Australia Full Up Go Away Please is as vile an idea as Terra Nullius. There is twice as much liveable land in Australia as there is in Europe. We should therefore delay for a year the seventy-three thousand incompetent Chinese waitresses currently at the head of the queue and let in all the Hazaras, now. Or, if it suits us, leave them all to serial beheading by the Pakistani Taliban by 2020.
There is no other choice that makes any sense.
Discuss.
Name:
Your mate Bob Carr might argue this point with you in private of course.
Yes, we do differ sometimes.
Your point being?
That incompetent Chinese waitresses make better Australians and are more needed as meat workers and small farmers in the regions?
What?
What is your point?
Environmental Sustainability I think is what motivates the thinking on this issue by many. ” know you differ Bob on grounds of humanaty which is noble
Indonesia sustains a hundred and ninety million people on one third of our arable land.
What are you talking about?
Would you live there? Would you bring up your kids there in preference to here. What are YOU talking about?
“Would you live there? Would you bring up your kids there in preference to here.”
I hope to Christ you were being ironic Shad, I really do.
No, I wouldn’t. Neither would the Hazaras. Neither do they.
Which is why they should, as genuine refugees from probable decapitation, be here.
Growing legal poppies in Tasmania. Slaughtering bulls in Longreach. Mastering biochemistry in Adelaide University. Or mining bauxite in the Pilbara.
Where else do you think they should go? Or try to go?
Please answer this.
Bob, this guy’s onto something…
http://allrightallright.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/a-solution-for-refugees-asylum-seekers.html
my contribution is the anonymous 75% Australian content comment.
This really has merit in all seriousness… now that we have UN profile and all…
All we need is someone at the top with the vision, passion, espri- de’cor and zeitgeist to make it happen!!!
or there’s our PM I suppose…
Do you think the treatment of the Hazaras will stop if it isn’t dealt with at the source Bob? That is the only way to solve the problem with the Hazaras which you seem to have a particular sympathy for. What about all the other people around the world who are treated the same? Shall we just open the doors to everyone who is treated badly in their own country. We have to have a proper balanced immigration program . You cannot solve the world problems by fucking up our own country.
No, we open our doors to refugees who come here, as we did in 1946. Other refugees prefer Italy or Canada. We do our bit, they theirs.
You seem to think there is a way of defeating and re-educating the Taliban.
What is it?
So anyone who isn’t a Taliban is a potential refugee?
We have no right defeating the Taliban and were not initially there to defeat them.On the other hand we might be able to convince them to moderate their barbaric and medieval ways. We just decided we would teach them how to live our way for noble and selfish reasons. The Taliban are no more guilty than the way Europeans treated the indigenous peoples.They don’t wish any harm to you or me.They are not Al Qaeda If you wish to save everyone Bob then grow a beard and find a manger. Don’t bleed for others that you may bleed yourself
Go fuck yourself. Banned for life.
I greeted the Bakhtiyari baby when he was two days old. He is dead now.
And you tell me the Taliban, who killed him, can be reasoned with.
What a piece of lunatic filth you are.
Please go away.
Taliban.Japanese{WWll}? and so on.Terrible what they do and I feel for you.
Sorry didn’t realize your personal involvement. Have just read your fine piece I leave for others
Dec. 2004
And so the story moves towards its end. The Bakhtiyari family’s phones have been confiscated and they wait in Baxter to be taken to Pakistan. They are asking to go to Afghanistan because that is where they come from, but Amanda Vanstone won’t let them go there. Although they speak no Pakistani language and speak Farsi, the language of their home region Uruzguan in accents appropriate to the region, they will go instead to Quetta, in Pakistan.
How do we know they come from Afghanistan? Well, the Governor of Sharestan said they did in a document signed on 7/9/2002, correctly naming all the children’s names. Roqia Bakhtiyari’s brother Muzar Ali voted, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, in the Afghan election of last October 9, a right he has as a duly registered (and investigated) Afghan citizen. Justice Kenneth Haynes of Australia’s High Court, moreover, said on Monday of last week they may well be Afghans. ‘It is at least arguable,’ he said while ruling the baby Muzar, though born in Adelaide, was somehow not an Australian, ‘that the applicant’s parents are both citizens of Afghanistan as they claim.’
They look and sound like Afghan Hazaras. The father Ali when I showed him a cricket game on television was mystified by it, unusual in a Pakistani, and asked me only if Ponting was an Afghan. And indeed, he looked like one, like Montezar, in fact. The mother Roqia when asked identified Afghan tribal recipes for bread and sour milk, and told how her village celebrated the birth of children.
But where was the village and what is its name? Ali drew a map that showed in central Uruzguan a village called Chaqu next to a village called Chenar under mountains called Daikwidi. They are all there where he said they were, but an Australian reporter, Alistair McLeod, later killed, went to a place a hundred miles north of the real one. The translator he brought with him belonged to the murderous Northern Alliance, and to him, of course, the fearful villagers in subsequent valleys professed unanimous ignorance of everyone. Bakhtiyari? Never heard of him. Roqia’s brother Muzar, dumped in Quetta so peremptorily that the DIMIA officers with him were arrested for lacking visas, went back to the real Chaqu however, and got and sent proof that Ali and Roqia are who they said they are. No court has yet considered this evidence.
Asked yesterday if she had read their file, Amanda Vanstone said she hadn’t. Asked if she had seen any evidence they were Pakistanis, she said she hadn’t. Asked if she’d seen, or anyone had seen, their Pakistani birth certificates, she agreed there weren’t any. She said, however, that they’d had a ‘fair go’ — including, apparently, twenty-seven months behind razor wire — and that fair go was now, sadly, fading to black. She never visited Woomera and, though herself a lawyer, never looked at the evidence.
That Ali is a Pakistani depends on a document that is not signed or dated and indicates one Akhbar Ali to have been born in Quetta in Pakistan. The names of his family — Mariah, Zaquia, Sikander and Ghazansar — are not those of Ali Bakhtiyari’s family. On this alone, an unsigned, undated document with the wrong names in it, he is held to be from Pakistan, none of whose languages he or his children speak.
Alamdar is in year eleven at St Ignatius College and doing scholastically well. Montezar, in year ten, is thought a world class soccer player and won the school medal for his ability in that game. The little girls Negina, Samina and Amina have made friends at school who are now crying on talkback radio.
What has all this suffering been about? Well, for the government to admit they were wrong and by their significant errors and cover-ups caused more suffering than Lindy Chamberlain’s family endured would raise the question of the many libels they have committed against this family. They let it be known, for instance, that Ali was an ‘electrical plumber’ from Quetta but never gave the address of his shop. They let it be known he was a rich man with businesses in Saudi Arabia and Alan Ramsay, the fool, printed this in his column. They let it be known, last week, that Roqia was so stressed with parenting that she would be better off in Quetta, begging with her family on the streets. And they did not let it be known there is a tiny village called Quetta, not far from Chaqu. Which may be where the confusion began. They’ve got, in short, a lot of answer for, and pay damages for, perhaps, in what may turn out to be — if our democracy survives — Australia’s Dreyfus case.
It began, of course, as cover-ups usually do, with an honest mistake. Roqia couldn’t identify some Afghan currency. But it was Northern Alliance currency, then unknown in her district. When she was rejected because of this, and they found out Ali had already been accepted — correctly — as a fugitive from the Taliban, they had to prove his story also was false. And they told so many tales about him that no-one remembers now any more what it is they said he did wrong. He did nothing wrong, of course, just try to save his family from slaughter by selling up and risking all on a perilous journey to a better, kinder land. And so the story moves towards its end. Merry Christmas, Bakhtiyaris? Bah humbug.
© Bob Ellis