Razor-Wire Policy Revisited On Best And Brightest

Phillip Adams - The Australian

Dear Philip Ruddock:

Just in case it has slipped your mind, let me remind you of the story of the Dunera Boys, that boatload of German and Austrian refugees, principally Jewish, who found their way to the UK expecting to join in the fight for regime change in Nazi Germany. Seventy-five thousand German-speaking refugees were rounded up in May and June 1940 on Winston Churchill's orders. Spooked by Dunkirk, he saw them as possible fifth columnists and decided to send them packing.

Australia agreed to take 6000 internees but only one shipload arrived. Of the 2732 on board, 2100 were Jews. Three boatloads made it to Canada; another ship was torpedoed. Canada's lot included a future Nobel prize-winner but our Jews were of comparable distinction. They included an anthropologist, some artists, a distinguished composer, a couple of political scientists, an athletics trainer, an economist, a physicist, a mathematician and a distinguished jurist.

All of whom were shipped to a concentration camp – that was its official designation – on the Hay Plains in NSW. Later, when Australian officials got a glimmer of what was happening in Europe's concentration camps, they took down the sign. But they kept the Jews locked up for years until, finally, sanity prevailed. And it had to prevail over local anti-Semitism as well as Churchill's paranoia.

After the war Australia could have chosen to force the Jews back to the ruins of Europe but, once again, sanity prevailed and those who wished to stay here were, at long last, welcomed. And the Dunera Boys, many of whom became exceedingly famous, made a great contribution to post-war Australia, one that is celebrated to this day.

But make no mistake, they were queue jumpers. Worse still, many had bribed their way out of Germany and Austria and, in some cases, paid people smugglers to aid their escape. They were illegals. Nobody wanted them.

A few weeks ago I attended a graduation ceremony at Edith Cowan University in Perth where, it seemed, almost every important academic prize went to, yes, a refugee from Iran. Again and again, he crossed the stage to receive a scroll, a plaque or a medal to the deafening applause of the audience. And he reminded me of something that you and the Government you serve refuse to acknowledge. That many of the people you've put behind razor wire are, far from being terrorists, the best and brightest from places such as Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. Hardly surprising, given that dissidents among intellectuals and scholars are often the first to leave. Either that or face prison, torture or death.

When Australia is struggling to maintain its population, let alone increase it, when we're suffering a significant brain drain from our best and brightest, who are leaving the country at a thoroughly alarming and increasing rate, we're treating decent and often conspicuously talented human beings as criminals. Just as many of the Dunera Boys would spend year after year in prison, we've condemned some distinguished human beings to the hell and humiliation of long-term internment.

At least there were no women and children in the Hay camp. We didn't imprison children during World War II. But that's what you've been doing, not only in Australia but in our offshore camps that form part of the grotesque Pacific solution.

The criminals are not the people behind the wire. The criminals are Australian politicians and their compliant bureaucrats who run this monstrous policy – which has brought us shame around the world.

OH yes, it's also brought us the flattering attentions of Tony Blair, who wants to borrow the Pacific solution for Britain so that refugees heading to the UK can be jailed in Africa or eastern Europe. And your Government has been trying to make political capital out of this.

In fact, it should bring you and Blair to your Christian knees to seek forgiveness. And it should add to the shame of Blair's monstrous duplicity over the weapons of mass destruction, itself one of the most shameful acts in the recent history of Western diplomacy.

Nonetheless, it's hard to top what Australia has been doing – and continues to do – to thousands of detainees within Australia and our colonial footprint in the region. Apart from its cruelty, its illegality and its profound cynicism (for its real purpose was to win elections), your wild exaggerations of the threat to Australia posed by refugees was a pre-echo of the wild exaggerations about the threat to the world posed by Saddam Hussein.

Many, perhaps most, of the "queue jumpers" you've imprisoned have real potential – like the Dunera Boys – to make significant contributions to Australian society. Yet we keep forcing the refugees back to Iran or to war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq.

Despite the scandal swirling around you, you still have the nerve, the audacity, to defend our response to refugees in your bureaucratic, technocratic jargon. And, yes, in "newspeak". This, on the 100th anniversary of George Orwell's birth.