s job was communism. Frydenberg’s Hungarian lawyers pointed to Hungary’s communist constitution, which came into force just weeks before the Strauszes departed. Cribbing heavily from Stalin’s 1936 Soviet constitution, it reinvented Hungary as a nation of “working people,” whose fundamental duties were to protect the property of the people, increase Hungary’s economic power, raise workers’ standard of living and so forth. By leaving Hungary, the lawyers posited, the Strauszes shifted from being working people to what the constitution called “enemies of the working people,” who were expressly denied the right to vote.

The very nature of the law under Communism provided Frydenberg with his best argument. Bencsik told the Federal Court that socialist legal theory has always recognised that the bureaucracy doesn’t just apply the law, it can also make the law through its own actions. This was especially so in Hungary in the 1940s and 50s, when “the published laws concerning passports and emigration, including the First and Second Citizenship Laws, were not applied consistently if at all.” The real law was what Benscik termed “pseudo law,” the practices of the secret police, Hungary’s real rulers. The “one-way” passport likely given to the Strauszes was a pseudo law, Benscik explained, legally barring them from returning to their homeland without permission.

Faced with this (literally) left-field argument, Staindl blinked again. He conceded that the Strauszes’ lack of any right of return to Hungary meant that all of the family, once they became Australian citizens and reached adulthood, were eligible to be elected to the Australian parliament. That included Erica, when she turned 18 in 1961 and when she gave birth to Josh Frydenberg in 1971. But Staindl argued that everything changed just as Frydenberg himself was turning eighteen.

That was the year, 1989, when communist governments fell across the Soviet bloc and the Iron Curtain vanished. That change also washed away the pillars of socialist law, including pseudo laws like the bar on re-entry by Hungarian emigrants. At that point, Staindl argued, the empty “shell” of Hungarian citizenship carried over the border by Erica and passed on to her son became full again, which was enough to make him a dual citizen for Australian constitutional purposes from then on.

Staindl’s argument didn’t fly. The Federal Court deemed it “imaginative” and (maybe) “appropriate in some legal contexts.” But not here. “These are not matters,” the court declared, “to be addressed using fine distinctions, metaphors or other constructs having little, or no, regard to the facts established on the evidence before us.” Staindl’s problem was that he never had the opportunity to put his “shell” theory to any expert in Hungarian law.

The Federal Court didn’t relish the prospect of having to watch sleepy witnesses testifying from Budapest via Skype, translated back and forward between Hungarian and English, and debating the niceties of socialist legal theory. Obliged by the electoral act to “be guided by the substantial merits and good conscience of each case without regard to legal forms or technicalities,” the three judges declared that written reports, including a joint one by the various Hungarian lawyers hammered together on their own in Budapest, would suffice. By the time pseudo law emerged as the most likely answer, it was too late to explore Staindl’s new theory or to try to find a footing for it in the (sometimes cryptic) reports.

In short, the court had sufficient evidence that socialist pseudo law had removed Erica Strausz’s Hungarian citizenship:

The niceties of proof of the production or issue of documents by the political police in a totalitarian state, possibly lost or destroyed in revolution (in 1956 in Hungary) or in travel (by the Strausz family in Hungary, or on the way to Vienna, to Paris, to Genoa, to Fremantle, and eventually to Sydney) can be put aside when one recognises the realities of 1949.

and no evidence that the end of that system had restored it.

“I see my journey to this place in the continuum of my family’s story,” Josh Frydenberg told parliament in his maiden speech in October 2010. He described how his father’s parents arrived from Poland “while Europe was plunging into darkness” and how his mother’s family’s “experience was different.” “Interned in the Budapest ghetto by the Hungarian fascists,” he explained, “they survived and eventually made their way through displaced persons camps to Australia.” The Strauszes ended up a “family of five crammed into a one-bedroom Bondi apartment.”

The welcome, opportunities and freedom they enjoyed, said the future treasurer, “is for me the essence of what makes Australia great.” While Samuel “punch[ed] holes in belts to eke out a living,” his middle daughter grew up to be a psychologist and marry a surgeon, and the couple eventually “settled in Kew, right in the heart of the Kooyong electorate. Never would they have dared dream that decades later, one of their own family members would represent Kooyong in the federal parliament. But in Australia anything is possible. We are only limited by our imagination.”

The future treasurer’s imagination surely never hinted that his family’s story would one day threaten to overturn the choices of Kooyong’s voters.

Frydenberg’s speech proudly noted the other luminaries who had been elected by Kooyong’s voters, including a future chief justice (John Latham, who famously dissented when the High Court struck down the law banning the Communist Party in 1951, just months after the Strauszes arrived in Sydney) and a prime minister (Robert Menzies, who famously owed his government’s 1961 re-election to Communist Party preferences — which makes Frydenberg Kooyong’s second MP to have his place in Australia’s government inadvertently saved by communists).

“I am proud of my Australian story,” Frydenberg concluded. “Decades ago in the gathering darkness of Europe, my family could never have imagined this day. But because this country is truly a land of opportunity I have been given this chance.” But he could continue sitting only because a Hungarian historian born the same year as Frydenberg was able to reveal an otherwise unknowable part of the law of that dark period to the Federal Court.

Is that all that kept Australia from losing its treasurer in the midst of this crisis? I don’t think so. Times have changed since 2017, and the High Court itself has become more creative in reading the constitution in ways that include, rather than exclude, Australians within our polity. But there are limits to what a court can do.

The only real solution to Australia’s exclusion of its many dual citizens from its parliament is to change its constitution, something that will require the support of all of the nation’s leaders. “I want to see an Australia where the only relevant consideration is the content of a person’s character,” Frydenberg told parliament in in 2010, before the “stop the boats” election but also long before Hungary’s decision — on the same day the Federal Court dismissed Staindl’s petition — to close its border with Austria for the first time since the fall of communism. •

The post Game of shells appeared first on Inside Story.

The trailer for the ABC’s new drama series Stateless is a succession of emotional surges, crosscutting scenes of distress, exultation, hysterical altercation and exuberant celebration. From the outset, it has been sold as a series built on great emotional intensity — a familiar strategy of the national broadcaster, which seems convinced that high drama is a drawcard.

No doubt there is a case for intensity in a series based on the story of Cornelia Rau, the German-born Australian citizen wrongfully incarcerated in Baxter detention centre for four months in late 2004 and early 2005. Rau’s story, recounted in meticulous detail by Robert Manne in the Monthly later in 2005, is strange and compelling, and continues to resonate in the national consciousness as a symptom of the disturbing political culture that took hold in the immigration department during the Howard years.

Rau was in her early thirties, and had been involved in Kenja, a Sydney sect run by a couple who preached a doctrine called “Energy Conversion,” when she began to experience psychotic episodes. Over the next five years, she led a chaotic existence punctuated by enforced hospitalisation. In 2003, she began attempting to escape the country by claiming to be a German backpacker and seeking a European passport. Found wandering on a remote road in Cape York the following year, she was questioned by Queensland police and turned over to the department as an illegal immigrant.

Interwoven with her story in Stateless are the experiences of an Afghan refugee, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), who has lost all but one member of his family, and a newly appointed guard, Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney), who has taken on this well-paid work in order to keep his young family in a spacious home with a swimming pool. Yvonne Strahovski as Sofie Werner, the Rau figure, brings star power, along with Marta Dusseldorp as Werner’s sister, Asher Keddie as the director of the detention centre, and Cate Blanchett and Dominic West as the couple running the Kenja cult.

With such a strong cast, expectations run high. And these actors certainly help anchor the sprawling storylines by bringing vividness and presence. Yet there is little opportunity for them to give their characters psychological depth. Blanchett and West perfectly capture the behaviour of the cult leaders, but we get no sense of what might underlie it. It’s as if their scenes with Strahovski are a string of “moments” designed to show off the actors rather than explore the dangerous tensions arising as a vulnerable subject comes under the influence of a creepy mesmerist.

Sophie is being drawn into a psychodrama here, which is probably an accurate rendition of what happened. But psychodrama has a cheapening effect when it’s allowed to leak across to the wider story. As the camera lingers over faces in close-up, giving us protracted reaction shots during every tense exchange, the dramatic texture becomes relentlessly expressive and overly explicit.

Little room is left for irony or implication. When skilled actors try to create it — as Keddie does when her character attempts to hold to some kind of human rationality in the face of a departmental boss focused on “controlling the narrative” — they are undermined. The scripting and filming techniques have their own ways of exercising narrative control, and are designed to create the shortest route to the next showdown. As the conflicted Sandford, Courtney is likewise steered into scenes of angry confrontation and teary meltdown.

Perhaps my response to Stateless was exacerbated by having been subjected to repeated screenings of the trailer during promotion breaks in last month’s Four Corners special on the bushfires, one of the most powerful pieces of television I’ve seen. A protracted replay of a father and daughter, caught in an ember storm, trying to contain their panic as they battled to save their home and their lives, was intercut with clips of stagey hysteria and grief.

In real life, the most rational and controlled aspects of human behaviour often come to the fore in the midst of extreme experience. Emotional responses of terror, anguish or grief are not synchronous in the way some dramaturges like to pretend: they may occur a day, a week or even years later.

American essayist Leslie Jamison has written insightfully about dramatic empathy as “emotional theft.” While she resists censoriousness, she nevertheless finds “something troubling about a certain sort of fixation on pain.” Especially so, perhaps, when the pain is being experienced by people whose situation and experience are remote from our own. In the case of those held under cruel detention policies, can an invitation to empathy really be honest or meaningful?

As Ameer, Fayssal Bazzi carries an impossible burden of pathos. What do we know about this man other than that his life and his family have been destroyed? Bazzi works to give the character a more moderated register of behaviour and reaction. Called in for an interview that will decide his destiny, he behaves with impeccable courtesy and apparent composure, but under the table, one of his feet trembles. It’s the kind of subtle detail the series generally lacks, but it is spoiled by the camera zooming in for the inevitable close-up of the tremor.

Some of the supporting cast in the detention centre are former detainees. Collectively, they communicate something of the ambience as they experienced it. These places were not settings for personal dramas. Most of the time they were places of dismal monotony, filled with people thwarted for years on end in their quest for a longed-for change of destiny.

When the breakdowns came they were not in a form any camera would want to capture in close-up. On the testimony of psychiatrists eventually admitted to Baxter, some detainees were so deeply traumatised that they could no longer walk, and resorted to crawling to the toilet. Some refused to venture out into the daylight. Some had screaming fits. Self-harm was rife.

Manne’s summary of the psychiatric reports is grim reading. The truth is, few people would want to watch a dramatisation of what life in an immigration detention facility really was, and is, like. Rau herself was more than just volatile and unstable; at times she was in a state of severe psychosis. Strahovski’s performance shields us from the more confronting aspects of her condition, allowing us to “empathise” with a character who comes across as a free spirit caught in a trap.

“Mental illness should never be sentimentalised,” Manne says. “It is frightening and uncharming.” All the more so in the case of detainees stripped of hope and dignity. Although the story arcs for the main characters in this series don’t distort the harsher realities they faced, the overall rendition is governed by the conventions of sentimentality.

No doubt the intentions of those who created the series were ethical and responsible. Cate Blanchett, whose company Dirty Films was a production partner with Matchbox Pictures and Screen Australia, also had a hand in the script. Her stated concern with “the erosion of empathy” and determination not simply to preach to the converted has driven the project from the outset. But perhaps creating a dramatisation that is both widely engaging and true was always going to be impossible. •

The post Getting too close appeared first on Inside Story.

Monique found work helping build the big top for Cirque du Soleil’s Melbourne show, Kurios. She was promised casual work as an usher after the show opened, but almost as soon as the tents were up all its performances were suspended. She’s living in her campervan and has found other work for now, but like many temporary migrants — backpackers, international students, skilled workers — her situation is precarious.

The rules faced by temporary migrants might seem a secondary concern in the current crisis, if not for the fact that they make up a large group in the community with their own rights and responsibilities, and many of them are performing vital roles. Sending them home when their current visas expire would pose risks to public health and their own welfare, create shortages of workers in vital sectors, and breach Australia’s global responsibilities.

Most importantly, people who find themselves unlawfully resident in Australia could behave in ways that pose a threat to public health. Effective social distancing and self-isolation are heavily reliant on people choosing to follow quickly emerging social norms. Someone whose visas expires shortly will find it hard to balance public health and their own interests.

The number of temporary visa holders in the workforce poses a more visible challenge. The most recent Home Affairs data shows there were 480,000 student visa holders in Australia in December 2019, and another 90,000 temporary graduate visa holders — former students who have been granted a post-study work visa. Temporary skilled workers numbered 65,000, and their partners and children — so-called secondary visa holders who are not shown in the skilled worker statistics — would probably bring the total number in this category to 100,000 people. Then there were 140,000 working holiday-makers and an estimated 200,000 New Zealanders who are settled, long-term residents of Australia but don’t qualify for most government payments and services apart from Medicare.

This adds up to around a million temporary visa holders (not including tourists). Numbers have almost certainly declined since then, with more temporary visa holders leaving and fewer arriving as a result of the virus, but we are nevertheless talking about a significant share of the population and the workforce. What is more, many temporary visa holders fill essential roles in the Australian economy.

At last count, for example, 2225 registered nurses were in Australia on temporary skilled visas. Each month, on average, the visas of fifty of them will expire. Their departure would further deplete an already stretched health workforce.

Elsewhere in the healthcare workforce, according to a forthcoming paper by demographers Peter McDonald and Helen Moyle, temporary migrants account for more than 5 per cent of general practitioners and resident medical officers, and close to 10 per cent of the nursing support and personal care workforce. Again, if they were to leave because their visas expire or because they want to be with their families during the pandemic, our capacity to run hospitals, aged-care and disability services would be compromised.

A significant proportion of commercial and domestic cleaners, whose services are particularly important right now, are temporary visa holders. Australia’s agricultural industries depend heavily on the temporary migrant workers who make up at least a quarter of all crop farm workers and a fifth of all slaughterers, slicers and boners in the meat industry.

Given the ban on travel to Australia, none of these workers will be replaced by new arrivals if they leave. The government can help limit the labour market fallout by offering an immediate twelve-month extension to any temporary visa that is due to expire within the next year. Under the Migration Act, the minister has extensive powers, so an innovative, streamlined solution should be available. Hospitals and other healthcare institutions need to direct all their resources towards preventing and treating the virus; they don’t need to be weighed down by complicated visa-renewal paperwork.

It is reassuring that the federal government has already made steps in this direction, by lifting the forty-hour-per-fortnight work limit for foreign nursing students employed in healthcare and for international students keeping the shelves stocked in supermarkets. Agriculture minister David Littleproud has also signalled he will engage in “minor tweaking” of visa rules for backpackers and Pacific seasonal workers employed in horticulture.

The government also needs to turn its attention to the welfare of temporary visa holders, especially if they’re likely to lose their jobs in the hospitality and tourism sectors. About one-in-five chefs and one-in-four cooks hold some form of temporary visa, as do one-in-six waiters, hotel service managers, cafe workers, bar attendants and baristas.

Many of these people may choose to leave Australia if they lose their jobs, and some would be forced to leave because their visa is linked to their employment. To help reduce international travel during the crisis, we should encourage them to stay — and if they do, holding to the view that non-Australians shouldn’t be eligible for taxpayer assistance would be inhumane and short-sighted. Their lack of spending would add to the deepening economic crisis, they may forgo healthcare to save money and, if they end up homeless or living in overcrowded conditions, they will be less able to use social distancing to help slow the spread of the virus.

The government should also consider extending the visas of another cohort, parents of migrants. At any one time, significant numbers of them are living in Australia on tourist visas. They often come for several months in order to support their adult children at important moments, such as childbirth, marriage, chronic illness or separation. It would be harsh to enforce their visa restrictions in current conditions.

None of these rule changes is simply a matter of compassion; rather, they would involve Australia meeting its global obligations. We’ve just closed our borders to new arrivals because international travel increases the risk in this public health crisis. If we send home temporary migrants and long-term visitors because their visas expire or are cancelled, the probability of Covid-19 transmission will increase.

With excellent public health facilities and robust social institutions, Australia is well placed to manage Covid-19. Encouraging people on temporary visas to return to countries with less public health capacity would only increase the epidemic’s global reach. •

The post Of visas and viruses appeared first on Inside Story.

As I wrote last week, it seemed safe to take that statement at face value and expect Germany to accept between 1000 and 1500 of the children who have arrived in Greece with other refugees in recent weeks. With the participating countries including heavyweight France, I assumed that up to 2500 of the children currently in dangerously overcrowded camps on Lesvos and other islands would be evacuated. Germany’s share might be well below the 5000 demanded by the Greens in the resolution debated on 4 March in the Bundestag, and below the ten unaccompanied minors for every 500,000 EU residents suggested by Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jean Asselborn. But it would be a start.

My assumption was wrong. On 12 March, the EU home affairs commissioner, Swedish Social Democrat Ylva Johansson, announced in Athens that seven EU member states had agreed to take 1600 children between them. According to a report in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany will take up to 400, France at least 300, and the remainder will be divided among Portugal, Finland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Ireland and Bulgaria. At the same time, perhaps in an attempt to indicate how the overcrowding really ought to be tackled, the European Union offered €2000 each for up to 5000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands who voluntarily return home.

Given that there are well over 40,000 asylum seekers on the Greek islands, among them thousands of minors, the offer to accommodate a paltry 1600 children is pitiful. Their relocation will do little to solve the problems on Lesvos, Samos, Chios and Kos. This failure on the part of the so-called coalition of the willing also bodes ill for future agreements to settle people rescued in the central Mediterranean by privately funded organisations such as Sea-Watch and Mission Lifeline.

At the same time, officially at least, the European Union remains unconcerned by the mounting evidence that Greece has been violating the human rights of people who have crossed the Turkish–Greek border since 28 February. It now appears that those who were beaten up and sent back to Turkey were the lucky ones. Others have been detained at what the New York Times calls a “secret extrajudicial location.” According to the German current affairs program Monitor, some of these detainees have been deprived of legal representation, summarily tried, and sentenced to up to four years’ prison.

Monitor’s report was broadcast last Thursday. Since then, Europeans have largely stopped paying attention to anything but the coronavirus pandemic. Thus far, the virus seems not to have spread to the camps at Europe’s borders (or to those in Idlib, for that matter). But it’s probably only a matter of time. Last week, the first Covid-19 case was reported on Lesvos. Given conditions in Moria and other camps on the Aegean islands, an outbreak of the disease would be disastrous.

The situation is grim, but some of the defenders of Europe’s values haven’t given up. I mention just two. The German charity Mission Lifeline has conducted search-and-rescue missions in the central Mediterranean. On 8 March, it launched an appeal to fund a charter plane to bring refugee children and their carers from the Greek islands to Germany. Within just a few days, more than the necessary €55,000 had been donated. While it seems unlikely that the German government will allow such a flight to go ahead, the campaign continues to draw attention to the situation in Moria and elsewhere.

Some members of the European Parliament have been highly critical of the European Commission’s backing of the Greek government’s approach. One critic is the chair of LIBE, the parliament’s committee on civil liberties, justice and home affairs, Juan Fernando López Aguilar, a constitutional lawyer and former Spanish justice minister. At a time when everybody else seemed preoccupied with the coronavirus, López Aguilar wrote an article for the Spanish edition of the Huffington Post about the “anti-European virus of insolidarity” that is devouring the European Union. He described Ursula von der Leyen’s talk about the Greek ασπίδα, or shield, supposedly protecting Europe, as “singularly outrageous” because of its complicity with the fear-mongering of the far right.

“Greece does not need rhetorical ‘solidarity,’” López Aguilar wrote. “It is one thing to support Greece and quite another to uncritically and unconditionally support whatever the Greek authorities do — or the Greek neo-Nazis, who, drunk with xenophobic violence, try to repel the ‘avalanche.’”

Many European commentators have rightly said that the democracies of Europe will be tested by the virus that is currently afflicting many thousands of their people. But Europe would do well to worry as much about the long-term damage caused by the “virus of insolidarity.” •

The post That other virus appeared first on Inside Story.

Her nomination by the European Council in July last year seemed less about her personal qualities and expertise than about the hostility of influential council members, including French president Emmanuel Macron, towards Weber and/or Timmermans. Last week, however, von der Leyen demonstrated that her previous assignment, as German defence minister, had prepared her well for the top job in Brussels. Only fatigues, helmet and flak jacket were missing when she fronted the press to declare Europe’s support for Greece’s treat response to refugees arriving from Turkey. The tone was befitting a general’s calm assessment of a grave threat.

“We… have seen how tense and how difficult the situation is,” she told journalists. “The Greek authorities are facing a very difficult task in containing the situation… I am fully committed to mobilising all the necessary operational support to the Greek authorities.” Flanked — and dwarfed — by Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Croatian prime minister Andrej Plenković, European Council president Charles Michel and the president of the European parliament, David Sassoli, she was nevertheless obviously in charge when she decreed: “We will hold the line and our unity will prevail.” She ended her brief statement by thanking “Greece for being our European ασπίδα in these times.”

Her statement assumed that Europe needs a Greek ασπίδα, or shield, because Greece is defending Europe’s borders. Just a few days earlier, on 28 February, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had announced that Turkey would no longer prevent asylum seekers from crossing into neighbouring Greece or Bulgaria. Thousands of them, many of them Afghans and Iranians who don’t enjoy the limited protection available to Syrian refugees in Turkey, immediately rushed to the Turkish–Greek border, some of them on board free buses provided by the Turkish authorities to ferry migrants from Istanbul.

The Greeks responded by closing their border and deploying additional military units and border police to guard it. Greek security forces then repelled prospective intruders by firing tear gas canisters and stun grenades. According to a report in the German magazine Spiegel, a twenty-two-year-old Syrian man died after being hit by a bullet. Turkish sources claim he wasn’t the only casualty. All those who had managed to cross the land border but had been picked up by the Greek police were immediately returned to Turkey, often after being beaten up by police or border guards. Greece also announced that it would accept no new asylum applications.

Von der Leyen’s use of the term ασπίδα may have been meant as a reference to Operation Aspida, which was launched in 2012 by the government of Antonis Samaras, Mitsotakis’s predecessor as leader of Greece’s conservative New Democracy party. Then, too, Greece’s European partners expected it to control a section of the EU’s external border: a 200-kilometre stretch mostly marked by the river Evros, which divides Greek West Thrace from Turkish East Thrace. Operation Aspida involved the construction of a barbed wire fence and the deployment of an additional 1800 border guards to keep out refugees and other irregularised migrants. It was accompanied by Operation Xenios Zeus, which was aimed at detecting — and then detaining — migrants living without a visa in Greek cities. Both operations were terminated when left-wing Alexis Tsipras replaced Samaras as prime minister in 2015.

I suspect Mitsotakis and his cabinet associate the term ασπίδα not only with the securitisation of the border eight years ago but also with an earlier effort to keep Asian invaders out of Europe, 2500 years ago. “Who doesn’t understand that this is a normal Turkish invasion?” Adonis Georgiadis, vice-president of New Democracy and minister for development in the current government, tweeted last week. As far as invasions from an Asian neighbour are concerned, perhaps none is better remembered — in Greece and elsewhere — than that of the Persians in 480 BCE. Then, a small Greek force led by King Leonidas of Sparta held up the vastly superior Persian army at the pass of Thermopylae. While their famous last stand only delayed the Persian advance, it allowed the Greek forces to regroup; the following year the Persians were decisively beaten and had to withdraw.

The Greek far right has frequently drawn on the history of Leonidas’s last stand to argue that all “illegal immigrants” need to be deported. The Golden Dawn, the fascist party that until last year held eighteen seats in Greece’s parliament, used to gather regularly at Thermopylae. References to Thermopylae are also used by the far right outside Greece. Last week, for example, a contributor to the white supremacist website VDare wrote: “Like their ancestors at Thermopylae, Greeks are trying to repel an Asiatic invasion… Western Civilisation began with ancient Greece. And it might end with the Third Hellenic Republic if the West doesn’t fight back.”

The river Evros is one of the sites where a replay of the battle of Thermopylae is now being imagined. The other is the Aegean Sea, or rather those of the Greek islands that lie only a few kilometres from the Turkish mainland. There, the heroics of the defenders of Greece against the imagined invasion include burning down facilities operated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the Swiss charity One Happy Family, assaults on journalists and aid workers, and attempts to prevent rubber dinghies carrying irregularised migrants from reaching Greek shores.

But it would be unfair to lay the blame for Greece’s hostile response to asylum seekers squarely at the feet of the far right. At the time of Operation Aspida, Human Rights Watch and other non-government organisations accused Samaras’s New Democracy government of violating the human rights of people seeking Europe’s protection, and of forcing desperate people to resort to using riskier routes, thus contributing to a higher number of border-related deaths. Similar accusations can now be levelled at the Mitsotakis government. It has been responsible for pushbacks (which are illegal under international law) and for endangering the lives of people trying to reach Greece by boat.

According to a recent New York Times report, Greece is also maintaining extrajudicial detention centres. It wants to deport to their countries of origin asylum seekers who arrived after 28 February and are being detained on board a Greek navy ship — without formally assessing whether they are owed protection. Police have done little to curb the activities of Greek vigilantes and far-right activists from France and Germany, who have taken it upon themselves to repel or expel asylum seekers and the people helping them.

Von der Leyen did not visit One Happy Family’s torched community centre on Lesvos, and only observed first-hand Greece’s ασπίδα in operation at the river Evros. Yet even there, it should have been obvious to her that the Greeks have been using tear gas and stun grenades to repel desperate migrants, including families with small children. She would certainly have been briefed about Greece’s decision to suspend its refugee determination procedures. But in an attempt to “hold the line,” she offered only praise for the Greek government’s hardline approach, and ignored its flouting of European human rights and refugee law. She presented as a visiting commander-in-chief, inspecting her troops at the southeastern limits of Europe, thereby distinguishing herself from her avuncular predecessor, Jean-Claude Juncker. (To be fair, von der Leyen had not sought to become Juncker’s successor; the job she had eyed was that of NATO secretary-general.)

After 28 February, asylum seekers also tried to reach Greek islands just a few kilometres off the Turkish west coast. According to local media reports, 977 people succeeded within the space of twenty-four hours on the first weekend of March alone. Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Kos and some smaller islands were often the first European port of call for Syrian refugees during the so-called refugee crisis of 2015–16. It was opposite the island of Kos that Alan Kurdi and his family boarded a small inflatable boat in the early hours of 2 September 2015; for many readers internationally, the photo of three-year-old Alan’s dead body on a Turkish beach would have epitomised the crisis.

Although the number of arrivals dropped sharply in early 2016 after the Balkan route was closed, conditions on the islands went from bad to worse. By the end of last year, the Moria camp on Lesvos, for example, which had been built for 3100 people, accommodated more than 20,000. “The suffering is palpable, the hopelessness is insidious, the feeling of abandonment is all-consuming,” wrote Annie Chapman, an English volunteer doctor working in Moria, in the Guardian in early February. She was particularly concerned about the situation of the most vulnerable camp residents: “Guardians work hard to keep the most vulnerable safe, but… monitoring and care is stretched, and problems continue to spiral. With finite space and an infinite number of increasingly vulnerable people arriving, many minors and women are living alone outside the [secure] sections, at risk of abuse, violence, and systemic failings.”

The conditions have been appalling not least because Moria and other camps have been hopelessly overcrowded. And that’s because the Greek authorities have been slow in processing asylum seekers, and because until very recently they refused to transfer people from Lesvos and other islands to the mainland. Conditions have also been poor because Greece didn’t take full responsibility for the asylum seekers crossing its borders and instead left their care to private agencies, individual volunteers from elsewhere in Europe, and local people.

At the height of the crisis of 2015–16, Greek islanders often welcomed new arrivals — so much so that Lesvos fisherman Stratis Valamios and eighty-six-year-old Lesvos islander Emilia Kamvysi were among the favourites to win the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize. Pundits assumed the extraordinary hospitality of the islanders would have to be acknowledged. But the arrival numbers kept growing and, with the Greek government failing to transfer people to the mainland, many islanders began to resent their presence. The islanders’ anger was initially directed at the authorities, but its target has shifted to the unwanted foreigners themselves. The Greek government saw no need to defuse the situation on the islands. It was demanding that other EU member states accommodate some of its asylum seekers and probably calculated that images of suffering children were aiding its cause.

Elsewhere in Europe, the appalling conditions on Lesvos have been a symbol of the failure of Europe’s asylum seeker policy for at least the past two years. In Germany, in particular, civil society groups have demanded that asylum seekers be evacuated from the islands and, if necessary, accommodated in Germany. Two years ago in Hamburg, for example, a coalition of civil society groups calling itself Hamburg hat Platz (Hamburg has space) began demanding that the state government agree to the resettlement of 1000 additional refugees from Greece.

Städte Sicherer Häfen (Safe Harbour Cities), a 140-strong network of German towns and cities formed last year in response to Italy’s refusal to let migrants rescued in the Mediterranean disembark, was also ready to welcome asylum seekers and refugees, including people accommodated in Moria and other overcrowded camps in Greece. Network members have been willing to accommodate asylum seekers over and above those assigned to them by Germany’s federal and state governments under a quota system.

These calls became louder towards the end of last year. Just before Christmas, Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the Greens, gave a much-quoted interview to the Sunday paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Asked what he thought of the Greek prime minister’s repeated call that other European countries relieve Greece’s burden, Habeck said, “First, get the kids out. Around 4000 children crowd on the islands. Lots of girls, lots of fragile little people. Our humanity demands that we help quickly.” His sentiments were widely echoed, although it was not clear whether he meant unaccompanied minors or children more generally.

Among those backing Habeck’s call was Heribert Prantl, a senior journalist with the liberal Süddeutsche Zeitung. He called the German government’s inaction “criminal” and likened the children on Lesvos to the infant Jesus, pointing out that the latter too had not been a Christian. Although the government rejected Habeck’s call, its timing (which meant that the children in Moria became associated with Mary’s child in Bethlehem) generated significant momentum, shifting the German debate. The issue was no longer whether to assist Greece and accommodate some of the asylum seekers stranded there, but when to evacuate vulnerable children.

The images of asylum seekers being tear gassed at the Greek land border focused the attention of critical European publics on several linked issues: Europe’s failure to develop a new common asylum system that could replace the existing Dublin regulations; the humanitarian crisis in Idlib that prompted Erdoğan to blackmail the European Union by unleashing a wave of irregularised migrants in its direction; the fact that Turkey is currently hosting more asylum seekers and refugees than any other country; the shortcomings and potential collapse of the refugee deal between the European Union and Turkey; and the intolerable conditions in Greek refugee camps.

In Germany, the spectacle of stun grenades being lobbed in the direction of unarmed men, women and children sparked demonstrations and pledges by mayors and state premiers to accommodate asylum seekers from Greece. The day after the first images of violence at the Turkish–Greek border appeared on German television screens, spontaneous demonstrations and vigils in support of a more generous German policy were held in nineteen German cities. More such rallies occurred over the following days. On 7 March, for example, some 5000 people took to the streets in Hamburg, and 4000 in Berlin.

Predictably, representatives of the extreme right-wing Alternative for Germany, or AfD, called for sanctions against Turkey, categorically rejected calls to admit children from Greece (calling them, borrowing a term used by Donald Trump and the Australian government, “anchor children”) and suspected a plot that would allow the German government to let in yet more people of the wrong colour and religion. They also showed their solidarity with Greece (the same country, by the way, whose people were accused not so long ago by AfD politicians of being lazy and undeserving of a bailout by fellow eurozone countries).

Perhaps surprisingly, however, many ordinary Germans remain open to the idea of resettling refugees from Turkey or Greece. In a reputable survey conducted three days after Erdoğan’s announcement, 57 per cent of respondents concurred with the following statement: “The refugees ought to be allowed to cross the border into Greece, and afterwards should be divided among the EU member states.” And 48 per cent thought that “Countries such as Germany and France should take in refugees, even if other EU member states are opposed to that.”

Last week in parliament, the Greens put forward a resolution calling for the admission of 5000 children and other vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece, an issue over which the governing coalition has been divided. Most Social Democrats want Germany to admit a sizeable number of asylum seekers from Greece. They agree that states and local councils prepared to take in extra people should be encouraged and enabled to do so. Speaking in his capacity as interior minister of Lower Saxony, prominent Social Democrat Boris Pistorius pleaded with the federal government to allow the states to go it alone and lead a coalition of the willing within the European Union.

The Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, have been saying that there must be no repeat of 2015: of the mass influx and the ensuing debate that divided the country and damaged the party’s brand. But they too were divided. Of the two main contenders for the party leadership, one, the conservative Friedrich Merz, opposes Germany taking in any asylum seekers whatsoever from Greece, whereas the other, the North Rhine-Westfalian premier Armin Laschet, who is considered to be a loyal Merkel supporter, advocates a more generous approach. The issue has also created unusual alliances: at a recent meeting of the parliamentary party, it was Merkel’s bête noire, interior minister Horst Seehofer, who defended her record and objected when it was suggested that Germans did not want any more refugees. Merkel herself has remained largely silent on the issue.

In the end, with the exception of eight members of the governing coalition who either abstained or voted against the government, Social Democrats and Christian Democrats toed the government line: that a German initiative could only happen as part of an EU initiative. Last Sunday, though, the Koalitionsausschuss — a committee comprising the leaders of the three governing parties together with Merkel and her deputy, Social Democratic finance minister Olaf Scholz — agreed that Germany would, after all, go ahead and accommodate between 1000 and 1500 children from Greece on the basis that a handful of other EU governments signed up to a joint initiative. By then, that condition had already been met, with France, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg and Croatia indicating they were willing to help out.

Given the size of the problem, though, the capacity of countries such as Germany and the willingness of municipalities to help, the evacuation of perhaps no more than 2500 children and other particularly vulnerable asylum seekers from Greece would be largely symbolic. Besides, it remains to be seen whether the promises will be kept. It wouldn’t be the first pledge by EU member states to resettle refugees and asylum seekers, or fund programs to assist them, to be left unfulfilled.

“We will hold the line and our unity will prevail,” Ursula von der Leyen said last week in Greece. “Now is the time for concerted action and cool heads and acting based on our values.” Given the uncompromising attitudes of Hungary and other Eastern European EU member states, a joint European approach that respects the rights of asylum seekers and other irregularised migrants — an approach that is indeed guided by their rights — is unrealistic. “Our unity” therefore means unanimous support for the response summed up by von der Leyen in Greece: a show of solidarity with Greece, a commitment to sealing the European Union’s external borders for asylum seekers, and — publicly at least — a shying away from criticising the Greek government’s flagrant violations of EU human rights and refugee law.

This is not an approach that would uphold the values considered intrinsic to the European project, enshrined in Article 2 of the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.

In 2015, at the height of the last large-scale influx of asylum seekers, von der Leyen was one of the staunchest defenders of Angela Merkel’s decision not to close the German border. She strongly supported the sentiments encapsulated in Merkel’s famous statement, “Wir schaffen das” (we are able to do this). Perhaps she adopted the persona of Europe’s commander-in-chief last week because she sensed that this was the only way she could speak for all EU member states. If so, then von der Leyen made the mistake of identifying the smallest common denominator and thus mirroring the views of the likes of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who are obsessed with “illegal immigration.” The current leadership of von der Leyen’s party, Germany’s Christian Democrats, may also have made the mistake of assuming that a simple majority would not be sufficient when it comes to deciding to take in additional asylum seekers and refugees, and that nothing short of unanimity would be required for such a momentous decision.

Von der Leyen made another mistake by focusing exclusively on the member states’ national governments. More so than most, she should know that an alternative approach is available, one in which European cities and regions are empowered to respond to situations such as those unfolding on Lesvos, thereby upholding the values spelled out in Article 2 of the Lisbon treaty. That’s to do with her family history. Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was also a prominent Christian Democrat. Six years after his return from Brussels, where he had headed the Directorate-General for Competition, Albrecht became the premier of Lower Saxony. Today he is perhaps best remembered for his unfortunate commitment to building a nuclear waste facility in his state.

But Albrecht should also be remembered for his decision, on 24 November 1978, to invite 1000 Indochinese “boat people” to settle in Lower Saxony. This was well above the number allocated to Lower Saxony by the federal government. In fact, in the previous three-and-a-half years, since the end of the Vietnam war, West Germany as a whole had taken in a total of only 1300 Vietnamese refugees. Albrecht and his state government subsequently decided to accommodate further contingents of “boat people.” He also prompted fellow state premiers to follow his example, was a supporter of the charity operating the Cap Anamur, which carried out search-and-rescue missions in the South China Sea, and lobbied conservative politicians in Europe in support of a European rescue mission for “boat people.”

If the German government is concerned about the backlash against the arrival of a sizeable number of asylum seekers in, say, Saxony, it could take up the offers of the eight German states and 140 cities and towns that so far have pledged to go it alone if a national consensus couldn’t be reached. They include, for example, the state government of Berlin, which has said that it has the capacity to take in 2000 people from Greece, including 150 unaccompanied minors, immediately.

German cities are not the only ones offering a safe harbour for asylum seekers and refugees. A network similar to Städte Sicherer Häfen, the Association Nationale des Villes et Territoires Accueillants (National Association of Welcoming Cities and Territories), exists in France. At the European level, sixty municipalities are part of the European Network of Solidarity Cities. It includes, among others, Amsterdam and Milan, Barcelona and Gdansk, Strasbourg and Munich. Incidentally, it also includes Athens and Thessaloniki, the two largest cities in Greece.

Ursula von der Leyen’s performance in Greece last week and the subsequent arguments over the evacuation of children from the Aegean islands suggest that Europe is in a bad way. “Respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” don’t seem to count for much. But things are not entirely dire: an alternative Europe — as evident in Athens and Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin — is slowly emerging. But that’s no comfort for those stuck in Moria, wedged between Greek and Turkish border guards at the river Evros, or forgotten in all the other camps at or beyond Europe’s borders that never make it onto the evening news. •

The post In defence of Europe appeared first on Inside Story.

What happened? Until last October, the East German state was governed by a coalition made up of the left-wing Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens. Bodo Ramelow, leader of the senior partner in that coalition, served as state premier. Ramelow, a former trade union official who moved from West Germany to Thuringia after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the first Die Linke leader to preside over a German state government.

When Thuringia voted on 27 October last year, Die Linke became the strongest party in state parliament. But its partners both lost seats, and the Red–Red–Green coalition lost its majority. The biggest losers, though, were the governing Christian Democrats, who crashed from 33.5 to 21.7 per cent. Apart from Die Linke, two other parties could claim to be winners: the liberal Free Democrats, who hadn’t been represented in the 2014–19 parliament but now cleared the 5 per cent threshold, albeit by a mere seventy-three votes, and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), or AfD, which more than doubled its previous vote and beat the Christian Democrats into third place.

Both the Christian Democrats and the Free Democrats had ruled out coalitions with Die Linke and the AfD, but between them the latter two parties occupied fifty-one of the ninety seats in parliament. This meant that no feasible combination of parties could command a majority in parliament. For the time being, the Ramelow government remained in office.

Not all Christian Democrats in Thuringia were opposed to the idea of supporting a Ramelow-led minority government. This was largely because politicians tend to have an eye on public sentiment. The Linke leader is immensely popular in Thuringia; according to a poll conducted at the end of January, 71 per cent of respondents approved of his performance as premier and 60 per cent said they would vote for him if the premier were popularly elected. Even among Christian Democrat voters, Ramelow is the most popular politician and remains the preferred state premier.

That’s not the only reason why some Christian Democrats have been open to deals with Die Linke despite the fact that it is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party, which ran the German Democratic Republic until 1990. The Christian Democrats in Thuringia are also a successor party — to the East German Christian Democrats. They were once one of the four non-communist Blockparteien, which were represented in parliament and supported the East German regime. Those of today’s party members who belonged to the pre-1990 East German Christian Democrats may well remember the close working relationship their party had with the Socialist Unity Party — and thus with some of the people who ended up with Die Linke.

But however much some of Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have liked to cooperate with a government led by Ramelow, they were not allowed to do so, because their party headquarters in Berlin has categorically ruled out any deal, anywhere, with AfD or Die Linke.

Notwithstanding the lack of a clear mandate, a Ramelow government remained an option. That’s because the state’s constitution allows for a premier to be elected with a simple majority of parliamentary votes as long as two rounds fail to produce an absolute majority for a candidate. Die Linke, the Social Democrats and the Greens were confident that it would come to that — and that a minority government would work because it would solicit the support of Free Democrats or Christian Democrats on a case-by-case basis.

The election of the new premier was scheduled for 5 February. In the first two rounds of voting, Ramelow won comfortably against the candidate of the AfD, Christoph Kindervater, the mayor of a small village in Thuringia, who isn’t actually a member of the AfD. As expected, though, Ramelow failed to gain an absolute majority in either round because nearly all Free Democrats and Christian Democrats abstained. In the third round, Ramelow suddenly faced two challengers: Kindervater and the leader of the Free Democrats, Thomas Kemmerich. Much to the consternation of members of the Red–Red–Green coalition, Kemmerich won. Having formally accepted the position, he was duly sworn in as Thuringia’s new premier.

Kemmerich’s election was only possible for one reason: all AfD members of parliament voted for him rather than for their own candidate. He was also supported by all but three Christian Democrats, who were no longer abstaining.

Kemmerich’s candidature had not been a spontaneous decision; in fact, the AfD, knowing that he would stand, had executed a clever plan to prevent the re-election of Ramelow while allowing the far-right party to claim that it was simply part of a conservative bloc whose candidate won.

All hell broke loose after Kemmerich’s election. The outrage on the left side of politics was perhaps best epitomised by the response of Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, the parliamentary leader of Die Linke, who, rather than congratulate the new premier, threw a bouquet of flowers at his feet.

As far as Kemmerich himself was concerned, he had been democratically elected. He said he did not intend to govern with, or even courtesy of, the AfD and announced that he would seek talks with Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens to put together a cabinet. But the Social Democrats and the Greens immediately declined the invitation. Even the Christian Democrats, who after all had voted for Kemmerich, suddenly realised that they could not support a government led by him.

Kemmerich was born in Aachen, a city in Rhineland, in the west of West Germany. When he moved to Thuringia after the fall of the Wall, he brought a key element of Rhineland culture with him: carnival. According to its supporters, carnival allows people to be irreverent and call a spade a spade. Its detractors would argue that it encourages people to make tasteless jokes. His response on 5 February suggested that he might have thought of his election — at the height of the carnival season — as a great joke, and if others did not get it, he could simply resign as if the joke had never been made. But nobody outside Thuringia’s Free Democrats and Christian Democrats was prepared to treat his candidature in that way.

The outcry over Kemmerich’s election — and even more so over his decision to accept the result — was also deafening among conservatives. The Free Democrats and the Christian Democrats in Thuringia were not the only targets of sustained criticism. Those who had congratulated Kemmerich immediately after the vote were also in trouble. Among them was the federal government’s high-profile special envoy for East Germany, the Christian Democrat Christian Hirte, who had posted a tweet congratulating Kemmerich for his election “as a candidate of the [political] centre” and wishing him success for the “difficult task” ahead. Angela Merkel considered the tweet a sackable offence and promptly replaced Hirte.

The most important collateral damage of Kemmerich’s election was the national leader of the Christian Democrats, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer — or AKK, as she is usually referred to in Germany. Although she had distanced herself from the actions of her colleagues in Thuringia, she had been unable to stop them, and afterwards was unable to convince them to toe the party line and agree to fresh elections. Five days after the debacle in Thuringia’s parliament, she announced that she would not seek to succeed as chancellor and would resign as leader of the party once she steered it through the process of nominating a candidate for the chancellorship at the 2021 federal elections.

Like Kemmerich, AKK is a carnival tragic. In fact, before her elevation to the position of general secretary of the Christian Democrats in 2018 — when she was premier of Saarland, a state even smaller than Thuringia — she was known also for the irreverent (or tasteless) jokes she made as Putzfrau Gretel (Cleaning-Woman Gretel), a persona she used during the carnival season. Leaning on her broom, she would pontificate about the world and make her audience laugh. She seems to have left the broom behind when she moved to Berlin, where it could have been used to rid the Christian Democrats of their closet AfD bedfellows.

AKK’s lack of resolve and authority was put into sharp relief by two of her allies: first, by the premier of Bavaria, Markus Söder of the conservative Christian Social Union, who within minutes of the vote lambasted the behaviour of Free Democrats and Christian Democrats in Thuringia; and then by the German chancellor, who was on a state visit in South Africa as events unfolded in Thuringia. Often considered a ditherer, Merkel was quick to respond in unequivocal terms, calling the local Christian Democrats’ decision to vote for Kemmerich “inexcusable.”

On 8 February, only three days after his election, Kemmerich resigned at the urging of his own party. After initially hedging his bets, leader Christian Lindner had joined the chorus of those condemning Kemmerich’s election. Lindner was being true to form; in 2017, having decided to call off coalition negotiations between the Free Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Greens in Berlin, he famously said, “It’s better not to govern, than to govern wrongly.” But his position, much like AKK’s, may turn out to have been irreparably damaged by the events in Thuringia.

What explains the extent of the outrage at Kemmerich’s decision to stand, and to accept his election?

In today’s Germany, it’s taboo for politicians belonging to Die Linke, the Social Democrats, the Greens, the Free Democrats, and the Christian Democrats or their sister party, the Christian Social Union, to collaborate with the AfD. This means that these parties are committed not to enter into agreements with the AfD and not to rely on the AfD’s votes — at the national, the state or the local level — to pass legislation. To depend on the support of AfD parliamentarians in a vote as crucial as that of 5 February in Thuringia was a violation of that taboo. The term most often used to describe what had happened was Dammbruch, a breaching of the dam.

The violation was perceived particularly acutely because Thuringia’s AfD is led by Björn Höcke, the poster boy of the AfD’s extremist Flügel faction, who according to a recent court ruling may be called a “fascist,” and whose words and deeds are closely monitored by the Bundesverfassungsschutz, Germany’s federal intelligence agency.

Taboos proscribe human behaviour that is ostensibly repulsive but might be considered attractive, at least by some. No taboo is needed, for example, to stop parliamentarians from using their speeches to abuse the people who voted for them — simply because it would not occur to politicians to do that. But the idea of forming an alliance with the AfD is sufficiently attractive, if only to some, that it requires a taboo to stop them from acting impulsively.

Despite its speed, intensity and near unanimity, the response to Kemmerich’s election doesn’t prove that a collaboration between, say, the Free Democrats and the AfD is unthinkable in today’s Germany. In East Germany, in particular, several prominent members of the Christian Democrats have questioned their party’s official line that it must not collaborate with the AfD. This is despite the fact that in the East German states the AfD tends to be far more radical than in West Germany. Advocates of a rapprochement between Christian Democrats and the far right have included the leader of the Christian Democrats’ parliamentary party in Saxony, Christian Hartmann, and key Christian Democrats in the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Prominent members of a 4000-strong network of self-confessed conservatives associated with the Christian Democrats, the Werte-Union, have also repeatedly argued that the differences between AfD and the Christian Democrats could be easily bridged.

But whenever such arguments have been made, they have met with a firm response from Christian Democrat leaders, including AKK and Merkel. After the Werte-Union welcomed Kemmerich’s election, for example, other Christian Democrats demanded that the party dissociate itself from that group (and possibly expel all its members), which compelled the conservative network hastily to endorse the party line and categorically rule out any collaboration with the AfD.

Thuringia’s Christian Democrats have convincingly argued that they had held no talks with the AfD prior to Kemmerich’s election. While they didn’t collaborate with the far right, though, they did collude with them. At the national or state level, this had never happened before. But at the local level, particularly in East German district and town councils, Christian Democrats have often collaborated, cooperated or colluded with AfD representatives. In local parliaments, the “dams” and “firewalls” conjured by AKK and others have been far less important. But local arrangements between Christian Democrats and the AfD have been informal and have usually been struck outside the media spotlight.

Elsewhere in Europe, the taboo that governs the relations between the democratic parties and the far right hardly exists at all. Last week, in an interview with the German news magazine Spiegel, Finnish prime minister Sanna Marin wouldn’t exclude the possibility that her Social Democratic Party would cooperate with the True Finns, the Finnish equivalent of the AfD. People in Finland expected politicians to identify solutions to pressing problems, she explained, rather than engage in ideological battles. In Denmark, centre-right minority governments have relied on the support of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party for fifteen of the past twenty years. In Austria, the far-right Freedom Party was the minor partner in conservative-led governments from 2000 until 2005 and again from 2017 until last year.

Why, then, do the overwhelming majority of German centre-right politicians, let alone Social Democrats and Greens, shun the AfD? Much of their response reflects a particular view of what happened towards the end of the Weimar Republic, when Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party — intent on replacing democracy, much like Björn Höcke’s AfD — came to power not least because it was tolerated by many conservatives.

In fact, the key historical moment that is often referenced in discussions about the ramifications of Kemmerich’s election happened in Thuringia. There, at the 1929 state elections, the Nazis won 11.3 per cent and the governing conservative coalition lost its majority. Rather than trying to form a coalition with the Social Democrats (which was then by far the largest party in state parliament), the conservatives opted to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1930, Hitler’s henchman Wilhelm Frick, who was later hanged as a war criminal, became Thuringia’s minister for education and the interior and set about “cleansing” the public service. The conservatives, who thought they had successfully co-opted the Nazis in Thuringia, tried to do so again three years later at the national level, thus paving the way for Hitler to become chancellor.

The historical analogy is, at best, problematic. Thuringia in 2019–20 bears little resemblance to Thuringia in 1929–30. Then, the conservative forces were not committed to democracy; nor, at the other end of the political spectrum, was the Communist Party. In today’s Germany, democratic ideals and a commitment to human rights and the rule of law are far more entrenched than they were during the Weimar Republic.

It is true, though, that Höcke’s AfD has borrowed some of the Nazis’ vocabulary. Much like them, the AfD is anti-democratic (and thus Kemmerich’s claim to have been “democratically elected” was not true in the sense that he had not been elected by people who believed in democracy). Much like Hitler wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic, Höcke and other Flügel representatives aim to tear down the Berlin Republic. And like Hitler’s party, Höcke’s AfD wants to become respectable and be taken seriously as a viable and legitimate alternative to the centre-right parties only in order to supplant not just these parties but all democratic structures.

Kemmerich and Thuringia’s Christian Democrats would have done well to cast their eyes back to the outcome of the 1929 elections, and to the successful attempts of a far-right party to use the conservatives’ loathing of the left to their advantage.

The taboo that prevents Christian Democrats and others from collaborating with the AfD is only part of the story; in fact, it obscures what might prove a more important issue, the question of whether the democratic parties are adopting views held by the AfD.

None of the parties outside the AfD has ruled out embracing positions of the populist far right. Obviously, a categorical refusal to advocate a particular stance on the sole grounds that it has been endorsed by the AfD would make little sense. But how about positions that are, for example, anti-democratic or racist — that is, positions that are an integral part of the far-right mix?

In the past, many prominent Christian Democrats, as well as some Social Democrats and Free Democrats, held views that are now principally associated with the far right. Occasionally, they also formed alliances with groups that were committed to particular varieties of right-wing extremism, without necessarily being likened to the Nazi Party. The first time the Christian Democrats collaborated with radical right-wing populists was not the election of Kemmerich in 2020 but the formation of a coalition government between the Hamburg Christian Democrats and the so-called Schill Party, led by the extremist law-and-order advocate Ronald Schill, in 2001. (While Kemmerich’s tenure lasted only three days, the government of the Christian Democrats and the Schill Party was in office for more than two years.)

Before the emergence and rapid rise of the AfD in 2013, Christian Democrats sometimes justified embracing extremist positions by arguing that a major conservative party needed to cover the entire right of the political spectrum, if only to deprive more radical alternatives of oxygen. The long-time leader of the Christian Social Union, Franz Josef Strauß, famously said that “there must not be a democratically legitimated party to the right of the Christian Social Union.”

Since it became obvious that the AfD is here to stay, Christian Democrats have put forward two arguments against adopting AfD positions. One is that the right-wing extremism often embraced by conservative politicians like Strauß is no longer compatible with the principles of a centre-right party. This is an argument made by Angela Merkel, among others. For her, she said in 2016, Strauß’s dictum was valid only as long it was possible to remain true to Christian Democratic principles. At the time, she had in mind the opposition to her asylum policy led by politicians of the Christian Social Union, including Merkel’s own interior minister Horst Seehofer. Christian Democrats who make the same argument, such as Daniel Günther, the premier of Schleswig-Holstein, tend to identify as liberals.

The other argument is strategic. Strauß and others were convinced that far-right parties could be kept small if they were unable to claim that they alone championed particular extremist views. The evidence from Bavaria largely supported this argument: only once, in 1966, did a far-right party manage to win seats in state parliament. But this stance came at a price: it positioned Strauß’s party to the right of all others represented in federal parliament; his image as a politician toying with ideas that were otherwise associated with the far right ensured that the conservatives, led by Strauß as their candidate for chancellor, lost the 1980 elections.

Markus Söder, the current leader of the Christian Social Union, was long a faithful Strauß disciple. In 2016, for example, he demanded to “end the asylum tourism” in the expectation that such statements would appeal to prospective AfD voters. But just ahead of the 2018 state elections in Bavaria, Söder realised that Strauß’s strategy no longer worked. He made an about turn, drew a clear line between the Christian Social Union and the AfD, regained the support of traditional conservatives who had threatened to vote for the Greens, and thereby ensured that his party remained the dominant force in Bavaria. Since then, another deeply conservative state premier, Saxony’s Michael Kretschmer, has also won a state election by distancing himself from the AfD.

At present, the leading politicians of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union agree that their parties should reject extremist positions advocated by the AfD — whether it’s because they believe, as Günther does, that their party ought to occupy the political centre and be open to progressive ideas, or because they are convinced that Söder’s und Kretschmer’s strategy has worked. But AKK’s retreat will reignite debates about principles and strategies. If the Christian Democrats ultimately reject both Günther’s and Söder’s arguments, then the taboo on cooperation would no longer hold. It would make little sense to embrace the AfD’s positions but refuse to form an alliance with a party representing up to a quarter of the electorate.

Outside Germany, too, the question of whether conservative parties should embrace the demands of the far right is more relevant than the issue of coalitions. But a preparedness to consider coalition governments that include the far right can also pave the way for policy shifts. Denmark is a good example. For years the Danish People’s Party was lent credibility because successive governments relied on its support. The current government of Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen no longer needs the far right to govern, but it has nevertheless adopted key planks of its platform, particularly in relation to the far right’s asylum policy. Something similar has happened in Austria, where the conservative People’s Party, which twice formed a government with the far-right Freedom Party but is currently in a coalition with the Greens, is now championing policies that used to be owned by the far right.

Where to now for Thuringia? Kemmerich’s resignation could have been followed by a repeat of the election of 5 February, except with both Christian Democrats and Free Democrats abstaining in all three rounds. But the AfD has said that it might now vote for Ramelow, in which case he too would have to resign to avoid being tainted by its support.

Die Linke has demanded — unsuccessfully, thus far — that at least four Christian Democrats and/or Free Democrats must vote for Ramelow in the first round to ensure that he is elected with an absolute majority. On Monday, Ramelow put forward another idea, which was endorsed by the Greens and the Social Democrats: new elections and, until then, an interim “technical” government led by his immediate predecessor, Christiane Lieberknecht from the Christian Democrats, who retired as a member of parliament last year. On Tuesday, Thuringia’s Christian Democrats rejected that idea.

It is not hard to see why. Ramelow is likely to benefit from new elections; polling conducted last week put his party at 40 per cent, with the Christian Democrats down to 14 per cent and the Free Democrats below the 5 per cent threshold. If the election results approximated current polling, the Red–Red–Green coalition would command a comfortable majority in parliament. The threat of new elections may be what is needed to convince the Christian Democrats to support Ramelow’s re-election.

Whatever happens, the AfD has successfully exposed leading Free Democrats and Christian Democrats as naive, greedy and unprincipled. On Monday night, Björn Höcke addressed a demonstration organised by the far-right Pegida movement in Dresden, claiming that a coup d’état engineered by Angela Merkel had toppled democratically elected premier Thomas Kemmerich. While the majority of Germans may find such claims bizarre, they appeal to his followers. And there are many of those — in fact, the events since 5 February have only cemented Höcke’s position as the de facto leader of Germany’s far right.

Where to now for Germany? The Christian Democrats are currently experiencing the most serious crisis in their seventy-five-year history. Their internal problems affect the work of the coalition government in Berlin and are likely to further entrench the view among Germany’s partners that the country is not interested in providing leadership. The party that more than any other has shaped the history of the Federal Republic and has led the federal government for fifty-two of the past seventy-one years is at a collective loss about how to position itself. It does not know how to reverse its longstanding decision not to collaborate with both Die Linke, a democratic party with an anti-democratic past, and the AfD. It does not have a collective vision for a life after Angela Merkel. And it does not know how to deal with those of its members who are tempted to violate the taboo of getting into bed with certified fascists such as Björn Höcke.

The events of 5 February have strengthened the resolve of Christian Democrats like Daniel Günther to position their party as an antidote to the far right. Conservative Christian Democrats appear to get the message; on Monday, the Christian Democrats in Dresden called on their followers to demonstrate against another Pegida demonstration — the first time this has happened in the more than five years since Pegida began holding its regular Monday evening rallies.

AKK’s announcement that she will step down has meant that two positions are now up for grabs: that of the leader of the Christian Democrats and that of the conservatives’ candidate for German chancellor. At the moment, there are three likely candidates for the position of party leader (although none of them has officially declared an intention): the premier of North Rhine-Westfalia, Armin Laschet, who belongs to the party’s moderate left and has been a staunch supporter of Angela Merkel; health minister Jens Spahn, a conservative; and Friedrich Merz, another conservative and long-time Merkel critic. Those three would also want to lead the Christian Democrats and the Christian Social Union into the next elections. But — notwithstanding his protestations — Markus Söder may also throw his hat into the ring. In any case, the question of how to deal with the AfD is likely to dominate the discussion over who will lead the conservatives from later this year and, potentially, Germany from 2021.

Or from 2020? AKK failed partly because last year Merkel resigned as party leader but not as chancellor. Whoever succeeds AKK will probably try to convince Merkel that she needs to go straight away. She won’t like it and will argue that she needs to remain at the helm in the second half of the year when Germany holds the rotating presidency of the European Union. But she may not have a choice.

If Merkel were forced out, the Social Democrats would probably demand new elections, and Germany may have a new chancellor by Christmas. I won’t hazard a guess about who will follow Merkel, but it seems certain that it will be a man: Laschet, Spahn, Merz, Söder — or Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens.

That last possibility also says something about Germany in 2020. While the rise of the AfD has made life difficult for Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, it has strengthened the Greens. It has provided motivation and oxygen to groups outside parliament that not only oppose the far right but also fight for measures to combat climate change and for a generous asylum and refugee policy. In other words, Germany might have experienced a resurgence of the far right since 2013, but it has also seen a civil society–led backlash against the extreme right and in favour of an alternative vision of society that may otherwise have been utterly unrealistic. Watch this space. •

The post Anatomy of a broken taboo appeared first on Inside Story.

One of Lee’s duties hadn’t been mentioned when he was hired. Twice a day, after dark, he would tow a big tank of chlorinated hydrocarbon residue from the factory to the nearby Bayou d’Inde. After making sure he hadn’t been seen, he would back up the buggy, check the wind, and turn the tap. The pressure inside would propel the thick, noxious fluid into the marsh.

Years later, Lee confessed what he’d done to a roomful of angry locals who relied on the area’s waterways for their livelihoods. By now, PPG and other factories in the state had propelled Louisiana to the top of the country’s hazardous-waste league table. Authorities were warning that fish from the Bayou d’Inde should be eaten no more than twice a month and humans should avoid any direct contact with the waters.

Lee had been fired by the company after an accidental drenching with chlorinated hydrocarbons sent him on sick leave for eight months. Not altogether surprisingly, his experiences had turned him into an ardent environmentalist — but an environmentalist, Hochschild discovered, who also supported the Tea Party, a movement that wanted the Environmental Protection Agency abolished and companies freed of red tape.

This seeming paradox was the starting point of Hochshild’s book, Strangers in Their Own Land. What she learned from four years of visiting Lousiana — where just 14 per cent of white voters supported Barack Obama in 2012 — is that Tea Party supporters, many of whom became part of the Trump “base,” feel quite differently about the world from the people she mixes with back in San Francisco. They feel that way for a complex mix of reasons, some of them particular to the southern United States — a prickly resistance to northern liberal attitudes, for instance, that dates back through the civil rights movement to the civil war — and some that would resonate in Europe, Russia and even Australia.

Out of Hochschild’s attempt to scale what she calls the “empathy wall” came a “deep story” that attracted a great deal of attention when her book was published. She concluded that the Tea Party supporters she met in Louisiana — “white, older, Christian, and predominantly male, some with college degrees, some not” — felt like they were standing in a queue that was moving extremely slowly. Ahead was the American Dream, “the goal of everyone in the line,” and behind were people of other races, young and old, often poor.

This line had always existed, but what had changed was the feeling that other people were cutting in ahead — black people, propelled by affirmative action programs, as well as “women, immigrants, refugees, public sector workers — where will it end?” And who was helping these queue-jumpers? It was Barack Obama, who seemed more sympathetic to the people pushing in than he did to the ones patiently waiting. “You feel betrayed,” Hochschild writes, addressing her informants. “The president is their president, not your president.”

This feeling is essentially why the people Hochschild came to know, and in many cases like, happily voted for Donald Trump, a man who vilified anyone who wasn’t white, who flouted the conventions of public discourse, who didn’t understand the difference between public and private interests, and who seemed to understand how they felt about being forced to stand stationary in the queue.

Political scientist Ivan Krastev and New York University law profesor Stephen Holmes also use a striking metaphor to explain the current political mood, though theirs is applied more boldly, and perhaps less successfully, across a wider canvas.

The Light that Failed is structured around the idea that Western history since 1989 has been shaped by three waves of imitation. First, the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union set out to imitate the fabled West that they’d envied for so long. Then, after Russia’s failed transition to Western-style democracy, Vladimir Putin created an authoritarian system that cynically imitated many of the features of Western democracy and began parodying America’s international interventions. And finally, taking a lead from Putin and other would-be despots, Donald Trump renounced America’s claim to exemplary behaviour and injected a dose of Russian-style authoritarianism into the US system.

“The future was better yesterday,” begin Krastev and Holmes. “The geopolitical stage seemed set for a performance not unlike George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, an optimistic and didactic play in which a professor of phonetics, over a short period of time, succeeds in teaching a poor flower girl to speak like the Queen and feel at home in polite company.” But it soon became clear that the East’s integration into the West wasn’t unfolding quite as expected. “It was as if, instead of watching a performance of Pygmalion, the world ended up with a theatrical adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Worse than that, the process of imitation had begun moving in the opposite direction.

Among the people of Central and Eastern Europe, the post-1989 euphoria fuelled hopes of dramatic improvements in living standards and general wellbeing: “Some thought it would suffice for communist officials to quit their posts for Central and East Europeans to wake up in different, freer, more prosperous and, above all, more Western countries.” When that didn’t happen, people began to leave for the West in an exodus that quickened once Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia and other countries joined the European Union in 2004. Since 1989, two million East Germans — more than one in eight — have moved to West Germany. Latvia has lost a staggering 27 per cent of its population, Bulgaria almost 21 per cent. More than two million Poles, or one in eight, have left for the West. After the process accelerated again during the global financial crisis, more people left these countries than would later arrive as a result of the war in Syria.

As the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote recently, “Emigration is the region’s real problem, but immigration is its imagined one.” The Light That Failed describes the psychic impact of that exodus on those who stayed behind — and how it fuelled fears of more broad-scale emigration — and suggests that loss helps explain support for parties pledged to restore the kind of ethnic makeup that had prevailed in 1989.

Something similar was going on in Russia — vast numbers of people leaving, Western-inspired economic reforms backfiring, disillusion turning to nostalgia — but with an important difference. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe had thrown off Moscow’s control, and now resented the feeling they were expected to exchange that subjection for another set of rules, these ones imposed by the West. Russia, on the other hand, was coming to terms with the fact that it had lost the cold war, and with it, territory and stature. Democratic reformers made less headway there, and its tissue-thin copies of Western practices and institutions — elections, parties, a constitutional court — were masking deep economic changes taking place with little or no public support.

Putin, now in control, preserved these “Potemkin” institutions but started planning for the future. Even at a time when the economy was doing well and his popularity was high, he blatantly rigged elections to display his strength and prepare for a time when sentiment might not be so favourable. Rather than having to look fair, the elections were designed to showcase his ability to “manipulate the accreditation, nomination and voting process in an orderly and predictable way and thereby, paradoxically, to demonstrate his authoritarian credentials as a man who can get things done.” Landslide victories, part real, part manufactured, were the result.

After relations with the West soured and the Russian economy hit the rocks, Putin’s strategic imitation of the West became more internationally assertive. The hypocrisies of American foreign policy — especially the humanitarian interventions that were actually designed to preserve strategic interests — became a template for Russian forays into neighbouring countries, most notoriously Crimea and Syria.

When Putin announced Russia’s annexation of Crimea he used whole passages from speeches in which Western leaders had sought to justify freeing Kosovo forcibly from Serbian control. “Just as NATO violated the territorial integrity of Serbia in 1999, so Russia violated the territorial integrity of Georgia in 2008,” write Krastev and Holmes:

Just as the American administration has blacklisted some prominent Russians, preventing them from entering the US, so the Kremlin has blacklisted some prominent Americans, preventing them from entering Russia. Just as the Americans and Europeans celebrated the dismantling of the Soviet Union, so Russians now celebrate Brexit and the dismantling of the EU. Just as the West has supported liberal NGOs inside Russia, Russians are financing far-right and far-left groups in the West to undermine NATO, block US missile defence programmes, weaken support for sanctions and European unity. Just as the West (in Moscow’s view) lied brazenly to Russia about its plan for NATO expansion and about the UN-sanctioned attack on Libya, so Russia lies brazenly to the West about its military incursions into Ukraine. And just as the US is aiding the military of Ukraine (traditionally in Moscow’s sphere of influence), so Russia is aiding the military of Venezuela (traditionally in Washington’s sphere of influence).

“Contagious imitation,” as the authors call it, didn’t end there. Far-right parties in Western Europe used the same fears to capture greater support (though never anywhere near majority support) and, depending on the local electoral system, translate it into control or at least bargaining power.

The third element of the imitation trifecta came with Donald Trump’s arrival in the White House. The Russians undoubtedly meddled in the election that put him there, but their main aim, say Krastev and Holmes, was to show that they were a power to be reckoned with. Supporting Trump was simply the easiest way to disrupt their ideological enemy.

Trump saw Putin’s calculating cynicism as refreshingly free of the hypocrisy he believed was limiting America’s ability to exercise power. For the new American president, being a great country didn’t mean being a beacon of freedom and democracy; it meant being a winner. He saw Putin — along with Hungary’s unashamedly illiberal Viktor Orbán — as winners, and hence as guides to how a leader could and should behave.

There is so much that is original and challenging in this book that it seems ungrateful to quibble about its overarching theme. But I’m not sure that Krastev and Holmes’s three varieties of imitation — Central and Eastern Europe’s post-1989 Western-focused euphoria, Putin’s retaliatory foreign policy imitation, and the illiberal copying by Trump and the far-right parties of Western Europe — fit together as neatly as that summary might appear.

In their discussion of the third of these trends, for instance, the authors challenge those who see the roughly simultaneous rise of “reactionary nativism” in the United States and Western Europe as more of a coincidence than a trend. Responding to their own question — in that case, why today? — they write: “One possible answer is ‘contagious imitation.’” That’s certainly a possible answer, but they have already given us the ingredients of another, more plausible, explanation for the simultaneous rise of the extremist right in Western Europe and the United States (and the illiberal turn in Central and Eastern Europe). This was the interaction of the global financial crisis with decades of bottled-up disaffection — in many countries, including the United States, fuelled by decades of stagnant incomes — which combined to produce an electoral rebellion.

The disaffection was driven by a mix of factors, some common across the West, others particular to different locations. Emigration was a longstanding problem not only in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, but also in parts of the United States and Western Europe, where it left regions and even whole countries with an older and more conservative population. The problem persists: Putin spent much of his recent state of the nation address outlining measures to encourage more births; Hungary has begun offering free in vitro fertilisation on top of its existing pro-birth polices; and Poland, Lithuania and Bulgaria are among the other countries using incentives (usually unsuccessfully) to try to lift birth rates.

Life expectancy was another canary in the mine. In Hochschild’s Louisiana, life expectancy at birth is three years lower than the United States’s not very impressive national figure of 78.6 years (and falling), which itself is four years lower than Australia’s 82.6 (and rising). In Britain, gains in life expectancy have stalled nationally and the figure is falling in some regions.

Although the point gets sidelined by their imitation thesis, Krastev and Holmes do acknowledge the impact of population ageing and decline in Central and Eastern Europe. “In a country where the majority of young people yearn to leave, the very fact that you have remained, regardless of how well you are doing, makes you a loser,” they write. “It also readies you to cheer anti-liberal demagogues who denounce copycat Westernisation as a betrayal of the nation.” Without the reference to “copycat Westernisation,” that passage could be referring to Louisiana, or to many other regions experiencing population decline in the United States, Britain or Western Europe.

Those population-related statistics are part of an alternative explanation for why the light failed. If a country is ageing unusually quickly — because of fewer births, more deaths or departures exceeding arrivals — then the shift in sentiment in those countries is at least partly a shift in demography. The views of particular individuals needn’t change in order for the balance of opinion within a country or region to shift. The political impact of that shift can be magnified by the electoral system and how it is administered. In some countries, electoral laws are used to discourage younger or poorer voters from voting; in some of the same countries, and in others, the system is weighted towards older, rural and more conservative voters.

In the United States, the second phenomenon is bad and getting worse: “By 2040,” political analyst Ezra Klein wrote recently, “70 per cent of Americans will live in the fifteen largest states. That means 70 per cent of America will be represented by only thirty senators, while the other 30 per cent of America will be represented by seventy senators.” With the presidential electoral college system following a similar trajectory, says Klein, Republicans “represent a shrinking constituency that holds vast political power. That has injected an almost manic urgency into their strategy. Behind the party’s tactical extremism lurks an apocalyptic sense of political stakes.”

In what are essentially two-party systems, the behaviour and leadership of the parties also matters when demography and other factors shift sentiment. Britain is still basically the country that elected Tony Blair three times; the United States is still the country that elected Barack Obama. The fact that British voters failed to elect Jeremy Corbyn prime minister and enough American voters in enough states knocked back Hillary Clinton doesn’t necessarily the country has changed fundamentally. In the case of the United States, the Democrats have won the popular majority in all but one of the seven presidential elections since 1992, including the one that brought Donald Trump to power.

One other factor was present in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe though not to anywhere near the same extent in the other countries discussed in The Light That Failed. That’s the sheer speed and intensity of change after 1989, propelled (especially in Russia) by Western-backed “shock therapy.” Within a few years, the political and economic system of every iron-curtain country had changed almost out of recognition, and maps had to be redrawn to show the new boundaries of the diminished giant on its eastern edge.

Demographic change and suspicion of elites have long been at work in Hochschild’s Louisiana, too. At around the time Lee Sharman came clean at the meeting of local fisherfolk, he also joined a tiny environmental organisation called RESTORE. It was hardly the kind of group that the big polluting businesses had much to fear from, but it seems to have come to the attention of at least one of the companies operating in the area.

One day, a schoolteacher who no one knew joined the group. Strange things began to happen. At first he seemed helpful, but then, on a shopping expedition for the group, he bought two GPSs and then told other members that Lee had bought them for himself with the group’s money. Left alone with the computer holding RESTORE’s records, he installed spyware. When this was discovered, there was a confrontation and the group fell apart. It later emerged, via a sworn deposition from a senior company executive, that chemical manufacturer Condea Vista had hired former Special Forces agents to infiltrate the group.

Yet, after all his experiences of the big polluters — the after-dark chemical dumping, the peremptory sacking, the infiltration — Lee still preferred the companies (and the state government, which had long been in cahoots with the companies) to the federal government, as did his fellow Tea Party members. How could this possibly be the case? It’s worth quoting Hochschild’s answer at length:

Lee’s biggest beef was taxes. They went to the wrong people — especially welfare beneficiaries who “lazed around days and partied at night” and government workers in cushy jobs. He knew liberal Democrats wanted him to care more about welfare recipients, but he didn’t want their PC rules telling him who to feel sorry for. He had his own more local — and personal — way of showing sympathy for the poor. Every Christmas, through Beau-Care, a Beauregard Parish nonprofit community agency, he and his wife, “Miss Bobby,” chose seven envelopes off of a Christmas tree and provided a present for the child named on the enclosed card…

Two events further soured him on the IRS [the US government’s tax office]. In one, he got a part-time job to earn a little extra money, but worked more hours than federal rules allowed, got caught, and had to wait a year to get back on Social Security… More enraging was the second event. “I made a date with a clerk at the IRS office to collect a tax refund of a certain amount, and nothing about the meeting did I like,” Lee explains. “The gal wore a see-through blouse, to distract me. Then she asked for every possible receipt, tallied the amount up wrong, and gave me less than I had coming. She cheated me. I needed the money, but I never cashed that cheque.”

I’m not sure whether Lee could ever be persuaded that federal welfare funds are always well spent, but even liberals can sympathise with his response to tight, zealously enforced rules and seemingly arbitrary decision-making.

So would his counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. As Timothy Garton Ash writes, “All current European populisms feed off anger at the way in which liberalism was reduced after 1989 to one rather extreme version of a purely economic liberalism, without the ‘equal respect and concern’ for all citizens that the philosopher Ronald Dworkin identified as essential to a modern liberalism.”

It’s easy to forget the upsides of a different kind of liberalism from the version that has had the upper hand since the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — a kind of liberalism that combines pluralism, tolerance and generous help for people in need, and needn’t have neoliberalism as its necessary end-point. You might call it social democracy — which, as the New Statesman’s Jeremy Cliffe wrote recently, “might seem like an anti-climactic suggestion” but brings together, in theory at least, “redistributive taxation, social insurance, universal public services, non-market mechanisms of coordination (such as trade unions) and a strategic role for the state where the market falls short.”

For their part, Krastev and Holmes are optimistic in a characteristically idiosyncratic way: “We can endlessly mourn the globally dominant liberal order that we have lost or we can celebrate our return to a world of perpetually jostling political alternatives, realising that a chastised liberalism, having recovered from its unrealistic and self-defeating aspirations to global hegemony, remains the idea most at home in the twenty-first century.” •

The post Was the future better yesterday? appeared first on Inside Story.

Let’s start at the beginning, or at the least the Australian beginning for Rudi and his first wife, Veronica. (I’m using pseudonyms because Rudi’s situation is delicately balanced.) About ten years ago, Rudi, Veronica and their toddler Maja left Europe for Australia. Veronica was an international student and the primary visa holder. Rudi and Maja were classified as her dependants.

About a year later, Rudi and Veronica’s relationship fell apart. Rudi needed his own visa if he wanted to stay in Australia and remain a father to Maja. He returned to study, starting with an English course then moving on to vocational qualifications in management and IT. At each stage he gained a new student visa.

For reasons that will become apparent, it’s important to stress that Rudi mentioned his daughter whenever he applied for a new visa, and that staying close to Maja was important to him. Technically, such honesty could have cost Rudi dearly, because all international students must satisfy a genuine temporary entrant requirement designed to identify — and potentially exclude — applicants who use the student visa program “for motives other than gaining a quality education.” Personal ties that “present a strong incentive to stay in Australia” are grounds for a refusal.

Rudi’s visas were routinely granted, though, which meant he could study and work during the week and care for Maja at weekends. “It was a good arrangement,” he says, because his relations with Veronica were amicable. “A verbal agreement on shared custody was all we needed.” But that didn’t last.

Over time, Rudi and Veronica both started other relationships. Veronica’s new partner was Australian, and their marriage meant that she and Maja would eventually become Australian citizens. Rudi fell in love with Maria Rosa, an international student from Latin America. Maria and Rudi married and had a baby, Maja’s half-brother Robbie, who is now a toddler.

Somewhere along the way, relations between Rudi and Veronica soured, and they could no longer agree on arrangements for sharing Maja’s care. When months of mediation failed, they ended up in the Family Court. (The involvement of the Family Court is another reason for blurring personal details in this story; Section 121 of the Family Law Act makes it an offence to report on proceedings in a manner that may identify the individuals involved in a particular case.) After a process that lasted eighteen months, the Family Court granted Rudi shared custody of Maja in a roughly 40–60 split with Veronica: Maja spends five nights a fortnight with Rudi, Maria and Robbie during school terms and is with them for half the school holidays.

While the Family Court recognises Rudi’s central role in the life of his daughter, these legally sanctioned shared-custody arrangements have no bearing on his immigration status. So, as Rudi completed his final course and his last student visa neared its end date, he faced a dilemma — how could he stay in Australia and maintain his role as Maja’s father? Although he was steadily employed, he lacked the qualifications that would secure him a visa as a skilled migrant.

As I have reported before in Inside Story, no visa category exists to allow the foreign parent of an Australian child to stay here in order to share his or her care and maintain their relationship. Desperate foreign parents must find complex workarounds, wriggle through migration loopholes, or leave the country and lose access to their child.

Rudi tried two things, and this is where his visa problems got really serious.

One approach involved an application for a contributory parent visa (subclass 143) supported by the church Rudi attends. As the wrinkled faces gracing the relevant pages of the Home Affairs website indicate, this visa is designed for a completely different purpose — to enable adult migrants who have settled in Australia to sponsor their ageing parents to join them here. As Rudi’s child, Maja is eligible to sponsor her father to stay in Australia; as a minor, however, this would require her mother’s consent and signing on her behalf. With the deteriorated relationship between Rudi and Veronica this was not an option, which is why the church stepped in.

This visa category has other drawbacks. It costs around $45,000 per applicant, it presently takes at least four years to process and it can only be granted if the applicant is outside Australia. Unlike many other visas, lodging an application doesn’t make you eligible for a bridging visa — in other words, it doesn’t help Rudi stay in Australia in the short term.

If Rudi, Maria and Robbie were forced to leave Australia until the visa was granted, they would be separated from Rudi’s daughter for four crucial years of her life — years in which she would go from being a teenager to a young adult. “You show love for children by being there,” says Rudi’s migration agent, who is advising him pro-bono. “If you are not present, they feel like they are not loved. When they grow up, they will say, ‘you left me’ and they won’t necessarily understand why.”

“I don’t want to be one of those absent fathers,” says Rudi. Of course, he could maintain a relationship with Maja online, through video calls and messaging apps. But his ability to stay in touch with his daughter would be at the discretion of his former wife. Given their estrangement, Rudi fears that Veronica might not allow such contact. As his migration agent points out, the Family Court’s decision on shared custody doesn’t say anything about the terms of any contact with Maja from overseas. Nor, once he has left Australia, can he go back to the court to seek new orders enabling him to keep in touch with Maja online.

Rudi and Maria also pursued a second option to keep Rudi in Australia. Maria applied for a new student visa, with Rudi and their son Robbie as her dependents. If she were granted a visa, then the family could all live in Australia while she studied, and the contributory parent visa would be much closer to being finalised by the time she completed her course.

But Maria’s visa application was denied. And when she appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, it was denied there too.

The fly in the ointment was the genuine temporary entrant requirement. Given the family’s extended student visa history in Australia, the presence of an Australian citizen child (Maja) and a lodged contributory parent visa, Home Affairs and the AAT both concluded, quite reasonably, that Maria was not a genuine temporary entrant. A key purpose of her student visa application was to enable Rudi to remain in Australia close to his daughter.

As Rudi’s migration agent acknowledges, Home Affairs and the AAT are not doing anything wrong in a legal sense. They are applying migration law correctly, but the effect of doing so produces a manifest injustice.

Cases like this are not just about rights of foreign parents; they are also about the rights of Australian children. Maja, an Australian citizen, risks being denied a close bond with her father and her younger brother. This contravenes the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires signatory states like Australia to ensure “that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when competent authorities… determine, in accordance with applicable law and procedures, that such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.” In Rudi and Maja’s case, the competent authorities — at the Family Court — have determined exactly the opposite: that it is in Maja’s best interests to have an ongoing relationship with her father.

The convention goes on to say that governments “shall respect the right of the child who is separated from one or both parents to maintain personal relations and direct contact with both parents on a regular basis.” States must deal with a parent’s applications to enter or leave a country for the purpose of family reunification “in a positive, humane and expeditious manner.”

There is nothing positive, humane or expeditious about the operation of Australia’s migration law in such circumstances. The lack of a simple visa pathway forces families to live for years in a state of anxious uncertainty. And in Rudi’s case, that limbo could last a long time yet.

Rudi’s last hope rests with an application for the immigration minister to personally consider his case. The minister has the discretion to replace the tribunal’s decision with one that is “more favourable” if he or she thinks it is “in the public interest to do so.” In short, the minister could choose to grant Rudi and his family visas.

Sometimes referred to as the God powers, ministerial discretion is non-delegable, non-compellable and non-reviewable. In other words, the minister alone makes such decisions; he or she can’t be forced to consider any particular case; there is no set timeline for reaching a decision; and no decision made in this way can be challenged in any court or tribunal.

The process is also entirely opaque. Home Affairs no longer publishes data on requests for intervention, but in the last year it did, back in 2011–12, more than 8000 individual applications were received. It is reasonable to assume the number is higher today. If the minister were to resolve 8000 cases within a year, that would mean working seven days a week and considering and finalising twenty-two applications every day. Of course, the minister doesn’t consider each case personally. Gatekeeping staff vet applications against a set of guidelines to try to identify which ones should progress to the minister’s desk. As the Home Affairs website warns, only a small number do.

So, the fair resolution of exceptional cases like Rudi’s — ones that migration law does not cater for — rely on the discretion of the minister. And yet there is no guarantee the minister will even look at such cases personally.

“We have to work with the legislation we’ve got,” says Rudi’s migration agent. “We’ve been up front and honest all the way.” The agent is buoyed by the fact that Rudi, Maria and Robbie have been granted three-month bridging visas. That suggests that the application didn’t fall at the first hurdle when it was vetted by staff in the minister’s office. But that also means the process could drag on for an unknown period. The responsible minister, David Coleman, has just taken indefinite leave from his portfolio, and his duties have been handed to Alan Tudge. Given the holiday season, and the fact that Mr Tudge will continue as minister for population, cities and urban infrastructure too, it seems unlikely that he’ll get around to considering Rudi’s plight any time soon.

As a result, Rudi and his family could find themselves living on one short-term bridging visa after another, never knowing if it will be renewed, and unable to travel outside the country in the meantime. Rudi worries that if one of his parents back in Europe were to fall seriously ill, he would be unable to visit them.

Rudi knows that sharing his story with me won’t alter his own fate. But he wants Australians to know what is happening to his family, because he thinks the way the law operates is wrong and should be changed.

Cases like his are not common, but as the number of temporary migrants living in Australia continues to grow, more families will be caught up in legal and administrative complexity, trapped between migration law and family law, two systems that don’t talk to one another. For those involved, the stakes are extraordinarily high. Yet it would be relatively easy for the government to create a straightforward visa pathway to enable foreign parents to live in the same country as their Australian children. • 

The post “I don’t want to be one of those absent fathers” appeared first on Inside Story.

As a hold-out defender of the White Australia policy in its dying decade, Menzies might find contemporary Australia very strange indeed. But he was right to predict that we haven’t detached ourselves from our old anchors and traditions; in fact, we are weighed down by them.

That, in large part, is the thesis of Tim Watts’s book. Watts celebrates Australia as “a nation that combines stable Westminster institutions, an open economy, and a liberal society with a young, dynamic and diverse population.” But it is held back, he says, by the “psychological hangover” of the White Australia policy:

The Australian identity of the past excludes too many of us and doesn’t speak to many others. It doesn’t bind us together in a sense of common purpose, a sense that what happens to one of us should matter to all of us. And our national symbols are increasingly used by people who want to divide us, rather than bring us together.

The ill effects of our hangover are felt in executive suites, courts, lecture theatres, newsrooms and parliaments. There are more CEOs called Peter in the ASX 200 companies than there are Asian Australians. Australians with an Asian heritage make up about 15 per cent of the population but account for just 3.1 per cent of partners in law firms, 1.6 per cent of barristers and 0.8 per cent of judges. Australia’s thirty-nine universities host more than a quarter of a million students from Asia, but there is only one vice-chancellor from a non-European background. All members of the ABC board are white, and the national broadcaster’s senior executives and content-makers don’t reflect the diversity of Australian society either. Asian Australians hold just five out of the 226 seats in the national parliament, and the top ranks of the public service are even less representative.

As Watts notes, this is not a uniquely Australian problem, but the statistics suggest that we perform far worse than comparable settler societies like the United States and Canada, and even former colonial powers like Britain. It seems little has changed since we attempted to become Asia-literate under Bob Hawke and debated whether Australia was an Asian nation under Paul Keating. In 2010, academics Andrew Markus, James Jupp and Peter McDonald wrote of the “paradox” that contemporary Australia is “a multicultural society with monocultural institutions.” As Watts puts it, we have “practically dismantled, but never quite symbolically disowned, the White Australia policy” and “the way we shaped our national identity in the past shapes our national symbols and institutions today.”

Tim Watts is Labor’s shadow assistant communications and cyber security minister and represents the federal seat of Gellibrand in Melbourne’s west. As he says proudly on his website, this is “one of the most diverse electorates in the country” with nearly two-thirds of residents born overseas or having a parent born overseas.

It is refreshing to find a serving politician writing a book that is not a naked exercise in self-promotion. It is especially welcome when that politician engages with complex and contested areas of public policy — national identity, immigration, multiculturalism — that carry significant electoral risk. Despite the obligatory genuflection to Australia as “the best country in the world,” his approach is open and critical. What is more, Watts writes clearly and engagingly. He deftly weaves his own family history into the narrative, opening with a visit to the Gum San (Gold Mountain) Chinese Heritage Centre in Ararat with his four-year-old Hong Kong Chinese–Australian son, and soberly documenting the darker exploits of his pioneering ancestors: Charles Nantes, a nineteen-year-old member of South Australia’s first fleet who arrived on the Africaine, and John Watts, the first MP to represent the Darling Downs in Queensland’s colonial parliament.

Nantes later moved to Geelong, became a member of the local Anti-Chinese Committee and helped lobby for the introduction of prohibitive poll taxes to deter Chinese migrants from landing in Victoria during the gold rush. The Chinese were forced to land at Robe in South Australia instead, and walk hundreds of kilometres overland to the diggings. John Watts, meanwhile, spent some of his brief stint in parliament justifying the atrocities committed against Indigenous Australians by Queensland’s Native Police.

Watts is attempting to grapple constructively with this past:

There is value in speaking about the legacy of the racism of White Australia in our national identity as a member of a family that’s participated in creating, and benefited from, that structure. Taking responsibility and seeking to make amends is an important symbolic act in itself.

Watts’s larger project is to reconcile “our national imaginings” with “our national realities.” He references Noel Pearson’s vision of weaving together the disparate strands of Indigenous heritage, British institutions and multicultural migration into a strong cord of shared identity. This would be the foundation of “the Golden Country,” a nation that offers the best of all worlds.

Watts thoughtfully mines Australia’s past for forgotten riches in support of this project. His title draws on an article published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine at the time when anti-Chinese sentiment in the colonies was at its height. Running counter to the prevailing sentiment of “Australia for the White Man” — the Bulletin’s strapline from 1886 until Donald Horne became editor in the 1960s — the Blackwood’s article envisaged Chinese and Europeans mixing in the goldfields to create a “Golden Australia.” This strand of “alternative tradition” deserves honouring, as do the lone voices of senator James Macfarlane and Bruce Smith MP, the only federal politicians who objected to the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 on the grounds that it “denied the Christian doctrine of common humanity.”

Watts would also like us to be as familiar with the exploits of sniper Billy Sing at Anzac Cove as we are with Simpson and his donkey. Simpson lived in Australia for just four years, having jumped ship from the British merchant navy in 1910, and enlisted in the hope of getting free passage home to England. None of this diminishes his bravery, but it does raise the question of why Billy Sing only rates on mention in Charles Bean’s official history of Australia’s Great War (in the caption to a photograph), given that Sing was apparently Australia’s best sniper, credited with killing 300 Turkish soldiers.

Born in Clermont in outback Queensland, Sing was a joker and a larrikin who had worked as a stockman, cane cutter, cricketer and kangaroo shooter. His commanding officer described him as “a good-hearted, well-behaved fellow” and said that “a braver soldier never shouldered a gun.” He had all the trappings of a stereotypical Australian hero, bar one — as his surname suggests, he was not white. By contrast, the white and newly dead Simpson was drafted into legend status during the war as part of a propaganda effort to overcome a recruitment crisis and to bolster the Yes campaign in the fierce debate over conscription. “The veneration of Simpson and the near obliteration of Sing tell us a lot about the power of the Australian Legend,” writes Watts, “and the way it perpetuated a narrow image of Australian identity.”

Watts navigates cogently through the history of Australia’s (dis)engagement with Asian migration: the gold rush, Federation, White Australia, the first world war, the mass settlement of displaced Europeans after the second world war, the arrival of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the subsequent calls by historian Geoffrey Blainey and opposition leader John Howard for a cut in the rate of Asian migration, the Howard era and the rise and fall of Pauline Hanson, the 2016 election and Hanson’s resurgence.

He writes tellingly about recent policy failings: the “creeping securitisation of immigration policy” symbolised in departmental name changes from Immigration and Citizenship to Immigration and Border Protection; the “symbolic downgrading” of the department’s nation-building role when it was subsumed into Home Affairs, and the associated loss of expertise in settlement services; the shocking exploitation of international students, working holiday-makers and other temporary visa holders.

He poses important questions, pondering, for example, what questions we would be asking today if we returned nation-building to the heart of immigration policy. He contemplates how we might come to terms with our past, perhaps by apologising to Chinese Australians, Pacific Islanders and others for the impact of the Immigration Restriction Act on their families and communities, as Victoria has apologised for the gold rush–era poll tax.

The book is not without its weaknesses, though. First, Howard looms too large in Watts’s reckoning of responsibility for our current problems. Howard “crippled our symbolic nation-building capacity when we most needed it,” he writes, with disastrous results. “Unfortunately, the revanchism of the Howard era on matters of race and identity have allowed the unconscious assumptions underpinning the [White Australia] policy to stumble on, zombie-like, in the symbols and institutions of our national identity.” The imagery is compelling, but while I don’t want to diminish Howard’s “weaponisation of race and immigration in the culture wars,” strategies like his only bear fruit if they fall on fertile ground. The resistance to attitudinal and systemic change runs deeper and is much harder to dislodge than a single prime minister.

Howard certainly combined high-level immigration with a tough-on-borders rhetoric and a careless dismissal of multicultural policy. On his watch Australia also shifted away from an assumption of permanent settlement and towards high levels of temporary entry, but there were larger demographic and economic forces at work too.

Watts also fails to resolve the tension between his desire to reimagine the Australian character by populating our history with forgotten characters like Billy Sing and the fact that the dominant strand in Australian identity emerged from the violent processes of expropriation and expulsion that shaped the nation.

Watts puts his finger on a substantial issue here. He argues that a strong sense of national identity is a necessary condition for a flourishing of the core institutions of a progressive society. Active participation in a representative electoral system, public investment in education and healthcare, and redistributive tax polices rely on “the mutual regard and obligation between citizens that underpins national identity.” But this thesis prompts another question: is it possible to create a unifying sense of national identity — an “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase — that is not also simultaneously exclusionary and limiting in its definition of who belongs?

Watts attempt to resolve this tension is to rescue something called “Australian values” from the ashes of our past; the egalitarianism that underpinned the Australian Settlement after federation and helped create a “working man’s paradise”; the mateship that enabled Australian soldiers to survive Japanese prison camps; the democratic temperament that saw Australia lead the world in delivering a universal franchise and electoral innovations like the secret ballot and compulsory voting. He writes, “Many of the values underpinning the Australian Legend — the fair go, egalitarianism, mateship, pragmatism, irreverence — haven’t lost their potency on our journey to the Golden Country.” The question is whether such things can be so easily disentangled. Can these values be recast, untainted by the fires in which they were forged?

The philosopher Charles W. Mills has called out his academic colleagues for teaching Immanuel Kant’s theories of inherent human dignity yet failing to mention that Kant was also one of the founding thinkers behind scientific racism. Kant formulated a hierarchy of race that had whites at the top, Africans and Native Americans at the bottom, and Asians somewhere in between. It is not sufficient, Mills argues, to sanitise Kant by bracketing out his embarrassing and inconvenient racism and sexism as if they were an aberration or somehow peripheral to Kant’s core thinking. Nor can we simply replace Kant’s Eurocentric definition of person with a more inclusive one. In his essay “Kant’s Untermenschen,” Mills argues that we must take on a much larger philosophical challenge:

Instead of pretending that Kant was arguing for equal respect to be extended to everybody, we should be asking how Kant’s theory needs to be rethought in the light not merely of his own racism but of a modern world with a normative architecture based on racist Kant-like principles. How is “respect” to be cashed out, for example, for a population that has historically been seen as less than persons?… How is cosmopolitanism to be realised on a globe shaped by hundreds of years of European expansionism?

I suspect that coming to terms with Australia’s history in order to chart our way to a golden future is an intellectual and moral task of similarly daunting proportions. •

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Visas to encourage migrants to settle in regional Australia and smaller cities have existed for around twenty-five years, and at first blush the latest changes seem minor. First, a new regional employer-sponsored visa will replace the current Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme, or RSMS, which has existed since 1995. Second, the provisional state/territory government-sponsored regional visa (subclass 489) will be replaced by a new visa to be called the skilled work regional (provisional) visa.

But the devil is in the detail. Where the old RSMS granted immediate permanent residence subject to a two year employment contract, the new regional employer-sponsored visa will give only provisional status. And while the new state/territory-sponsored skilled work regional (provisional) visa is theoretically easier to access, both will be hard to convert to permanent residence.

Both visas will require their holders to live and work for three years in a regional area or a smaller capital city (Adelaide, Hobart, Canberra and Darwin). Before they can become permanent residents, they will also need to earn a minimum annual salary of $53,400. Provisional employer-sponsored visa holders must also remain in the same occupation for the full three years. For these purposes, occupations are classified according to the six-digit ANZSCO job code used by the home affairs department; even minor changes in work — moving from one type of nursing to another, for instance — could potentially wipe out eligibility for permanent residence.

The existing RSMS visa requires newly arrived workers to enter into a two-year contract with their regional employer, and the existing state/territory-sponsored provisional visa requires them to live in a regional area for at least two years, and to work in that area for a year or more earning at least the minimum full-time wage.

Before we get to the detail of these new visas, it’s worth mentioning that the government is also negotiating additional Designated Area Migration Agreements in a number of regions. These agreements provide opportunities for employers to recruit temporary semiskilled workers with limited English and on very low pay. Meatworkers, farm hands, waiters, cooks and truck drivers are likely occupations. These visas are not counted as part of the permanent migration program.

In effect, these agreements outsource to local and regional authorities the federal government’s responsibility to protect workers from exploitation. Because of their low skill levels and generally poor English, these workers have very little chance of gaining provisional or permanent residence, and most will be required to leave Australia at the end of their temporary visa. In this sense, they are totally beholden to their employers. If they are dismissed, some of them — having spent many years working and living in regional Australia — may become overstayers who are at even greater risk of exploitation.

Designated Area Migration Agreements are poor public policy. By making temporary migrants wholly reliant on a single employer, they replicate mistakes in immigration policy made by the United States and countries in Europe, just when those countries are trying to learn from Australia’s experience.

Regional Australia is also feeling the impact of a surge in asylum seekers. The fact that most are working on farms — around 95,000 in recent years — mirrors another feature of failed policy and practice in the United States and Europe. As the chart below shows, the increase in their numbers is being offset by a decline in the stock of working holiday-makers and skilled temporary residents. (None of these people are counted as part of the migration program. But their movements do show up in the Australian Bureau of Statistics’s population figures, which the government can use to reassure business that the migration cuts aren’t as great as they seem.)

Yearly snapshot of skilled temporary entrants and working holiday makers residing in Australia

Source: Department of Home Affairs website. Stock data for working holiday-makers at end June 2019 not publicly available, but first visa grants for these fell significantly in 2018–19.

The government has also set aside 5000 places in the permanent migration program for its new “global talent visa,” which targets people with special skills relevant to niche and emerging industries. Despite the government’s hopes, migration agents advise that take-up of this visa remains low.

According to the government’s March 2019 population plan, the primary objective of the 2019–20 migration program is to increase the number of skilled people settling in regional Australia while reducing the number who settle in major cities. As this chart shows, the anticipated increase in regional visas is indeed dramatic.

Newly issued state-specific and regional migration visas

Source: Department of Home Affairs migration program reports, 2018–19.
Note: For 2018–19, the chart includes only provisional and permanent residence visas counted as part of the formal migration program. Outcome for 2018-19 does not include a small number of state-sponsored business visas. Designated Area Migration Agreements are not included because they offer no pathway to permanent residence. The 2019–20 planning level includes an assumed 3000 Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme visa grants, but is likely to be less than the actual backlog of applications if there is a surge in RSMS applications ahead of 16 November 2019.

While the overall number of state-specific and regional migration visas planned for 2019–20 may be less than the peak in 2012–13, the risks for individual visa holders are increased by four factors: the speed of the increase in numbers; the relatively subdued demand for labour in regional areas; the increase in the proportion of provisional visas; and the much more difficult conditions for securing permanent residence.

The first challenge, though, will be to issue the planned 50,000 state-specific and regional migration visas in 2019–20.

Demand is strong for permanent residency among the rapidly growing group of temporary graduate visa holders currently in Australia. At the end of June, around 90,000 temporary graduates were resident in Australia, and thousands more had returned to a student visa to acquire additional qualifications and/or acquire the three years of skilled experience required for employer-sponsored permanent visas. Most are living in the major capital cities, of course, but perhaps the federal government thinks that many of them will readily move to regional Australia to apply for the new visas.

The new version of RSMS has 9000 places in 2019–20 to be delivered over seven to eight months — around the same as the number granted for the whole of 2018–19 under the current scheme. Changes made in 2018 have already led to a decline in RSMS application rates so great that a large portion of the 9000 visas granted under RSMS during 2018–19 went to people who had lodged an application under the old rules. The maximum age for applicants was reduced from fifty to forty-five; the English-language requirement was tightened; the minimum required skilled work experience was lifted to three years; and a Skilling Australia Fund charge of $3000 was imposed on small businesses and $5000 on large businesses for each migrant worker nominated. All these conditions carry over into the new version of RSMS.

The new version of RSMS will also require the applicant to undertake a formal skills assessment. No waivers will be available, even if the applicant had undertaken a skills assessment in the process of obtaining a temporary graduate visa after graduating from an Australian educational institution.

Although the new visa will include a larger number of eligible occupations, its various conditions mean that it will be less attractive than a general employer-sponsored visa — the opposite of what the government says it intended. Its 9000 places are unlikely to be filled by a sizeable margin.

Perhaps in recognition of this problem, the federal government is taking steps to limit other options for potential migrants and force more of them to apply for regional visas. Overall, only 30,000 places are available in 2019–20 for employer-sponsored visas (far less than the 40,000 to 50,000 of recent years), and that figure includes any visas granted under the existing RSMS.

To shift the focus of the migration program to regional Australia, the government has also significantly reduced the number of places in the traditional points-tested skilled independent category, as the chart below highlights. This is the visa category that has most distinguished Australia as a migrant nation over the past thirty years, and has often been approvingly referred to by British and American politicians because of the strong labour-market performance of these migrants.

The decline in these visas in 2019–20 may be even greater than the chart suggests because the government virtually stopped releasing places in this category in August and September this year. If the government persists with this strategy for many more months, it may run out of time to process even the reduced number of places in this category planned for 2019–20.

Newly issued points-tested skilled independent visas

Source: Department of Home Affairs website.
Notes: The figures for 2018–19 and 2019–20, which are projections, assume the same level of skilled independent visas to New Zealand citizens as in 2017–18. Prior to 2017–18, NZ citizens accessing skilled independent visas were not counted as part of the migration program.

These declines in numbers leave state/territory government-nominated visas to play a crucial role in delivering the 2019–20 migration program.

The Commonwealth has planned for 24,986 places in 2019–20 for two of the existing state/territory-nominated visa subclasses — the direct permanent residence subclass 190 as well as the provisional subclass 489 — in 2019–20. During July and August this year, state/territory governments nominated 1130 migrants under subclass 190 and 3197 migrants under subclass 489. In the latter, the Coalition-held states of South Australia (1662 nominations), Tasmania (703) and New South Wales (649) led the way, with very few nominations from the other states/territories.

At that rate, the planning level of 24,986 looks achievable. But once the old subclass 489 is closed to new nominations on 16 November, all state/territory governments will need to significantly increase nominations under subclass 190 compared to the first two months of 2019–20.

Demand for subclass 190 from temporary graduates in Australia will be very strong. But if the labour market weakens further, state/territory governments may choose to severely limit the number of migrants they nominate under subclass 190. That would result in a shortfall in visa grants compared to the 24,986 planning level.

The Commonwealth has allocated a further 14,000 places for the new state/territory-nominated provisional visa starting from 16 November 2019. Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory are likely to use it very sparingly given the possibility of exploitation and the risk that these migrants will be unable to find employment that pays $53,400 per annum over three years. The Labor governments of these states/territories are likely to prefer the subclass 190 visa, which allows for immediate permanent residence — though only for people in the health, aged care and other occupations with critical shortages.

The federal government will be pressuring South Australia and Tasmania in particular to significantly increase the number of migrants they nominate for the new provisional visa. Both governments will be wary of the risk of exploitation and destitution, South Australia especially so given that nominated migrants in that state have in the past complained that they were misled about the ready availability of well-paying skilled jobs.

The key point is that jobs that pay recent graduates $53,400 per annum — the same minimum salary required for skilled temporary entrants in Sydney and Melbourne — are not common in South Australia or Tasmania, or indeed in many parts of regional Australia. This might be a low salary for experienced skilled workers in large cities, but it is too high for relatively recent graduates in regional Australia. (In May this year, average annual earnings for all private sector employees in South Australia were $52,265, and $49,322 in Tasmania. In regional centres — Albury, for example, on $45,382, or Griffith on $41,042 — the figures were even lower.)

In time, of course, most skilled migrants attract much higher salaries. But to expect them to do so soon after graduation puts them at risk of exploitation and/or immigration limbo.

Add to that the high and rising rates of unemployment in these states, and the South Australian and Tasmanian governments would be foolhardy to make extensive use of the new visa. Trend unemployment in South Australia increased from 5.5 per cent to 6.8 per cent over the year to August 2019, with the rate for people looking for full-time work increasing to 7.4 per cent. In Tasmania, trend unemployment increased from 5.9 per cent to 6.6 per cent over the same period, with the rate for people looking for full-time work increasing to 7.3 per cent.

The challenge in South Australia, Tasmania and regional Australia will be to match the skills of potential applicants with the vacancies that do exist (11,500 in South Australia and 3700 in Tasmania as at August 2019). Experience shows that this isn’t straightforward.

Of course, the largest numbers of job vacancies in August 2019 were in New South Wales (76,200) and Victoria (65,400), and most likely mainly in Sydney and Melbourne. As the next chart shows, while the number of job vacancies has risen strongly as a portion of the number of unemployed in recent years, this trend reversed in 2019. Nevertheless, the overall number of job vacancies remains substantial.

Job vacancies as a proportion of total unemployed

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics catalogue nos. 6202 and 6354.

The government’s skilled migration strategy will do little to tackle these shortages, and cuts to funding for post-school education and training of Australian residents will make them worse. The fact that many overseas students study commerce and finance, occupations that are not in high demand in regional Australia, will also complicate skills matching by state/territory governments.

As it stands, the most likely outcome for the 2019–20 migration program is that the Commonwealth’s skilled migration projections won’t be met without significant policy changes. When the shortfall attracts criticism from the business sector, the government may try to shift the blame to state/territory governments. And to maintain its preferred balance of migrants — two-thirds skilled, one-third families — the Commonwealth might also need to cut back further on the family stream, which would raise a whole fresh set of issues. •

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Although the AfD attracted only one in eight German electors, it won 27 per cent of votes in the East German state of Saxony, narrowly beating the Christian Democrats’ 26.9 per cent. This remarkable result brought Saxony’s next state election, still two years away, into sharp focus.

Some commentators portrayed the state election — which was eventually scheduled for 1 September this year — as potentially the most significant state-level vote since reunification; others called it a Schicksalswahl, an election that would determine Germany’s fate. A Bundestag in which a far-right newcomer had become the largest opposition party was one thing; a state parliament in which the AfD was the dominant party would be quite another. Would the AfD once more outperform the established parties? Might it even be able to form government? Or would Saxony become ungovernable?

The rise of the AfD, which has been around for just six years but is represented in the national Bundestag and all sixteen state parliaments, is widely interpreted as the most obvious sign of a Rechtsruck, a lurch to the right, in German society. As I’ll explain, I don’t subscribe to that view. What’s beyond doubt, however, is that the AfD has undergone its own Rechtsruck. From a party of Eurosceptics with a neoliberal agenda, it has morphed into a far-right party whose leaders promote an aggressive nationalism, deny that humans are responsible for climate change, and bitterly oppose Germany’s accommodating of significant numbers of refugees and asylum seekers.

The radicalisation of the AfD’s program didn’t scare off voters; on the contrary, it attracted a higher percentage of the vote. But the party’s support has been unevenly distributed. In the 2017 federal election, for example, it scored well below 10 per cent in the four northwest German states of Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Bremen and Hamburg. In Saxony, where it performed best, the results were also mixed: in Leipzig 2, one of two electorates in Saxony’s largest city, it came only third, behind the left-wing Die Linke, which topped the vote, and the Christian Democrats. At the other end of the spectrum, in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in Saxony’s southeast, the AfD’s candidate scored 37.4 per cent, the party’s best individual result nationally.

Most of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge’s 245,000 inhabitants live in small towns, the largest of which are Pirna, the shire’s administrative centre, and Freital. Both have populations of just below 40,000 and are within easy reach of Dresden. But the shire also includes small villages, some of which can’t easily be reached by public transport. It extends over 1654 square kilometres, approximately the combined total size of the city-states of Hamburg and Berlin.

Like other parts of the former German Democratic Republic, the southeast of Saxony was hit hard by the massive changes to the economy after 1989. The industrial bases of towns like Freital, Pirna, Sebnitz and Heidenau mostly disappeared, leaving industries that employ only a fraction of the workforce. Unemployment skyrocketed and the population declined, with young people — and young women, in particular — leaving for West Germany. In 2002 and 2013, Pirna and other communities along the Elbe and its tributaries were also hit hard by floods.

In economic terms, though, the shire has recovered well. Saxony’s unemployment rate is 5.4 per cent — lower, for example, than in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, or in the city-state of Hamburg. With 4.2 per cent, the shire of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has the lowest unemployment rate in all of Saxony.

For many communities here, the growth of tourism has been a key ingredient of economic recovery. Both Saxon Switzerland — the mountains along the Elbe between Pirna and the Czech border — and the Ore Mountains are a hiker’s paradise, and the latter are also a popular skiing destination. The shire has also benefited from the fact that nearby Dresden — less than a half-hour’s train ride away from some population centres — has been booming.

Most of the tourists are Germans, with another significant proportion from the neighbouring Czech Republic. But international tourism is playing its part. The tourism industry has also been responsible for labour migration; hotels and restaurants regularly fill vacancies by recruiting staff from across the Czech–German border.

To try to understand the local mood and get a sense of how the 1 September election would unfold in this part of the state, I visited Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge frequently over the months leading up to Sunday’s vote, speaking to local members of parliament, mayors and other local politicians and representatives of civil-society organisations. By mid August, while the forthcoming state elections were featuring prominently in the national media, the campaign still didn’t seem to be in full swing in the shire. Was this perhaps evidence of a political culture that was different from the one I had grown up with in West Germany?

Sunday 18 August 2019

With only a fortnight of campaigning still to go, the local newspaper, the Sächsische Zeitung, is dominated by matters other than the election. No large election rallies are scheduled in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, and only one public forum involving the main candidates in each of the four state electorates that cover the shire. This series of forums has been organised by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, the state body responsible for civic education. On 28 June, admittedly very early in the campaign, only sixty people had turned up for the forum in state electorate #49, which covers the town of Dippoldiswalde and the Eastern Ore Mountains.

Outside Pirna and Freital, comparatively few election posters are on display. Almost all of the ones that show local candidates or party leaders depict the faces of men, simply because most candidates in Saxony, and most of the parties’ state leaders, are men. Of the twenty-four candidates representing the six parties predicted to get over the 5 per cent threshold in the shire’s four state electorates — Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Greens, Die Linke, Free Democrats and AfD — only nine are women. Only the Greens and Die Linke are led by a team of one man and one woman; the leaders of the other four parties are men.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in particular, politics is men’s business. The Pirna town council, for example, has twenty-seven members, just three of whom are women. Only one of the nineteen towns in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge has a female mayor. Surely the peculiar politics in the shire have something to do with the fact that women play only a marginal role.

The politician whose image is most conspicuous in public spaces is forty-four-year-old Michael Kretschmer, the state premier. From 2002 until 2017, he was a member of the Bundestag; from 2009 until 2017 he also served as deputy leader of the Christian Democrats in federal parliament. The support he enjoyed in 2013 in the electorate of Görlitz, in Saxony’s east — 49.6 per cent of the primary vote, 30 per cent more than the runner-up from Die Linke — seemed rock-solid. But in 2017 he narrowly lost his seat to an AfD candidate. Less than a month later, Saxony’s premier, Stanislaw Tillich, resigned to make way for him. Since then, he has tried hard to convince people in Saxony that he is willing to listen, and that a vote for the AfD is not an effective means of protest.

On the question of how to deal with the AfD, Saxony’s Christian Democrats are divided. A minority of state MPs wouldn’t be opposed to forming a minority government that is tolerated by the far-right party. Kretschmer has ruled out such an option. But the matter is complicated. The vote compass developed by the Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung allows voters not just to see how closely their own views align with those of each political party but also to compare the positions held by the parties. According to the compass, the Christian Democrats and the AfD have a lot in common (about as much as, for example, the Social Democrats have in common with the Greens). The common ground between the Christian Democrats and their current state and national coalition partner, the Social Democrats, is far smaller.

Kretschmer and his supporters are also ruling out a coalition with Die Linke. They are willing to contemplate a deal with the Greens (which may be the only option left to them), but it is hard to see how they could agree on the phasing out of coalmining, for example, or the detention of “deportable” asylum seekers. The vote compass also detects very few synergies between Christian Democrats and Greens (as few as between the Social Democrats and the AfD), a problem both Kretschmer and the leaders of the Greens have acknowledged.

Among the parties that have put up posters across the shire is the neo-Nazi Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or NPD. Back in 2004, the NPD won 9.2 per cent of the statewide vote — by far the party’s best result in any state election since 1990. It was represented in Saxony’s parliament until 2013, when it missed the 5 per cent threshold by only 0.1 per cent. The NPD has had a strong presence in the shire, but at the local elections in May it performed well only where the AfD did not run candidates.

The AfD and NPD are not the only parties whose slogans are designed to blame foreigners, including refugees, for society’s ills. The Free Democrats are just more subtle. As one of their posters reads, dog whistle–style: “Drogen, Clans, Extremismus — Hier nicht!” (Drugs, clans, extremism — not here!)

Monday 19 August 2019

The election forum for state electorate #48 is held in a small performance space in Freital. About 150 people have come to listen to six local candidates, among them the sitting member and prominent Christian Democrat, Roland Wöller, interior minister in the state government.

Some of the candidates seem poorly prepared. The Social Democrats’ Daniela Forberg, for example, seems sometimes to be hastily consulting her party’s election program when she responds to questions. Others resort to oversimplifications and misrepresentations in the expectation that they won’t be held to account. Discussing the controversial issue of whether police officers should be identifiable, Wöller conveys the impression that the Greens and Die Linke would like the police to sport name badges, when all they have suggested is that police officers should be identifiable by means of a number that can be cited if a complaint is lodged.

Germany’s asylum policies elicit the strongest response from the audience. Should asylum seekers whose protection claims are unsuccessful be immediately deported, the moderator wants to know. Neither Wöller nor Forberg, whose parties have been responsible for asylum seeker policy at the national level, point out that it would be against longstanding government policy to deport people to war zones. Only Die Linke’s candidate does justice to the complexity of the issue.

The most uncomfortable question comes towards the end, from a man who introduces himself as a local businessman. He says that when crossing a nearby square he noticed a man wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with these words: “Schwarz ist die Nacht, in der wir euch kriegen / Weiß sind die Männer, die für Deutschland siegen / Rot ist das Blut auf dem Asphalt” (Black is the night when we’ll get you / White are the men who are victorious for Germany / Red is the blood on the road). These are the lyrics of a song, “Schwarz ist die Nacht,” recorded by Frontalkraft, an East German neo-Nazi rock band. The questioner didn’t say anything to the man with the t-shirt because he was not confident that other people nearby would support him if the situation got ugly. What would you do, he asks the six panellists. And “should I perhaps not encourage my non-German employees to learn German, lest they then be able to read such texts?”

The answers are evasive and unsatisfactory. None of the panellists wants to say that the presence of neo-Nazis is a major problem, and none wants to admit that neo-Nazi symbols, statements and attitudes are tolerated, if not condoned, by more than a few isolated (and, as one candidate ventured, “sick”) individuals.

Freital has had an image problem at least since 2015, when it became the scene of militant protests against a former hotel housing asylum seekers at the height of the “refugee crisis.” The town has also been associated with the Gruppe Freital, a far-right terrorist group formed in that year. Key members of the group were arrested in 2016, and two years later eight of them were convicted and given long prison sentences.

At the height of the protests against asylum seekers, Freital was also the scene of counter-protests — often carried out by people from Leipzig and Dresden, though, if not from places further afield. Many local citizens claimed that they were caught in the middle. Freital’s image as a hotbed of neo-Nazis has meant that journalists from West Germany regularly visit the town; too often the reports they file reinforce its image but do little to understand its problems. But the image, of course, is not without foundation.

Unlike in Pirna, whose mayor has gone out of his way to promote an image of a town that welcomes strangers and encourages asylum seeker support groups and anti-fascist initiatives, Freital’s local administration claims that the town has been victimised and its people misrepresented. But in Pirna, as in Freital, the AfD and politicians sympathising with its positions have enjoyed strong support at the ballot box. The Pirna mayor’s decision to take a stance might have had an impact on what can be said in public, but so far it doesn’t seem to have swayed people’s opinions.

Tuesday 20 August 2019

Public broadcaster MDR has published the results of a survey of which issues will be most decisive in influencing the voting decisions of electors in Saxony. It was no surprise that 24 per cent nominated “climate change and the protection of the environment.” Thanks to Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, reinforced by last year’s exceptionally hot and dry European summer, climate change has been the dominant issue in public debate in Germany this year. One result is the meteoric rise of the Greens, who outpolled the Social Democrats in the recent European elections, with some observers speculating that Robert Habeck, the charismatic co-leader of the Greens, rather than the leader of the Christian Democrats, might succeed Merkel as chancellor after the next national elections.

It is less obvious why another 24 per cent of surveyed voters nominated “refugees, immigration, asylum policy.” For a start, most issues to do with migration are federal rather than state matters. Also, this year has seen a further decline in the number of asylum seekers reaching Germany. In the first seven months of 2019, according to the latest statistics, Germany received 86,300 new applications for asylum — a far cry from 2015 and 2016, when the combined total was more than 1.1 million new applications. The shire currently accommodates 574 people with a pending asylum application, as well as 569 whose application has been rejected, and 807 refugees who have been granted protection. Only one in thirty-eight residents of the shire doesn’t hold a German passport, making Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge one of the shires with the lowest percentage of foreigners in the country.

At lunchtime, I come across a comparatively rare sight: a party campaigning in Pirna’s pedestrian mall. On a stall drumming up support for the Greens are one of the party’s local politicians and five members from Mönchengladbach, a city in the Rhineland, more than 600 kilometres west of here. They have come to Pirna and Freital for five days to support fellow Greens. They report that the experience of engaging with prospective voters is very different from back home. “We don’t normally get shouted at when campaigning,” I’m told. “People tend to be more civil back home.” No wonder then that none of the parties is doorknocking voters here.

Greens membership is low here compared with West Germany, and anybody offering to put leaflets in letterboxes or let themselves be abused in the local mall would be welcome. On the other hand, West German advice, help and attention comes with the burden of a twenty-nine-year post-reunification relationship in which West Germans knew what was best and took some pleasure in pointing out how ignorant, reactionary and behind the times their brothers and sisters in “Dunkeldeutschland,” or Dark Germany, were.

Tonight, about 200 people have come to listen to the six local candidates in state electorate #50, which includes Pirna, at a Landeszentrale-hosted forum. But the best-known local candidate, at least among people outside Pirna, has not been invited because her party isn’t likely to win more than 5 per cent of the vote. Frauke Petry won electorate #158, Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, in 2017 for the AfD; at the time, she was her party’s co-leader. Immediately after the election, she quit the AfD to set up the Blue Party. The AfD had moved too far to the right, she said. The Blue Party has had no electoral success so far, and Petry has not been able to persuade more than a handful of federal and state parliamentarians to leave the AfD and join her.

Petry’s nemesis was Jan Zwerg, the chairman of her local branch. He is now the general secretary of the AfD in Saxony, and the AfD’s candidate in state electorate #50. Zwerg is associated with the AfD’s right-wing faction, the so-called Flügel (wing), whose most prominent figure is Björn Höcke. Outside Germany, Höcke is perhaps best known for calling the Berlin Holocaust memorial a “Denkmal der Schande” (monument of shame). The Flügel has been investigated by Germany’s federal intelligence agency for advocating positions that violate Germany’s constitution. Saxony is a Flügel stronghold.

The standard of the debate is not high, although an improvement on yesterday’s in Freital. The questions from the audience appear designed to confirm divisions rather than elicit new information. Given the male-only panel, it seems fitting that all questions come from men. As in Freital, men also make up the majority of the audience, most of whom are over sixty.

Both here and in Freital, the audience learns little about the candidates themselves. Tonight, though, there are three exceptions. Zwerg exudes self-confidence bordering on arrogance, and on one occasion can’t be bothered answering a question put to him by the moderator. The Greens candidate is plainly out of his depth; when asked about the AfD’s proposal to build new nuclear power stations in Saxony, he obviously doesn’t know what to say.

The third exception is the sitting member, thirty-five-year-old Oliver Wehner of the Christian Democrats. When asked with whom he would consider forming a coalition after the elections, he rules out the AfD. Imagining a situation in which he and Zwerg have to negotiate the government’s policy, he explains: “And then he [Zwerg] says, for him it is important that Germans and foreigners are treated differently when they go to see a doctor. I would have an issue with that. And then, if Herr Zwerg becomes interior minister in Saxony, I might read in the paper that people have been shot at the border, then I would have my second problem.”

At this point, Wehner can’t continue because many in the audience protest vociferously. Perhaps trying to defuse the situation, the moderator says he can “understand” that people are annoyed by what Wehner has said.

Wehner’s stance is unusual. It might have something to do with the fact that he was once responsible for the former hardware store used to accommodate asylum seekers in Heidenau in August 2015, which became the focal point of violent protests. But it also makes sense for him to rule out collaborating with Zwerg from a purely strategic point of view: voters who agree with the AfD won’t vote for the Christian Democrats just because they claim they can understand people’s frustration and anger, even if it is directed against asylum seekers. Prospective Greens voters, on the other hand, might be persuaded by conservative politicians who distance themselves from the far right.

In Pirna and in Freital, politicians of all persuasions have bemoaned the fact that society has been divided. All have expressed the hope that relationships can be mended. It is true that the question of how to respond to asylum seekers has divided families, workplaces and society at large. The yearning for unity is palpable, but it’s hard to see how expressing empathy for irrational fears will solve the issue.

Wednesday 21 August 2019

I return to Freital for what is probably the best-attended campaign event in the shire. The audience is younger, bigger and more diverse, and they have come to see Robert Habeck, co-leader of the Greens. Unlike any other German politician, he has genuine rock star appeal.

Rather than giving speeches, Habeck and Wolfram Günther, co-leader of Saxony’s Greens, engage with the audience by responding to questions. Most are critical of the Greens’ policies, but Habeck and Günther take their time in answering them and don’t shy away from issues that seem overly complex. The audience — including those who would probably never vote for the Greens — show their appreciation by being patient and respectful. Here it seems possible to have a conversation that does more than buttress pre-existing views.

Habeck stresses his belief that it is essential to debate issues with one another. Here again, West Germans are at an advantage. Broadly speaking, Saxony’s postwar political culture (including civic education) was first shaped by the communists, whose hegemony remained undisputed until 1989, and then by the Christian Democrats, whose hegemony was not challenged until 2017. There was little room for debate. West Germans like Habeck, who were already adults when the Berlin Wall fell, also lived through two periods in the 1970s and 1980s in which society was bitterly divided: first over the use of nuclear energy and then over the stationing of American cruise missiles. For East Germans, on the other hand, the controversy over Germany’s response to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers is the first that prompted everyone to take sides. But the schism — within families, communities and workplaces — hasn’t been overcome by a discussion engaging both sides of the divide.

Habeck is asked about possible coalitions after the elections. He recounts his involvement in three sets of negotiations: twice in his home state of Schleswig-Holstein in the north of Germany, and once at the federal level after the 2017 election. The latter talks (between Christian Democrats, Free Democrats and Greens) ended when the leader of the Free Democrats walked out. According to Habeck, these negotiations failed because there was no genuine willingness to be innovative and find common ground. Habeck was also involved in negotiating the current coalition between the same three parties in Schleswig-Holstein, and has only good things to say about his fellow negotiators. He would know, however, that deeply conservative Christian Democrats like Michael Kretschmer have very little in common with Christian Democrats like Schleswig-Holstein’s decidedly liberal premier Daniel Günther.

In a final statement, Habeck comments on the AfD without mentioning it by name. He refers to Brexit as a salutary lesson about the viability of populist positions. He then makes the only reference I have heard during the campaign to the fact that the election in Saxony takes place exactly eighty years after Germany’s invasion of Poland and the beginning of the second world war, imploring the audience “not to vote for a party that has an unbroken relationship to fascism.”

Sunday 1 September 2019

It’s ten days later now, and the results are in. The most extreme scenarios — that the AfD would come first; that Michael Kretschmer’s position would be weakened to the extent that he would be replaced by a Christian Democrat willing to make a deal with the AfD; that Saxony would become ungovernable; or that the Social Democrats would lose so badly that they would leave the coalition in Berlin — have not come to pass. In Saxony, the Social Democrats fared less well than ever before in a state election in the Federal Republic; but the result in today’s other state election, in the East German state of Brandenburg, was much better for the Social Democrats, which remains the strongest party there and is likely to lead the next coalition government (presumably with the Greens and Die Linke).

In Saxony, the Christian Democrats won 32.1 per cent of the vote and the AfD came second with 27.5 per cent. They were followed by Die Linke with 10.4 per cent, the Greens with 8.6 per cent and the Social Democrats with 7.7 per cent. The Free Democrats failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold and will not be represented in the next state parliament. The most likely outcome will be a coalition between Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens.

In Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge, the Christian Democrats retained two of the four electorates. In both cases, they were probably helped by the strong showing of two independents. Oliver Wehner, the Christian Democrat who tried to tell a Pirna audience why it would be unconscionable for him to collaborate with the AfD, lost his seat. Frauke Petry scored a paltry 805 votes.

The results are noteworthy for several reasons. First, the number of people who voted was significantly higher than at the 2014 election, with the AfD as the main beneficiary. Second, both in Brandenburg and in Saxony, some people seemed to have voted strategically. Given the real prospect that the AfD would become the strongest party, a sizeable number of followers of the other parties probably voted for the party that had the best chance of beating the AfD: in Saxony, this strategic voting strengthened the Christian Democrats; in Brandenburg the Social Democrats were the beneficiaries.

Third, immigration was the key issue for 34 per cent of AfD voters but for only 2 per cent of those who voted for Social Democrats or Christian Democrats. Fourth, the main losers weren’t the Social Democrats but Die Linke, which was once the undisputed second-largest political force in the state, and is now just one of three minor parties. And, finally, about a third of electors voted out of a sense of disappointment and two-thirds from conviction. For AfD voters, though, disappointment was the more important factor.

No doubt talk about a Rechtsruck, a lurching to the right, will intensify over the next few days. It is true that the AfD trebled its vote in Saxony. It is also true that more than a quarter of electors cast their vote for a party that advocates extremist positions and whose most significant faction, the Flügel, is under observation by the federal intelligence agency.

But let’s put things into perspective. The rise of the AfD has also prompted the rise of a powerful counter-movement. It has politicised people who consider themselves liberals or even conservatives, particularly in West Germany. It has prompted numerous innovative civil-society initiatives to strengthen democracy. It has contributed to the electoral successes of the Greens. I would even argue that the much-acclaimed Willkommenskultur, the culture of welcoming refugees in 2015, was itself also already a reaction against the xenophobia advocated by the AfD and the Pegida movement.

It’s also important to remember that Germany has moved to the left politically over the past thirty years, becoming a more tolerant society whose majority has embraced the fact that this is a country of immigration. In the early 1990s, during a previous “refugee crisis,” when hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the former Yugoslavia sought refuge in Germany, Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Free Democrats and respectable media outlets such as Der Spiegel fanned fears of migrants and advocated positions that today would not be acceptable outside the AfD.

The Rechtsruck thesis also suggests that those who now vote for the AfD changed their views in recent years. Numerous surveys show this not to have been the case. Sentiments, attitudes and opinions have barely changed; what has changed dramatically is the range of views that can acceptably be voiced publicly (although “publicly” often means within the echo chambers provided by Facebook and other social media). That, of course, is a cause for concern. But the experience of the past four years suggests that German democracy, by and large — in the West more so than in the East — is remarkably resilient. It’s important to reflect on the events of 1 September 1939 and on its causes — but not because the past is about to return. •

The post The significance of 1 September appeared first on Inside Story.

As a longitudinal survey, HILDA puts the same (or similar) questions to the same people each year to build a long-term picture of life in Australia. In research terms, this is a top-shelf methodology — but it’s also expensive and difficult to maintain. A lot of hard work and significant government funding goes into HILDA.

The central challenge with any survey of this type is making sure that the people being asked the questions look the same as the general population. When it was set up, HILDA’s pool of respondents reflected the Australian population of 2001; every year, as people leave Australia or arrive, it has become a little less representative of the population as a whole.

The team that runs HILDA at the Melbourne Institute is acutely aware of this. A 2006 research paper estimated that by 2011, HILDA’s tenth year, the percentage of recent arrivals falling outside the original sample would be about 6.6 per cent. After fifteen years, this was expected to be 8.3 per cent. HILDA attempted to solve this problem with a top-up of the sample in Wave 11 of the survey, designed to ensure a good representation of the Australian population in 2011.

So far, that has been the one and only top-up, and HILDA has been becoming slightly less representative each year since then. This is not a criticism of the team at the Melbourne Institute but a call for more funds to conduct another top-up in order to make sure the survey represents all Australians.

How big is the problem? Between June 2011 and December 2018, Australia’s population grew by 13 per cent, from 22.3 million to 25.2 million. Of those extra people, about six in ten were migrants, which means that HILDA is roughly in the same position in relation to new arrivals as it was in 2011.

But perhaps more of a concern is how migration trends have changed. While the total number of arrivals might be similar in the two periods, 2001–11 and 2011–18, the two sets of migrants are different in important ways.

When HILDA was first established in 2001, new migrants tended to arrive on a permanent visa and settle into Australia. People still come to Australia this way however the migrant intake now includes a higher share of people who arrive on a temporary visa and then move to a permanent visa. These people represent a challenge for HILDA because many of them change their residency intentions after arriving in Australia. This means they are more difficult to categorise as either overseas visitors or long-term Australian citizens. The share of permanent visas granted to people in Australia has shifted from fewer than one in three in 2001 to about one in two by 2018.

For a bunch of survey questions, these trends probably don’t matter too much at the moment. Income dynamics are unlikely to be seriously affected by eight years of undercounting, for example — though the effects will become more serious if no top-up is carried out for another decade. But in a handful of areas, undercounting is more worrying. Take two topics, congestion and welfare.

According to the Parliamentary Library’s analysis of the most recent HILDA report:

 There has been a notable increase in the time spent commuting in Australia from an average of 48.8 minutes per day in 2002 to 59.9 minutes per day in 2017. Of the major capital cities Sydney has the highest average commuting time at 71.1 minutes in 2017 which compares with 60.6 minutes in 2002.

A lot was made of this finding, with politicians and media analysis focusing on the increase.

But the evidence shows that migrants arriving since 2011 are more likely to cluster in inner-city areas (or near universities, in the case of international students) even compared with arrivals between 2001 and 2011. With the growth in housing supply — mainly apartments — in the inner suburbs, these recent arrivals are probably closer to work or other regular destinations, on average, than the existing population.

If that’s the case, HILDA is undercounting potential reductions in commuting times. It’s true that the general increase in commuting times documented by HILDA is substantial, and would not be erased by the potential effects of recent migrants, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to capture the full picture of commuting and congestion in Australia.

Welfare is another area where new arrivals and the existing population will differ. Legislative change in 2018 now means people who gain a new permanent visa are restricted from receiving Newstart for four years, a doubling of the waiting time. This obviously means that recent migrants are less likely to access Newstart (whether or not they are unemployed) compared with Australian residents, and so HILDA potentially overcounts the proportion of households receiving that payment.

The past decade’s rise in migration to Australia by New Zealand citizens, who are largely excluded from welfare support, is also likely to be affecting HILDA’s results. In the medium term, all these effects will start to play bigger roles in household and income analysis.

HILDA is heavily relied on by researchers and generates much attention because of the critical role it plays in providing a record of how Australians are tracking. The survey underpins research across multiple fields and is closely followed by all levels of government, the bureaucracy, business and civil society. It is simply too important for us to watch as more years tick by without another top-up and it slips from being a truly representative sample of the Australian population to a representation of an Australia frozen in time.

The inability to factor migration trends into evidence and research is not restricted to longitudinal surveys. For a country shaped by migration, we are strangely ignorant about the effects of migration on our social and economic experience, and on our environment. Bureaucrats often ignore the impact of migration, mostly because they lack a strong grasp of the basic data. And this leads to the charge that “elites” are deliberately pushing a big Australia down the throats of an unwilling public.

More importantly, the vast majority of public decision-makers simply don’t know what’s going on, whether in terms of urban planning, higher education or the labour market. In a small way, HILDA is contributing to this ignorance and deserves a funding bump to make sure it looks like modern Australia. •

The post The problem with HILDA appeared first on Inside Story.

In a world so comprehensively dominated by Hollywood, theatrical releases of Australian films outside Australia have always been difficult, with the cost of creating publicity and awareness often exceeding the box office. (There are exceptions, of course, with Crocodile Dundee immediately coming to mind.) Now that online streaming services have reduced theatrical opportunities even further, most theatrical revenue is earned by superhero action movies aimed at the under twenty-fives. Aquaman, the improbable story of warriors who can breathe under water, has grossed over a billion dollars. But older audiences frequently prefer to stay home, pay their Netflix subscriptions and settle back for a new movie on their latest smart TVs.

So Ladies in Black is travelling the world via airlines and streaming services. But it has another life as well, doing its bit for Australian public relations at small festivals and special screenings hosted by our diplomatic corps. In fact, the film’s inclusive themes of immigration and multicultural understanding have made it a popular subject for diplomatic initiatives.

Ladies in Black was invited to be the closing night film at the Palm Springs Film Festival, a prestigious art-house event in the mid-century modern show-business resort close to Los Angeles. It also opened the Taormina Film Festival in Taormina, Sicily, where it played on a sultry July night on an enormous screen in the Greco-Roman amphitheatre above the town. The Italian audience had no trouble with Australian idiom of another era conveyed in subtitles, laughing along with the “reffo” and the Melbourne jokes and cheering the director when he came on stage as the end titles rolled.

The Australian embassy in Jakarta chose Ladies in Black as the feature presentation in its Festival Sinema Australia Indonesia, which screened at several Indonesian cities in March. A month later, the embassy in Washington hosted a screening at the Washington, DC International Film Festival in the presence of the ambassador, Joe Hockey, who kept a careful ambassadorial eye on ninety-nine-year-old Eileen Hammond, mother of Nicholas Hammond, who plays the film’s Mr Ryder.

Shortly after the Taormina screening, the subtitled print screened at Isola del Cinema on Tiber Island, in the heart of Rome. Each year the Australian embassy in Rome hosts some of the screenings at this open-air festival, which seats about 500 and runs through the summer. This year it chose Ladies in Black for an invitation-only event to start its program, and the film’s connection to the immigration history between Italy and Australia made it a perfect choice. (“Magda” in the film is from Slovenia, Italy’s next-door neighbour.)

The evening began with a cocktail party for members of the Italian arts and business communities on the cinema’s open forecourt in the shadow of the oldest Roman bridge still standing in Rome, circa 62 BCE. The Australian ambassador to Italy, Greg French, opened proceedings by singing, in Italian and English, a musical homage to the film and the filmmakers set to the tune of “Waltzing Matilda,” accompanying himself on the guitar. As a warm-up it could hardly be bettered, although it veered dangerously close to upstaging the film. The audience loved it, and it set the tone for a warm and informal evening in which Ladies in Black fitted perfectly.

The response to the film in Italy, Indonesia and the United States, and before a mixed English and Australian audience in London has been identical to the reaction of audiences in Australia. Wherever the film is screened, audiences laugh, cry and, whenever he is present, give Bruce Beresford a standing ovation. The film’s inclusive themes and its warm heart clearly touch a universal chord.

The revival of the Australian film industry in the 1970s had the unexpected consequence of creating awareness of Australia around the world; our films were the first thing to attract international attention as Australia began to emerge from the long shadow of the British empire. Though perhaps in a less dramatic fashion now that sport and tourism are so well promoted, our films and our creative talent continue to raise awareness of our country and our culture. •

The post On the road with the Ladies in Black appeared first on Inside Story.

The man whose followers call him Il Capitano (the captain) has been able to position himself as the strongman of Italian politics and the de facto leader of the European far right. He has effectively sidelined both prime minister Guiseppe Conte and Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement, the nominally senior partner in Italy’s governing coalition.

Salvini is well-known for his racism and for trying to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Italy. His policies and practices have been controversial not least because they appear to contravene Italian and European law, though so far neither Italian nor European courts have issued rulings against him. But it was only a vote in the Italian senate that stopped him from facing criminal charges for directing the coast guard vessel Diciotti not to dock at an Italian port with rescued migrants on board.

Neither Di Maio nor Conte, nor Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Partito Democratico, the largest opposition party, have had Salvini’s measure. Even Pope Francis wields less influence among Italy’s Catholics than Salvini, who claims to be a devout Christian and often fondles a rosary in public but has dismissed many of the Pope’s views, particularly concerning the human rights of migrants. According to an analysis published recently by the Guardian, it was former Trump strategist Steve Bannon who in 2016 advised Salvini to go after the Pope.

But Salvini might have met his match: thirty-one-year-old Carola Rackete, a German woman who, in Italy, is referred to as La Capitana.

Unlike Salvini, who failed to complete his university studies in history, worked briefly as a journalist, and has otherwise been a full-time politician for most of his adult life, Rackete is a ship’s captain by training. She has a degree in nautical science from Jade University, and worked for several years as an officer on German and British research ships in the Arctic and Antarctic, on cruise ships and on a Greenpeace vessel.

Rackete joined the German activist group Sea-Watch in 2016. The organisation had been established the previous year to keep the European Union accountable by patrolling the Mediterranean and, if necessary, rescuing migrants at sea. Rackete briefly captained the organisation’s Sea-Watch 2 in 2016, and in June 2019 was put in charge of the Sea-Watch 3, a fifty-metre Netherlands-registered vessel built as a supply ship for Brazilian oil platforms.

Over the past two years, Sea-Watch has clashed with Libyan, Maltese and Italian authorities. On two occasions in 2017, dozens of people died because the Libyan coast guard thwarted attempts by the crews of Sea-Watch 2 and Sea-Watch 3 to rescue them. Between June and October 2018, Maltese authorities prevented the Sea-Watch 3 from leaving the port of Valetta because, they claimed, the ship had not been properly registered. In January and May 2019, the Italian authorities tried to prevent the Sea-Watch 3 from disembarking people it had rescued; in both these instances, though, they were eventually landed in Italy to be taken to other EU countries for the processing of their asylum claims.

On 12 June this year, the Sea-Watch 3, under Rackete’s command, rescued fifty-three people in international waters off the Libyan coast. Two days later, the Italian government issued a security decree making it an offence for non-government organisations to disembark rescued migrants in Italy, and provided for hefty fines for noncompliance. Rackete rejected Libya’s offer to let the Sea-Watch 3 disembark its passengers at a Libyan port, because migrants are exposed to torture, rape, forced labour and extortion in that country. She also rejected suggestions by European politicians that she head for a Tunisian port, because, like Italy, Tunisia had closed its ports to migrants rescued in the Mediterranean and has no refugee determination process.

Sea-Watch 3 nevertheless aimed for the Italian island of Lampedusa to disembark its passengers. But while he allowed the medical evacuation of some of them, Salvini prohibited the ship from entering Italian waters. He accused Rackete and her crew of being the “accomplices of traffickers and smugglers” and running a “pirate ship.” For two weeks, the vessel remained in international waters in deference to the Italian government’s order, but on 26 June Rackete declared a “state of necessity” — a provision in international law describing circumstances that preclude the unlawfulness of an otherwise internationally unlawful act — and took the ship to within a couple of miles of Lampedusa.

Three days later, with people on board becoming increasingly restless and the situation threatening to spiral out of control, Rackete decided that she had no choice but to dock at Lampedusa. As the Sea-Watch 3 approached the quay, a much smaller Italian customs vessel tried to block it. A minor collision ensued, with no injuries, and Rackete completed her manoeuvre. Video footage of the incident suggests that Rackete did not deliberately endanger those on board the Italian ship and that it was more likely that the latter’s recklessness led to the accident.

When the German captain left her ship, she was arrested by Italian police and later charged with resistance, violence against a warship, and people smuggling, and put under house arrest. On 2 July, a judge in Agrigento, Sicily, ordered her release after throwing out two of the charges. Another judicial hearing is scheduled for 17 July.

Since her release, Rackete has been holed up at a secret location in Italy. That’s not because she wants to avoid the publicity surrounding her case but because she has reason to fear for her safety. She has been subjected to online abuse and has received death threats. In Germany, former police officer and serial video blogger Tim Kellner published a YouTube video attacking Rackete and her family, which to date has been viewed more than 320,000 times. Most of the more than 3700 comments posted so far applaud Kellner and are informed by hatred. Some contain threats. For example, “Grillgucker” wrote: “A bullet between the eyes would solve the problem.” Others referred to her as Assel (woodlouse) or Zecke (tick), or to her and her supporters as Volksverräter, the term used in Nazi Germany for traitors.

In Italy too Rackete has been threatened with rape and murder, for which Salvini can take part of the blame. He has used social media to attack her, calling her a criminal and claiming that she committed an act of war. Referring to the crew of the Italian customs vessel, Salvini said she had tried to kill five members of the Italian military.

If Salvini’s tone has become more strident, I suspect that’s because twice in the past week he has suffered a defeat. First Rackete was able to defy his order and dock in Lampedusa. Then two of the charges against her were dismissed and she was released from house arrest. Salvini has also attacked Alessandra Vella, the Agrigento judge, claiming her decision was politically motivated, shameful, scandalous and dangerous, and suggesting that Vella resign from her position and seek a career in politics. After her decision, Vella too has been subjected to abuse and death threats. Salvini has also threatened to push for “judicial reform.”

In other, forthcoming court cases Salvini’s own policies and conduct will be closely examined. Last week, Rackete’s Italian lawyer Alessandro Gamberini announced she would launch a libel lawsuit against the minister. At least outwardly, Salvini remained unconcerned about that prospect, writing on Twitter, “She breaks the law and attacks Italian military ships, and then sues me. The mafia doesn’t frighten me, so why should I be afraid of a rich and spoiled German communist.” But now Gamberini has upped the ante: in the fourteen-page statement prepared for the court, he not only claimed that Salvini broke the law on twenty-two occasions, he also asked the court to order the closure of Salvini’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.

But a case before the European Court of Human Rights might provide a bigger headache for Salvini. It concerns one of the incidents in 2017 in which the Libyan coast guard prevented a Sea-Watch ship from rescuing migrants. Seventeen survivors are now suing the Italian government for abetting the Libyan coast guard in their return to Libya, where they were exposed to extreme forms of violence.

If the court finds against Italy, the case might have similar ramifications as the Hirsi case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2012 that Italy had breached its international legal obligations when returning migrants intercepted in the Mediterranean to Libya under a deal negotiated between the Gaddafi and Berlusconi governments. Italy had been taken to court by a group of Somalis and Eritreans rescued by the Italian navy only to be handed over to the Libyans.

In its ruling, the court found that “the Italian border control operation of ‘push-back’ on the high seas, coupled with the absence of an individual, fair and effective procedure to screen asylum-seekers, constitutes a serious breach of the prohibition of collective expulsion of aliens and consequently of the principle of non-refoulement.” This judgement was behind the decision by the European Union and Italy to use the Libyan coast guard for pull-backs. But it is conceivable that the court will find the pull-backs contravene international law no less than the Italian push-backs of 2009.

There are two more reasons why Salvini has been under the pump. First, the absurdity of Italy’s Libyan solution has again been put into sharp relief. This week, the Italian government announced that it wants to work even more closely with the Libyan coast guard. But Salvini’s argument that the Libyans could rescue and look after migrants trying to reach Europe sounds increasingly hollow. In the early hours of 3 July, a government-run migrant detention centre in the Libyan capital Tripoli was bombed, presumably by the forces of general Khalifa Haftar, who has been waging war against the government in Tripoli. At least forty-four of the detainees died when two missiles struck the centre, and more than 130 were severely injured. According to reports, the centre’s guards shot at detainees who were trying to escape after the first missile hit.

Salvini is also vulnerable as an indirect result of the fact that Italian and European support for militias aligned with the Libyan government has made it more difficult for people smugglers to sell places on small boats leaving from Libya. Why pay money to smugglers when the boat is likely to be intercepted by the Libyan coast guard and its passengers returned to Libya? Smugglers have therefore offered an alternative option: larger ships take people from the North African coast to an area within easy reach of Italy, and there they are transferred to dinghies or other smaller vessels that take them directly to Lampedusa or Sicily.

As a result, seventeen small boats, carrying more than 300 migrants, landed in Lampedusa alone during the two-week stand-off between Sea-Watch 3 and the Italian government. Salvini doesn’t want to talk about them because they make a mockery of his claim that he has been able to seal Italy’s maritime borders to migrants arriving by boat.

Carola Rackete and Sea-Watch have suffered much abuse in recent days, as has the Pope, who used a mass on Monday to speak out on behalf of migrants. But Rackete has also been hailed as a heroine, both in Italy and in her native Germany, and Sea-Watch has received much support, including from unexpected quarters.

Within twenty-four hours of Rackete’s arrest, a campaign launched by two German television presenters had netted more than €1 million in donations, mostly from people in Germany, but a sizeable amount also from Italians. In fact, Sea-Watch has received so much extra funding that the organisation has decided it can afford to share some of it with other organisations running private search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean.

Predictably, politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany have praised Salvini’s stance and condemned the Sea-Watch captain. Equally predictably, Rackete has been applauded by politicians from the Left and the Greens. Perhaps less predictably, among the first to defend her were the two most popular German politicians, federal president Frank-Walter Steinmeier and foreign minister Heiko Maas. They were followed by the European Union’s budget and human resources minister, and prominent Christian Democrat, Günther Oettinger, and by development minister Gerd Müller of the Bavarian Christian Social Union, the Christian Democrats’ sister party.

Remarkably, Müller has called not only for a resumption of European search-and-rescue missions in the Mediterranean, but also for an evacuation of refugees from Libya in a joint EU–UN operation. On 8 July he told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that “the people in the [Libyan] camps of misery have the choice of dying in the camps through violence or hunger, to die of thirst in the desert on the way back or to drown in the Mediterranean.” While Angela Merkel hasn’t yet commented on Rackete — or Müller’s proposal, for that matter — a government spokesperson has strongly condemned the criminalisation of private search-and-rescue missions. Even Merkel’s bête noire, hardline interior minister Horst Seehofer, wrote to Salvini to ask for the reopening of Italy’s maritime borders.

Sea-Watch’s and Rackete’s responses to the rhetorical support they have received from the federal government have been lukewarm. They have pointed out that Germany has also provided funding and logistical support to the Libyan government, and that more than words are needed.

The German print and electronic media have largely rallied behind Rackete, and have often been critical of the Italian government and the European Union. Numerous newspapers have published long feature articles about the deaths in the Mediterranean and the tussle between Salvini and Sea-Watch. Last Saturday, Germany’s premier news magazine Spiegel ran a cover story about Rackete. Most of the articles in the German media have avoided portraying the conflict in national terms, even though Salvini has tried to make much of the fact that Rackete is German.

Across Germany on the weekend, tens of thousands took to the streets in around ninety separate protests against Rackete’s arrest, the criminalisation of rescue missions in the Mediterranean and the German government’s complicity in migrant deaths. In Hamburg, about 4000 people marched under the slogan “Free Carola,” although the organisers had expected a crowd of only 1500. In Berlin, 6000 turned out for the same cause.

While European governments took their time to agree on the distribution of the people rescued by the Sea-Watch 3, there has been no shortage of offers to accommodate them. In Italy, archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Torino said that his archdiocese was willing to take care of the migrants from the Sea-Watch 3. In Germany, several towns and cities have offered to accommodate migrants rescued in the Mediterranean — over and above those asylum seekers assigned to them by the federal and state governments. Thirteen local councils have formed the Bündnis Städte Sicherer Hafen (Alliance of Safe Haven Cities). Among them is Rottenburg, a town of about 40,000 in Baden-Württemberg in Germany’s affluent and conservative southwest.

Christian Democrat Stephan Neher has been Rottenburg’s mayor for more than ten years. “We want to act globally and take advantage of globalisation,” he said soon after the Sea-Watch 3 announced that it had rescued fifty-three people. “Therefore, we also have to bear its negative consequences. Anyway, accommodating fifty-three refugees in Rottenburg would be a piece of cake.” He even offered to send a bus to Italy to pick them up. Neher’s stance seems to have attracted a lot of local support: this week, he told the German weekly Zeit that when he walks through his town, he is often stopped, because Rottenburg residents want to know when the refugees will arrive and how many of them the town is “allowed” to host.

What explains the magnitude of support for Sea-Watch in Germany? Carola Rackete is part of the answer. For a start, she is comparatively young. Since the emergence of Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, young people and their concerns are being taken seriously. To give one other example: the Social Democrats are currently looking for a new party leader, and the most obvious candidate is thirty-year-old Young Socialists chairperson Kevin Kühnert.

For those who have long campaigned for an about-turn in Europe’s approach to forced migration, Rackete is an activist with the necessary street cred. She is principled and determined and, sporting dreadlocks and appearing barefooted in a television interview, she looks every bit like somebody who might otherwise live in a treehouse in the occupied Hambach Forest protesting against open-cut coalmining or demonstrating against the deportation of asylum seekers or disrupting a gathering of Neo-Nazis. No doubt her appearance also helps explain the vitriol reserved for her by far-right trolls.

Moderates who are concerned about German, Italian and European asylum seeker policies but who would never join potentially violent protests can also embrace her because she does not come across as a radical. Contrary to what Salvini has claimed, she is no communist.

Rackete does not let herself be provoked by Salvini. In interviews, she is calm and her words are measured. Talking to German television station ZDF, she declined to comment on Salvini’s attacks on her. “I find it inappropriate to insult others,” she explained. “I like to work with facts. And anyway, as a captain you shouldn’t get excited. At least not in front of others.” In interviews, she presents as a captain: as somebody who is responsible for her crew and for the migrants rescued by them, and who takes that responsibility seriously.

Rackete is also highly articulate and clearly knows what she is talking about: about her ship, the international law of the sea, Europeans’ moral responsibilities, and conditions faced by migrants in Libya. At the same time she claims that she prefers her actions to do the talking for her.

Her arguments are convincing. She is not calling for Europeans’ pity but insists that Sea-Watch is standing up for the rights of forced migrants. A recent article in the online edition of the Bremen daily Weser-Kurier was illustrated by an image of Rackete with a quote from her: “There is a right to be rescued. It’s all about the principle of human rights.”

Commentators in Italy and Germany have likened Rackete to Sophocles’s Antigone: the woman who defies the law of Thebes by deciding to bury her brother Polynices. When brought before Creon, the King of Thebes, Antigone justifies her action by claiming that divine law trumps state law. Rackete too has claimed that she has obeyed one set of laws (namely international law) only to fall foul of another set of laws. But here the parallels end. For Sophocles, Antigone (rather than Polynices) is the key tragic figure of his play. Rackete would probably point out that the real issue is the drowning of migrants rather than her violation of Italian law, and that the conflict between the two sets of laws could be solved if domestic law were adapted to conform with international legal standards.

Finally, Rackete stood up to powerful, unscrupulous and objectionable Matteo Salvini, and did not let him bully her into submission. That explains why her case has attracted more support than that of Pia Klemp, a young woman who captained Sea-Watch 3 (and, before that, the Iuventa, a ship belonging to non-government organisation Jugend Rettet). Like Rackete, Klemp has been charged with people smuggling offences in Italy and, according to her Italian lawyer, she could face “up to twenty years in prison and horrendous fines.” Unlike Rackete, Klemp has been portrayed as Salvini’s victim rather than as an opponent who got the better of him.

The drama around the Sea-Watch 3 has also resonated with Germans for reasons that are unrelated to the attributes of particular individuals. (I discussed some of them in Inside Story a year ago, so I’ll focus on other aspects here.) Over the past decade in particular, the idea has slowly taken hold that non-German residents of Germany enjoy the same rights as citizens. To use the words of Angela Merkel, who ought to be credited with insisting on this idea even when it was unfashionable, “The values and rights of our Basic Law are valid for everyone in this country.”

Once it is accepted that the first line of the constitution’s Article 1, “Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar” (human dignity is inviolable) applies to everybody in Germany, then it makes little sense to deny this right to people outside Germany’s borders. An increasing number of Germans believe that the obligation to rescue migrants in the Mediterranean has nothing to do with their particular motivation for migrating or degree of suffering; rather, it’s to do with their being human. This conviction prompts people to attend rallies, donate money for organisations like Sea-Watch, and demand that their local communities commit to accommodating additional refugees.

Also in the mix is a commitment to Europe. When the Spiegel put an image of Carola Rackete on its cover last week, it did so with the headline “Captain Europe.” This should be read as more than a reference to the Captain America superhero movies. Those yearning for another, better Europe in which solidarity is not a hollow term focus on what happens at its borders, because it is there that the idea of Europe has been most severely compromised. As the following episode shows, this is not always made as explicit as it was on the Spiegel cover.

One of the German cities whose council has passed a resolution condemning Italian and European policies is Hildesheim in Lower Saxony. Because it’s the town where I was born, I was interested to find out about the debate surrounding this resolution.

Hildesheim’s councillors voted in August 2018 on a resolution jointly submitted by Social Democrats, Greens and the Left titled “Facilitate and support rescue at sea — fight against the dying in the Mediterranean — accommodate people in distress.” Although the Christian Democrats opposed the resolution on the grounds that these issues were none of the city council’s concern, one Christian Democrat rose to speak in its favour. According to the minutes, “It is true that the council cannot solve all of the world’s problems, such as the persecution of the Rohingya or the poverty of the elderly, and has to concern itself with the problems it has been entrusted with. However, the obstruction of rescue ships is a scandal which needs to be identified also by the Council of Hildesheim.”

This explanation is at once baffling and compelling: baffling because the persecution of Rohingya, on the face of it, is as much an event outside the council’s remit as the deaths at Europe’s borders; compelling because the councillor’s obvious reasoning is that the scandal is European-made, and that implies an obligation to speak up as a European.

The German support for rescue missions in the Mediterranean may also be informed by the experience of the Willkommenskultur (or culture of hospitality) of 2015–16, when many Germans rose to the challenge of accommodating a record number of asylum seekers rather than revert to the fear, if not panic, evoked by a comparable situation in the early 1990s. But I suspect that the safe haven initiatives by German cities and the recognition that human rights don’t end at national borders will prove more significant than the much-discussed Willkommenskultur.

While Carola Rackete is still in hiding, Sea-Watch is sending a new crew to Lampedusa. It is hoping that Italian authorities will release its ship soon, and that it can then return to the waters off the North African coast.

Meanwhile, three other non-government organisations are active in the Mediterranean. Earlier this month, the German organisation Sea-Eye’s ship Alan Kurdi handed over sixty-five rescued migrants to the Maltese authorities; the day after leaving Malta, it then rescued another forty-four migrants and is now looking for a harbour where it can disembark them. Alex, a yacht belonging to the Italian organisation Mediterranea Saving Humans, also defied Salvini’s orders and last week disembarked forty-one migrants in Lampedusa. And the Barcelona-based organisation Proactiva Open Arms is still active but has been threatened by Spanish authorities with fines of up to €900,000 if it continues its rescue mission.

The EU is once again talking about distributing migrants rescued in the Mediterranean among some member states without having to haggle over the quotas each time. But so far these talks, like many similar talks on previous occasions, haven’t had any tangible outcomes.

Gerd Müller’s idea of evacuating migrants from Libya has met with silence both in Brussels and in Berlin. But it may be less far-fetched than it seems. Germany, for one, has been resettling some migrants deported from Libya to Niger: according to unofficial figures, 276 Eritreans and Somalis were resettled in mid October and early December 2018, for example. Thus there is a precedent for another kind of “Libyan solution.”

In the meantime, conditions in Libya could hardly get worse, and the European border in the Mediterranean remains the deadliest border in the world, accounting this year for about half of the world’s border-related deaths. In the first ten days of July, the International Organization for Migration counted eighty-three border deaths in the Mediterranean, while there were seventy-eight in all of June.

When Carola Rackete described the seventeen days it took to find a solution for the people her crew had rescued, she drew attention to the fact that there was a lot of talking — in Rome, in Berlin and in Brussels — but no action. By acting, she exposed the emptiness of the talking. Even Matteo Salvini, who likes to portray himself as a can-do politician but, like Donald Trump, spends most of his time campaigning, was shown to be spouting mere rhetoric. •

The post The remarkable deeds of Captain Rackete appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the District Court of New York’s decision to stop the question appearing in the 2020 census — a decision since upheld by the Supreme Court — and despite assertions by commerce secretary Wilbur Ross and the justice department that the courts would be heeded, Trump says he is considering an executive order to force the question onto the census.

Some legal experts think this end run around the Supreme Court and Congress will bring chief justice John Roberts and House Leader Nancy Pelosi into the fray. It would certainly put the White House squarely at loggerheads with those two bodies, and could provoke a constitutional crisis.

How did America reach this contretemps? Under the Constitution, an “actual enumeration” of everyone living in the United States must take place every decade. Seats in the House of Representatives are then apportioned according to “the whole number of persons in each state.” The census also determines each state’s quota of electoral college votes, as well as helping shape electoral maps and ensuring the equitable allocation of some US$900 billion in federal funds for Medicaid, development grants, public schools, law enforcement and disaster relief.

Despite the Census Act’s requirement that Congress be notified of planned questions three years in advance, citizenship was not on the list Ross sent to Congress in March 2017. But we now know that the topic was being discussed within the White House, though perhaps mainly among since-departed right-wing functionaries like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

The public debate was kicked off by a leaked January 2017 draft executive order calling for the Census Bureau to add the question as part of a range of new immigration enforcement measures. Secretary Ross approved the question in March last year, overriding career officials at the bureau who were concerned that the question would reduce the response rate among non-citizens.

In congressional testimony later that month, Ross denied having discussed the matter with the White House and said he was responding solely to a request from the justice department; but it later emerged that he had discussed the matter with Bannon and attorney-general Jeff Sessions in the spring of 2017. Leaked emails show that the idea had been pushed by a justice department political appointee who, in private practice, had defended partisan electoral boundaries introduced by Republican legislators.

Adding new questions to the census isn’t unusual, and nor is asking about citizenship — though only in census-related surveys targeted at a sample of households rather than in the questionnaire received by every household. Those latter forms haven’t included questions about citizenship or country of birth since 1950.

As early as 2015, four former census directors were warning that a citizenship question to all households would undermine the accuracy of the count. They argued that significant numbers of people — especially those from immigrant and minority families — would be fearful of responding. That fear was heightened when Trump threatened that immigration enforcement agents would begin rounding up and removing millions of people without approved documentation.

Because of their potential impact on response rates, all questions proposed for the census must be adequately tested. The citizenship question hasn’t been through that process, but testing of the existing 2020 census questionnaire had already revealed a heightened reluctance to answer the survey and increased concern about confidentiality and privacy. Although the federal government is barred from using individual census data for law enforcement, most people don’t know or perhaps don’t believe that.

With the Census Bureau required to make follow-up efforts to collect data from non-responding households, a low response rate will be costly. For every percentage point of non-responsiveness, the bureau is expected to spend around US$55 million following up.

For some states in particular, inaccurate census data will result in less representation in Congress and less federal funding. By one estimate, 6.5 million people will be missing nationally, with Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Texas potentially losing seats in Congress. According to a Pew Research Center study, a majority of the nation’s undocumented immigrants live in just twenty metropolitan areas, with most of them resident in New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Miami and Washington, DC.

Along with lawmakers in states like California and New York, urban leaders, who are mostly Democrats, are alarmed by the proposed question. Their fears appear well founded. The justice department’s official view is that it needs to know how many people are eligible to vote so it can better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But recent evidence — in the form of files found on the computer of a Republican strategist after his death — suggests that the citizenship question was drafted specifically to benefit Republicans. In 2015, the strategist, Thomas Hofeller, conducted a study that found a citizenship question would help Republicans in their efforts to shape electoral boundaries to their advantage during the periodic “redistricting” process. Hofeller contributed to a memorandum for the justice department arguing that the question was critical to enforcing “voting rights.”

Not surprisingly, more than twenty states and cities, along with civil liberty groups, filed lawsuits about this issue, culminating in the Supreme Court decision that shocked Trump and his administration. In what has been described as a “split the baby” decision, the Supreme Court upheld, 5–4, the decision of the New York District Court requiring the commerce department to give a true explanation for its decision to include the citizenship question in the census.

Chief justice John Roberts was the surprise swinging vote. He sided first with the conservatives on the court to uphold the right of the administration to add the question, finding that this was constitutionally and statutorily permissible. Then he switched sides and, along with the four liberals on the court, held that the commerce secretary had not given the true reasons for needing the question on the census. The opinion written by Roberts suggested that Ross was motivated by partisan politics and could face charges for his “pretexts” (a lawyerly term for lies) and for blatantly misleading the courts.

The justice and commerce departments appeared to accept the Supreme Court decision, announcing that the census materials would now be able to meet the 1 July deadline for printing. Trump, fuming, had other ideas. At 1.04am on American Independence Day he undercut his officials to tweet that “News Reports about the Department of Commerce dropping its quest to put the Citizenship Question on the Census is incorrect or, to state it differently, FAKE! We are absolutely moving forward, as we must, because of the importance of the answer to this question.”

What followed was a round of chaotic manoeuvring, as administration officials quickly reversed themselves and pledged to restore the question to census forms. Attorney-general William Barr now says the Supreme Court decision was wrong, and that there is “an opportunity potentially to cure the lack of clarity that was the problem” — presumably this means Ross’s lies — “and that we might as well take a look at doing that.”

By one count the Trump administration has changed its position on the citizenship story at least ten times in the past four months. But the real thinking behind the citizenship question became clearer in the argy-bargy following the Supreme Court’s decision. The acting director of the citizenship and immigration services said the questions would help “financially and legally with the burden of those who are not here legally,” and Trump said, “I think it’s important to find out if somebody is a citizen as opposed to an illegal.”

The justice department’s search for a “legally available path under the Supreme Court’s decision” appears to have hit a roadblock. Earlier this week the lawyers charged with this task were removed from the case with no explanation. Just as I write this, though, it is reported that a federal judge, acting at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs, has barred government lawyers from leaving until they meet a legal requirement to satisfactorily explain their departure and show that it would not impede the case they were working on going forward.

It seems likely the legal team’s departure is linked to the legality of Trump and Barr’s pushing ahead and aggravated by Trump’s threat of an executive order to bypass the courts’ decisions and get the citizenship question on the ballot. However much Trump might want to do this, a presidential order cannot override existing court rulings. And federal courts also have the power to set aside unconstitutional executive orders. Moreover, Congress cannot cede its constitutional responsibility for the census to the executive branch and the president.

It’s hard to imagine chief justice Roberts and House leader Nancy Pelosi allowing Trump to get away with this testing of the boundaries of executive power, and this is why some legal experts see a constitutional crisis looming.

The administration has other, less dramatic options, as Trump himself has acknowledged. “We could also add an addition on,” he has said, allowing time for a renewed effort to introduce the citizenship question by normal means. “So we could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision. So we’re working on a lot of things including an executive order.” Trump also says he has asked the administration’s lawyers if they can delay the census.

From a logistical point of view, though, any delay or add-on could be problematic. The census is mandated to take place on 1 April 2020 and changing the date would require an act of Congress. Printing and distributing a separate question would be prohibitively expensive.

Even if the troublesome question doesn’t make it into the census, the damage has probably already been done, with people’s confidence and willingness to accurately supply information compromised. Certainly, the job of the thousands of census workers in certain neighbourhoods has been made doubly difficult. Beyond the census itself, this has now become a civil rights issue.

Unless there is a reasonable resolution soon, this contentious issue will be a major factor in the 2020 election. Trump’s recent tweets give an indication of how he will use the census to play to his base. On Tuesday he tweeted about the “strained” Supreme Court ruling, saying it “shows how incredibly important our 2020 Election is.” •

The post In for the count appeared first on Inside Story.

The cuts rest on two assumptions: that Australia’s population will grow more rapidly over the next decade than in any other equivalent period in our history; and that the likely retirement of five million–plus baby boomers will have little or no impact on economic growth, tax revenue or government expenditure.

On that basis, Treasury assumes that the economy will throw off its sluggishness and start growing faster over the next two financial years, then stabilise at around 3 per cent a year. Government receipts will rise, it says, from 25.0 per cent of GDP to 25.5 per cent by 2028, and government payments will fall from just below 25.0 per cent of GDP to around 23.5 per cent.

The government will then be in the happy position of being able to cancel its net debt, deliver steadily growing budget surpluses — 2 per cent of GDP from the mid-2020s — and still make those big tax cuts.

Or will it? Are we really about to enter economic and budgetary nirvana, or are there hidden traps in the government’s plan?

Crucially, this virtuous sequence of events hinges on the rate at which Australia’s population grows over the next decade. And on that question Treasury, and the government, have been less than forthcoming.

In this year’s budget papers, Treasury claimed that Australia’s fertility rate will rise to 1.9 babies per woman from 2021 onwards. But when the Australian Bureau of Statistics last calculated the fertility rate, in 2017, it had fallen to 1.74, the lowest level on record. A return to 1.9 by 2021 would be astonishing. On the basis of this heroic assumption, Treasury expects Australia’s natural increase over the next decade to be 300,000 higher than would be delivered by the recent rate of gain.

Chart 1. Population growth: migration and natural increase

Source: ABS 3101 and Budget Paper No. 3

Treasury also predicts rapid growth in net migration: 155,000 more people over the next four years than its 2018 forecast, and 400,000 more over the next ten years. But how can that be reconciled with the prime minister’s March 2019 population plan, which included a 120,000 reduction in permanent migration over the next four years that was necessary, he said, to reduce congestion in the biggest cities?

Source: Commonwealth Budget Paper No. 3, Appendix A, 2018 and 2019

If he sticks to that plan, then Treasury’s rise in net migration inevitably means a huge surge in long-term temporary migration to more than offset the reduction in permanent migration. Not a word was said about this during the election campaign, perhaps because it wouldn’t have helped the government’s congestion-busting argument.

So what is going on?

Treasury hasn’t explained how its population growth assumptions square with the government’s economic, budget and tax plans. Higher levels of net migration and fertility would certainly reduce the rate at which the population is ageing. They would also increase pressure on infrastructure and government services.

But on the question of what would happen to the government’s plans if these assumptions weren’t realised, Treasury is silent. As the organisation well knows, a shortfall in the natural rate of increase is likely, and a shortfall in the net migration increase is even more likely, especially as the 2018 figure has already fallen 11,000 short of Treasury’s forecast.

But it is Treasury’s newfound indifference to the impact of ageing that is most surprising.

Launching the first Intergenerational Report back in 2002, treasurer Peter Costello warned of the impact of an ageing population on the economy and the budget. Lower labour-force participation rates and a declining working-age-to-population ratio would dramatically reduce future revenue. At the same time (though some experts dispute this), big increases in health, welfare and aged care spending would be required. Treasury believed that “the gap between spending and revenue could grow to 5 per cent of GDP by 2042.”

Against this background, the Howard government significantly boosted net migration, partly to reduce the rate at which the population was ageing. This decision has helped Australia achieve higher participation rates — all those young migrants looking for jobs — and age more gradually than otherwise would have been the case. And more gradually than comparable countries.

The government also provided a range of major tax advantages to older Australians with access to capital income, designed partly to reduce the growth in the number of people receiving the age pension. In the event, the cost of these measures in lost revenue may well be more than the savings on the age pension.

The ageing theme featured again in the latest Intergenerational Report, delivered in 2015 by treasurer Joe Hockey. “The proportion of the population participating in the workforce is expected to decline as a result of population ageing,” said Treasury, and that means “lower economic growth over the projection period.”

Hockey assumed that “average annual labour productivity growth over the next forty years will be 1.5 per cent” and real GDP growth would average 2.8 per cent a year. Combined with controversial actions to limit spending in health services and the age pension — actions that parliament mostly rejected — he anticipated that productivity growth would quickly put the budget into surplus and net government debt would be repaid by the mid 2030s. It was an extraordinary turnaround from Costello’s forecast of the impact of ageing.

Not to be outdone, Scott Morrison seems to have decided that Costello was far too cautious about the future and Hockey was a wimp when it came to achieving surpluses and repaying net debt. A key element of the PM’s ten-year budget plan is its assumption that the economy will soon return to the level of real GDP growth that prevailed over the two decades between 1998–99 and 2017–18.

The problem with this view is that during the first half of that period — the decade to 2008–09 — the number of working-age people as a proportion of total population was rising towards its peak of 67.5 per cent in 2009. Most of the 5.5 million baby boomers were at their income-earning peak and were spending at a high rate. Real GDP growth — at around 3.4 per cent a year — was well above the average of the past twenty years.

With the working-age-to-population ratio peaking in 2009 and falling to 65.3 per cent in 2019, real GDP growth has been much lower, at about 2.5 per cent a year.

Using the average of these two periods as the basis for forecasting Australia’s long-term real GDP growth takes no account of the ageing that has occurred since 2009 and its role in slowing economic growth. More importantly, it assumes further ageing will have no impact over the next decade.

Chart 2. Proportion of the population of working age

Source: Parliamentary Budget Office

By 2030, Australia’s working-age-to-population ratio will have fallen to 63.4 per cent. The whole boomer cohort will have moved beyond sixty-five and mostly into retirement. As Costello and Hockey forecast, the downward pressure on participation rates will be considerable.

From 2025, all boomers will be eligible for the pension phase of superannuation and most will be paying no tax on superannuation earnings. Some will be getting large franking credit refunds. Their private household consumption expenditure will fall as they age, and their take-up of health and aged care services and the age pension will increase.

By 2030 the number of Australians aged eighty and over will rise to just under 1.6 million, from around 960,000 in 2016, putting further pressure on the health system. The Australian Medical Association already says the public hospital system is in crisis, and waiting times to enter aged care facilities are under severe strain.

Yet Treasury fails to acknowledge any significant impact of ageing on the economy, tax receipts or the health, welfare and aged-care budgets. Indeed, it now thinks government expenditure as a portion of GDP will fall significantly at the same time as we are ageing.

The independent Parliamentary Budget Office doesn’t agree. In a report released the day before the budget it said:

Since 2011 — when the first of the baby boomer generation turned sixty-five — the share of the population of retirement age has increased significantly and the share of the population of prime working age has begun to fall. This flows through to the budget in the form of a reduction in revenue, due to lower labour force participation, and an increase in spending, reflecting greater demand for government programs that support older Australians. Over the next decade, the ageing population is projected to subtract 0.4 percentage points from the annual real growth in revenue and add 0.3 percentage points to the annual real growth in spending. In real dollar terms, this equates to an annual cost to the budget of around $36 billion by 2028–29.  This is larger than the projected cost of Medicare in that same year.

The government knows the likely negative future impact of ageing on the economy and the budget. When the inevitable debt-and-deficit disaster occurs, will it argue for massive cuts in spending like those Joe Hockey attempted? Does it plan to reduce the role of government according to the American model, opening up more privatisation opportunities for the government’s favoured businesses?

And why is it assuming such an extraordinary increase in population growth — and especially growth in the stock of long-term temporary residents — only to hide the fact in an appendix to Budget Paper No. 3 rather than including it in its much-vaunted population plan?

The next Intergenerational Report, likely to appear with next year’s budget, provides the prime minister with an opportunity to reappraise the challenges that an ageing population will pose. It seems unlikely he will take up the opportunity.

Regardless of the pros and cons of immigration or budget surpluses, Australians are entitled to honesty in politics, in the public service and in the media. The government’s assumptions need to be made clear, so the country can make informed and realistic decisions about its future rather than falling for a fairy tale about the good times rolling on forever. •

The post The numbers game appeared first on Inside Story.

A good starting point is the extraordinary blow-out — to almost 230,000 — in the number of people living in Australia on bridging visas. These visas are issued when the department can’t keep up with demand in substantive visa categories, and reflect long processing times and a ballooning of certain categories of arrivals.

The record number of Chinese, Malaysian, Indian and now Vietnamese visitors seeking asylum is in particular need of scrutiny. People smugglers are flying vulnerable people in on visitor visas and then applying for asylum on their behalf in order to secure work rights. They are then made available to Australian employers, effectively as indentured labour. This is happening every day through major airports, yet home affairs minister Peter Dutton and his department continue to gaze out to sea.

Without an efficient visa system with high levels of integrity, any debate about improving the broader design of immigration policy is pointless.

Here, the questions Labor needs to pose are obvious. When will the multitude of visa-processing backlogs — not to mention the lengthening queue at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — be reined in? When will government crack down on the people running the asylum scams out of Malaysia and China? How will all this be done given the projected decline in funding for visa processing? And how can the proposed privatisation of visa processing possibly help deal with this disaster?

The opposition also needs to expose the misleading population plan Scott Morrison issued in March this year. The plan talked of cutting permanent migration and sending more provisional migrants to the bush to “bust congestion.” Yet, just a few weeks later, the 2019 budget papers assumed a massive increase in population, fed by higher net migration and fertility.

The bulk of this population increase would need be driven by long-term temporary migration. The number of temporary entrants living in Australia would need to grow well beyond the current level of around two million to between three-and-a-half and four million in ten years. Inevitably, they will mainly settle in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

The government hasn’t explained how these extra migrants will be recruited and processed, or how faster population growth in the major cities will bust congestion. Will its infrastructure plans be big enough to accommodate the forecast surge in population? Have state premiers signed on to this massive population increase in major cities?

It’s more likely that a weakening labour market will bring a large fall in immigration, leaving the prime minister’s jobs creation and budget surplus plan in tatters. The jobs and small business department is already forecasting a 350,000 jobs shortfall in the growth of net employment, indicating that more people will need to take up second and third jobs for the prime minister’s promise to be met.

The list of problems goes on:

• It’s now clear that pure politics lay behind the government’s failure to take up New Zealand’s resettlement offer for refugees on Manus and Nauru. The opposition should intensify pressure on the government to resolve the predicament of the remaining refugees. The dubious and highly expensive single-source contracts for running the two offshore detention centres must also stop.

• On the mainland, most people in the legacy caseload of boat arrivals are living on temporary visas, their future uncertain. In the past both Coalition and Labor governments have regularised the status of people on such visas. Yet Peter Dutton appears to have no plans at all for their future.

• The department has been unilaterally limiting the number of spouse visas, despite the fact that parliament has twice voted (in 1989 and again in 1996–97) to deny it that power. Home affairs must be made to obey the law and process spouse visa applications according to the Migration Act.

• Home affairs must also adopt the Auditor-General’s recommendations on its tardy processing of citizenship applications. Did it have an unwritten policy of delaying granting citizenship to young people to prevent them voting in the recent election?

• The department needs to deal with the mounting risk to the reputation of our international education industry that comes from outsourcing student visa processing, especially in the higher-risk cases recently highlighted by the ABC’s Four Corners.

• The government needs to be pressured to act on the recommendations of its own taskforce on migrant worker exploitation. The problem will only worsen if the labour market weakens or if government proceeds with its risky new provisional visas.

Ham-fisted changes to temporary and permanent employer-sponsored migration have done little to reduce the risk of exploitation or protect lower-skilled Australian workers. Yet they have made it harder for Australian businesses to attract high-skilled workers from overseas. The costs and delays associated with processing these visas have deeply concerned employers and reputable migration agents.

Home affairs faces extraordinary challenges over the next three years, most of them a result of the decisions made by Peter Dutton and his departmental secretary, Mike Pezzullo. Survey data reveal that staff morale is declining rapidly, and the visa processing figures alone show that the department is increasingly dysfunctional. Labor’s challenge will be to show that the minister and his secretary are not the people to lead the department out of this mess. •

The post Department of dysfunction appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s the fact that Keneally is a rising star and a great forensic media performer whose success is largely measured in quantums of limelight.

The plan, apparently, is for her to apply a relentless blowtorch to minister Peter Dutton, particularly on the big increase in asylum seekers arriving by plane on his watch. As the opposition leader gushed on Monday, “Peter Dutton will know he’s alive each and every day with Kristina Keneally as the shadow minister.”

After taking government in 2013 the Coalition had a rude awakening. They stopped the boats in no uncertain fashion, after Kevin Rudd’s disastrous policy fiddles had produced an escalation in arrivals, but they got barely any credit from voters. It was almost as if this wasn’t the defining Australian political issue of the twenty-first century after all, and that people were more interested in bread-and-butter economic matters.

Now, it’s true that when immigration, refugees and unauthorised maritime arrivals are pushed to the front of voters’ minds, it’s good politically for the Coalition and bad for Labor, regardless of who is in government. That can never be changed. But while Australians much prefer the Coalition on the issue — going right back to John Howard in 2001 — they are also aware that these same politicians can be tempted to be too clever, to manipulate it, to play them for mugs: like Howard and the “children overboard” in 2001. Voters can be cynical.

The problem for Dutton as minister has been that whenever he’s tried to conjure up a gratuitous piece of scare-mongering, like the claim that refugees will take your hospital bed, it’s been too obvious. People know they’re being had.

Now Labor will do his work for him, ensuring that immigration, and asylum seekers in particular, is regularly on the front pages.

But wait, there’s more: the crafty shadow minister is doing a bit of “triangulating,” internalising and tweeting this slice of Dutton-speak about keeping Australians “safe” from the unwashed hordes:

@AlboMP’s decision to introduce a Shadow Home Affairs portfolio sends a clear message that Labor will ensure Australians are kept safe. Labor fully supports offshore processing, boat turnbacks where safe to do so, and regional resettlement.

Wait, isn’t it supposed to be all about preventing drownings these days?

Labor trying to out-tough the government on “border protection” is like the Coalition promising to be the party of protecting penalty rates. If people are really going to cast their vote on that issue, there’s only one choice.

More recently, Keneally seems to be saying she’ll be making the case for a bigger immigration program. That too, from opposition, is a political disaster waiting to happen.

Bill Shorten’s biggest mistake was loading himself up with big, comprehensive policies, seeming to take to heart from facile urgings to “rediscover the reformist zeal of the Hawke–Keating years.” (Facile because Hawke and Keating were in government, not in opposition, and also because very few of those great reforms celebrated today were taken to elections first.)

But Shorten handled immigration and related matters reasonably well. Shadow minister Shane Neumann was a missing-in-action man, and when he did speak you could see why. But that was preferable to swashbuckling in this sensitive area.

Albanese, judging from his positioning in past Labor leadership stoushes, always seemed one of the smart ones when it came to understanding the dynamics of electoral politics. (He backed Kim Beazley against Mark Latham in 2003, Beazley against Kevin Rudd in 2006, and Rudd against Julia Gillard — both times.) Not for him the Latham–Gillard fantasies of out-Howarding Howard.

But this appalling decision will come back to bite him and his team. Keneally is totally the wrong person for the job — unless making asylum seekers an election issue is the aim. •

The post The Keneally blunder appeared first on Inside Story.

But the checklist has a bonus for racist voters. They no longer have to guess each candidate’s ethnicity based on the candidate’s surname and picture. Remember those eight last-minute candidates the major parties nominated who all have Anglo-sounding surnames? The checklist reveals that they are all as (non-immigrant) Aussie as you can get. Just one of their forty-eight parents and grandparents — the paternal grandfather of the lone Labor replacement — was born overseas (in Gloucestershire). Last week, I speculated that ethnicity was probably the sole criterion for their selection. This week, one of them resigned after the media noticed that he had made a homophobic attack on a star Liberal candidate.

Peter Killin owed his selection as the Liberal candidate for Wills to the “Indian heritage” of the preselected candidate, Vaishali Ghosh. Her reported legal problem wasn’t foreign citizenship, but rather the possibility that she is “entitled” to some of the privileges of Indian citizenship. As of 2015, people with Indian ancestors are allowed to live in India as long as they want, without a visa or even registering with the police.

Ghosh likely baulked at giving up that right, which would automatically cancel the same right for her spouse and kids. Even though no one knows if a mere right to live in India (without any right to vote or be elected to India’s parliament, or even to work in the public service) is enough to disqualify someone from Australia’s parliament, the Liberals apparently weren’t willing to risk the embarrassment. Instead, they — and the voters of Wills — got Killin.

To find out who else we’ve got, you need to read each candidate’s checklist. It isn’t easy. Some are illegible. Others make no sense. A few give too much information, such as where a candidate spent last Christmas. More give far too little. “I don’t have a legal father,” declares one. (The Labor candidate for Indi is reportedly the child of a non-anonymous sperm donor from New Zealand.) My father “was not listed on my birth certificate,” says another. (Anthony Albanese omits how he recently tracked down his father after his mother’s death, as well as the constitutionally dangerous detail that Carlo Albanese was Italian.) Many detail their foreign ancestry but barely explain why they missed out on foreign citizenship. (Josh Frydenberg’s checklist simply states that his Hungarian and Polish parents were stripped of their foreign citizenship in 1948 and doesn’t address whether they or he might have regained it.)

Some allegedly lie. The commission has no power to refuse a nomination, but it has referred Rod Culleton to the Australian Federal Police. Culleton was the first person to be disqualified after the 2016 election, thanks to a belatedly annulled conviction for stealing some car keys. His problem now is that the government labels him bankrupt, but he ticked “no” to that question on his checklist. Still, the police referral seems unfair. Culleton wrote “see attached” next to his answer and supplied pages of legal argument as to why he isn’t bankrupt (and also why he remained a duly elected senator until parliament was dissolved in April). Right or (more likely) not, his checklist’s transparency makes it a very poor case for prosecution.

Anyway, take a step back for a moment. Why should Culleton’s theft conviction or his bankruptcy or Ghosh’s free-ranging right to move to India automatically rule out their serving in our parliament? After all, none of these things automatically rules out being an Australian police officer or a bankruptcy judge or a diplomat (though they might bite in some circumstances). Nor do they disqualify anyone from being elected to the parliaments of Canada, New Zealand or (except for fraudulent insolvency) the United Kingdom. The fact that Donald Trump might be a US–British dual citizen doesn’t disqualify him from the presidency, and nor would his bankruptcy.

These things may matter a lot to some voters, who should vote accordingly. But others may think they’re irrelevant, understandable or no worse than other politicians’ questionable pasts. The entire point of section 44 of the Constitution is to stop this latter variety of voters from having their say in Australia.

Alas, section 44 remains very popular with many voters, who blame politicians for not “following the rules.” That is the take of the Rise Up Australia Party, which says that last parliament’s debacle shows a “general lack of accountability within the government ranks to ensure all representatives qualify for the very responsible positions they hold,” and wants section 44 to be applied to state parliaments too. “Does the average Australian want their local MP to be a citizen of, and showing allegiance to another country such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Nigeria, North Korea, China and who knows…?”

The checklists of several Rise Up candidates tell a different story. One sent the Italian consulate an email the week before nominations closed with the subject “Urgent Please heck [sic] my dual Citizenship due to upcoming election.” Several wrote on their forms that they had no idea where one or both of their parents were born or whether they ever became Australian citizens. The checklist of the party’s top Senate candidate in Victoria, Rosalie Crestani, includes a set of cryptic German records and her assertion that her relatives all lost their overseas citizenships when they naturalised as Australians. She includes a statutory declaration sworn before her local chemist, stating that “I may be eligible to apply for restoration of an inherited Lithuanian citizenship, however I have not applied for Lithuanian citizenship and will not apply.”

On my count, Crestani is one of a least five Victorian Senate candidates at the top of their party’s lists — and hence with a chance of being elected — with possible section 44 problems. The Help End Marijuana Prohibition’s #1 candidate has an English father and an Irish mother, while Health Australia’s #1 candidate has an Irish father and a UK mother, but neither supplies any evidence of their renunciation of one or both of their British Isles citizenships by descent, a similar problem to multiple MPs last election.

The Secular Party’s top candidate, meanwhile, admits to having been a Pakistani citizen until just a few weeks before nominations closed and supplies only a letter from the Pakistani consulate forwarding his request to Pakistan as proof of his renunciation, the type of move that felled several Labor MPs last time. Sustainable Australia’s main candidate has a Dutch-born father, which could make him Dutch too in some circumstances, depending on when his father moved to Australia and took up Australian citizenship. His checklist doesn’t say.

There is nothing wrong with voting for a potentially disqualified candidate. Even if his or her election is ruled invalid by the High Court, your next preference will count anyway (in the Senate) or you can vote again in a by-election (in the House of Representatives). But if voting for a disqualified candidate is a problem for you, then you need to read each candidate’s checklist.

The main questions to check are 2 (on ancestors’ known foreign births) and 5 (on ancestors’ known “acquired” foreign citizenships). A “no” to both suggests that there are no dual citizenship problems (assuming they didn’t admit to known unknowns in their ancestry — check for a “no” or “N/A” to question 3 or a “no” to question 4). In my own electorate of Melbourne, three of the candidates — from the Liberals, Reason Australia and an independent — appear safe (assuming they filled in the form properly).

Any other candidates need a closer look. In Melbourne, the Animal Justice Party candidate reveals that he has UK-born grandparents, but that’s it for foreign-born ancestors. Although he provides no further explanation, he’s likely in the clear because British law largely precludes citizenship by “double descent.” On the other hand, the United Australia Party candidate, like many others in his party, submitted a checklist that asserts he has both foreign-born and foreign-citizen ancestors, but provides no details about them and doesn’t explain why. There is no way to check his claim that he isn’t a dual citizen. Or his ethnicity, if that matters to you. (“Melbourne is a great multicultural city, and I hope that Melbourne will always be fair, free and strong,” he says in a UAP press release.)

That left the two candidates with the best chance of winning in Melbourne: Greens incumbent Adam Bandt and (until his resignation) Labor challenger Luke Creasey. Both admit to having foreign-citizen ancestors and provide full details. Each denies having any foreign citizenship themselves, but their denials differ. Bandt, who has a British mother, attaches a recent letter from the UK’s “Nationality Team” confirming that Bandt can “derive no claim to British citizenship.” The excellent British citizenship site explains the queasy details: Bandt was born before Britain ditched its sexist ban on citizenship by maternal descent.

By contrast, Creasey, who has grandparents born in what is now Ukraine and Serbia, simply asserts that he “was incapable of acquiring foreign citizenship by descent from my foreign born maternal grandparents because they were stripped of citizenship and rendered stateless due to the events of WWII.” Understandably, he provides no evidence of these historical claims. Less understandably, he also provides no evidence of his current status under Ukrainian or Serbian law. Voters either have to trust that Labor’s vetters have checked these things or do their own foreign-citizenship research.

Creasey has now resigned from the Labor Party (but remains on the ballot, like all “disendorsed” candidates) because of a different part of his history, his social media antics from seven years ago. In revealing the gory details, the Herald Sun mentions in passing that Creasey is “a teacher at Coburg High School.” If that’s true, then he’s undoubtedly disqualified from being an Australian MP for holding an “office for profit under the Crown,” just as Phil Cleary was when he won Wills back in 1992. But it’s likely that Labor made Creasey quit his teaching job before he nominated, and he probably felt safe to do so because Victoria allows federal election candidates who quit their teaching jobs to apply to get their same job back if they lose. The catch is that it is up to the state government whether to rehire them. Thanks to section 44, Creasey must now hope that the education department doesn’t hold his social media past against him.

Voters have an additional role they can choose to play in the coming election: they can enforce section 44 of the Constitution. After the election writs are returned — presently scheduled for no later than Friday 28 June — all voters have forty days during which they can petition the High Court of Australia to challenge the outcome in their electorate or (for the Senate) their state. Bringing a petition is not for the faint-hearted. Petitioners will face close scrutiny from the High Court or the Federal Court, likely responses from senior lawyers hired by the major parties, and the possibility of paying everyone’s legal fees. They have to deposit $500 as security against the latter possibility.

Nevertheless, we’re likely to see a lot of petitions after the 2019 poll, the first since section 44 morphed from oddball annoyance to mass inconvenience in the last parliament. More importantly, it’s also the first poll since the High Court ruled — in dismissing a challenge to the Nationals’ David Gillespie over his interest in a shopping centre with Australia Post as a sub-tenant — that voters cannot bring a challenge in any other way. The only other option is referral by majority of a house of parliament, and the previous parliament promised that it would only refer MPs if they omitted something from their checklist. So, the voters’ right of challenge forty days after the writs close is use it or lose it, especially when it comes to things admitted to in the 1514 checklists.

As well, whether or (more likely) not the checklists succeeded in their goal of prompting candidates “to actively consider their circumstances,” they will help voters seeking to lodge petitions to find potential grounds for a challenge, without relying on the major-party targeting, long-term investigations, luck and media scrutiny that yielded scalps last parliament. That alone isn’t a recipe for chaos. The richest pickings will be in the minor parties, whose candidates generally only win in the Senate, where the most a petition can do is force a recount that typically puts the next candidate in the party’s list into parliament. Challenges to major-party candidates in the House can force a by-election, but voters to date have always simply re-elected the disqualified candidate or their party’s replacement.

What may cause chaos is the nature of the challenges brought. Last parliament’s disqualifications all came about because of MPs’ resignations or referrals by a house of parliament, generally based on clear legal advice that the MPs were in breach of section 44. As well, parliament opted not to refer candidates in some circumstances because of political or moral squeamishness, for example with descendants of second world war refugees, like Josh Frydenberg or Jason Falinski (or Luke Creasey), and especially sympathetic examples like Anthony Albanese. By contrast, individual voters are free, if they’re game, to bring challenges based on much more speculative legal arguments about the outer limits of section 44 against whomever they want. In some instances, voters’ challenges will allow major parties to extract the strategic advantages of such petitions without paying the political cost.

Any number of speculative arguments could be brought, but the commission’s checklists facilitate an especially broad one. The Constitution bans not only dual citizen MPs, but also MPs who are merely “entitled to the rights or privileges of” a foreign citizen. The potential reach of this ban is huge. In my electorate of Melbourne, the Greens’ Bandt is vulnerable, because his ancestry may give him the right to obtain foreign citizenship, as was Labor’s Creasey.

Bandt’s possible entitlement arises because Britain allows him to reverse the earlier sexism of its citizenship-by-descent laws, though his eligibility depends on his mother’s continuing British citizenship and his satisfaction of a “good character” test. Applications can be made online, but cost nearly $2000. Creasey’s possible entitlement to Serbian citizenship, although based on a more distant ancestor, is broader because Serbia allows anyone with Serbian ancestry to claim Serbian citizenship, on applying at an embassy and paying $367. Neither Bandt nor Creasey has to move overseas or prove a present connection to his ancestors’ homelands, though Creasey would have to sign a statement that he “accepts” Serbia as his “country.”

On the perverse logic of section 44, banning people who are merely eligible to become citizens of another country (without onerous requirements) makes sense because a future allegiance may conceivably conflict with an MP’s loyalty to Australia. However, as Australia’s leading constitutional law academic Anne Twomey has rightly commented, such a ban would cause chaos. And, unlike actual citizenship, which can usually be renounced, a possible entitlement to citizenship is, paradoxically, hard to get rid of.

Still, as Twomey says, no one can know for sure if this argument will work until the High Court so holds. Bringing a petition is one way to achieve that end. The same is true for plenty of other speculative arguments, such as ones based on candidates’ business interests, including their interest in companies that lease space to Australia Post, claim childcare benefits or use Medicare.

What is especially tempting about such arguments is that some of them can be applied to MPs in very marginal seats, where a rerun might buck the usual trend of voters simply re-electing disqualified candidates. Labor’s candidate for Australia’s most marginal electorate, Cathy O’Toole, who won Herbert by just thirty-seven votes in 2016, has a Lebanon-born grandfather, which likely entitles her — under a new scheme enthusiastically promoted by the Lebanese government — to reclaim her Lebanese ancestry for free. The checklist for Anne Aly, the sitting member for another ultra-marginal, reveals that she still lacks proof that the Egyptian government has issued a decree removing her Egyptian citizenship, as Egyptian law seems to require.

Labor’s candidate for another key seat, Banks, claims that he lost his Indian citizenship (acquired by descent) when he became an Australian, but that assertion is murkier for people born in Australia. His candidacy raises questions about the significance under Indian law of acquiring an Australian passport and the significance under section 44 of his ability to live in India for life without a visa.

Like many, I think all of the challenges to major-party candidates have long odds (although I’m often wrong about these things). But the lodging of so many petitions in the High Court is still likely to be consequential if the election result is close. If there are lots of petitions, particularly in marginal seats in the lower house, then the size of the incoming government’s majority, or perhaps even its identity, will be uncertain. As well, a large number of petitions — and a disparate set of complex arguments, involving uncertain facts, uncertain foreign laws and novel constitutional issues — will take a long time for the High or Federal Courts to resolve. In short, I predict months of post-election chaos.

But it’s not all bad. If anything could convince voters that the parliamentary qualification problem is mostly down to our dodgy Constitution rather than our dodgy politicians, it’s a lengthy lawyers’ picnic. Perhaps even the major parties will come on board and provide the requisite political support for an urgent referendum. Or perhaps not. Labor’s answers on the smartvote Australia website reveal that it “definitely” opposes allowing dual citizens into parliament. The Liberals “mostly” oppose it. Only the Greens — who played an ignoble role on the issue in the last parliament — “definitely” support change, in the form of replacing the whole section with a new ban on proved corrupt politicians. Discriminating voters — of either sort — should pay especially close attention to those opposing policies. •

The post How to be a discriminating voter appeared first on Inside Story.

The burst of interest is revealing. It highlights the growing electoral influence of migrant voters but also shows how issues that greatly concern them can often go largely unnoticed in the mainstream media (with SBS Radio a notable exception). It also highlights the complexities and inconsistencies of Australian migration policy. The government is creating a new visa that will enable tens of thousands more migrants to come to Australia for stays of up to ten years at the same time as it is cutting permanent migration to appease voter concern about urban congestion. Perhaps most importantly, the debate over parent visas highlights the perils of policy on the run.

The promise of a new visa emerged from the 2016 election campaign, following a very effective campaign by frustrated migrant communities. The source of their frustration was the difficulty migrant families experienced in trying to bring parents to join them in Australia. The permanent visa categories for parent migration were either prohibitively expensive or involved a decades-long wait. The only alternative was to bring parents out on a twelve-month visitor visa, after which they would have to leave again for at least six months before applying to make a return visit.

Exasperated Adelaide resident Arvind Duggal launched an online petition to home affairs minister Peter Dutton that quickly attracted almost 30,000 signatures, and migrant voters lobbied Labor and the Coalition, including in marginal electorates. Partway through the 2016 campaign Labor promised to create a new visa that would allow parents to remain in Australia for three years; a few days later the Coalition gazumped it with a plan for a five-year parent visa.

That five-year visa is now a reality, and the first applications can be lodged on 1 July. But the slow transition from an open and apparently generous campaign promise to concrete bureaucratic arrangements has left the new visa hedged about with conditions and fees. To qualify as a sponsor, a migrant family’s annual taxable income must exceed $83,000. A family can only sponsor one set of parents. A visit of up to three years will cost a pricey $5000, and a five-year stay will set the sponsors back $10,000. The visa can be renewed once for another stay of up to five years, but the parents need to leave Australia before applying. And visa places are capped at 15,000 per year.

Arvind Duggal, the original petition organiser, told SBS that the arrangements are unfair. He pointed out that the fee for parents coming on a year-long visitor visa is just $140, yet the annual cost of the new visa will be more than ten times that amount. “They are trying to make money from the grandparents visiting their kids, which is un-Australian and unethical,” he said.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that the costs and conditions attached to the new visa may have rendered the annual cap on numbers unnecessary. Many migrant families would not meet the income threshold for sponsorship or be able to afford the fees. Sponsoring families will also have to stump up the cost of private health insurance and out-of-pocket expenses for their parents, and act as guarantors for any debt to taxpayers that might arise from a medical emergency.

Recognising an electoral opportunity in the dissatisfaction with the new visa, Labor has used the current campaign to promise major changes if it wins office. Not surprisingly, it made the announcement in the marginal Sydney seat of Reid, held by retiring Turnbull loyalist Craig Laundy, where about 76 per cent of residents have at least one overseas-born parent.

Labor pledged to scrap the limit of one set of parents, a restriction it labelled “heartless, callous and cruel” for forcing families to choose between sets of parents. It would also slash the cost of a three-year visa from $5000 to $1250 and the cost of a five-year visa from $10,000 to $2500. The visa would be renewable in Australia, meaning that parents would be able to stay for a total of ten years without leaving the country. Importantly, Labor also promised to abolish the annual cap on numbers.

The Coalition and its boosters in the media have responding by charging that Labor is opening the floodgates to an unsustainable wave of grey migrants. Immigration minister David Coleman said Labor’s policy “showed a complete lack of regard for sensible immigration and population planning.” On Sky News, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin described it as “a shameless bid for votes” and an attempt to “mop up” the damage done to Labor’s reputation among migrants when remarks by NSW opposition leader Michael Daley were released during the NSW state election.

Labor can claim it is simply sticking to its guns — it criticised some of the visa’s conditions when the legislation came before parliament, and the bill eventually passed late last year without its support — but its policy does appear hasty and ill-considered. When asked how many applications might be expected, shadow finance minister Shayne Neumann’s response was decidedly imprecise: “We think it will be very popular.”

While it’s hard to predict exactly how popular, the most recent Migration Program Report gives a clue. Close to 100,000 applications for permanent parent visa were on hand on 30 June last year, divided roughly equally between the “contributory” and “non-contributory” categories.

A contributory visa costs $47,455, an amount meant to offset some of the costs these migrants might impose on the community as they age. In 2017–18, 6015 contributory places were on offer; while Home Affairs no longer publishes processing times on its website, SBS reports that the average wait is almost four years.

At $6100, a non-contributory visa is comparatively cheap. Last year, though, there were only 1356 places in the program; with waiting times stretching out more than thirty years, few migrants’ parents are likely to live long enough to make it to the front of the queue.

In other words, the pent-up demand for parent migration is huge, and the costs and caps of the permanent parent visa categories are what make the option of a ten-year stay on a temporary sponsored visa so attractive to migrant families. So it seems safe to assume that Labor’s much cheaper, uncapped proposal would see almost all of this backlog shift to the new temporary category.

What’s more, as this chart shows, the backlog for permanent parent visas has been growing by about 6000 applications per year over the past four years, with all the growth in the contributory visa category. Since there will be many migrant families for whom the contributory fee of almost $50,000 is unaffordable, it is again fair to assume that this represents only a portion of the potential annual increase in demand.

Permanent parent visa applications on hand at 30 June 2018

Source: Home Affairs annual reports on the migration program

Another factor will also make the temporary parent visa an attractive option for migrant families. Applicants for the two permanent parent visas must satisfy the balance-of-family test: that is, at least half the parents’ children must be settled in Australia, or they must have more children living here than in any other country. Since the balance-of-family test does not apply to the new temporary visa, parental migration will become a viable option for thousands of migrant families who would otherwise never have been eligible to act as sponsors.

When I wrote about the 2016 election promises on parent visas for Inside Story two and a half years ago, the immigration department was unable to provide basic information that might have helped judge the potential demand for a temporary visa. When I asked, for example, how many people currently use workarounds like the twelve-month subclass 600 visitor visa, I was told that the information was not “readily available.”

In theory, high demand won’t be a problem, because parents on temporary visas will have to be entirely self-financing. They will have no right to any kind of pension, welfare or government-funded aged care, and they will have to pay all their own medical expenses. They will not be allowed to work.

But attempts to draw neat lines between the categories of “temporary” and “permanent” migrants are fraught with problems, especially when those “temporary” migrants have a right to reside in Australia for up to a decade. It’s not hard to foresee difficult scenarios, like these two, developing down the track:

• A son-in-law sponsors his wife’s widowed mother to Australia, but a few years later the marriage ends. The estranged husband withdraws his sponsorship, but the wife can’t step in as a sponsor because she doesn’t meet the income threshold. The mother’s visa will be withdrawn at exactly the point when the distressed wife is in a vulnerable psychological condition, possibly even suicidal, and she and her children need the support of her mother more than ever.

• After living in Australia for more than ten years on a temporary visa, an elderly parent develops Alzheimer’s. He claims he is being subject to elder abuse by his sponsor child. The relationship deteriorates to the point where the child withdraws sponsorship so the parent must leave Australia. But there is no one in the homeland to care for him. Does the father get sent back anyway? If not, who intervenes and who pays for the parent’s high-needs care?

These are not far-fetched possibilities. Human lives are messy and complicated and tend to explode administrative systems and rules, no matter how detailed and thoughtful the design. Cases like these will end up in the media and lead to lengthy, resource-intensive and tortuous appeals to immigration ministers to use their discretionary powers. The more people who use the visa category, the more unforeseen circumstances and unintended consequences are likely to emerge. Such problems may be many years away, and will land in the laps of future governments, but that’s no reason not to take them seriously today.

Parent migration is undoubtedly a difficult issue. All of us can understand a strong desire to keep fathers and mothers close by as they age, to have grandparents pass on cultural and familial knowledge to Australian-born kids, and to express our love for our parents in tangible, practical, intimate ways. There are also much more pragmatic considerations: grandparents can provide unpaid, in-home childcare and other types of household support.

Despite the strong political demand from migrant voters, though, there is no public policy appetite for expanding the number of permanent parent visas. The government has already cut Australia’s migration program by 30,000 places from its peak of 190,000 a few years ago. What is more, both Coalition and Labor governments have for decades skewed the migration program heavily towards young, skilful, healthy applicants with English-language proficiency, on the basis that they are the new arrivals most likely to be economically productive and pay lots of income tax while placing limited demands on the healthcare system and welfare services.

Ageing parents have none of these desirable characteristics. Indeed, in a landmark report on Australia’s migrant intake, the Productivity Commission estimated the “cumulative lifetime fiscal costs” of a migrant parent on a permanent visa in 2015 to be “between around $335,000 and $410,000 per person.”

The temporary parent visa might seem to offer a way out of this dilemma. Migrant families can have their parents join them in Australia at no cost to the public purse and without needing paid work. But it risks creating a new cohort of people who are not quite Australian — who live here for an extended period but have restricted rights, no say in political decision-making, no political representation and no access to public support in times of crisis. •

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