(btw, catherine, or anyone else over here, did you watch Insight? If you did, what did you make of it?)
Catherine wrote:
> Isn't mandatory sentencing (apart from itself being a law) also
> exemption from the ruel of law...
Sure, but it's not _resolutely_ so, which is what I think I wrote; ie., it removes the discretionary sentencing powers of judges, but it doesn't remove the presumption of innocence, trial, burden of proof, limit on detention, possibility of review of the time or merit of detention, the need to lay charges, the obligation to inform someone of their legal rights, et cetera. My argument doesn't go to deciding between awful and awfuler horrors, but to getting a sense of just how much is tolerable for a country that presents itself, in official documents again that lay out the four or five (I forget) quintessentially Australian values, as being for the rule of law.
> this is a racist immigration policy by stealth, pretending it makes no
> specific division in terms of 'race'. I think that is very different.
What we call the White Australia policy wasn't principally implemented by way of an open classification of people into races, but rather the infamous 'language test' through which immigration officers could give anyone they didn't like tests in languages (any language, Swahili, French, etc) they knew the applicant couldn't speak. There were other shorter-lived bits of legislation to do with specific groups (Pacific Islanders, Chinese), as well as the part of the Constitution that makes it possible for state govts to disenfranchise a 'race' (a part of the Constitution which still stands, right?), but aside from those provisions in the Constitution which haven't been enacted for over a century, the White Australia policy was a policy enacted in administrative practice, as is the DIMA blacklist.
> And what makes them different is that mandatory sentencing doesn't have
> the degree of 'general public approval' which the 'detention of illegal
> immigrants' does.
I think 'general public appproval' is a direct result of narratives chosen or denied: when media and politicians choose to make a big deal about the reasons for which anyone seeks asylum, there tends to be general support for those asylum seekers; when politicians and media talk in terms of 'illegal', 'queue-jumpers', etc, support is for locking them up or sending the boats back at sea. 'Public approval' is a function of the narratives politicians and media decide for on each occassion -- flattery seems to be a major ingredient in either case.
> The ALP couldn't run on a platform of getting rid of the detention
> centres, but they will run their opposition to mandatory sentencing as
> far as they can.
It's kind of nice to see Beazly invoke the spectre of Victorian England/Les Miserable, even if it remains partially blind. Actually, I think they could run on such a platform and for similar reasons, although it would take a decade to turn around what they spent a decade setting up -- that's in the absence of any significant campaigning outside the ALP and assuming that the ALP is the key here, of course, which I don't.
> Well... anti 'illegal' immigrant line. Which is, again, significantly
> different in terms of an imaginary Australian position on immigration.
Not quite I think: in the time we're talking about, the ALP made a real effort to depict migration as the cause of rising unemployment, stopped access to welfare to legal migrants in the first six months of stay, the Greens, ACF and Democrats (later dropped) adopted a zero-population growth policy in a return to malthusianism -- all before the emergence of Hanson. But, I don't get this adherence to legality. There's an equally powerful discourse in liberalism and social democracy which says that there's a distinction between law and justice, isn't there? What makes that disappear in this instance it seems to me are the addition of other elements: they want to steal our way of life, and so on -- which, as I think about it more specifically, is that part of the colonial mentality that lives on as projection. All these people want to invade Australia, says Ruddock, when it seems that very few actually do want to come here at all; to the point where Howard is now considering increasing migration intakes because over the last two years we've got quite close to the astonishing rates of _emigration_ prior to the 1930s, with recent migrants from the so-called skilled migration programme leaving in their first year of stay in record numbers.
> Which is where the minister returned to insisting they are not related.
> Of course they are, but the main distinction is that mandatory
sentencing
> appears to be about Australian citizens and contravenes a popular
> imagination of Australian-ness as being about 'a fair go' and so on. I
> think it's fascinating, given the degree to which Australians tend to
> disavow 'patriotism', that this disintction based on the qualification
> of citizenship exists.
Yes, I think that's probably the crux of the what makes one tolerable and the other not. It fascinates me as well; also by the extent to which certain groups of citizens are still called upon to prove their patriotism on occassions or to stand up at some ceremony to prove that Australia isn't a divided nation.
> But this discourse on 'wealthy refugees' is also about public
> representation of need in Australia, where asylum-seekers are supposed
> to prove how benevolent 'the Australian people' are. And poverty is a
> criteria for that.
Yeah, I think that's right, unfortunately the whole terrain of asylum is premised on compassion and altruism -- which is a volatile terrain at best, with predictable consequences when things don't work out as demanded: asylum seekers have to always play at being good victims, passive and grateful. But it does seem to me that if this thing about poverty were to be a serious contention, rather than a performance of a benevolence, then there would be an additional insistence that the UN Convention be changed to allow the recognition of refugees who are fleeing poverty and starvation. I don't see that happening at all soon; but it seems to me the only response worth making to those kinds of claims.
Michael wrote:
> I've got to say, from an American perspective, the most remarkable thing
> about the Australian brouhaha over immigration detention centers and
> mandatory sentencing and the rights of child defendants is that there's
> a brouhaha. We've got all those things here and nobody's saying boo.
The
> UN is right down the street from where I'm sitting and not even the
> local papers cover them when they denounce us for these things.
The local papers are there to flatter you, not make you feel bad. I just watched the news, and our pollies are upset that the NRA has been telling people that Australian crime rates are out of control after the passage of the gun laws -- I felt, err, so reasonable and civilised compared to you crazy, gun-toting yanks. I enjoyed that news item, or perhaps it was infotainment.
Anyway, I thought there were migration detention centres there, but what's the legal status of detention? Is it mandatory, non-reviewable? Is detention legislated, ad hoc? Here detention was ad hoc until 1992, when the Govt rushed through legislation to make it legal the day prior to a Federal Court hearing to release a group of Vietnamese refugees who had been in detention for something like two years.
On mandatory sentencing, though, it didn't become an issue because the UN was critical -- the UN report said nothing critical, and in any case, it's always down to political expediency whether the line about 'foreigners shouldn't tell us what to do' is trotted out. It was that criticisms were expunged from the UN report that made the UN report a story for more than a day. What made mandatory sentencing an issue is that an Aboriginal boy died in jail after being sentenced under those laws for stealing stationery, protests, judicial rebelliousness over having their powers limited, as well as the historical juncture of a lead up to the Olympics (best foot forward to the world and all that, cobber) and the ascendancy of the Australian military to the role of regional humanitarian cop post-East Timor.
Angela _________