The WEEK ending 17 March 2002
LETTER FROM AUSTRALIA
When Commander Norman Banks of Her Majesty's Australian Ship Adelaide stepped ashore this week for the first time since his crew picked up becalmed asylum-seekers last October he denied reports that he had seen children thrown overboard. In Australia the incident is seen as having won the general election for right-wing PM John Howard who claimed that asylum-seekers were callously risking their children's lives to blackmail the authorities into accepting them. Since then Iraqi and Afghan asylum-seekers incarcerated in Woomera detention camp have highlighted their case with hunger strikes, sewing their mouths shut, and most recently digging their own graves and burying themselves.
In the asylum row, Howard has attempted to galvanise Australians in a nationalistic defence of their way of life. (The targeting of Afghans as aliens is ironic given the historic role of Afghan camel herders who provided the country's first inland communications, see G Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, 2001, p294.) According to left-wing commentators, Howard stole the election by appealing to anti-immigrant feeling. More probable is that the Howard government had been relatively successful in promoting Australia abroad (with the use of Australian troops in East Timor, for example) while Labour had little distinctive to offer. Now Australia's international reputation has been damaged by the Woomera affair, but the attention given to the government's campaign against immigrants gives a skewed impression of the country's mood.
At a recent conference on population employers rallied to the cause of immigration as a way to solve Australia's chronic under population problem. With a landmass as great as the USA, Australia has just over 20 million inhabitants. Business leaders complained that the small internal market robs them of the economies of scale and opportunities that a bigger market could afford. More pointedly, the employment ministry has reported a chronic shortage of professionals, from lawyers to nurses. Victoria's state governor has called for a population target of 50 million, to be achieved through mass immigration. Government ministers are nervously fighting off these demands.
Underscoring the under-population problem is Australia's exemplary economic growth, reporting an increase of more than four per cent of GDP in the last quarter, the best performance of any developed country. Jobs growth and increased consumer spending are credited for the good figures. One rural town has lobbied the government on behalf of its Afghan asylum-seekers, who have turned around the town's fortunes by filling the vacancies in the local abattoir. The one voice that chimes with Howard's anti-asylum policy is the environmental movement. The Greens shun any explicitly racial immigration policy but vehemently oppose any increase in numbers, which they fear will threaten Australia's supposedly fragile eco-system. For them, twenty million is quite enough.
Worldwide the population debate took an interesting turn as World Health Organisation officials revised their estimations of population growth downwards. Despite long-standing fears of an explosion of population in underdeveloped regions, officials were surprised to discover that the fall off in births recorded in the developed world is reproduced in the developing. Population forecasts have always expressed elite anxieties more than real changes. In the past the WHO merely echoed the fears of Western ruling classes that the Third World would swamp them. Those fears were underpinned by the understanding that capitalism had little to offer the mass of people in terms of employment. But for the last five years the pattern of economic growth has been transformed. Instead of intensive growth displacing well-paid workers with cheaper machinery, the global economy has been marked by extensive growth, in which more and more people are drawn into capitalist wage labour at the same basic productive level, or lower than the norm. With the numbers in work growing across the globe, fears over population are shifting from the perception that there are too many people to a more inchoate anxiety that there are too few. In truth of course there are neither too many nor too few in any absolute sense, only in relation to the perverse preoccupations of the employing elites.
-- James Heartfield Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Age is available at GBP19.99, plus GBP5.01 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'. www.audacity.org