Dear Bob Correll

Nov 13, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Values

Dear Bob Correll

 

To: Mr Bob Correll,
Deputy Secretary
Department of Immigration and Censorship

 

Dear Bob,

Bob, you aren’t replying to any of my messages. Is everything all right? I thought we had something really special for a while.

Bob, you wrote to me earlier this year, explaining to me all about “Australia’s reputation overseas”, of which you were clearly most protective. You talked about “the important business managed by the Department, including the processing of visa applications”.

But now, Bob, this shocking news; I’m having trouble working out how it all fits with what you have said.

Bob apparently, according to the scurrilous Mainstream Media , in 1999 your department detained a certain Tony Tran in a breach of the necessary procedure which requires your department to notify a person that their bridging visa has been cancelled, before, in fact, locking them up.

Now, I know that you are the go-to guy about visas and their clever use as a tool of government policy, so I know that you will have been appalled — appalled !— at this oversight when you found out about it. And you will have been terribly upset that the said Tony Tran was bashed by another inmate while enduring his five years of illegal detention at the hands of your important department.

Of course, we can all understand that your department can’t be held to blame – or to account – for Tran’s broken marriage, or his separation from his baby son for … how long? Just because Tran says,

“I never got to say goodbye and I never got to kiss my son”,

I mean, we need a sense of perspective, don’t we?

After all, your department has lots of really “important business” to manage which takes precedence over the human concerns of mere “people”; important business such as making stirring speeches at expensively-catered conferences for the high-flying and influential; speeches with impressive titles like 

‘Managing our shared future: the use of the visa as a whole-of-government policy tool’[!], or

‘Enhancing ethics and governance while transforming the business[!]’.

“The business”, Bob?

It’s “a business“?

Does the Department consider what it does to unfortunate, desperate refugees as “giving them the business”, perhaps?

Ah, yes. Now we remember!

It was you yourself who was able to turn unemployment into just such a “business“.

A business is not about people, is it.

It’s about “Outcomes” and “”, “Deliverables” and perhaps your favourite, “Compliance”.

A business has the wonderful ability to remove those pesky “human beings” from the equation almost entirely.

Well done!

No wonder John Howard and Kevo Andrews love you!

Bob, I understand now what you meant about ‘the important business managed by the Department’.

And, look, I know it may not look so generous in hindsight, that thing about changing Tony’s baby’s name to a more Korean-sounding one so he could be deported to Korea. It might look somewhat … I don’t know … callous? … cruel and heartless? … unbelievably inhumane? … to some.

But I’m sure that in some way which, in our ignorance, mere people like myself can’t grasp, “Australia’s reputation overseas” has been immeasurably enhanced by this episode.

By the way, I have discovered your website. I like its design very much and would really like one just like it for my very own one day.

Anyway, I came across a page called “Success Stories of Australian Migration”. And I searched and searched but I couldn’t find anything there about Tony Tran! Nor could I discover anything about Vivian Solon or Cornelia Rau, or about Robert Jovocic.

Nothing at all.

Odd, I thought, when they were all examples of success stories of your Department’s important business.

On a personal note, Bob, I just noticed you have five kids! Geez, mate, bit of a stud, eh! Eh? How do you fit them all in the Volvo?

Just, you know, Bob mate, keep your eye on them. Please. You wouldn’t want them being renamed and packed off to some strange country before you’ve had a chance to kiss them goodbye. Would you?

P.S. How’s the job-hunting going? You’ve only got a couple of weeks.

… Oh, Bob, I’ve just been informed that Tran’s case was only one of more than 200 others in which the Ombudsman has determined people have been unlawfully detained, just like Tony Tran. That really is some success story for your department and its important work.

Don’t you agree all these cases really ought to be shown on your beaut website? It seems you might be required to front a Royal Commission if Labor succeeds in a few days. That would be exciting for you, wouldn’t it!

Chateau Quelquechose

Nov 12, 2007 | Australian Values, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, OzPol Values, Religious Values, Values

Chateau Quelquechose

 

Gone out the window

 

We were on the train this morning and for the first time in a long time noticed the truly stuffed in our society and how comprehensively invisible they are to most of us. “Stuffed” in the bad way, not ‘stuffed’ like a Liberal politician after a fine meal and a cheeky Chateau Quelquechose or two (at the tax-payer’s expense). And we saw clearly what it is that we hate so much about what Howard has done to our country.

Once upon a time we seemed to care about our society as a society; as a community, you might say.

If someone was down we picked them up because they were part of our team. We looked after them. Now it is all about looking after No. 1. It’s not because people have become more callous. We have just had to learn to look after ourselves in order to survive and avoid being the ones who are stuffed, ourselves.

We have had to learn to be selfish, because all around us has grown this culture of greed fostered by Howard.

We at Values Australia have nothing personally against “stuff”, acquisition, money – even lots of it – but we can’t seem to enjoy it the way we’d like to when others can’t find enough for them or their kids to eat. Or a bed to sleep in, or something to hope for and look forward to in the future.

These days, of course what we prefer to say to these people is, “get over it”, “stand on your own feet”, “if you can’t get a job these days you’re a lazy dickhead who deserves to suffer.” “Where’s me bloody Plasma?”

Ultimately, a society is judged not by its average accumulations of wealth and belongings, not on its greatest and wealthiest but on its very least – on how the community looks after its own, its most needy, and lifts them up. That takes a real, not a rhetorical, sense of community – a whole community – a responsible community.

And that is what has gone out the window as a direct result of this nasty, hateful, selfish, grasping ideology of John Howard’s.

And that is why he must go, before he irreparably tears apart everything that actually made this the best country on earth.

 

As Captain Whyte, a lifelong Liberal voter, said:

“I’m sick of living in an economy; I want to live in a society”.

And, for the christians — as JC his very self is reputed to have said:

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

How Howard ‘Destroyed’ Hanson

Oct 27, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Immigration, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values

How Howard ‘Destroyed’ Hanson

“We’re running hard on security and terrorism”

 
It’s just past the sixth anniversary of the sinking of the SIEV-X and the drowning of approximately 353 people.We found this post by ex-Liberal candidate for Reid, Irfan Yusuf, via the [Andrew] Bartlett Diaries.

Excerpt:

” Then, one afternoon in October, I received a call from a lady named Mahbooba who ran a small charity working among Afghan orphans in Pakistan. She wanted to introduce me to a Middle Eastern chap. We agreed to meet at a small mosque in Auburn.

 

I entered the mosque and saw Mahbooba sitting with a visibly distraught man whose reddened eyes betrayed days of mourning. The man continued to weep in my presence while Mahbooba showed me some photos of some young children. The man then spoke:

 

These are the children of my sister. She was killed by the government of our homeland. I”ve been an Australian citizen for 25 years. I run my own business. I pay my taxes. I have only ever asked one thing from my local member and that was to help me get my sister and her children out of there.

 

“Who is your local member?” I asked. “John Howard,” was his answer.

 

He then told me about how he was informed by other relatives that the children had been placed on an unseaworthy boat. They were among some 350 others who had drowned.

 

This was the first time I had heard of the SIEV-X incident. I wasn”t sure what I could do. I was just a candidate in a hard-luck seat with little hope of winning. What could I hope to achieve for this man?

 

“Some people in your Party are starting to tell lies about my sister”s children. They are saying my sister taught her children to be terrorists. You must speak out against them. Remember what the Prophet Mohammed said — that the best jihad is to speak the truth to rulers. It is easy for you because you are in their Party”

 

I listened to the man”s story and looked at the photos of these young children who had barely reached their teens. After the meeting, I got onto the phone with campaign HQ. I told them about the conversation I”d had with the man, and how I wanted to make some statement about it.

 

“No way, Irfan,” said the voice from HQ. “You mustn”t talk about this topic. I”m warning you that if you say anything about it, you might find yourself disendorsed and expelled from the Party. We are running hard on security and terrorism.“

“But these are young kids,” I objected. Then the HQ officer told me something that made me shudder.

 

“Listen, I know how much you hate Pauline Hanson. You”ve got to understand that we have a deliberate strategy here. We want to destroy Hanson by sounding like her and attracting her voter base away from her. It”s part of a deliberate strategy, and it”s temporary.”

Temporary? It’s party policy! It’s dogma. It’s mandatory to promote the Pauline xenophobia. It’s been dragged out yet again by the Hansonite Kevin Andrews (wash my mouth out) with his ‘dirty filthy black diseased criminal African refugee rapist gangs’. Destroy Pauline Hanson? They’ve become Pauline Hanson.

In July we reported on Tony Kevin‘s interview with Richard Fidler on his advocacy about the SIEV-X issue when he said,

” I think my work achieved useful results going beyond SIEV X. It helped more people to see the truth behind the now discredited myth that John Howard is just another Australian politician trying to do his job more or less decently. Australians know the real Howard now. I think my SIEV X research and advocacy helped to expose the ugly truth about this man.

And it is such an ugly truth.

Disaster Capitalism

Oct 14, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Capital Punishment, Citizenship, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Economic Values, Global Warming, Immigration, Legal, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Science Values, Terrorism, Values, War

Disaster Capitalism

 

In other news…

Better the devil you know?

 

Howard’s appeal on 60 Minutes tonight fits right into the well-worn Disaster Strategy.

 

On the one hand:

“you’ve never had it so good”

but on the other:

“these are savage, uncertain and untamed times”.

In other words, you should feel disoriented and anxious and hang on to what you know.

“Love me or loathe me, people know where I stand and what I believe in.”

Quite so, John.

It’s just that we hate what you stand for and despise what you believe in and we don’t want any more of it.

…But We Weren’t

Oct 12, 2007 | Australian Values, Border Security, Corruption, Cultural Values, Democracy, Media Values, OzPol Values, Racism, Religious Values, Terrorism, Values

…But We Weren’t

Moe Keelty – yet again

 

Let’s not mince words about Indonesia. While most of its ordinary people, at least the ones we have met, are in the range from friendly to wonderful, it has seemed to us, looking at reasonably recent history, that for the most part Moe Keelty’s Indonesian friends, the police, and their friends  – politicians, military, police, judiciary – are corrupt, ignorant, stupid, racist, bigoted and brutal.

But, you know, we knew we could be wrong.

But we weren’t.

” JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) Indonesia’s anti-terrorism chief was relaxed as he mingled with the guests on his lawn. Muslim hard-liners swapped tales of al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and the Philippines. Convicted Bali nightclub bombers feasted on kebabs. 

Indonesian law enforcement – Moe Keelty’s friends.

The Courtier’s Reply

Sep 18, 2007 | Australian Values, Cultural Values, Freedom of Speech, Religious Values, Values

The Courtier’s Reply

The Emperor’s New Clothes

 

The King is in the altogether,
The altogether, the altogether,
He’s altogether as naked as the day that he was born.
~ Danny Kaye/HC Andersen

One of the constant “arguments” – actually not so much an argument as a condescending whinge – made against Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion is Dawkins’ failure deeply to consider the omnitude of historical religious discourse – what Sam Harris in Letters to a Christian Nation describes as “bookish men parsing a collective delusion” – and in fact this “oversight” is often used to insinuate an intellectual inferiority.

Of course it is nothing of the sort.

The worst, or at least most voluble, of these – really, mendacious – detractors is H. Allen Orr who wrote

” You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).

Breathtakingly illogical, as you can see, since Dawkins’ point is not the finer subtleties of religious credos but lack of any gods at all.

Dawkins has attempted to answer these critics and criticisms, but it is difficult to hope that your answer might make sense to someone who so obviously cannot, or refuses to, understand the question.

Dawkins wrote to The Independent to answer two other such detractors, Messrs Cornwell and Stanford:

” Cornwell’s slighting of my reading list is singled out for special praise by Stanford. This is a stock criticism. It assumes that there is a serious subject called Theology, which one must study in depth before one can disbelieve in God. My own stock reply (Would you need to read learned volumes on Leprechology before disbelieving in leprechauns?) is now superseded by P Z Myers’ brilliant satire on the Emperor’s New Clothes…

Stanford’s trump card is his observation that “religion is not primarily about belief, as we understand the word today, but faith.” Religion, as he sums it up, “simply isn’t about facts.”

Exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

So here is the meat of The Courtier’s Reply by PZ Myers.

” I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, “On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat”. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all.
[….]
Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.

How dare he. The impertinence!