It’s not at all clear that there is a problem, but let’s say the Morrison government was, in fact, struggling manfully to defend Australia’s sovereignty in the face of a “Sri Lankan asylum surge” as The Australian reported on Monday morning.

If you are a government, and you face an actual problem, it’s generally best to be straightforward about it, releasing information in orderly and transparent fashion so considered judgments can be made, otherwise people might suspect you are fully intent on the selective presentation of information to try to control the narrative.

People might even (as one reporter suggested to Scott Morrison on Monday morning) get cynical about it, given stories about surges in boat arrivals do tend to arrive at politically convenient times; a happy sort of coincidence.

Anyway let’s lay out the facts as far as they can be known, or documented.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/sep/02/news-corp-front-page-with-...

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has conceded he ordered the release of new data on Sri Lankan boat arrivals to “keep the threat of illegal arrivals” alive.

The admission comes after the PM vowed he will not intervene to allow a Tamil family facing deportation to stay in Australia.

On Wednesday lawyers will make a last-ditch effort in the Federal Court to prevent the deportation of Priya, her husband Nadesalingam and their two Australian-born children Kopika, 4, and Tharunicaa, 2.

The government had struggled to fight off accusations it was playing dirty politics with the release of information on Monday that it has stopped a people-smuggling vessel from Sri Lanka four weeks ago.

When he was immigration minister, Mr Morrison refused to speak about “on-water matters”, but on Monday he conceded the government had released the information about the intercepted boat.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2019/09/02/scott-morrison-sri-lankan/

Why do politicians get nervous about dragging Christianity into politics? 

Because so much of what they do clashes horribly with the teachings of the Bible. 

A quick check through the Ten Commandments, for instance, is definitionally uncomfortable for anyone in a profession where coveting, working on Sundays and bearing false witness against one's neighbour is pretty much a KPI.

The Sermon on the Mount — if delivered today in the House of Representatives — would occasion much nervous checking of Apple watches and shuffling of papers, as it would for many of us. Turn the other cheek? Judge not, lest you be judged? Blessed are the meek? Jesus was — if it's not too heretical to make the point — really showing his inexperience in Australian politics with those sentiments.

And at the parliamentary church service, where cameras are allowed, no-one ever reads out Matthew 6:5:

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

But nowhere is biblical teaching more embarrassed than when it confronts — in this country — immigration policy.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-04/politics-and-religion/11474738

Read from top.

As the Home Affairs Minister continues to pinball the traumatised young Tamil family from Biloela right around the country, the amount of money being spent by Peter Dutton’s in an attempt to look busy is only growing.

After keeping the family-of-four locked up since the birth of the youngest girl, the cost to the tax-payer is nearing $10 million, after taking into account the thousands of public servants involved in the countless failed attempts to send them back to Sri Lanka where they face severe persecution and potential death.

This 18-month process has seen the family dragged out of their weatherboard home in Biloela, separated from each-other, transferred to a Melbourne detention centre for an entire year, where the youngest of the two daughters’ teeth became rotten because of poor dental hygiene in the facility, before they were put on a plane home and sent back to Sri Lanka. A last minute court ruling then demanded the plane land in Darwin until further notice.

The two-year-old daughter received a last-minute reprieve on Friday when the Federal Court determined her case for asylum had not been properly heard by immigration officials. They were sent back to Melbourne that, and then Christmas Island in the dead of the night, so as to keep them away from the lawyers, medical professionals and advocates. A process that has been a fuckload more expensive then just leaving them in the bush and letting the old man keep working at the abattoir.

However, these figures are not even including the $180 million Scott Morrison spent re-opening Christmas Island Detention Centre to house the family of four.

Earlier, this year, the detention facility was Frankenstiened back to life at cost of around in an erratic and extremely costly knee-jerk by the PM amid fears the passing of a medivac bill would see sick and dying asylum seekers be transferred to the Australian mainland – a risk that really is worth the nearly a quarter of a billion tax payer dollars that was spent averting it.

At least it is getting some use by housing this likeable Tamil family of four that everyone wants to stay in Western Queensland. 

Our reporters hit the streets to figure out what the average Joe and Jane are thinking.

Local tax-payer and swing voter, Cheryleen Grogan (55, Dental Assistant, Betoota Heights) says she’s torn on this particular issue.

“Look, I know Western Queensland needs to be protected from hard working immigrant families that just want to spend their life sweeping floors in a meat works and raise their kids without the fear of being killed by insurgents”

“But I also understand that spending up to $200 million trying to resurrect the White Australia policy is also a bit excessive”

Read more:

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/breaking-news/tax-payer-weighs-up-leavin...

Unfortunately, the satirical Betoota Advocate full of fake stories is starting to tell the truth... Sad (not about the Betoota but about the truth being what it is)...

So now for the fake story:

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/breaking-news/pauline-wants-to-know-who-...

Australia is prepared to waive the practice of charging the estimated $1 million deportation cost for the Sri Lankan family at the centre of national protests if they agree to return home and reapply for legal work visas.

The New Daily understands the automatic and punitive costs that Australia charges to failed asylum seekers attempting to return on migrant visas will be waived for the family as a show of good faith.

The olive branch offers no guarantees for the family, but would allow the couple and their two Australian-born children a chance to return to the town of Biloela on migrant work visas.

It would also allow the Morrison government a pathway to responding to community concerns without abandoning its hardline policy.

Waiting periods to reapply for work visas to Australia could also be waived.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2019/09/05/tamil-family-governe...

Some 52 refugees and asylum seekers in offshore detention have received temporary protection visas or safe haven enterprise visas, according to new statistics that fly in the face of the Morrison government’s refusal to allow the Biloela Tamil family to stay.

The home affairs department has revealed to a Senate inquiry that of the 3,127 people classified as “illegal maritime arrivals” who have been taken to a regional processing country since 2011, some 52 have received visas and now face legal limbo if banned from permanent settlement in Australia.

Fourteen families are set to be broken up by a government bill to prevent asylum seekers who were sent to regional processing coming to Australia, it said. The statistics also reveal that of a total of 5,191 asylum seekers who came to Australia by boat 2,074 people were never transferred to a regional processing country.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/07/home-affairs-data...

Read from top.

There is no written record of the advice provided by the Australian Border Force commissioner that led to a family of Tamil asylum seekers from Biloela being kept in detention on Christmas Island for months while waiting for their day in court.

Priya, her husband, Nadesalingam, and their Australian-born children, Kopika, 4, and Tharunicaa, 2, have been held on Christmas Island on their own since the end of August after a court ordered an injunction against the government removing them from Australia back to Sri Lanka.

The court will decide if the government has properly considered whether the youngest child, Tharunicaa, is owed protection. The rest of the family has had their claims rejected.

The four asylum seekers are the only residents of the Christmas Island detention centre, which was reopened at a cost of tens of millions of dollars in response to the parliament passing laws allowing medical transfers for asylum seekers from Manus Island and Nauru to Australia.

In late September, the federal court ruled the family could stay until their case could be heard by the court.

Prior to being moved in August, the family had been in detention in Melbourne, and before that had been living in the regional Queenslandcommunity of Biloela.

However, there is no written documentation to support the government’s decision to keep the family in detention on Christmas Island while waiting for their case to be heard.

On 19 September, the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, justified to 2GB’s Ray Hadley the decision to move the family to Christmas Island. He said because activists “cut through the fence and chained themselves to the front of the plane” when the family was evacuated at Tullamarine airport, the advice he had received from the commissioner of the Australian Border Force, Michael Outram, was that it would be safer for the ABF and the family for them to be moved to Christmas Island.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/27/no-written-record...

Hitler's Nazis would be proud...

Read from top.

Study: As Many As 59 Million Displaced By America’s War On Terror

The report caused the establishment to throw a tantrum 'symptomatic of the reflexive defensiveness' of the blob.

By Barbara Boland

In the nineteen years since 9/11, the U.S. has waged ceaseless wars in dozens of countries around the world. A new study finds that those wars have exacted a heavy human toll on local populations—at least 37 million people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria have fled their homes due to wars the U.S. was involved in during the post-9/11 wars.

This exceeds the number of people displaced by every war since 1900, other than World War II. Thirty seven million is a conservative estimate—the number may actually be closer to 48-59 million. From 2010 to 2019, the total number of refugees and displaced persons globally nearly doubled from 41 million to a staggering 79.5 million, surpassing even post-World War II numbers.

Thirty seven million people is equivalent to the number of nearly all the residents of the state of California, or all the people in Texas and Virginia combined; it’s nearly as many people as live in Canada.

In other post-9/11 conflicts which involved U.S. troops, millions more people have been displaced, in as far-flung regions as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, according to the study by Brown University’s Costs of War project.

“Mainstream foreign policy makers and wonks, inside the administration and working at think tanks, both Democrats and Republicans, so often make policy prescriptions and advocate for things like going to war, with very limited attention to, or concern for, the human damage these actions will cause. Sadly this way of thinking goes back to the U.S. war in Vietnam, where there was a similar disconnect between the policymakers and the human effects,” American University professor and author of the study David Vine told TAC.

The report lands as the United States approaches the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, and plans are being made within the Trump administration to draw-down U.S. troop numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet the study prompted very little self-reflection from the Washington foreign policy establishment, said Trita Parsi, co-founder and Executive Vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, in an interview with TAC.

“The reaction that I saw from the blob was predictable,” said Parsi. Experts at many think-tanks prefer to see “the U.S. as some sort of a passive non-entity in these different conflicts, which at a minimum does not account for the negative consequences of our wars.”

“When a report like this comes out, which shows that these wars have created millions of dispossessed refugees, instead of having even a brief moment of self-reflection, the immediate reaction is to attack, dismiss, and criticize,” said Parsi. “It’s not very different from the reactions of many politicians, which is probably why it’s so hard to change policies on this. It’s a pattern that also fits a lot of America’s wars; there’s just no willingness to recognize the problems.”

Reports that neglect or are completely silent on the U.S. role in various global catastrophes are “constant,” said Parsi. But a report like this one, that accounts for U.S. actions, causes the establishment to “throw a tantrum.”

“That’s symptomatic of the reflexive defensiveness which makes it really difficult to shift US foreign policy,” he said. “There’s an unwillingness to recognize that there could be something wrong with the grand strategy of constantly wanting to dominate the whole globe.”

When Americans think of the post 9/11 wars, they tend to almost exclusively focus on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, where large numbers of U.S. troops were deployed. The study’s inclusion of other countries and conflict zones where America either had boots on the ground, or provided weapons and materiel support, ruffled some feathers in the Washington foreign policy establishment, and caused some to question the study’s methods.

But the study authors explain their methodology clearly:

“We focus on wars where the U.S. government bears a clear responsibility for initiating armed combat (the overlapping Afghanistan/Pakistan war and the post-2003 war in Iraq); for escalating armed conflict (U.S. and European intervention in the Libyan uprising against Muammar Gaddafi and Libya’s ongoing civil war and U.S. involvement in Syria); or for being a significant participant in combat through drone strikes, battlefield advising, logistical support, arms sales, and other means (U.S. forces’ involvement in wars in Yemen, Somalia, and the Philippines).”

And while some within the blob interpreted this to mean the study authors are blaming the U.S. for these conflicts and for the millions displaced, the very next next sentence in the study reads:

“In documenting displacement caused by the U.S. post-9/11 wars, we are not suggesting the U.S. government or the United States as a country is solely responsible for the displacement. Causation is never so simple. Causation always involves a multiplicity of combatants and other powerful actors, centuries of history, and large-scale political, economic, and social forces. Even in the simplest of cases, conditions of pre-existing poverty, environmental change, prior wars, and other forms of violence shape who is displaced and who is not.”

Vine said some took issue in particular with the inclusion of the displaced Syrians in the study.

They “questioned” our decision to include Syrians in our calculations, but “we anticipated this, and that’s why we were conservative in our estimates. We could have included upwards of 20 million displaced, since in some ways the U.S. has been involved in Syria, funding Syrian rebel groups all the way back to 2013; and given the role the U.S. had in destabilizing the region with the Iraq War which birthed ISIS,” said Vine.

Instead, the study “opted for a more conservative approach given that U.S. involvement in the war has been relatively limited compared to that of the Syrian government, rebel forces, foreign militants, and Russian, Turkish, and other foreign militaries.”

“We included 7.1 million displaced people from Syria, focusing only on the years that the U.S. was engaged in the anti-ISIS war and only those displaced from provinces in Syria where U.S. forces have operated,” said Vine.

“A less conservative and arguably more accurate approach would include the displaced from all of Syria’s provinces since 2014 or as early as 2013 when the U.S. government began backing Syrian rebel groups,” write the study authors.

Since U.S. support for the Syrian “free Army” has always been portrayed in U.S. media as the “good fight” against Assad’s bad guys, it’s easy to see why the blob is dismayed by the inclusion of Syrians displaced by U.S. action. Indeed, official sources have never fully acknowledged the billions of dollars of weapons the Pentagon poured into the region.

“I think people feel like the U.S. shouldnt take the blame for displacement on that scale in Syria, and that’s what upset some people,” said Vine. “We’re very clear in the report we are not saying the U.S. is solely responsible for the 37 million displaced globally. There’s responsibility to be shared by many other actors, including Assad, ISIS, Taliban, Shia militias. But we focused on displacement in areas where the US has significant responsibility because the U.S. launched the war, or played a significant role in the conflict.”

What impact will a study like this have on foreign policy thinking in the decades to come? Will the next administration carefully ponder a study like this, alongside cost estimates, weapons capabilities, oil futures, and U.S. casualties?

“Personally, I hope this study casts more light on the human impact of these wars, that I think largely has been overlooked, certainly in recent years,” said Vine. “There’s been a humanitarian catastrophe that has engulfed the Middle East and I think a lot of people in the U.S. and elsewhere haven’t reckoned with the full scope of destruction and damage these wars have wrought.”

“Somehow the record of the past 19 years of war — disastrous doesn’t even begin to capture how horrific these wars have been, for the U.S., for the world, for the people who have been affected — yet somehow there’s people in Washington that still think the U.S. military can and should invade Iran or start a war with North Korea,” Vine added.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/study-as-many-as-59-million-displaced-by-americas-war-on-terror/

Read from top.