Painting Fakes

Nauru is back in the Australian news which can only mean one thing - Australia is about to exile some more refugees there.  Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke went to Nauru last week for a series of meetings that culminated in a deal for Nauru to provide permanent residence for up to 280 asylum seekers.  In return, Australia has agreed to pay the Nauru government a one-off $400m and then $70m per year thereafter.  It's not clear how long this nonsense will continue but if we assume it will last for five years, it will cost the Australian government a total of $750m, or $2.7m per asylum seeker. Nauru from the air. It just so happens that I went to Nauru for a few days some years ago.  I can't tell you what I did there, but I can tell you that it was a depressing place.  There were a lot of asylum seekers there at the time, living under a regime known as 'open detention'.  That is to say, they were free to roam the island at will.  Some were still living i...

In his writings - both his award-winning novel/memoir No Friend but the Mountains and his journalism, recently collected and analysed in Freedom, only Freedom  - Behrouz Boochani talks about what he calls the 'Kyriarchal System'.  This term is his and Omid Tofighian's translation of the Farsi term system-e hakim.   Tofighian attempts to explain the term as follows: [it] can be translated in numerous ways ... sovereign system, controlling system, ruling system, governmental system, dominating system, oppressive system, subjugating system, ruling system ... but none of these actually capture the essence of what Behrouz is saying.... Wikipedia tells us: In feminist theory, kyriarchy is a social system or set of connecting social systems built around domination, oppression, and submission. The word was coined by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in 1992 to describe her theory of interconnected, interacting, and self-extending systems of domination and submission, in which a singl...

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right? This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     because he has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners     and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were faste...

Well now.  I am at a loss to understand how it is considered OK in Australia to imprison people for eight years for arriving in the country without the right paperwork, when serious sex offenders can get two and a half years for abusing children.   A few months ago I wrote a letter to the (then) new Immigration Minister, Alex Hawke, asking him to give his attention to freeing the detainees who are being imprisoned in immigration detention in the Mantra Hotel at Kangaroo Point, at the inappropriately named Brisbane Immigration Transit Centre and elsewhere.  Strictly speaking I should have written to the Home Affairs Minister but since that was Peter Dutton I thought I would try Hawke. A couple of weeks ago I got a much-delayed reply from an official of the Home Affairs Department.  It was predictably appalling.  I was angry, and wrote a detailed response.  As fate would have it, we now have a new Home Affairs Minister, Karen Andrews, so I sent it to her...

Here's my latest letter to our dear Prime Minister.  I've broadened the ask to take in three things that are uppermost in my heart at the moment.  After all, you're allowed to ask for more than one thing for Christmas aren't you? *** Dear Prime Minister I trust you have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and return to work ready to face the considerable demands that 2021 will bring. I have many wishes for 2021, some of which have nothing to do with you.   However, one of my wishes is for better government in 2021, from you and your colleagues.   This wish could be summed up in one main theme – end the divisive, partisan slanging match that politics has become, and get on with making the difficult decisions that we all need. The silver lining in the cloud of 2020’s pandemic is that for a short time, our governments (State/Territory and Commonwealth) worked together irrespective of political colour via the National Cabinet.   However, it didn’t take long t...

In her brief stint as the Independent Member for Wentworth, Dr Kerryn Phelps bequeathed the nation a gift, which has become known as the Medevac legislation.  A short explanation of this legislation is that when asylum seekers imprisoned on Manus Island and Nauru are sick in ways that cannot be treated there, the decision to evacuate them to Australia for treatment is made by a panel of doctors, not by Border Force officers with no medical training. Doesn't seem that controversial, does it?  They are not granted Australian residency.  They are not even released from detention.  They are simply moved from detention on a distant island to detention in Australia, close to the medical resources needed to treat their illness.  It's humane in a strictly limited, basically inhumane kind of way.  I think Phelps would have liked to do more, but this is the best she could get through with the help of Labor and her friends on the cross-benches.  Even then the L...

It is now thirty years since Robert Hughes published his brilliant history of Australia's convict period, The Fatal Shore .  The fact that it is still in print shows just how compelling it is. Years ago I bought a battered copy at a Lifeline book sale.  I put it on my shelf, and there it stayed until a couple of months ago when I took it with me on a holiday to Tasmania. Hughes tells the story of the Australian convict system from the first planning to the end of transportation nearly a century later.  He alternates between official records and the individual experiences recorded in letters, memoirs and case notes.  The result is a vivid portrayal of colonial life.  If you haven't read it, please do!  Let me just give you a little taste of its riches. Although Hughes doesn't ignore the tragedy of Aboriginal Australia during these years, this is very much a British story.  Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century was a troubled society....