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July 19, 2013
Federal Labor, in its desperation to stem its electoral loses in the 2013 election, has made a hard turn to the right, on asylum seekers arriving by boat. All unauthorised arrivals will be sent to Papua New Guinea for assessment and if successful, they will be resettled in PNG.
Arriving in Australia by boat will no longer mean settlement in Australia.
David Rowe
Under the new agreement between Australia and PNG, asylum seekers who arrive from Friday will have health checks and immunisations on Christmas Island and then, within weeks, will be transferred to Manus Island and “other centres” in PNG as yet unspecified.
UNHCR recently found that, while improving, the conditions on the remote Manus Island were still below required international standards. The conditions of the detention facility are harsh and inhumane.
Presumably, this hard turn to the right is designed to achieve what the Howard government’s Pacific Solution could not: that is, to ensure that no refugees are in fact resettled in Australia. The success of Rudd Labor’s plan relies on the ability of PNG to resettle large numbers of refugees. How can PNG deal with this problem?
A resurgent, Rudd-led, Labor party has embraced Fortress Australia in a global world, instead of supporting UNHCR and regional governments to swiftly process refugees and provide them with real solutions. So its off to the polls we go.
Rudd is in charge of things. He's taken back control. The Rudd government has shown that it has the power and capacity to act in postmodernity. Postmodernity means that we have:
now entered an era when none of the ‘modern' institutions of government seem capable of really exercising any control over the material, socialand cultural changes which capitalism continues to unleash upon us. At the same time, none of the large-scale, coherent systems of thought which have been handed down to us from earlier moments seem capable of grasping the full pluralism and complexity of a world of such dense, wild, unregulated capitalism as we see all around us today.
We are in a situation where there is an inability of institutions which were born in the industrial revolution and came to maturity in the era of cinema, railways and mass democracy to get to grips with the mercurial fluidity and speed of postmodern cybernetic capitalism.
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Its a vote winner