The Washing of the Feet
Millionaire Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was asked, as he and his Kaminski-millinered wife Lucy served a few Xmas lunches to people doing it tough, about the death on Xmas eve of Faysal Ishak Ahmed, 26, a refugee held illegally on Manus Island by the Turnbull government.
Mr Ahmed had been ill for some time. According to his friend, Abdul Aziz Adam, he was repeatedly turned away from the IHMS clinic on Manus by nurses who accused him of “pretending” to be ill. After collapsing, Mr Ahmed was flown to the Royal Brisbane Hospital, where he subsequently died of his imaginary illnesses.
“The system is designed to kill us one by one,” Mr Adam said on learning of his friend’s death. This is an observation with which I entirely concur.
It is remarkable enough that the Turnbulls’ chose to exploit underprivileged citizens by using their Xmas day as a photo opportunity. It’s not as if the PM is particularly concerned about their fate, having slashed the very funding that holds at least the possibility of relief to homeless people, those whose lives are in chaos as a consequence of domestic violence, disabled people, pensioners, the unemployed and those of us unfortunate enough to struggle with illness. Actually, the only demographic the PM does look upon with tender concern is bankers, mine owners and the otherwise wealthy.
However, when the PM was asked at this occasion about the death of Mr Ahmed, an innocent man who had been declared by the UN to be a refugee, he defiantly replied that he stood by his government’s policy to protect our borders and stop deaths at sea.
Quite why refugees have to live miserable lives and die in their twenties in order to protect Australia’s borders remains a dark mystery to me.
Quite why it is entirely immoral to let people die at sea, but entirely moral to let them rot and die on land also remains one of life’s even darker mysteries.
The lie (let us not sugar-coat by using the term ‘post-truth’) the lie that asylum seekers and refugees who arrive here by boat have committed a crime, continues to be the foundation of and justification for successive Australian governments’ murderous policies. This lie is invoked at every turn to justify denial of medical treatment, detention in inhumane conditions, denial of human rights, and destruction of all hope. We do not do these things to convicted murderers and rapists. We strongly disapprove of those who do these things to animals, and when anyone is caught ill-treating animals there is an outcry, sometimes even by Liberals.
What Turnbull accomplished on Xmas day was a staggering performance of hypocrisy that I doubt he will be able to trump in the coming year. In one half hour, from the lofty heights of political position and personal wealth, Turnbull acted out a ghastly and perverted imitation of Christ’s publicly washing the feet of the poor as a lesson in humility to the arrogant.
Turnbull “humbly” served lunch to the very people he victimises. He then instructed the rest of us to “hug” them.
At the same time, he refused to acknowledge that his government’s policies have murdered yet another refugee, who came to us seeking sanctuary from murderers in his homeland.
I think Turnbull’s jumped the shark. Anything that follows can only be pale imitation and dull repetition.
No Place For Sheep 
Did he really use the Christmas meal as a photo opportunity? If he did, what a hypocritical scumbag he is! Did anyone ask him why Manus Island was still functioning nine months after the NG court ordered it be closed? Were Brussels sprouts, looking like cartoon versions of Peter Dutton, served at the dinner?
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Everything is a photo opportunity for a politician.
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Jennifer writes: “It is remarkable enough that the Turnbulls chose to exploit underprivileged citizens by using their Xmas day as a photo opportunity.”
I have to disagree. Not only is it unremarkable, it is entirely predictable. That’s what politicians do – it’s not about the substance, it’s all about the image.
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I know, Stephanie but I have to keep remarking on it….
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Especially tory politicians.
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Hey, Shaun, hope your festive season is going well.
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Thanks Jennifer, well I’m still here, emotionally battered and bruised but still here, I hope yours was better than mine.
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I’m sorry to hear that, Shaun. It’s a bad time of the year for tension.
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My self imposed retreat over this Xmas period was because I refused to witness or participate in these ghastly hypocrisies. The obvious photo op on the news made my blood run hot, and the death of Faysal caused great sorrow..thanks for saying it how it is. Perhaps I need to do a bit of retail sale therapy to raise my spirits……
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linda, retail therapy does not work for me anymore; the only things I buy these days is books and plants, and I don’t need Boxing Day sales to get those… 🙂
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I am defiantly using part of an inheritance from my pedophile father to make free new clothes for refugee kids – I used the sales only to stock cotton, new material, elastics and buttons and saved a bucket load in the process. All done on line by the way.
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Marilyn, We have in excess of 3 million people in Australia living below the poverty line, you might spare a thought for them too.
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They still have a good deal more than refugees who have 0 fucking income, charity does not always begin at home.
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Yes. You also knocked up a batch for kids in Qld.
I think that is a good action deserving of support, but it doesn’t preclude my feeling that yourself and Jennifer Wilson are unrealistic in your approach to asylum seeker policy in a neo liberal world resistant to the sort of economic reform that could deal with refugees and other victims of globalisation, in their billions.
Europe over recent times demonstrates what happens when the rulers do not lubricate population movement or economic development in the third world as an alternative or/and addition through adequate financing.
Hint: the underlying problem is use value against exchange value against the reality of narcoticised consumerist western society; that is where the needed money is going.
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I do not buy that crap, refugee law is set in fucking concrete and it’s time we live up to it instead of committing genocide.
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Yes. I observed a fleet of Commonwealth police cars heading for Dutton’s office to arrest him.
I’ve an idea that the government passed legislation a long time ago that has been held up in the courts that bogus national security arrangement trump international law, or the police are just slack at doing their job.
Obviously Manne wrote his article on the feeling that international law was not going to be applied for reasons I can only speculate upon.
He either forgot the the point you made
odd?), or wrote the article on the basis that noaction was going to be forth coming toward the government from legal entities, so taken within that rationale, his argument makes sense, yes/ no.
Perhaps you misunderstood that?
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Townsville, if the Australian government didn’t choose to spend $5 billion each year turning boats around and torturing asylum seekers on Pacific islands, that would be $5 billion more to contribute to addressing Australian poverty.
But no, their priority is not to help either asylum seekers or poor Australians, their priority is to look tough so as to win the next election.
If they freed up the $5 billion and spent it where it’s really needed, Marilyn would no longer have to toil over her sewing machine and Australia might be seen internationally as a country which honours the UN treaties it signs.
Stop voting fools into office.
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Linda, the only people helped by ‘retail therapy’ is the rich 1% of the global population who own the “un-taxed” foreign corporations operating within Australia. There is no escape, I try to sleep a lot.
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Malturn, Mutton, Ms Julie, I can’t look at them ,I can’t listen to them…
I don’t care much about Christmas, but am willing to tolerate it for the family’s sake, Malturn & Mutton managed to suck out the last bit of my Christmas spirit…
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Mooka jumped the shark a long time ago, as he abandoned just about everything he stood for from action on climate change to hypocritical broadband reforms to the republic.
Just another derogation of many.
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And I’m keeping tally, DQ.
Hope you’re having an enjoyable festive season, btw.
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The usual get together, Guinevere. I won’t be sorry to see the end of 2016 – too many downsides.
Still, KBO as Churchill put it. 🙂
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Jennifer writes: “the lie that asylum seekers and refugees who arrive here by boat have committed a crime”. Yes, this has been a considerable annoyance for several years now, in fact ever since Scumbag Morrison became the LNP’s Immigration spokes-alien.
You may have noticed that since that time they have almost completely refrained from their previous habit of referring to people arriving by boat as “illegals”. Instead, they have systematically and methodically applied the term “illegal” to the mode of arrival, thus: “Illegal boat arrivals”, “people arriving illegally by boat”, “choosing to arrive illegally” etc.
I suspect this shift was prompted by three reasons.
Firstly, the term “illegals”, applied to people, was starting to look a bit threadbare – many people recognised its inaccuracy, and they’d been using it for more years than anyone cared to remember. It had reached its use-by date, in that its negative spin-offs for public opinion were starting to outweigh its positives.
Secondly, for the majority who didn’t analyse their rhetoric all that closely, the new formula would have exactly the same effect as the former – to create the conflation of boat-borne asylum-seeking with some notion of law-breaking. So, mission accomplished.
Thirdly, if anyone accused them of calling asylum-seekers “illegals”, they could turn around and say you’re not listening to what we say, we’re not talking about the people themselves, we’re talking about the mode of arrival, which is illegal because you need a visa to come here and they haven’t got one.
All of which deliberately, and of course disingenuously, ignores the fact that in Australian law there is a distinction, not widely known outside of lawyerdom, between “illegal” and “unlawful”. To most people these words would be synonyms. In Australian law, they are not.
The Al-Masri Federal Court case of 2002 (http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/cases/cth/FCA/2002/1009.html?query=al%20masri) established beyond doubt that the legality of your mode of transport is irrelevant to the application of the Refugee Convention. If you claim to be a persecuted person and want to claim asylum under the Convention, you can arrive any damn way you please. Even with a forged passport and visa, which is what quite a few people do at airports, but nobody ever talks about that.
The official term for such arrivals is “unlawful non-citizen”. This does NOT imply criminality, it’s just an administrative category meaning someone who is here and doesn’t have a visa. The court case established that, effectively, the illegality or irregularity of the mode of arrival is overlooked or set aside, as long as the person is claiming asylum under the Convention.
The LNP continue, all these years later, to get away with this misleading rhetoric. It is impossible to believe the misleadingness is not deliberate.
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I agree, it is deliberate Stephanie, & many thanks for outlining that disgraceful time line.
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How do they get away with this lie that it is illegal to seek asylum ?
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That’s the whole point, Townsville. They don’t say it’s illegal to seek asylum. I don’t think they ever have said it’s illegal to seek asylum. That bald statement would be too easily refuted.
Tony Abbott, then leader of the Opposition, at an electorate forum just ahead of the 2013 election, said “seeking asylum IS legal”. He said it twice (and his emphasis, not mine). Then he went on to claim, falsely, that asylum seekers need a visa to enter Australia.
If you ask any Lib/Nat politician the direct question “Is it legal to seek asylum?”, they will answer “Yes, it’s legal, but these people coming by boat have arrived illegally without a visa”.
Which entirely (and deliberately) ignores the fact that irregular arrival without a visa has traditionally been overlooked, in Australia and elsewhere, on the basis that that is the whole point of the UN Refugee Convention – to provide an escape route when all other avenues are closed.
The phrasing of the Lib/Nat rhetoric is critical. They have succeeded in their obvious aim, which is to persuade the Australian people (including you, it seems) that there is something illegal in arriving by boat to claim asylum. There is not. If you do that, your administrative status is “unlawful non-citizen”, which, as I said above, was shown in the 2002 Fed Court case not to imply criminality.
Don’t try to interpret what they say. Listen to what they actually DO say. They’ve worked on their rhetoric to create exactly the kind of misunderstanding you’ve fallen into.
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The ALP/LNP cartel have a lot to answer for. Not only are they slaughtering people in three nations now they are torturing and killing any victims who arrive here.
Glad you put up Al Kateb, I knew Al Masri a bit through the Woomera lawyers – he won in the federal and full federal courts and the scum bag racist David Bennett for the government won in Al Kateb and Al Khafaji who was a friend of mine.
Al Masri was slaughtered like a dog in the streets of Gaza while signing on to be a police man to feed his kids, Al Khafaji is a tireless campaigner for Gaza because Al Masri was his great friend in the many prisons they were locked up in. He also is dying from Lupus thanks to be beaten almost to death in Curtin prison.
I hate this fucking country, it ratifies human rights treaties for photo opportunities and throws them in the bin before the ink dries in the UN and 100% of the time ignores all rulings against us.
Turnbull is a moron and coward, but he’s no worse than the rest of the trash.
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No argument on that from me.
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Amen to that, Marilyn. Australia, in its efforts to get elected to the UN Security Council a few years ago, had the effrontery to use the bid-slogan “Australia – we do what we say”. This despite arguably breaching at least a couple of dozen clauses in 6 UN human rights treaties, in its treatment of refugees alone. That’s without even starting on indigenous rights.
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Forget for a minute that Australians are terribly racist, and incredibly selfish about their mortgaged quarter-acre mentality projected nation-size when it comes to our immigration system, and that any political party that has a desire (covert or orvert) to return to the days of 2007-2013 will fail at the ballot box.
If any participant at this blog were Immigration Minister for one minute, of course there would be no such thing as an “illegal immigrant”, so please nominate an approximate number of arrivees without identity documentation or visa would you be happy to accept into Australia each year.
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Fuck off with the demented how many, that is not the point and nor is the fucking holding of documents. Do you think the millions of refugees every year who are fleeing wars can pick up their fucking papers while their homes are bombed to bits.
Having papers is fucking irrelevant. As for 2007-2013 just about 8,000 people a year arrived on average while 7.5 million non Australian’s arrived every fucking year.
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Immigration Minister Marilyn – I’ll take that as “no limit”. Thank you. Next!
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Everyone has the right to seek asylum, there is no way to set a quota or limit that.
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I have noticed for a long, long time that Australia only wanted ‘rich’ immigrants, for example if a family had a floor tile shop in Italy, they would have no trouble getting into Australia, on the other hand if you were/are only a laborer you would have no chance. Money speaks volumes.
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None of my destitute relatives would have been allowed to enter, they left Cornwall, Wales and England in the 1880;s when the tin mines flooded and closed, they came here on boats with bugger all. The German ones were refugees in 1844 fleeing conscription and the Prussians in Silesia, and the last grand father was sent as a 15 year old indentured farm slave from the slums of London in 1920.
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Could your destitute relatives have flown across the world to Indonesia, ditched their travel documents, then paid for passage to Christmas Island like 50,000 were encouraged by Labor/Greens between 2007-2013?
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Now that takes the cake for cretinism,
1. Planes were not invented.
2. the all jumped on boats on the other side of the world and rocked up to take land from aboriginal owners.
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“Money doesn’t speak it screams”
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Well, Havana, I’m a cosmopolitan, I don’t *believe* in borders in the first place.
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Open borders won’t work without a rational economics to lubricate it.
” Set the dollars free..”
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Do “cosmopolitans” believe in locks on their front doors? Banking passwords?
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Yes. What do these things have to do with free travel?
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Australia’s commitment under the UN Refugee Convention, to which we have been a signatory since 1954, is that if someone arrives, documented or not, we consider their claim for asylum.
Please note, that does not, repeat NOT, mean we have to accept them into Australia, nor does it mean we are obliged to give them citizenship. What we have signed up to is to consider their claim to refugee status, and if that is confirmed, then provide protection.
There is no provision in the UN Refugee Convention about their long-term status, and no requirement for us necessarily to give them residency or citizenship. Just protection – while they need it.
So my answer to your question “how many?” is “however many arrive”. We’ve promised to assess their claim, so we should do that. If we’re unwilling to do that, we should withdraw from the UN Refugee Convention. No Australian Prime Minister has had the guts to do that in 62 years, despite a lot of anti-refugee rhetoric in recent years.
Beyond that, if we choose to remain a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention, we should practise triage:
(1) Those who qualify as refugees under the Convention, we should give them the temporary protection they need. After a while we should assess whether they really need to stay here, or whether they can be resettled in another country, or whether, given time, they might be able to return to their home country if circumstances have changed there.
(2) Those who don’t qualify as refugees under the Convention but obviously would be still under threat if they returned home, we should consider for Complementary Protection. Then, the same considerations as category (1).
(3) Those who don’t qualify under categories (1) and (2), that is to say they are not Convention refugees and not in need of Complementary Protection, deport them.
What’s your alternative, Havana? Continue the lie that we fulfil our obligations as a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention? Don’t bother assessing people’s asylum claims? What?
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Thank you Stephanie for your informative and compassionate posts. Much appreciated.
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Wrong, when refugees in our territory are offered protection they must by law grant them full status and rights equal to all citizens. The rest is lies made up by Ruddock and the ALP.
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Must by law grant them full status and rights, yes. But there’s no legal requirement to grant permanent residency and citizenship.
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The likes of Havana are the same kind that on the other side want small government, and free markets and are up in arms about group think and always yelling about the rights of the individual, while simultaneously wanting to impose international ID’s and background checks and security agencies and detention centres, bank account checks, character checks, all for the good of the country of course.
Havana wants to control the movement of every individual on the face of the earth, ensure they do it correctly, politely, dot the I’s and cross the T’s, with due genuflection in the right direction of the proper authorities.
And if we in our infinite wisdom should invade a country, fight a war on foreign soil, tear apart a country’s infrastructure, create an environment in which maniacal Muslim terrorists can wreak havoc among a population, or allow drug cartels to replace Governments, or prop up corrupt business enterprises and corrupt politicians, fund despotic leaders, as I said in our infinite wisdom of always knowing what is best for the rest of the world, and then, and then, tell millions of people you just stay where you are, and you can like it or lump it, well Havana is just towing the party line.
What a chicken shit coward Havana is, longing for a bygone era, As if the world was any different then to what it is now. What a smug, complacent, government arse kissing lickspittle he is.
How Havana, do you propose to stop humankind from going where it will? What number of troops, how large the bureaucracy do you intend to put in place, how much surveillance do you want to implement, how many detention centres to you propose to build, how many walls, how do you intend to punish and identify those that do not succumb to your will?
Give me a round figure?
Thought not, next!
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Immigration Minister Allthumbs – I’ll take that as “no limit”. Thank you. Next!
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“No limit” is actually what the Refugee Convention provides for, Havana. And last time I looked, Australia is still a signatory nation. If you don’t like that, you should be lobbying our major political parties to withdraw from it.
Good luck with that. For many years now, rather than honour the terms of the document or behave honestly and cancel out of it, they have preferred to turn moral and practical somersaults to prevent asylum seekers from accessing the rights we freely assented to in 1954. I don’t see the current lot changing the ingrained habits of the last 20 years.
No good asking us, in this forum, how many WE want and whether WE would set a limit. Read the wording of the Convention itself. If you find any mention of limits, be sure to let us know. Please quote the Article number.
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A poem on the subject by someone called Brian Bilston:
Refugees
They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or me
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way
(Now read it line-for-line from bottom to top.)
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Oops. That should’ve been ‘line-by-line’.
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Cute structure. The sentiments are commendable, if rather naive.
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I have learnt to ignore my toffy-nosed English neighbour, who thinks she’s one of the Queen’s cousins or Philip’s love-child ( she must have forgotten that Phillip is a mere foreigner, a Greek…)
I’ll learn to ignore Havana as well, I don’t read her posts.
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Does your neighbour have a zincalume fence? I think I might know her. If not she probably marked you as a typical wealthy leftist nitwit hypocrite within about ten seconds.
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Haven’t you got anything better to do than troll, Havana? How sad.
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A very well reasoned, polite interpretation of Turnbull and his government shameful hypocrisy. Unfortunately his apologists will not read this article, and if they did, would not doubt continue the justifications repeated ad infinitum by him, his ministers, labor, one nation, and all the other xenophobic bigots, including the media, in this land. I’ve been ashamed to be Australian since Manus and Nauru were set up, actually since Howard’s ‘Pacific Solution’ bullshit. We know they’re wrong, and will be brought to justice eventually, except it’s taking too damn long.
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Indeed it is taking too damn long, keryn. I can only hope it is severe when it eventually happens.
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The fucking arseholes will do it while fucking racist pollsters keep running racist fucking polls claiming the public wants to murder refugees.
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Nah!
You just don’t get REAL news.
Old pensioner hits bollard at post Xmas sales..movie star dies..chip shop floor flooded during freak storm…cricket big hit scones spectator at Big Bash.
You need to get with the program.
Btw, anyone know it they finally took Mosul?
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Please provide a link to any poll which indicates a majority of Australians want to “murder” refugees. That your hyperbole has worn on the staunchest of no-borders activists Manne and Ellis might be instructive.
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Why we fail both our own and refugees:
http://theaimn.com/need-corporate-tax-cuts/
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More than 8 months now since the PNG Supreme Court ruled the Manus Centre illegal (26 April 2016). Why the delay in closing it?
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Took him long enough:
Bob Hawke pushes nuclear power at Woodford Folk Festival north of Brisbane
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-28/we-must-embrace-nuclear-power-bob-hawke-divides-audience/8151346
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We do not have enough Uranium to last more than 20 years (ie “200 years at current consumption”) so it is not a long term option nor is it a particularly safe option.
Hawke looks at Australia’s reserves and knows a good mine when he sees it. Dig it up ship it off sell it off quick . . . the same goes for coal, no doubt.
(DQ rolls eyes once more.)
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Your eyes roll more than a saltwater crocodile, DQ
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Sadly, there is much to roll them, Guinevere.
Happy New Year!
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And to you, DQ. All the very bestest.
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