"Champagne diplomacy! You know, like 'champagne comedy' from the Late Show? No? Yeah, probably a bit obscure." Photo: Omar Havana
A toast to Scott Morrison for paying a war criminal $40 million to house refugees in abject poverty
The weekend's news, reduced to an angry rant by Andrew P Street.
The Age | 28 September 2014
Human rights really are in the eye of the beholder
Your immigration minister Scott "Redacted" Morrison signed an agreement with Cambodia's Interior Minister Sar Kheng on Friday,
after lobbing in late to the ceremony, drinking champagne in
celebration of sending desperate people to a poverty-stricken country,
and then refusing to acknowledge - much less answer questions from - the
massed journalists being corralled nearby.
For some reason Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young thought this was a smidge tasteless:
"On budget night we had Joe Hockey dancing, and now we have Scott
Morrison popping champagne corks after signing a dirty deal with one of
the most corrupt and poorest nations on Earth."
Other people who thought it a bit less-than-great included "Australians who had once lived in Cambodia", who clashed with police outside the Canberra embassy
while making the point that us shipping people to Cambodia is in breach
of the UN 1951 Refugee Convention - to which we are signatories - since
we can't ensure that Cambodia will recognise their human rights when
they arrive. Cambodia is not a signatory, and has a human rights history
that is… let's go with "colourful".
Why would that be?
Hun Sen, this is your life!
Let's have a little chat about Scotty's new BFF Hun Sen. You know, the former Khmer Rogue leader? That one.
For a start, he's been Prime Minister of Cambodia for 25
years. You'd assume from that sort of length of time that he was a
dictator, right? But no: as Morrison has repeatedly assured us,
Cambodia's a democratic country, and Hun has just happened to have been
returned time and time again.
Others disagree, like Amnesty International and the United
Nations: the first accused him of war crimes and of torturing prisoners
and political opponents, and the latter demanded he step down after they
monitored Cambodia's elections and found them laughably corrupt. Hun
decided not to worry about either.
And Cambodia is a wealthy country with a strong textile and
agricultural sectors, as Mozza has made clear. It's also the country
with lowest quality of life of the ASEAN countries, with endemic
poverty, 40 per cent malnutrition among its children, and - on a
not-unrelated note - is currently ranked as the second most corrupt
nation on the planet, second only to North Korea.
So, to recap: your government is chuffed to deal with a war
criminal presiding over a dictatorship in order to send people to one of
the most poverty-stricken regions on the planet. Oh, and we've just
paid said war criminal $40 million to sweeten the deal - money which
will no doubt be used wisely, right?
I know that this sort of thing just sounds like business as
usual these days, but just to be clear: this isn't something with which
you should be basically fine.
Let's have a little talk about racism
That's a statement that really shouldn't need to be expressed
in 2014, but apparently people think it's OK to spit on folks of Middle
Eastern appearance, tell them to go back where they came from,
vandalise their property, and even write insanely inflammatory columns
about the t-t-t-terrorisms in newspapers, including this one.
So I'm just going to make this crystal clear: if you think this is reasonable, there is something wrong with your think-meat.
Tony Abbott might be down with putting your kids at risk by
telling a generation of angry, alienated young Muslims that they're not
real Australians and that they have no place in our society, and Bill
Shorten might be totes fine with going along with it. They are wrong.
And thankfully the wider community has been banding together in the face of this nonsense, via rallies and social media campaigns.
These folks recognise that people from all over the planet
have come to Australia and amazingly, for the most part we've gotten
along - and benefited massively as a result. It's a tough country,
Australia, and we needed to help each other to make lives here. So with
remarkably little trouble, we did.
Now that admirable history is being kicked apart by idiots
who don't understand that this is a nation made almost entirely of
immigrants. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it's not
us-and-them, because there's there's no "them". There's only us.
Yelling at people in the street is merely confirming the propaganda that ISIL et al
are spreading, which is that there's a war between the West and Islam.
You anti-Muslim idiots are doing a better job of radicalising Muslims
than any iman could.
And abstract questions of basic human respect aside: we know
from the US experience that most of the terrorists caught by authorities
were dangerous people reported by friends and family. You really want
to turn allies into enemies and put Australia at risk? Keep spouting
your racism and hatred, morons. You're doing ISIL's job for them.
Sport trumps biogtry
There has a been a win, though: the International Olympic
Committee have agreed - after a concerted campaign by activist groups
around the globe, including Australia - to make discrimination against
folks on the basis of their sexuality a reason to deny them an Olympics.
Specifically, there's a new clause in the contract for host cities
which states that the city will "conduct all activities in a manner
which promotes and enhances the fundamental principles and values of
Olympism, in particular the prohibition of any form of discrimination
with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion,
politics, gender or otherwise, as well as the development of the Olympic
Movement."
It's in response to the harsh anti-gay laws passed in Russia
ahead of the Sochi Winter Olympics, which could have seen gay athletes
deported or even jailed for not being un-gay. From now on, nations,
you'd better think pretty hard about whether pointlessly hating gay
folks is a price worth paying for missing out on an Olympics.
In related news, maybe hold off on printing thousands of "Bahrain 2022!" t-shirts.
Ebola-a-go-go
But just in case you're feeling OK about things, be advised
that Ebola is looking less like a possible epidemic in western Africa and more like the new normal.
And the reason is partially because of the way it spread very
rapidly to urban environments, rapidly crossing borders at a time when
suspicion of public health organisations is at an all time high - and
again, thanks a bunch for the fake immunisation programmes you used as a
cover when tracking Bin Laden in Pakistan, CIA; you've done a great job
in making the Muslim world suspect of all WHO interventions - but also
for another reason: money.
Specifically, no-one giving enough of it to pay for doctors,
medications and other necessary resources. And now things have gotten
out of hand, to the point where it might not actually be containable at
all.
"We would need a campaign like the global smallpox
eradication program from the '60s and '70s," said Daniel Lucey,
professor oat Georgetown University Medical Centre.
Despite what condescending politicians tell you,
approximately 99 per cent of the time, throwing money at a problem can
and does make it go away. In fact, throwing money hard and fast at a
problems tends to prevent that problem getting bigger, longer term and
more expensive - as we'll learn in Australia when Medicare cuts and
up-front fees mean you start paying for the hospital-based intensive
care of people who avoided seeing their GP when they started feeling a
bit under the weather.
However, there's an upside: since the mortality rate is
around 70 per cent, there's the hope that the disease will just run
through the whole population fairly quickly and burn out. The downside
is that 70 per cent of those people will die, but at least it won't
require all that wasteful foreign aid that Australia's been
enthusiastically cutting of late.
The cocktail hour: quoll with it!
And finally, cute overload with baby quolls! These endangered
native cats are a) awesome and b) should be a nice reminder of what's
important in this country of ours. Bottoms up!
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