American alliance
All of Australia's defence personnel serving overseas should be withdrawn immediately
The revelation by defence minister Senator Hill that our troops in Afghanistan killed three hundred of the enemy without loss and without taking any prisoners is horrifying. Who were the enemy? Unarmed peasants?
Our activities overseas and on the high seas are ensuring that we will suffer a violent retribution some day from the Islamic world. Will we be like the Americans after September 11 and plaintively ask "Why us? What did we do?"
Col Friel
Alawa NT
Multiculturalism
I am constantly amused by the question "is multiculturalism working?", this contemporary quagmire ludicrously posed in Australia and Canada.
The basis of the question is this: have "we" done harm to "our" country by letting "them" in? Michel Foucault must be having a field day over this supposed debate. Who is the "we", and who are "they"?
If this is what I think it is, Caucasian people asking themselves whether the recent influx of (surprise, surprise) non-Caucasian immigrants has been a detriment to the culture of "their" country, then I cannot but laugh at the sheer hypocrisy of such a question.
Have "we" conveniently forgotten how Caucasian people came to Canada and Australia and completely decimated the pre-existing cultures and societies of aboriginal peoples? Perhaps "we" fear from immigrants the same fate we have bestowed upon the real natives of our respective countries.
Devon Rowcliffe
Vancouver
Canada
Budget I
Treasurer Costello's 2002-3 offering has been portrayed as a khaki budget, because of his stated emphasis on increasing surveillance at home and killing abroad. A more realistic appreciation would lead to its portrayal as a tatty cacky attempt to cover-up the excrement into which Australia is sinking.
Certainly, we are going to quadruple the expenditure on discouraging asylum seekers from entering our country. A lot of the increased cost is as a direct result of the Howard government's obsession with the Pacific solution and processing many of asylum seekers on Christmas Island.
We will beef-up our capacity to sink refugee boats at sea. We will continue to tow unseaworthy boats to beyond our territorial limits. We will refuse to allow asylum seekers access to our courts by maintaining the fiction that Christmas Island is not part of 'Straya.
It was costing us less than $100 million a year to process asylum seekers on shore. We could have reduced the cost to about $20 million by releasing asylum seekers into the community after initial security and health checks as is the practice in most of Europe. The $400 million we are wasting to pander to the Howard/Ruddock refugee obsession could have been used to maintain disability support pension eligibility conditions and reinstate the free dental program for the poorest Australians.
In the meantime, we will need to ignore the $3 billion subsidy to rich people's private health insurance, the subsidy to private doctors insurance costs, the subsidy to highly paid superannuates, the $17 billion subsidy to industry and such like. We will have to content ourselves kicking the wheelchairs out from under disability support pensioners and hiding jobs from the unemployed.
John Tomlinson
Brisbane
Budget II
A disgraceful budget is the only way to describe it. It plays entirely on the irrational fears and imagined dangers, claims to be forward looking but makes no provision for that, is in no way reformist, assists the rich, again, penalises the needy and does not address the real dangers facing Australia.
Does this treasurer really have leadership aspirations? He has failed the test already. A safer Australia? He has no idea at all how to achieve that. Do we now have a real Opposition that has the guts to fully expose the unspeakable incompetence and mendacity of the Howard government, provide the effective policy alternatives and block supply in the Senate to force a new election? Australia can do much better than this.
Klaas Woldring
Pearl Beach NSW
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 22, 2002.
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