OPINION: Asylum-seeker shame rises for some political pundits

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of the United States embassy in Canberra last November. And to be sitting there watching and listening as that unnamed ''key Liberal Party strategist'' that boat people was a politically ''fantastic'' issue with ''the more boats that come the better''. And if, for no other reason, than to know who that imbecile strategist was!

Oh, to now be a fly on the wall of that strategist's office and see his or her face watching images of the Indonesian fishing vessel with 100 Iranian and Iraqi asylum-seekers on board crashing against the coastal rocks of Christmas Island.

Of course, the political logic of the strategist's comment to US diplomats is really quite straightforward. If the boats stop coming, Tony Abbott would look like a right royalist fool by standing up on Manly beach, budgie smugglers and all, and screaming at the top of his voice: ''Stop the boats!'' If there were no boats hitting Christmas Island, how would voters in nearby marginal Queensland seats feel threatened enough to vote for the Liberal National Party?

And of course, this madness is all the result of our obsession with border security. To secure our borders, we go to faraway places and take part in wars against enemies, many of whom have never heard of us. What we don't seem to realise is that when we take part in wars, we have obligations. We have an obligation that is triggered as soon as hostilities cease and our leaders feel triumphant enough to declare ''mission accomplished''. It's an obligation in international law to restore and maintain basic law and order for the lucky citizens not ripped to pieces by our weapons.

Now let's look at the record in Iraq and Afghanistan. Basically it can be summarised like this: we came, we saw, we conquered, we unconquered and we lost control. Any MP or pundit who thinks Iraq and Afghanistan are bastions of stability should spend Christmas with their family in a "holiday house" in Kandahar or Basra.

Many Iraqis don't celebrate Christmas. One of the most important religious festivals in Iraq is Ashura. It isn't easy celebrating when suicide bombers are out to blow themselves, you and your family to pieces on a holy day.

And if you do happen to celebrate Christmas, things aren't much better. A siege of the Our Lady of Deliverance church on October 31 left 52 worshippers dead. In such an environment, is it any wonder so many Iraqis and Afghans are fleeing?

But Andrew Bolt and other allegedly conservative bloggers keep reminding us of the existence of an orderly queue. Everyone should just take a ticket and patiently stand in the queue and wait for their number to be called.

So where does the queue start for Iraqis? We know that many fled to neighbouring Syria, where living conditions were described in a UNHCR survey conducted in July and August at the Waleed border crossing between Syria and Iraq. One extended family of 13 people was living in a one-bedroom unit.

Syria now holds 290,000 Iraqi refugees, more than 70 per cent of whom have lived there for at least four years. And back in May 2007, The New York Times reported that thousands of Iraqi women have been forced to work in prostitution. The report said:

Aid workers say $50 to $70 is considered a good night's wage for an Iraqi prostitute working in Damascus. And some of the Iraqi dancers in the crowded casinos of Damascus suburbs earn much less ... From Damascus it is only about six hours by car, passing through Jordan, to the Saudi border. Syria, where it is relatively easy to buy alcohol and dance with women, is popular as a low-cost weekend destination for groups of Saudi men.

One Iraqi prostitute told the reporter:

The rents here in Syria are too expensive for their families. If they go back to Iraq they'll be slaughtered, and this is the only work available.

This is the orderly queue we hear about. Imagine what evil people would use people smugglers to jump from such a safe and secure environment. Surely the average Aussie, let alone Bolt and Scott Morrison, would happily bring up their families in such circumstances than spend six months in a leaky boat.

If you had to choose between selling one's daughter into prostitution and borrowing thousands to hit the high seas, the choice would be obvious. If Australian voters were more aware of the realities refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran must face, they would punish politicians who used imbecilic terms like "queue-jumper".

If anything good comes out of the Christmas Island tragedy, it will be that Australian politicians will have received a reality check. Demonising the most vulnerable should now become political suicide. Voters don't have the stomach for images of children smashed against rocks and drowning, even if it means a more humane and sensible asylum- seeker policy.

Finally, here's a Christmas gift idea. Australian-Vietnamese entertainer Ahn Do has just published his memoir The Happiest Refugee: The extraordinary true story of a boy's journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia's best loved comedians.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Monday 20 December 2010.

UPDATE I: The following letter to the editor was published in the Canberra Times on 22 December 2010:

Rescue from evil

Good on you Irfan Yusuf for reminding our politicians what drives the Iraqis, Afghans and others to turn their back on their own country and seek refuge in a foreign land ("Asylum-seeker shame rises for some political pundits," Dec 20, p9). These people, who had hoped that the West would rescue them from the clutches of their wicked rulers, now realise that their safety and security was hardly the concern of the armies that dropped in to liberate them. The least we can do for these desperate people is to rescue them from the new evil which our poorly planned mission helped create.

Sam Nona
Burradoo, NSW

VIDEO/IRAQ: Lengthy report on the Secret Iraq files ...

VIDEO/COMMENT: John Howard's war of liberation ...

According to his recently released memoirs, John Howard says that the Australian Labor Party was absolutely wrong to oppose the invasion and war in Iraq. Why?

John Howard says it was "inconceivable" that Australia would not back the US in Iraq ...

The former Liberal prime minister charges the Labor Party with lacking conviction, hiding behind the UN and outsourcing its foreign policy to the Russians and French on the Security Council.

It's all about alliances. Human beings don't seem to matter. I'm not aware of a single occasion where Howard expressed even a word of sympathy for Iraqi victims. Indeed, any Iraqi victim who managed to escape and make it to our shores was thrown into detention.

As for the ones who couldn't escape ...



Mr Howard should remember some of the families mentioned in this clip next time he goes for a drive with Janette.

OPINION: Refugee Hysteria Suggests Aussies Have Forgotten Their Own Ancestors

YOU can always tell when Australia has entered election mode. Suddenly the really big issues come to the fore - issues that affect the economy, national security, indeed Australia's very survival. Issues like the occasional arrival of a handful of desperate boat people from Afghanistan, Iraq or Sri Lanka via Indonesia.

On Sunday, March 28, Rupert Murdoch's tabloids across Australia ran the front-page story of a mass invasion of asylum seekers. In Brisbane, the headline was THEY'RE HERE.

And who were they? The paper reported that 2000 asylum seekers had made it to Christmas Island, while 425 people were being housed on the mainland. But the real nightmare was seven adults and three children going shopping in Brisbane. They spent an hour and a quarter in a shopping centre, the paper howled.

The group returned with two shopping trolleys loaded with grocery bags. Their purchases included Home Brand Hawaiian pizza, Smith's potato chips and cartons of Coca-Cola.

How selfish of seven adults to share pizza, chips and soft drink. And to think these people claim to be desperate refugees!

Anyway, back to the world of sanity. Readers with even a basic knowledge of Australian history will find the current immigration hysteria ironic. For some reason, non-European illegal immigrants seem to bring out the worst indignation in white Australia. It's as if Aussies have forgotten their own ancestors came here from mother England on boats. And many were here as a result of being sentenced for the kinds of offences for which our migration laws today would bar them from leaving Sydney airport.

Australians are all too quick to forget the key historical role people from Afghanistan played during the mid-19th century. For 60 years, these men and their camels were the only transportation available through the centre of Australia, servicing distant mines and sheep stations as well as being involved in Australia's first overland telegraph line.

With troops fighting in Afghanistan, Australia has an obligation under international law to restore order. Australia and its coalition and Nato partners have singularly failed to do this. Hence, when it comes to accepting Afghan refugees, Australia has a major responsibility. Sadly it is the conservatives, self-declared protectors of Australia's Christian heritage, who show the least Christian attitude towards refugees.

The prejudice in Australia's popular media toward anyone deemed a Middle Eastern migrant is so endemic that one can only hope God in his good sense doesn't send the Son of Man to Australia for the Second Coming.

IN AUGUST last year, on an ABC television chat show, Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop reminded viewers of the perils posed to Australia by an increase in the number of people arriving by boat.

She shared the panel with conservative American humorist P J O'Rourke. He found all this hysteria about boat people in Australia and some parts of the EU rather amusing.

You know, we in the States have much, much more experience with being all wrong about immigration than you do. I mean, 36,000 you said in Italy? We laugh. That's a day in the United States. And we are so wrong about it. I mean, build a fence on the border with Mexico, give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry, you know ...

Ms Bishop tried to rescue her conservative credentials after being showed up by O'Rourke. She recited the usual Liberal Party mantra about people smugglers.

O'Rourke's response?

Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. You know, if you open your borders, you don't have people smugglers ...

These people are assets. One or two of them might not be, but you can sort them out later. Oh, I think conservatives are getting this wrong all over the world, I really do.

The Rudd Labor Government is not much better. Australia's immigration minister recently announced that the processing of new asylum applications from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan would be suspended. The government says circumstances have changed in both countries such that it is now safe enough for asylum applicants to return.

That being the case, one can expect Australian troops in Afghanistan to prepare for their imminent return. Yet the reality is that the US is getting ready to send 17,000 more troops into the country and has requested its allies (including Australia) to increase their troop presence. Canadian Defence Minister Peter MacKay has told Nato and other allies that the military alliance cannot take its foot off the gas in Afghanistan, simply because the US is about to send 17,000 more troops.

And so we have all this fuss over 4500 boat people. Meanwhile, there is little fuss over 50,000 illegal immigrants from Britain and the US.

In the Australian psyche, illegal immigrants must necessarily be non-European and non-white. Either that or some illegal immigrants are more illegal than others.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. This article was first published in the Dominion-Post in Wellington, New Zealand.

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OPINION: Rising trend of fearmongering on refugees and passports ...

Coalition rhetoric now appears to slipping back to the worst practices of the Howard era, IRFAN YUSUF writes ...

Tony Abbott wasn’t exactly born into the Liberal establishment. His political mentor was none other than Bob Santamaria, the ultraconservative Catholic activist who founded the National Civic Council and who was more concerned with ridding trade unions of communism than supporting what he described as Menzies’ "party of capital".

In his book Battlelines, published shortly before his accession to the Liberal leadership, Abbott affectionately refers to his mentor as "Santa". He admits that Santamaria (who died in 1998) had some concerns about the young Abbott joining the Liberals. Santamaria apparently had a

... prejudice that serious Catholics couldn’t advance in the Liberal Party.

In recent times, followers of other non-Protestant faiths must be wondering whether the same applies to them. Recent comments about asylum seekers, burqas and passport forgeries must surely make us wonder whether the Australian electorate would be ready for "Captain Catholic" to rule over a country where Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are the fastest growing faiths.

Many wondered during the mid-1990s whether John Howard, the man who suggested that Asian migrants may not make a neat cultural fit, could one day become prime minister of a country located closer to Kuala Lumpur than London.

Coalition rhetoric on these issues today seems a mere continuation of the worst of the Howard era. Former Liberal prime minister (and now former party member) Malcolm Fraser described the party as being more about"fear and reaction".

The recent "real action" advertisement shows the origin of illegal immigrants to Australia. Five red arrows are shown emerging from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia respectively. The words "Stop illegals now" are shown in the top left corner of the screen.



No red arrow was shown emerging from Britain, even though it provides one of the largest proportions of illegal immigrants in Australia, certainly larger than any of the five Asian and Middle Eastern nations shown in the Liberal advertisement.

Presumably the Coalition strategists regard white-skinned English-speaking Brits as less scary than dark-skinned English-speaking Tamils or olive-complexioned Iraqi Christians.

The Coalition has also announced a return to some form of Pacific solution. This will involve the offshore processing of any asylum seekers arriving “illegally”. We will also see a return to Temporary Protection Visas under a future Coalition government. Yet, as Bernard Keane notes in Crikey, there was "a 50 per cent surge in asylum seekers coming by boat after TPVs were introduced in 1999" by the Howard government.

Furthermore, most TPV holders were eventually granted refugee status. The TPV regime is hardly incentive for “illegals” to avoid boats altogether. Hence the Liberals could once again become the people smugglers’ best friends.

Yet the irony is that so much of the fear-mongering runs directly contrary to Australia’s best interests, let alone liberal and/or conservative fundamentals and common sense. At times, the Howard government showed a complete disdain for Australian citizenship, all the while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns encouraging permanent residents to take up citizenship.

The complete disdain Howard and his ministers showed to Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, unlawfully detained by the United States, was just one example of how fear-mongering was used to evade the government’s responsibilities to its own citizens.

Recent comments by Julie Bishop show an even greater disdain for the rights of Australian citizens whose passports have been fraudulently used to carry out a terrorist act. Some may baulk at the suggestion that the murder of a Hamas leader could be deemed a terrorist act given that the deceased was himself responsible for acts of terror. Hamas, they will say, was a murderous organisation with a history of bloody retaliation.

And now Hamas will have a large number of Australian passport holders on their retaliation list.

To make matters worse, Bishop indicated (and hastily retracted) that Australian governments had forged other countries’ passports for use by our intelligence services.

One wonders whether Bishop was part of such a government and privy to such a decision, or, if such forgeries existed, whether they were used in assassinations or other forms of terrorism.

Indeed, can Abbott promise that a future Coalition government will not forge overseas passports, including those of permanent residents and citizens? Will he be prepared to put this in writing?

The Coalition has again been caught out placing the interests of foreign countries (albeit allies) above the safety and security of Australian citizens. In government they allowed two Australian citizens to languish in an illegal US prison camp in Cuba at the insistence of the US. Now, in Opposition, the Coalition is showing effective disdain to the security of Australian citizens to protect the sentiments of a nuclear-powered Middle Eastern government that used Australian passports to carry out an assassination.

And to think Bishop was accusing her opponents of appeasing an overseas lobby.

■ Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer, a former federal Liberal candidate and author of Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Friday 28 May 2010.

UPDATE I: Neil James of the self-styled Australian Defence Association wrote this delightful letter to the newspaper.

In what again seems to skate closely to an apologia for Islamist terrorism, and among other polemical claims too numerous to refute, Irfan Yusuf ("Rising trend of fear-mongering on refugees and passports," May 28, p13) incorrectly claims that David Hicks was "unlawfully detained by the United States'' in an "illegal prison camp".

Under the Geneva Convention, as a Taliban combatant captured by the opposite side in a war he chose to fight in, David Hicks was not detained illegally for a single minute at least, perhaps, until his later separate criminal trial and prison sentence by US Military Commission. He was only detained by the US for so long because the war continued, and our then inadequate treachery laws meant he could not be released on prison of war-type parole for criminal trial in Australia (as the US was willing to do).

Fortunately this long-standing and disgraceful legal loophole has been closed so a future Wilfred Burchett or David Hicks can have his day in court. Rightly, since the Security Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Act, 2002, an Australian citizen anywhere in the world now commits treason if he or she (among other things):

*intentionally assists, by any means whatsoever, an enemy, at war with the Commonwealth;

*intentionally assists, by ''any means whatsoever'', another country or organisation that is engaged in armed hostilities against the Australian Defence Force; or

*forms an intention to do any of the above acts and manifests that intention by an overt act.

In a liberal democracy ruled by law we owe no less to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force. Irfan Yusuf should be prepared to acknowledge this.

Neil James, executive director, Australia Defence Association

What can I say? Unlike you, Mr James, I don't consider myself an expert in public international law. But I find your suggestion that our men and women overseas are fighting and dying so that our liberties can be curtailed by draconian laws you and the small minority of similar mind boast of to be utterly ridiculous and an insult to our armed forces.

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OPINION: Values blur in good and evil ...

Uncle Sam stands at the top of a flight of stairs, looking more than slightly perplexed. Below him is a windowless chamber its sparse furnishings consist of a lamp, a wooden bench and a closet shaped roughly to the contours of a human body, spikes emerging from its rear wall. A man hangs from the roof, his ankles bound. Below him stand a Caucasian man dressed in a Nazi uniform, a hooded Spanish inquisitor brandishing a sword and a third man in military fatigues and an Arab head-dress.

All three are watching Uncle Sam, inviting him to join them, the third man stating:

C'mon down. Once you take the first step, it's easy.

What I've just described in words is a cartoon by Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Tony Auth. It's only now, with debate over the use of torture in the "war on terror", that we're discovering just how deep the Leader of the Free World had descended.

The frequent mantra recited by Western political masters was that we were in a war against terrorists who hated us because of who we are, because of our values. Terrorists despised us for being civilised. They wanted to replace notions such as democracy and the rule of law, which we stood for, with terror and lawlessness. This was a war for civilisation, a fight to defend freedom.

Yet within a mere six months of the 9/11 attacks, top officials of the CIA were happy to flout the rule of law and to breach the very values they claimed to protect. To use the words of North Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, the Bush administration saw the law as a nicety we could not afford.


This new lawlessness incorporated the use of harsh interrogation techniques (read torture) such as waterboarding. In this torture, a prisoner is bound to an inclined board, his feet raised and his head slightly below the feet; then cloth is wrapped over his face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the prisoners gag reflex is activated and he feels convinced he is drowning.

One CIA prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, is said to have been subjected to waterboarding that proved so effective that he provided false evidence of a link between al-Qaeda and the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein which led to the 2003 invasion. Al-Libbi made these fabricated claims as he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

Even if we accepted claims by United States lawmakers that torture was used to protect Americans, al-Libbi's torture was clearly used for political purposes to justify a war the Bush administration was determined to fight even before the first jets hit the World Trade Center. Once evil means are adopted even for seemingly noble ends, the lines between good and evil soon become blurred.

Al-Libbi's treatment is just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of people have been detained in various US detention facilities, both known and secret, including in Indonesia, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay. Among them were two Australian citizens David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib.

Yet while US media seem almost fixated with the role that Republican and Democrat lawmakers and US government officials played in ordering and executing torture of detainees, few Australian journalists have considered what role (if any) the Australian government may have played or at least what knowledge it may have had of the torture of Australian citizens at Guantanamo Bay.

And yet now the US is reluctant to settle Guantanamo detainees on its own territory. Meanwhile US President Barack Obama is reluctant to release further documents and photos of torture conducted by the CIA for fear it will further inflame tensions. It is this very secrecy which provides a perfect cover for even more abuse.

Regardless of how painful the process may be, the US must take responsibility for the consequences of its inquisition. Yet all we seem to be hearing from Obama is empty rhetoric about how the US does not torture the same rhetoric used by his predecessor. Obama chose Cairo as the location to give his speech to the nominally Muslim world.

Cairo was also the place where Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was sent by the US to have terrorism confessions extracted from him using the most brutal forms of torture. In his memoir My Story: the tale of a terrorist who wasn't, Habib outlined not just his own torture but also the suffering of other inmates also beaten and drugged.

During his Cairo address to an audience of political leaders and diplomats from Muslim-majority states, Obama admitted the US had acted contrary to its ideals by instituting torture. Yet among governments represented were those which will continue to implement the US policy of extraordinary rendition or the secret abduction and transfer of prisoners to countries that will carry out torture on behalf of the US.

The Washington Post reported on February 1, 2009, that Obama issued executive orders allowing the CIA to carry on with renditions. He further allowed the CIA to detain suspects in facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis. America will effectively now outsource Guantanamo-type operations to the generals, sheikhs, colonels, dictators and presidents-for-life who will no doubt torture not just those deemed terror suspects by the US but also domestic political opponents.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recently urged all those involved in the torture process including doctors, nurses, psychologists and lawyers to be pursued and not let off the hook. Australia and New Zealand can play a role in this process, given that both are the only two nations in the Pacific region to have ratified the Convention Against Torture. Yet given the lacklustre performance on the part of John Howard and Kevin Rudd on the treatment of former Australian citizen detainees at Guantanamo, one cannot expect too much from Australia.

Terrorists may hate us for our values, but clearly we don't seem to like our values too much either.

Irfan Yusuf's first book Once Were Radicals about young Muslims flirting with radical Islam was published by Allen & Unwin in May 2009. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Tuesday 7 July 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO: US troops handed out Bibles in both Iraq and Afghanistan ...

What's the big deal with a bit of evangelism? Better a Bible than vicious dogs at your testicles, I say.

Except that handing out Bibles confirms all the stereotypes Arabs and Afghans have of Coalition forces occupying the country just to bring Iraq and Afghanistan into the broader "Christian empire". Taliban propagandists will have an even bigger field day than they are already having with US bombardments on US civilians.

Here is the text accompanying this video:

The highest ranking military officer in the United States says it's not the military's position to ever push any specific form of religion, in response to an exclusive Al Jazeera report that showed a group of US soldiers in Afghanistan in possession of Bibles translated into local languages.

The troops discussed giving the Bibles to Afghans as gifts - despite military directives banning soldiers from spreading religion, as Al Jazeera's James Bays reports.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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COMMENT: Border Insecurity ...

The letters section of the Daily Telegraph of Friday 24 April 2009 has two typical examples of uninformed hysteria concerning the issue of "border security" and asylum seekers. I'm in no way suggesting the Tele shouldn'y be publishing these letters. Everyone's voice should be heard, and it's useful to know just what some people are thinking about such sensitive issues.

The first letter is from one P Cummins. It starts like this ...

The reason we now have a swag of boat people trying to get into Australia is because the Rudd Government last year loosened our border security laws ...

This might possibly be true in the case of Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers, but the fact is that the conflict in Sri Lanka has only recently escalated to the extent that many Tamil civilians are fleeing directly from Sri Lanka as opposed to via Indonesia.

They need to be tightened for the protection of the citizens of this country, an obligation the Government has to its people.

So Australian citizens need to be protected from weak malnourished asylum seekers fleeing persecution. And what will these poor people bring with them? WMD? Nuclear weapons?

One has to ask why all of these asylum seekers come down to Australia? There are dozens of Muslim countries near Iraq and Afghanistan that are wealthy and not at war, where other Muslims and their families would fit right in and be comfortable.

There are hundreds of thousands of Iraqis living in Syria, which is struggling to accommodate them. Syria is itself not a terribly wealthy nation. Hazara Afghans fleeing the Taliban would hardly want to stick around in Pakistan where elements of the same Taliban have taken over large areas of the country. And using your reasoning, I'm not sure which Muslim-majority country Tamil Sri Lankans will go to given that they're a mixture of Hindu and Christian. In any event, it isn't just about religion. People's identities are not limited to religion. If our identity was solely determined by religion, we should have seen Kevin Rudd and/or Malcolm Turnbull and not John Safran being nailed to a cross in the Philippines. After all, the Philippines is a Catholic country, and both Rudd and Turnbull are Catholic.

So why come many thousands of miles down to Australia, a basically British culture and a Christian country? These are the questions we should be asking.

In that case, I'm sure quite a few of these people would happily convert to Christianity if it meant they and their families would be safe. After all, quite a few asylum seekers such as Kashmiri Peter Qasim converted to Christianity. However, that didn't stop him from being kept in detention by the Howard government even though it drove him into severe depression. And I guess we shouldn't have any problem accepting Tamil Christian asylum seekers. As for being British, I don't think indogenous Aussies were eating with knives and forks 40,000 years ago. Then again, neither were the Poms for that matter.

But why should we be asking such questions? After all, our immigration system does not discriminate on the basis of religion. And anyway, how can we really tell what religion a person subscribes to? Or is it someone we determine based on their racial background? So we assume that an Iraqi must be Muslim because he is Iraqi and has an Arabic-sounding name, even if he could well be a Chaldean or Yazidi or Assyrian Orthodox?

Then there is a letter from one Lynne Cole whose arguments make a similar degree of (non)sense.

The recent boatload of asylum seekers were all male, presumably some of them are or were married, perhaps with children. So they left family behind to cope with the Taliban on their own.

Your point being? That these men just callously left their families behind and left without so much as a goodbye? That their families had no say in the matter? That their family members don't wish to see even one person flee to safety? Or are you saying that their families are all in Afghanistan or Pakistan and not in Indonesia? That the Taliban have made it to Jakarta?

How will the families of the five dead survive?

Are you suggesting you're really concerned about their welfare and would support their migrating to Australia?

Why aren't these brave men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our young soldiers who are in Afghanistan trying to improve the lot of the Afghan people?

Maybe for the same reason the vast majority of young Australian men and women aren't there - they're not professional soldiers. And maybe because it isn't nice staying in a place where you could be kicked out of your property and/or be murdered at anytime and where you've already seen family members slaughtered. And from a strategic perspective, the last thing Coalition forces and the Afghan National Army needs is severely traumatised people fighting on their side.

Our young men are killed or injured while these people choose to try for an easy life in Australia.

It's so easy being away from one's family and only hearing their voices on the other end of a phone (presuming you can even contact them). It's a piece of cake surviving in a new country where you aren't allowed to work and cannot access any social security and are forced to rely on charity to make some kind of a living. And on top of that, having to deal with the trauma of having just survived life in a warzone and mourning alone over your dead relatives, presuming that you even know that they are dead.

Those we have already admitted no doubt tell those back home that what a soft touch we are.

Pfft. Are you suggesting, Lynne, that we start behaving like al-Qaeda and Taliban and LTTE and the Sri Lankan Army just so that you feel protected from nasty dark-skinned refugees? I'm glad we are a soft touch. If you want to experience a not-so-soft touch, feel free to go join our brave men and women fighting in Afghanistan.

CRIKEY: Mafia scandal should make O'Farrell and Turnbull very nervous ...

Well it’s been a bad few weeks for the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party.

Brendan Nelson decided to POQ, his parting message to many of his more senior colleagues to join him. Julie Bishop was effectively demoted. Former leader John Hewson wrote op-eds in Fairfax papers telling Costello to also POQ. Joe Hockey reckons Costello’s refusal to POQ makes him resemble Prince Charles waiting for Queen Lizzy to kick the bucket or abdicate. Both Phillip Ruddock and Bronwyn Bishop are facing pressure from their branches to POQ. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, it now seems the Federal Police have been investigating links between the Liberal Party organisation and a local franchise of the Calabrian mafia.

The Party has seen better days. Who could forget that famous scene when John Howard told a packed hall of Liberal Party faithful on the eve of the 2001 federal election: "We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come". If allegations raised in The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald today are anything to go by, it seems the Howard government had decided who (persons with links to organised crime) would entered and remained in Australia and the circumstances (political donations) in which they would come.

It shamelessly lied in accusing asylum seekers of throwing their children overboard. John Howard and Phillip Ruddock, in the name of "border protection", happily took a cue from Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld by locking up in detention centres ordinary Iraqis and Afghans (including children) fleeing persecution, all the while boasting of a "war on terror" designed to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the Liberal Party Division in both John Howard’s and Malcolm Turnbull’s home state was happy to accept donations from people allegedly close to the Calabrian mafia. Liberal MP’s happily lobbied to keep a man accused of having mafia links in Australia and happily received donations of up to $150,000 from his buddies.

Vanstone denies donations affected her decision to intervene, which she claimed was made on humanitarian grounds. Vanstone had evidence of the person’s links to organised crime. She overruled her Department’s recommendation and exercised her discretion to allow the individual to remain in Australia, overturning the decision of her predecessor. Fairfax also reports that the man was subsequently arrested in relation to his alleged involvement in the world’s largest importation of the illegal drug ecstasy.

This was supposed to be the government which prided itself on its national security credentials. This is the party which wants to form the next State Government in New South Wales. Barry O’Farrell should be more than a little nervous And Malcolm Turnbull must be on the verge of a cardiac arrest.

First published in Crikey on Monday 23 February 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: When will anti-war conservatives condemn the so-called war on terror?

The former opinion editor of The Australian (and no doubt author of numerous editorials in The Oz at the time) has made his position on the Iraq war, George W Bush and neo-Conservative foreign policy very clear. In The Oz today, Tom Switzer reminds his readers that he is "someone who strongly opposed the war from the outset ... long believed the Iraq invasion was unnecessary". Switzer disputes any link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, refers to the "incompetence" of former Prez Dubya and has a go at "the neo-conservative architects of this misbegotten venture". He reminds us also that "democracy was not an export commodity".

I needed Tom’s reminder. Like many who kept a vomit bag handy whilst reading The Australian at the time, I remember The Oz editorial and op-ed sections doing little more than accusing war critics of lacking patriotism. Switzer edited a page and wrote editorials singing lyrics written by Bush, Blair and our own Dubya, John W Howard.

I know many conservatives disagreed on Bush’s foreign policy adventures. From Pat Buchanan to Owen Harries, prominent non-neo-Con conservatives objected not only to war in Iraq but indeed the entire fiasco of torture, murder, mayhem and lawlessness packaged as the "War on Terror".

But can the man who brought Janet Albrechtsen to the national stage now honestly claim he was never a neo-Con after all? Is Switzer changing his tone in line with a new American administration, to shore up his position at the United States Study Centre at Sydney Uni? Can Switzer really legitimately claim to be a critic of the Iraq debacle?

Yes, he can.

As far back as May 2003, Switzer opposed the Iraquagmire in a book review for Quadrant. Switzer lamented the almost near-absence of anti-war sentiment among Australian conservatives when compared to their UK and US counterparts. In a Quadrant article in December ’05, Switzer and Neil Clark argued that conservatives down under "have practically wanted the Australian Army to serve as the American Foreign Legion". They argued the Iraq war was a profoundly unconservative war.

Now Switzer and other conservatives must acknowledge the Iraq war was part of a wider war on common sense, world peace, the rule of law and democratic values. Yes, two jets did hit the Twin Towers. Yes, bombs went off in Madrid, Bali, London etc. But did that make some "War on Terror" necessary?

There’s no point opposing the Iraq war if you still support all the nonsense associated with it. Nonsense like Guantanamo, like extraordinary rendition, like some crazed theory of the world being divided along neat cultural lines.

Conservatives like Switzer need to acknowledge that the so-called war on terror, not just its Iraqi component, may have had some good consequences and may have been well-intentioned. But by and large, it has been an unmitigated disaster.

First published in the Crikey daily alert on Monday 09 February 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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VIDEO: All-American sharia ...

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Noah Feldman

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

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VIDEO: A superb oration of President George W Bush

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COMMENT: Dr Greg Barton tries to grapple with Indian terrorism ...

Dr Barton knows plenty about Indonesia. He's written some superb stuff on the subject of Indonesian Islam, and has authored an insightful biography of former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid (known to his people as Gus Dur). He is a sober and thoughtful analyst who has a strong understanding of Indonesian culture and language.

On the morning of Thursday 27 November 2008, Dr Barton appeared on the ABC's morning TV show with Virginia Trioli and Barry Cassidy. I'm not one to bag genuine academics, but I found Dr Greg Barton's performance on the ABC morning show a little disappointing. It's often hard for news programs to find "experts" on short notice, and it's even harder for experts to provide anything more than somewhat vague analysis early in the morning.

Dr Barton seemed completely out of his depth when talking about the Indian situation. A cynic might even suggest that Shane Warne could have provided at least as equally useful analysis on South Asian affairs. But that would be rather unfair.

I took notes of Dr Barton's interview after watching it on the ABC website and stopping and starting the video. The excerpts below are based on my notes.

It is quite surprising. More bombings wouldn’t have been surprising but this sort of attack across the city using guns – that’s surprising.

Attacks on major towns and cities by violent terrorists are common in India. One need only recall the Gujarat massacre in 2002 and subsequent communalist violence in Gujarat. There have also been attacks by Maoist groups on Hindutva politicians as well as Hindutva attacks on Indian Catholics in such states as Orissa. Hindutva groups have attacked other religious minorities as well as members of lower casts. Many of these attacks have involved brazen daylight attacks in busy urban centres including Mumbai, where Hindutva activists are active. Further, quite a few such groups are linked to organised crime gangs. Then there is the spectre of inter-caste violence. All these matters are well-known to Indians and India-watchers.

Dr Barton further claims that the fact that they target those with British and American passports ...

... does suggest an international jihadi terrorist group of the kind linked with al-Qaeda. It doesn’t mean that there are links with al-Qaeda here of course but that ideology does seem to be at play here.

Targetting foreign Western citizens (though some of those attacked included Singaporeans) doesn't automatically make a group linked to al-Qaeda. The group might be a Maoist or militant unionist group (from, say, Bihar or even Maharashtra) who doesn't like Western capitalist influence. Hindutva groups are also unhapy with Western cultural influences such as Valentines Day. There are Hindutva groups unhappy with India's growing friendship with Pakistan.

India is a complex place with all kinds of nuanced conflicts. But the only conflict Dr Barton seems to understand is the kind of conflict that led to the London or Madrid bombings.

Indian authorities have been saying they don’t have a domestic problem. It’s just a problem across the border. This appears further proof of a deep domestic problem.

Indian authorities have repeatedly said that they don't have a specific al-Qaeda presence within their Muslim communities. But they do acknowledge the existence of a range of militant groups, whether they be communalist militants of Hindu or Muslim or Maoist or separatist variety. Indians know they have a domestic problem. Mumbai itself has numerous domestic problems, including violent Hindutva groups and organised crime gangs.

The Indian police, the Indian military especially, are very professional and so we can expect some very good responses from them.

I hope this is true, but many Indians are highly critical of corruption in the police force. However, Mumbai police are supposed to be among the best in Asia, if not the world.

Dr Barton went onto make some perceptive comments about ...

... globalising influences ...

... and ...

... al-Qaeda-type concerns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m not sure whether one could describe opposition to foreign troops in Iraq and/or Afghanistan as “al-Qaeda-type concerns”. This seems a little simplistic given that such concerns are shared by many Afghans and Iraqis themselves, including lawmakers from these two countries who are deeply opposed to terrorism. They are also shared by leftist groups inside India.

Of course, it may be that Dr Barton's analysis turns out to be absolutely correct and that some group linked to al-Qaeda is in fact responsible. One has to wonder why the group targetted Westerners specifically. Surely one would expect groups like al-Qaeda to specifically target Muslims as they usually do in areas with large Muslim populations.

Dr Barton's experiences and knowledge of Indonesia don't necessarily reflect the situation in Mumbai and the rest of India, where there have always been various layers of conflict simmering below the narrow surface occasionally picked up by Australian media.

IRAQ: How minorities suffer in silence ...

Iraqis of all ethnic and religious backgrounds are suffering thanks to the breakdown of law and order across the country. However, Iraq's religious minorities are particularly bearing the brunt. I've written elsewhere about the historical experience of Baghdad's Jewish community. Recently I saw a news report on al-Jazeera about the increasingly precarious situation facing many of Iraq's Christian denominations.

This surely must be a human rights area in which both Australia's Christian and Muslim communities must work together. At present, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society is working on the ground. One wonders whether they need further assistance and funds. Perhaps groups like World Vision, APHEDA and Muslim Aid Australia, who have previously on projects together, could launch some kind of appeal for Iraq's religious minorities.

Click below to watch the al-Jazeera report ...



Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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CRIKEY: Downer laughs at water-boarding and other "pretty fascinating" stuff ...

Well, it's great to see Alexander Downer having a good laugh in his retirement:

*Laughing at the use of waterboarding and other torture methods by our American allies in the "War on Terror";

*Laughing at the almost certain torture and mistreatment of two Australian citizens at Guantanamo Bay ("We did precisely the right thing. I think it was important we were tough");

*Laughing at Mamdouh Habib's further torture as part of the US policy of outsourcing torture (known as exclusive rendition);

*Laughing at how woefully the war in Iraq is going.

It's all part of a period Downer describes to John Lyons in The Australian today as ...

... that pretty fascinating period of my life.

On a slightly less-than-laughing matter, Downer alleges that the Hawke government had allowed our external spy agency ASIS to be run down to the extent that we weren't able to detect emerging threats such as the transformation of Jemaah Islamiyah into a full-blown terror outfit. He might have a point.

Yet he also acknowledges that ASIS didn't have any substantial intelligence on Iraq's WMD prior to the 2003 invasion. His excuse?

Yeah, but I mean we are obviously not main intelligence gatherers in Iraq, if I can be so indiscreet as to say that.

So Mr Downer sent other people's sons and daughters (but not his own) to fight a war based on the dubious intelligence of others agencies. At least Hawke waited for a clear UN mandate before committing Aussie troops in the 1990 invasion.

Downer barely acknowledges what ASIO's head recently told a Senate Hearing, ie that Australia knew full well of Mamdouh Habib being sent to Egypt for torture. Instead, Downer's response to suggestions America tortures terror suspects in secret locations was "a spirited laugh".

Indeed, Downer's FoxNews-type record on foreign affairs would be worth laughing at if it didn't have such potentially serious consequences for our international reputation and national security.

Downer's successor in the federal Seat of Mayo clearly couldn't find much to laugh about over the weekend, having received almost as big an electoral fright as Downer himself received in the 1998 Federal Election at the hands of a certain well-known folk singer.

First published in the Crikey daily alert for Tuesday 9 September 2008.

CRIKEY: Kevin Andrews' immigration crusade

Since the end of the White Australia Policy, there has been bipartisan support for a non-discriminatory immigration policy. But with the Howard government so intent on sucking up to sectarian groups, it was only a matter of time before someone discovered evidence of it trying to co-opt Fred Nile’s agenda before the last election in much the same way as it did Pauline Hanson’s before the 2001 poll.

Richard Kerbaj reported in The Weekend Australian of a proposal by former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews to increase Christian migration from the Middle East.

FORMER immigration minister Kevin Andrews instructed his department to lift the intake of Christian refugees from the Middle East in response to what he saw as a pro-Muslim bias created by corrupt local case officers.

Mr Andrews was so concerned about the extent of corruption in Middle Eastern posts - despite the allegations being investigated and dismissed by his own department - that he wrote to then prime minister John Howard advocating a $200 million plan to replace local employees with Australian staff in 10 "sensitive" countries, including Jordan, Iran and Egypt ...

A Department of Immigration spokesman said there were no substantiated cases of anti-Christian discrimination in Australian embassies and no plans to replace "Islamic locally engaged staff" with Australian officials.

An investigation by The Weekend Australian has discovered Mr Andrews was petitioned by the Australian Christian Lobby to address alleged religious discrimination against Iraqis. Before losing office in the November 2007 election, he ordered the number of Christian Iraqi refugees to be increased by 1400 for 2007-08, almost doubling the previous year's Iraqi total of 1639.

"Put it this way, it was made very clear to the immigration department that more Christian refugees were wanted," a Howard government source said ...

In his letter to Mr Howard in August last year, Mr Andrews, a devout Catholic, proposed significant changes to the refugee selection process.

In the letter, seen by The Weekend Australian, Mr Andrews accused the case workers in Australian embassies of fraud and bribery when processing migration applications.Such posts are predominantly staffed by local workers.

He said this raised "considerable security risks".

"The other significant reason for changing the staffing composition of overseas posts is to prevent discrimination at the 'front office' of the posts," Mr Andrews wrote.

"Since becoming Minister, I have received a large number of representations from people alleging systematic and co-ordinated discrimination against particular persons based on race and religion at certain sensitive posts. In particular, this allegedly involves the active blocking and impediment of the lodgement of applications at the front office.

"At worst, potential applicants are simply being told not to lodge an application. The majority of such claims have been made in respect to posts in the Middle East and Central Asia. For these reasons, I think it would be timely to revise the staffing arrangements for immigration posts that can be classified as 'sensitive' and to staff these posts exclusively with Australian departmental
officers."

Mr Andrews names 10 countries - Pakistan, India, United Arab Emirates, China, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kenya, Russia and Egypt - in which the posts should be staffed exclusively with Australian departmental officers ...

There is no provision within Australian immigration laws to select refugees on the basis of religion. A former Howard government source said Mr Andrews wanted to save Christian Iraqis from persecution by Shia and Sunni Muslims throughout the Middle East.

"With the intake from the Middle East the department was told that we want to focus on Iraqi Christians," the source said. "The department basically said they couldn't do that because that would be discriminating on race and religion."

The official explanation given last August by Mr Andrews for boosting Iraqi refugees numbers was that the altered intake was in response to an international conference run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees four months earlier seeking to help Iraqis forced out of their country.

The Howard government was at the forefront of extending humanitarian support for African (mostly Christian) refugees. But in response to the senseless murder of 18-year-old Sudanese man Liep Gony, Kevin Andrews declared Africans were just not integrating and committing too much crime.

But if The Oz report is correct, Muslims working in the immigration sections of some Australian embassies are behaving corruptly, giving Muslim applicants special treatment. Andrews was lobbied by the Australian Christian Lobby about discrimination against Christians in Iraq. The Oz doesn’t mention whether the ACL representatives' claims alleging nasty pro-Muslim conspirators were responsible for reducing the number of refugee places awarded to Iraqi Christians.

DIAC-heads had already investigated and dismissed these allegations, but Andrews still wrote to Howard suggesting $200 million of taxpayers’ funds be used to send Aussies to our overseas posts to make sure discrimination against Christian applicants is replaced by discrimination against Muslim ones. Or something like that.

There’s no doubt Iraqi Christians face a perilous situation in Iraq. Many are considered too close to Saddam’s aggressively secular regime. Chaldean Christians are particularly vulnerable given Saddam’s number 2, Tariq Aziz, was Chaldean Catholic. It hasn’t helped that Baghdad’s Chaldean Christian Patriarch called for Aziz’s release from prison last Christmas. The Patriarch's remarks were clearly designed not to inflame sectarian agendas but rather as a humanitarian gesture, though many of Saddam's victims will not see it that way.

Saddam was the master of sectarian wedge politics, playing one congregation off against another. His murderous legacy continues even after his death, with angry Sunni Arab community members attacking Shias and Kurds while angry Shias and Kurds attack Arab Sunnis and Chaldean Christians. Entire groups are being held responsible for the actions of powerful individual group members like Aziz.

However, Middle Eastern Christian migrants shouldn’t take Andrews’ support for granted. If any of their sons are fatally bashed during the term of a future Coalition government, there’s some chance the Immigration Minister will claim it’s their fault for not integrating properly.

A version of this piece was first published in the Crikey daily alert for Monday 21 July 2008.



Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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OPINION: No regrets? Downer did it his way, sadly ...

Some years ago, I went to a ''Big Ideas'' forum hosted by the Centre for Independent Studies. The session was moderated by ABC board member Janet Albrechtsen who related a conversation she had had with our then foreign minister Alexander Downer, who described his after- hours schedule to her. Let's play some of the tape:

... after he had a particularly bad day on the political hustings, he slinks home and he sits on the sofa with a glass of whisky turn[ing] on the television to watch FoxNews just to remind himself that there is some sanity left in the world.

Sanity? In FoxNews?

In recent times, Albrechtsen has again found reason to relate to her fans her conversations with Downer, who as you all know is thankfully no longer our foreign minister. In fact, he soon will no longer be the Federal Member for Mayo.

In The Australian on Tuesday, Downer tells Albrechtsen that he has no regrets about his 25 years or so in Parliament. No regrets? Sounds a bit like Opposition Leader Dr Brendan Nelson claiming he has no regrets about that time in 1993 when as AMA president he screamed over a megaphone, "I have never voted Liberal in my life."

Let's survey Downer's history and see if he has reason to have no regrets. Some years after Nelson said those immortal words, the parliamentary Liberal Party decided to give Dr John Hewson the flick and disappoint many media pundits who predicted Bronwyn Bishop (yes, her!) would lead the charge against the Labor Party. Aren't we all glad political journalists don't get to vote in internal Liberal ballots.

Instead, the party opted for an allegedly new generation of leaders with Downer as leader and Peter Costello as his deputy. Downer was 43 at the time. It was a tough time for the Opposition. The Coalition had just lost the seemingly unlosable election in 1993 after trying to sell a GST (a key feature of then opposition leader John Hewson's Fightback! package) to the electorate.

Downer issued a rather strange set of motherhood statements posing as policies called The Things That Matter. Downer's quaint summary of his policy platform makes, er, interesting reading: '

When we release our domestic violence policy, the things that batter. Our marginal seat strategy, the swings that matter. And our family policy, look this is a reflection of our own home I suppose, the flings that matter.

In one verbal swoop, he managed to get a certain 51 per cent minority in the electorate rather offended. Downer later explained it away as a joke. His party colleagues weren't laughing, and made sure he didn't last in the job beyond a few days over eight months, making his the shortest period of Opposition leadership in Liberal Party history. You'd think he'd at least have regrets about that.

Strangely enough, Downer now criticises Nelson for not being able to provide a ''broader narrative'' to compete with Labor. I mean, give the guy a break. For a start, he now actually does vote Liberal.

Downer agreed to hand John Howard leadership in January 1996 in a deal that saw Downer become foreign minister (Australia's 38th) in the Howard government.

No doubt Albrechtsen will dispute my claim that Downer should find lots to regret about his term as foreign minister. He involved us in a disastrous war in Iraq which has cost God-knows how many Iraqi lives (not to mention troops and contractors). The only people who seem to have benefited from this war, as ABC-TV's Four Corners exposed the other night, were companies such as Halliburton.

Downer should also regret the role he made our country play in the so-called war on terror, often at the expense of Australian citizens. In this respect, Albrechtsen might wish to read reports in her newspaper about ASIO's prior knowledge that Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib would be sent to Egypt as part of the American practice of extraordinary rendition. Given that ASIO knew about this (and probably about what would likely happen to Habib), I find it difficult to believe that Downer knew nothing.

And if Albrechtsen doesn't believe this story, she might like to read her colleague Caroline Overington's book Kickback: Inside the Australian Wheat Board Scandal and ask why Overington isn't alone in wondering why Howard didn't sack Downer once the full extent of AWB corruption became known. When questioned in the subsequent Cole inquiry in April 2006, Downer took a cue from Ronald Reagan and confidently declared, "I don't recall" some four times.

But perhaps Downer's greatest moment was when, in response to then Opposition leader Kevin Rudd's speech in Mandarin at the APEC meeting in Sydney, Downer declared he could speak fluent French.

Still, it would be unfair to characterise "Lord" Downer's political tenure in such negative terms. I mean, what about declaring victory in Iraq? Whoops, we haven't won. What about the Free Trade Agreements? Er, that was the minister for trade. Seriously, surely Downer must have had some successes.

Um, er, I don't recall.

Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney lawyer and writer. A version of this article was first published in The Canberra Times on Saturday 5 July 2008.

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf

COMMENT: Reading list ...

The folks at NewMatilda.com are serving up an intellectual feast of profiles and interviews from the Sydney Writers' Festival.

For those who think conservatives are, by definition, people without principle and a bunch of war-mongers (and for the rest of the world), I recommend reading Richard Broinowski's profile of American Professor of International Relations and Vietnam veteran Dr Andrew Bacevich. Here's a taste ...

Now Professor of International Relations at Boston University, Bacevich is a West Point graduate, a principled man on the conservative side of politics who considered it wrong for wealthy citizens to leave the fighting of America's wars to the poor and disadvantaged. He fought with the US Infantry in the southern highlands of Vietnam, and his son, a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Army, volunteered for duty in Iraq ...
Bacevich is the author of The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War, one of the most trenchant accounts I have read about contemporary American military culture. It should give any thinking Australian pause about the growing influence of American doctrine, strategy, training, equipment and choice of weapons over the Australian Defence Force.

He asserts that modern American militarism began in the late 1960s as a reaction to the humiliating defeat in Vietnam. It was driven by military officers intent on rehabilitating their profession, intellectuals fearing that the loss of confidence at home was paving the way for the triumph of totalitarianism abroad, religious leaders dismayed by the collapse of moral values, strategists stung by the worthlessness of their war schemes, politicians on the make, and purveyors of pop culture looking for a buck.

NewMatilda boss Rod McGuinness talks food with the guru of food Michael Pollan. Try spreading these paragraphs with your hommus ...

Pollan acknowledges that the cheapest calories are soy and corn based ones - both heavily subsidised in the US. These are rife in popular food products such as bread, soft drink and TV dinners, found in formats such as soy lecithin, corn starches and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCP). When asked how we can be expected to eat better when the cheapest and most accessible food is largely unhealthy, Pollan says he sees the growth of farmers markets as critical. Although he doesn't suggest subsidising the production of perishable foods such as carrots and broccoli, he does believe policymakers should subsidise their cost to consumers.

Another strategy is learning to cook. Regardless of social class, studies indicate that people who cook their own food are healthier than those who don't. Education on better eating is important but what about education about the (less healthy) foods we currently eat?

Meanwhile, resident village-idiot Irfan Yusuf (no doubt genuine village idiots like Tim Blair and that dude from the Herald-Sun will quote me on that) celebrates a session of political mud-wrestling between Robert Manne and Tony Abbott ...

Most explosive of all was Abbott's call for a constitutional change to extend Commonwealth legislative powers. He might be right, but I somehow think we'll have to become a republic first. States-rights conservatives beware.

Abbott tried to paint himself as the underdog, recognising Tom Switzer, Christopher Pearson and Peter Coleman as the only conservatives in the audience. I'm not sure if many in the audience even recognised these names. This certainly didn't stop them from agreeing with Abbott's declaration that Kevin Rudd positioning himself as an economic conservative meant that we were now all conservatives.

Sadly, Abbott lost many of these sympathetic punters when he compared Nelson to "Australia's most successful conservative leader" - apprarently Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Robert Manne didn't have it all his own way either. When an audience member asked Abbott and Manne whether they were aware of the concept of peak oil, Abbott may have looked silly for admitting he didn't know the precise meaning of the term, but at least he was honest. Manne attempted a vague explanation, which lead to a wave of frowns through the audience.

You guessed it. This SWF session was free!

Words © 2008 Irfan Yusuf


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