So, let me tell about a bit about what I've been doing these past few weeks and why.
Since late last year, legislation has been pending to make all onshore applicants for asylum able to receive only a 3-year temp visa if their applications are granted, ever. They would not be allowed, having been granted refugee status (which is extraordinarily difficult), to receive welfare, health care (Medicare), travel outside the country... lots of terrible shit. At the end of Jan this year, the legislation passed with the support of the Labor Party.
Last week, a group of people being held at a Western Australian refugee camp (it really is a camp -- barbed wire around tents in the remote desert) went on a hunger-strike. They sewed their lips together. Refugee prison guards have often enough resorted to force-feedings to ostensibly break a hunger-strike -- torture in another language. Their demands were pretty simple really: to be moved somewhere were they wouldn't be subject to the intolerable heat of the WA desert (it's summer here), and to have their applications processed faster. Applications take a very long time to process -- often over a year. More often than not, and increasingly, deportation is the result. Anyway...
Most of the legislative changes to the Migration Act that have led to this latest began in 1992 with the Labor Government. The current Liberal-National Government has merely extended certain things quantitatively or set about 'fixing the loopholes'. The adviser to the current Liberal Immigration Minister is none other than the previous Labor Minister for Immigration.
So, what does all that have to do with Slavoj?
In 1996, Pauline Hanson (and later her One Nation) arrived on the political scene. Hanson made lotsa ranty speeches about being "swamped by Asians", the kind of stuff you'd find in Plato about those dnagerous sailors and the stable virtues of the goatherders up in the hills... You know, rural refoundation kind of stuff, but in Ustrayan rather than Greek.
Hanson -- the phenomana that was --- began by writing a letter to the local paper as the Liberal candidate in the upcoming elections. In it, she complained about "those Aboriginals" who get handouts and are lazy, amongst other things. People of good conscience were indeed appalled, perhaps at the nasal, whiney inelegance of Hanson herself. The Labor Party denounced Hanson as a racist, the Liberal Party whose candidate she was promptly responded by removing her candidacy as a Liberal member... and she went on to win one of the safest _Labor_ electorates in Australia. Following this little bit of quite fascinating theatre, she went on to form One Nation and set about -- with the help of a couple of rather odd fellows -- getting a number of people elected to the Queensland Parliament (with 30% of the vote) who held the balance of power. It was only due to the unbounded paranoia and incompetence of Hanson and her lads that said politicians began resigning from ON and ON today exists as a series of lawsuits in the High Court brought by ex-members.
In the meantime, a constant round of anti-Hanson rallies had ensued. Wherever Hanson went, antifa rallies went -- the kind of actions not seen for a very long time, and not seen since, including as they did Liberals, Laborites, the Democratic Socialists, the International Socialists... In Hanson, people had found a spectacle they could easily denounce whilst not having to do very much at all, including not having to even think about the policies either the previous Labor Govt had put in place and the Liberals were in the process of drafting. United Fronts, it was said. Hanson was really, truly the threat of fascism it was said. First, we defeat Hanson, and then we defeat whatever else is lying about, it was said. This kind of ordering of priorities with Hanson at the top of the list was already a reversal of chronology. It was also stupid.
Right now, I wouldn't be so busy were it not for that rather effective dose of valium. Even and especially those sections of the left which were so active in organising the anti-hanson rallies require basic introductions to the reality of border laws in Australia. It's like teaching people how to speak again after a stroke. What, the ALP is really this bad? The Liberals too?
People went into a stupor. Racism = Hanson; much like I suspect in Europe Racism is coming to mean Haider. What exactly has Haider proposed that isn't being done on the broader scale of the EU's border arrangements already, being done by Blair and whatsisname in Germany? I really have no idea; but I doubt it's all that different.
I don't think the anti-hansonism of those rallies here was cynical, or entirely so. First, people enjoyed them. I mean, they really enjoyed them: smiles, camaraderie, we all know the feeling of Feeling of Fighting the Good Fight. Second, it all so easily converged with a habitual preference for bureaucratic reproduction and/or political jockeying: the DSP and ISO competed with eachother for newspaper sales and recruits; they all tried to outdo eachother in how anti-hanson they were, since this, it was supposed, implied something about how anti-racist they were.
Well, what we have now is a series of policies that _exceed_ even those presented by ON. ON is defeated, or rather it fell down of its own accord, but so what? Things were bad before ON, and now they're worse -- and all thanks to many of those people who "chased" Hanson outta town.
Yesterday, an Aboriginal boy of fifteen was found hanged in a cell. He had been jailed through the Northern Territories' 'three-strikes' mandatory sentencing provisions for stealing stationary. Hanson had nothing to do with it. The guy who drafted the mandatory sentencing laws was, however, part of the United Front.
btw, Zizek's remarks on the relation between censoriousness and enjoyment are a repeat, in lacanese, of Marx's remarks on the relation between censorship and fascination in the latter's writings in defense of freedom of speech.
Angela