Politics
Those ugly demonstrations
The idea that the far right somehow hijacked a peaceful demonstration about migration doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The organizers had a clear White Australia theme.
Any claim from the organizers that the March for Australia was simply about migration numbers – claimed pressure on schools, roads and so on – was blown away when neo- Nazi thugs were able to use the demonstrations as a platform to promulgate their vile messages. When the same black-clad thugs who had been at the forefront of the Melbourne march violently attacked the Aboriginal protest site Camp Sovereignty, their hypocrisy was in full display, because if any group has a legitimate claim to make about immigration it’s the original owners of this land.
Some will mount the defence that these thugs hijacked the movement, transforming it into a white supremacist push, but as the ABC’s Michael Workman, Matt Martino and Georgie Hewson point out, there were strong links between those with white nationalist views and March for Australia organizers. For example the organization’s website originally had reference to “remigration”: that is the practice of returning permanent residents and citizens to their supposed country of origin, more confrontationally known as “ethnic cleansing”. According to Defence Minister Richard Marles, it also had reference to “replacement of European heritage”. In itself that’s a vague term, but to Nazis and white supremacists the word “replacement” has a clear meaning: it’s about the “white race” being replaced by those of lesser worth.
The ABC’s Isabella Higgins points out that it was not only a handful of neo-Nazis who made the protests into a racist statement. “While some Australians may have attended to genuinely raise issues with immigration policy, it is also clear many turned out to support the concept of ‘white Australia’” she writes in her post Politicians condemn Neo-Nazis at rallies but not those standing beside them.
The small Canberra event was more peaceful, but as in other capitals it would be hard for anyone to claim it was simply hijacked by the far right. Notably it was disproportionately male, and in appearance it seemed to be more representative of a gathering in a 1950s hotel bar than the population of Canberra.
Soon after the protestors arrived at Parliament House Pauline Hanson turned up to speak – an event that would have been arranged by the organizers. Upon her appearance only a handful of protestors left the demonstration. She defended the March for Australia, and while she seems to have refrained from mentioning the ethnic composition of migrants, she did criticize programs for indigenous Australians. Again, as in the Melbourne demonstration, there is no logical way to link immigration with programs for indigenous people. That is, unless the theme is racism – an assertion of the virtue of white Australia, whatever the sources of non-whiteness be they local or foreign.
Some promoters of the march specifically mentioned the presence of Indian immigrants as being problematic in some unspecified way. Maybe that’s because if one turns to 2023 ABS data on immigration its summary points out that between 2000 and 2021 India was the top country of birth among permanent migrants.
Had they looked into the ABS bulletin a little further they would also have learned that 97.5 percent of those Indian migrants are proficient in English, and that 81 percent have come to Australia as skilled migrants, compared, for example, with 59 percent of immigrants from England. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is reported to have accused the government of running a migration policy that brings in people, particularly Indians, who are more likely to vote Labor. She could have a point that they are less likely to vote for the Coalition, because we set reasonably tough requirements on migrants’ education attainments.
Ebony Bennett of the Australia Institute describes the growing threat to Australia from right-wing extremism, identifying in these demonstrations echoes of the white supremacist language at the time of the 2005 Cronulla riots: Who’s going to stand up and make Nazis ashamed again?. She writes:
These marches can be seen as part of a pattern of neo-Nazis and fascists becoming more and more emboldened in Australia and overseas, using anti-immigrant sentiment to bring heinous and extremist ideas like the mass deportation of non-white people into the mainstream.
Apart from Pauline Hanson and Bob Katter other politicians wisely distanced themselves from the movement. Several politicians made statements condemning the organizers. Liberal Party immigration spokesperson Paul Scarr, in a short Radio National interview, expressed his concern and disgust in terms that called for unity and cohesion. He also called for immigration to be conducted in a “considered and measured way”, lest neo-Nazis and other racists exploit people’s susceptibility to misinformation on immigration.
There is no reason to believe that Liberal Party commentators such as Sussan Ley and Paul Scarr are anything but sincere in their support of multiculturalism, and in their disgust at the resurgence of white supremacy and misrepresentation of migration data. Even those in Coalition ranks who may have some feelings in the other direction are surely aware of the electoral risk of not supporting multiculturalism. Immigrants, almost by definition, don’t have rusted-on party loyalties, and can determine outcomes in many marginal urban electorates. Our electoral geography, combined with compulsory voting, may be saving us from the worst of racialized polarization such as we are seeing in England, Germany and the USA.
Migration numbers – do we have a problem?
Although the issue of migration numbers was only a cover for the movement’s organizers, it is a matter that should be brought into focus, because there is so much misunderstanding and deliberate misinformation about migration.
In an interview on Radio National (after covering the Nauru deportations), former Immigration Department deputy secretary Abul Rizvi described how immigration data has been misinterpreted, particularly following a press statement released by the Institute for Public Affairs on 14 August, leading some to believe that the government has let immigration rise to record high levels. Even after the ABS went to the unusual extent of issuing a document to clarify the situation, some media continued to carry the message that immigration is running at unprecedented levels.
The true story is covered in a short policy brief by the ANU Why is net overseas migration plummeting? That’s right, it’s falling, and the explanation has to do with the recovery from the plunge in immigration during the Covid pandemic, which had effectively closed our borders. Our net overseas migration is now below the trendline of the pre-pandemic period.
Rizvi is concerned that the Commonwealth is partly to blame for these misunderstandings, because it has not engaged with the public in explaining the complexities of immigration. In the years since 1788 migration has become a little more complicated.
Those flags: what is their meaning?
One notable aspect of the demonstration was the presence of flags. In fact there were few placards or other symbols: it was as if that flag spoke for itself. But what was its message?
It is common in America to find politicians and community groups calling for people to rally around the flag. That is understandable, because the US flag is enshrined as a symbol of the country’s victory in the anti-imperial struggle of the War of Independence, and the country’s national anthem is written around the flag.
Australia is different – very different. The present flag, a quarter of which is the flag of a foreign country, is actually a symbol of a colonial past. It was chosen in 1901 in a competition administered by the new Commonwealth government, but it was made clear that it would be submitted to the imperial authorities, including the British admiralty, for approval, and it was made clear that it should include Britain’s Union Jack.
It is strictly not correct to suggest that the present flag goes back to Federation, because the original flag was the red ensign: the switch to the blue ensign was much later. But it probably had widespread acceptance during the period 1914 (the outbreak of Europe’s war) to 1942 (the fall of Singapore), when many Australians, even though they had been born here, considered the country to be part of the British empire.
Eighty years on the present flag has far less acceptance than it had in past times and than we find among people in other countries in support of their flags. Only 61 percent of Australians believe it should be retained, and that percentage has been falling. Also there are age and partisan differences. National, One Nation and Liberal voters strongly favour its retention (97 percent, 89 percent, 76 percent respectively), while a majority of Labor and Green voters want to see a new design (56 percent and 72 percent respectively).
The meaning of the flag has shifted over the years: as Monash University historian Graham Davidson points out, and as confirmed by the above survey data, it has become politicized – in fact weaponized.
Fashion statement
It has become a symbol for the far right. The 5000 louts who patrolled the Cronulla beach in December 2005 looking for Muslims to beat up draped themselves in the flag, and we have once again seen it so used in the March for Australia demonstrations. Writing in The Conversation Callum Jones of Deakin University and Kurt Sengul of Macquarie University see the protests in the context of the global anti-immigration movements of the far right, mentioning similar movements in the US, Germany and Britain, where Nigel Farage has been dominating the isolationist and anti-immigration movement.
It is notable that Andrew Hastie, one of the Liberal Party’s strongest conservative advocates, has been running a “Together Under One Flag” campaign, defending the existing design.
It is strange that someone who has served his country in combat should be promoting a symbol that is shared with a foreign country, and support of which is split along partisan lines.
The prominence of the Union Jack in these demonstrations suggests there could be some link with the British far right. Our security agencies would do well to see if there is any cooperation between the organizers of March for Australia and British right-wing nationalist movements, such as its Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (whose board members include Tony Abbott, John Anderson, Andrew Hastie, and John Howard).
If there is a good outcome from these demonstrations it may be a re-energization of movements to develop an unambiguously Australian flag. You can hear Harold Scruby of Ausflag introducing a talkback session What if we changed the Australian flag?. The present flag could be given a decent burial, and the cry “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” can go the way of other racist tropes.
The Nauru solution
The government’s secretive deal to send 350 people to Nauru is the latest instalment of brutal policies towards asylum-seekers, sustained by political parties’ strategy of wedge politics.
It’s as if the Albanese government is trying to prove it can match Trump’s deportations by the ICE (The Immigration and Customs Agency).
Writing in The Conversation – By sending non-visa holders to Nauru, Australia is shifting its responsibilities – Mary Anne Kenny and Lisa van Toor of Murdoch University reveal as much as can be found out about the government’s decision to send “hundreds” of people – probably around 350 – to Nauru. They explain the legal processes that have led to this situation, including the 2023 High Court case that prohibited the government from holding people in jail after their sentences had been completed, and the government’s subsequent moves to legitimize their deportation.
The deal with Nauru involves an initial transfer of $408 million (more than $1 million per person deported) and an ongoing payment of $70 million a year ($200 000 a head). We know little about the conditions that may apply to this funding, and what (if any) level of accountability is attached to it. The ABC’s Maani Truu reports on a little more detail from Department of Home Affairs officials who appeared before the Senate. The $70 million will go on for 30 years, meaning the total cost will be about $3.5 billion – a neat $10 million per deported person: Nauru deportation deal set to cost Australia $2.5 billion over 30 years. Why not just give them $10 million each to put into a family trust and encourage them to become small businesspeople?
There is a memorandum of understanding, but the Minister for Home Affairs isn’t telling us much about it – so little, that its provisions, tracked down on a departmental website, can be reproduced in full:
It [the MOU] contains undertakings for the proper treatment and long-term residence of people who have no legal right to stay in Australia, to be received in Nauru.
Australia will provide funding to underpin this arrangement and support Nauru’s long-term economic resilience.
In announcing the MOU, the President and Minister referred to further long term visas to be granted by Nauru to people who no longer have a legal right to remain in Australia.
This MOU will allow the continued management of the NZYQ cohort.
Maani Truu also reports on statements by Prime Minister Albanese and the Nauru Government: Prime minister insists $408 million deportation deal with Nauru not a “secret”. It’s hard to keep expenditure of that magnitude secret, and in any case it is notable that the government announced this decision on the Friday just before the White Australia marches last weekend, allowing the government to criticize neo-Nazis while appearing tough on “illegal” immigrants. This has echoes of Kevin Rudd’s 2013 “PNG solution”, a move designed to outflank the Coalition’s “Pacific solution”.
David Speers goes further into the politics of the decision in his article: Nauru deal finds support amid confronting anti-immigration displays. It’s an easy decision for the government. The Coalition won’t oppose it, and there is no affection in the community for 350 people with a criminal record. So much for the idea of redemption.
In an interview on Radio National Abul Rizvi, former Immigration Department Deputy Secretary, describes what he calls the government’s “extreme option”. He takes us through the government’s Orwellian political logic: in Australia, with a population of 27 million, including thousands who are out in the community having served their time for violent offences, we cannot keep the Australian community safe from these dangerous asylum-seekers with criminal records, but Nauru, a poor country with a population of 13 000 can. He’s not sure that this logic stacks up. He’s also not sure that if the government’s assumed power to deny these people any rights of appeal, yet to be legislated, would stand up to a High Court challenge.
Reference to Nauru’s “long-term economic resilience” reads like a sarcastic insult. It’s a tiny, isolated state, under threat from a rising sea-level, and it does not have a record of sound economic management. This is not to suggest Nauruans are stupid, but could you imagine the people of Burnie or Port Augusta, cities with populations about the same size as Nauru, finding the people to run a national economic and fiscal policy? The ABC’s Doug Dingwall has a short history of Nauru’s problems of dealing with its earlier bonanza of income from phosphate, and the legacy of that windfall.
Kenny and van Toor in their Conversation contribution remind us that even if Australia can cover itself legally, we still have obligations to protect these people’s human rights. They also ask what happens if some of them re-offend and have their Nauru visas cancelled.
Unsurprisingly organizations speaking for the interests of asylum-seekers are highly critical of the government’s move. The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre has assembled a number of statements of its own and of other organizations.
This is a policy that should be condemned in strong terms. But we need to take a longer-term look at how this policy has come about. As The Economist explained in a recent (12 July) edition that focussed on the asylum system:
The system is not working. Designed for post-war Europe, it cannot cope with a world of proliferating conflict, cheap travel and huge wage disparities. Roughly 900m people would like to migrate permanently. Since it is almost impossible for a citizen of a poor country to move legally to a rich one, many move without permission.
That is not to classify everyone who risks their life to a people smuggler as a wannabe economic migrant. Among them are still millions of people fleeing war and poverty, desperate to get away from the brutality of corrupt and violent authoritarian regimes that have taken over their countries. But displaced people’s main concern is to be able to return to their own countries, which is why it makes more sense, for the Economistwriters, if they can be given safe shelter closer to home, until they can return safely. That is why it is in the interest of the rich and the poor alike if more support, through UN and similar agencies, can be given to those countries sheltering refugees. In the longer-term there should be cooperation to improve the economic standards of the world’s poorest countries so that they are less likely to become failed states.
That all takes international cooperation, and public expenditure on development aid, but that is probably less than is spent on programs such as “sovereign borders” and on dealing with legal challenges. These are only the fiscal costs, which don’t include the costs in terms of lives lost, lives unfulfilled, and financial transfers from poor people to criminal gangs running people smuggling.
But that hasn’t been our policy direction. When we reflect on our treatment of asylum-seekers, going back to the 2001 Tampa and “Children overboard” affairs, we can attribute our worst policies relating to asylum-seekers to our established convention of wedge politics – a convention pursued by both the old established parties, but disproportionately by the Coalition, with backing and prodding from the Murdoch media.
There is no inevitability that politicians in democracies should resort to wedge politics, and there is too little recognition among our political class that wedge politics weakens the legitimacy of democracy as a political system.
Freedom from information
The government is reviewing freedom of information processes. It would all be easier if public servants didn’t overclassify in the first place.
We learn through the media that the government is planning to tighten the rules around releasing documents as required by Freedom of Information (FoI) laws enacted by the Fraser government in 1982. The proposals seem to involve banning anonymous FoI requests (a discouragement to whistleblowers), tightening restrictions on releasing cabinet documents, and charging a fee for most FoI searches. Tom Crowley has a description of the government’s proposed changes on the ABC website: Labor proposes blanket refusal of freedom of information requests in overhaul of transparency laws.
The proposals have met with strong reactions from public interest groups, who are concerned that the Albanese government seems to be becoming more secretive than the Coalition governments it replaced. In a short interview on Radio National Greens Senator David Shoebridge and Geoffrey Watson of the Centre for Public Integrity voice their concerns.
The Australia Institute notes that the government has expressed concern with the costs of processing FoI requests, suggesting that this cost blowout is a result of the government putting more effort into denying requests.
In a longer interview on Radio National (8 minutes) Andrew Wilkie explains why he believes FoI legislation and processes do need to be reviewed, particularly in light of the capacity of artificial intelligence to generate multiple requests. He understands Attorney-General Michelle Rowland’s point that dealing with FoI requests is diverting public servants from other work they should be doing. Wilkie is concerned, however, that the government could use these problems as an excuse to tighten up restrictions around disclosure of cabinet documents – a restriction that hindered the work of the commission into Robodebt. He explains how security classification of advice to executive government should ensure that public servants feel free to give frank and fearless advice, but he also questions reasons why there should be such secrecy: surely the public would be more understanding of governments’ difficult decisions if they had more access to the advice going to executive government. Former Senator Rex Patrick, appearing on the ABC’s 730 program, is concerned that the government’s proposals “would wrap a secrecy blanket over pretty much any matter that’s being considered by cabinet, or any matter that is in some way controversial”. Cabinet submissions themselves are short documents, but they are often padded with attachments that share the “cabinet in confidence” classification.
The same 730 session shows hitherto unpublished data from the Centre for Public Integrity revealing a tougher approach to FoI requests that’s been in train for at least 14 years.
The point Rowland misses is that there would be far fewer FoI requests if public servants didn’t default to over-classification. Because the occasional classified document falls off the back of a truck, we know how overclassification works: mostly it has nothing to do with national security, with individual privacy, or protection of commercial information. Rather it is about protecting politicians from political embarrassment.
Australia’s gambling addiction
Lawmakers are rightly concerned with financial scams on the internet, but are unconcerned by poker machine owners who use the same tactics to fleece money from the vulnerable.
Americans have guns. Australians have poker machines.
Americans find firearm control politically difficult because of a 1791 amendment in the Constitution. An extensive and painful search through our Constitution, however, finds no right of poker machine owners to prey on the vulnerable. Unlike their American counterparts, Australian governments that fail to rein in the gambling lobby have no constitutional excuse for their moral cowardice.
Writing in The Conversation earlier this year Wayne Peake of the University of Western Sydney reminded us once again how Australians became the world’s biggest losers in terms of gambling losses. Australia has a long history of reasonably constrained and limited gambling, but in 1956 the rot set in when New South Wales legalized poker machines. By 1991 they were legal in all states except Western Australia which has been protected from this contagious stupidity by the Nullarbor Plain.
The graph below, reproduced from Peake’s data, shows how Australians have the honour of being classified as having the world’s worst gambling losses per adult, at $1635 a year. Losses through poker machines constitute the lion’s share of those losses.
In a press release on Tuesday, Wesley Mission, drawing data from the most recent quarterly reports from the New South Wales Liquor and Gaming Authority, drew to our attention the fact that poker machine losses in New South Wales in the latest quarter have been $2.27 billion, up by 8.8 percent on the same quarter last year, and that those losses are concentrated in the state’s poorer urban regions – Canterbury-Bankstown, Fairfield, Cumberland (all in western Sydney) and in the Central Coast, Wollongong and Newcastle.
It's hard to make a great deal of sense from such gross figures, but it is possible, using state population data and the population growth rate, to bring these figures to a per-capita basis – a per-adult basis in fact. These show losses to poker machines – the largest category of gambling losses – to be around $1370 per adult in the latest 12 months, and they confirm that there has been strong growth in those losses – 7.4 percent which is just a little lower than Wesley’s figure, because some of that 8.8 percent growth is from population growth. It’s still well ahead of inflation or wage growth, and it does not dampen Wesley Mission’s strong message, or their criticism of the New South Wales state government.
That growth, and its split between clubs and hotels, is shown in the graph below. New South Wales has about 1000 clubs and 1000 hotels with poker machines. As an aside, for those who want a drink in Sydney away from the curse of poker machines, there is a website of Sydney pubs without pokies.
If that loss of $1370 were across all adults it would be substantial – around 1.5 percent of average earnings. But it is concentrated among the one third of adults who gamble on poker machines as reported in the most recent Australia Institute research on poker machine gambling. If the losses are allocated across all those who use poker machines they come to around $4000 per gambler. And we know from the New South Wales data, and from the 2010 Productivity Commission inquiry into gambling, that losses are further concentrated among those with low income.
Public attention is understandably focussed on those with extreme gambling addictions, but should we remain indifferent to seeing a substantial proportion of the population, who complain about being under cost-of-living pressure, losing $4000 a year to poker machines?
There is a libertarian argument that people have a choice to gamble, and would no doubt accuse the Wesley Mission of being guided by Methodist wowser traditions. But even the United States, with a much stronger libertarian tradition than Australia, manages to rein in gambling losses: see the chart above. As for complaints about paternalism or wowserism, there isn’t a voice calling for a ban on all gambling. The focus of campaigners is on forms of short-cycle gambling, with frequent small “rewards” to reassure the gambler, and with a focus on the isolated individual. These are the same psychological tactics used by skilled scammers on the internet, and are in a completely different world from a Saturday afternoon with mates at the races, a chook raffle, or an occasional lottery ticket.
State governments have their own addiction to poker machines. Of the $8.9 billion New South Wales people have lost to poker machines over the last twelve months, $2.5 billion has been collected as state taxes. Because it falls on the most vulnerable it must rank as the most regressive form of taxation imaginable: an across-the board increase in GST would be much fairer. Any move towards tax reform should therefore include gambling taxes. Furthermore, even with a narrow fiscal lens, governments should look at the effects on their social security, health and law-enforcement budgets when a substantial proportion of the population is being regularly fleeced by $4000 a year. It’s an amount that represents, for many, the difference between saving and going down the spiral of ever-growing debt, with all its consequences.
That $4000 is also about twice the Covid-period boost to “Jobkeeper” that allowed those on unemployment benefits to lead lives with some autonomy and dignity for a short while.
The clubs’ and pubs’ final line of defence is that revenue from poker machines subsidizes food for patrons, and in the case of clubs it subsidizes sporting facilities (which is why clubs’ poker-machine revenue is taxed at lower rates than pubs’ revenue). That’s a hollow argument: there is no shortage of eating and drinking places or of sports in Western Australia, or in the rest of the planet where poker machines are scarce or non-existent. And one should spare a thought for those publicans and owners of cafes and restaurants who try to make an honest living without having to compete with businesses subsidized by gambling.