Radio Australia Today Editorial
Archive for October, 2009
Alzheimer’s Disease. It’s touched a nerve.
30 October 2009
Earlier this week I spoke on the program with Vivienne Ulman, whose mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. Vivienne shared her journey with me on the program, and as someone who has a mother with dementia, it resonated with me. Vivienne told of how she had suspected for years that something was amiss with her mother, especially when her mother started forgetting simple things.
Then came the official diagnosis and that was the start of the real journey for Vivienne. It’s one thing when you suspect, but another when you find it is true. Vivienne started viewing her mother in a different way, and in a way she started mourning the loss of the strong woman that she had known all her life.
There are, in these situations, times when the child laments the loss of the life that they knew, and often are the times when they are upset at the unfairness of it all.
But if you are lucky, you come to a realisation that although life will now be different, it can be a fulfilling and wonderful life, just as wonderful as it was before your mother got ill. In my case, my mother’s dementia transformed her from a strong but slightly nervous woman into someone happier. Our times together since her stroke have been joyful. Of course I know that her time on this planet is limited now, but we have a relationship that has the same joy that it had when I was a child, before I grew into a diffident teen.
It surprised me that my journey and Vivienne’s were so parallel. And in the days after our chat we have had plenty of emails from listeners saying that their experience was similar and that the discussion resonated with them also.
That sort of connection is what everyone on radio aims for. Thanks for sharing your stories.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Asylum Seekers. Day 11 and no change
29 October 2009
Everyone seems to be losing patience.
Certainly the 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers still on the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking are losing patience. They are refusing to disembark. Indonesia says it will not use force to get them off. And neither should it. The agreement between Australia and Indonesia said nothing about Indonesia having martial control over the asylum seekers. This leaves Australia with two options as far as I can see. It can (1) use force to get the Sri Lankans off the customs ship, or it can (2) turn around and bring the passengers to Australia.
According to international refugee law expert Professor James Hathaway, who I spoke to this morning, this second option is exactly what Australia is obligated to do.
According to an international treaty that Australian signed nearly sixty years ago, any ship that picks up asylum seekers at sea is obligated to bring them to the ship’s country of origin. The other alternative is that the ship’s country of origin can negotiate with another treaty signatory. Indonesia is not a signatory, so according to James Hathaway, Australia is in breach of its treaty obligations by doing the deal with Indonesia.
Professor Hathaway says there should never have been an ‘Indonesian Solution’ as there should never have been a ‘Pacific Solution’ which was formulated by the Howard government some years ago. The only proper course in both countries, he says, is an Australian Solution.
Australia currently takes one tenth of one percent of world refugees. Opinion polls in Australia might sugest that many Australians fear being swamped by asylum seekers, and this is a fact that must weigh on the minds of those in government.
But that Australia may be in breach of international obligations only adds to the problems mounting for the government. The world is watching, and the Australian government is learning the hard way that when it comes to the tricky issue of asylum seekers, there are no quick and easy political solutions.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Sri Lankan Asylum Seekers. Now for Indonesian Politics
28 October 2009
The Australian government is unrepentant.
And on a sympathetic view of Rudd and Co, you might be able to see why.
The government says it was acting humanely, and according to international maritime conventions when it rescued a boatload of Sri Lankan asylum seekers in international waters. The boat was coming from Indonesia, and the rescuing vessel, the customs ship Oceanic Viking, took them straight back to where they came from, ie: Indonesia.
The cry from human rights advocates in Australia and elsewhere was loud. They said that the seekers should have been brought straight to Australia, where they could be assured of humane treatment and proper assessment. Indonesia, they said, was known to have treated some of its asylum seekers less well, and Australia should have taken this into account.
Th Australian Opposition has been highly critical of the government too, surprisingly so, considering that it was in government when the very controversial “Pacific Solution” was put in place, which effectively took asylum seekers even further away from the sight of Australian voters, and landed them on small Pacific islands for an often painfully slow assessment.
In the face of all this criticism, the Australian Foreign Minister has come out fighting today. He says he has no regrets about how Australia handled this issue. It he had his timer again, he would still authorise the rescue. If he had his time again, he would still return them to Indonesia. And he has no regrets about working with Indonesia to find a processing cente for the asylum seekers. He says that asylum seekers have no right to demand that they be taken to any destination of their own choice. The fact that they want to go to Australia doesn’t mean that Australia is obligated to take them. And finally showing a toughness that is rare for the urbane Mr Smith, he answered ‘No’ when asked if there was any chance that the asylum seekers would be brought back to Australia.
The embarassment for the government is not going to lighten, because two things of the red-face variety happened yesterday. The local Indonesian governor said he didn’t want the asylum seekers to land in his province, and would only do so if ordered by the Indonesian president. The second thing was a documentary filmmaker revealed that conditions in Indonesian detentions ranged from okay to filthy. Hopefully the Australian-funded centre in Bintan is in the former category.
But its certain that as has been true for much of the last forty years, asylum seekers are again proving to be a really hard issue for Australian governments, and no matter what the governments do, a whole lot of people here are not going to be pleased.
- Phil Kafcaloudes
Tamil Asylum Seekers. Damned Each Way.
27 October 2009
It seems that the mode of transport asylum seekers use to come to Australia is the defining factor on how they are treated.
Many people fleeing persecution come to Australia by airplane, and formally seek asylum once they are in the country. For others, the only option on escaping their country is to hire the services of so-called ‘people smugglers’ and get transported on risky and dangerous old boats across a very difficult stretch of water, only to land on a barren coastline, where the chances of survival are terribly low. For people who say that these people are ‘queue-jumpers’ is to ignore the fact that a persecuted people, such as Tamils in Sri Lanka are unlikely to have access to passports and the freedom of movement to get on an international plane undetected from the people allegedly persecuting them.
So then why are these distresseed people being treated so differently to people who come on a QANTAS flight. Is it easier for the government? Is it for the political scoring that can be made by a government that is being seen to be tough on boat people?
The government denies this of course. It says that in the case of the 78 Sri Lankans now awaiting processing in Indoensia, these people were on a boat that came from Indonesia, and therefore it’s reasonable that Indonesia take its share of responsibility for handling them. The Rudd government says it is helping Indonesia by paying for the detention and some of the processing of the asylum seekers.
The Rudd government also vehemently denies comparisons between its actions and the policy of the previous Howard government to send asylum seekers to Nauru (as part of that government’s “Pacific Solution”). As the ABC’s Tony Jones noted last night on Lateline, the big difference between the two programs is that the asylum seekers in Nauru at least had a chance of eventually being able to settle in Australia. The likelihood of the asylum seekers currently in Indonesia ever coming to Australia is much less.
That’s a distinction that may well prove to be a political bonus for the Rudd government in the short term, but as more and more Australians come to realise the Tamils are being shunted away, never to reach our shores, there could well be a bounce against the government from its own heartland, the very people who voted for Kevin Rudd because they were fed up with the perceived heartlessness of the Howard administration.
It’s a danger that Kevin Rudd should ignore at his own long-term political risk.
Meanwhile these Tamils who couldn’t stay in their own country are finding that their attempts to find a safe home almost as heart-wrenching.
Hunger is coming, and in a big way.
26 October 2009
It was 25 years ago that Ethiopia suffered the famine to end all modern-day famines. One million Ethiopians died and millions more were debilitated by malnutrition.
It’s a problem that as not gone away.
And sadly it looks like it’s not going to go away any time soon. Next time you see a baby at the mall or in a pram on the street, think of what that child has coming up. By the time he or she reaches adulthood, that baby will be facing the problems that we could never have imagined. The Ethiopian famine was caused largely by a drought, and climate change is going to make sure that drought is going to stay with us, and going to get worse. There are plenty of climate change scientists who have slipped into pessimism about our ability to fight off global warming. There are plenty who haven’t yet, but the slowness of the world community to act is only going to increase the levels of concern.
Only last week we heard predictions that the world is not going to be capable of producing enough food to supply a burgeoning population. Australia is going to be fine for quite a while. It has plenty of agricultural land and natural resources. It is capable of handing a few more millions of people, but even the population projections for this country are predicted to take it beyond its food capabilities within a few decades.
So where does this leave countries such as Ethiopia, who are dependent on world aid right now and have been for decades?
In real trouble, that’s where. Oxfam has called for the world to help Ethiopia to build resistance, to help it become self-sustaining. Too much aid to this African nation has come in food, most of it from the United States. The sad fact is that the cost of packaging and shipping this food is as much as the food itself. Oxfam is right when it says that this kind of aid should only be used in an emergency situation. Trainers and infrastucture are what Ethiopia and other agriculture-poor countries need right now.
The rest of the world also needs to look at how it can boost food production and help each other out as the twin problems of climate change and population booms hit us by time that baby turns 20.
