Racist White Australia Deports
Brown Australian CitizenBy Gideon Polya
15 May, 2005
Countercurrents.orgWhite Australia has had an appalling 2 century record of racism, violence and human rights abuse ranging from 19th century slavery in the Pacific Islands and genocide of indigenous peoples to continuing complicity in horrendous Coalition passive genocide in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories. White Australia actually achieved a Left-driven "window" of remarkable social decency in the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, but has seen an appalling resurgence of cowardly, nudge-nudge, wink-wink racism over the last decade.
Non-European people around the World have been all too aware of the White Australia Policy that maintained a "Whites only" immigration policy from Australian Federation in 1901 until the Whitlam Labor Government abolished it in 1973.
There were rare exceptions, however, typically involving marriage partners. Thus in 1966 I went down to the White Australian Immigration offices in Adelaide to get the immigration visa stamped for my fiancee (a Fiji Indian of Bihari-Bengali background, university-educated like nearly all of her immediate family and the daughter of a distinguished lawyer and member of Parliament who had helped negotiate independence for his country). There were 2 officials behind the counter and one of them pointedly asked me "Is your fiancee a prostitute?" Having been wisely brought up to avoid confrontation with such "people", I simply replied "No , sir", the visa was stamped and nearly 40 years on we are happily married, proud parents and indeed grandparents.
However the last decade has seen explicit, red-neck anti-Asian racism and better-mannered conservatives excelling in what has been called "dog whistling" politics (after dog whistles that only dogs can hear) - while constrained by post-Labor, public "political correctness" and even by anti-bigotry legislation in some State jurisdictions, the conservative Liberal-National Coalition has consistently appealed to red-neck racists by words and deeds that diminish indigenous and immigration-derived non-Europeans in White Australia.
Two major vehicles for the New Racism of White Australia have been persecution of non-European refugees and military support for Anglo-American "democratic imperialism" (democratic Nazism) in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Thus in recent years the conservative government has appallingly treated numerous, mostly Muslim and Asian refugees through indefinite detention of thousands of distressed adults and hundreds of traumatized children in abusive "detention centres" (concentration camps) located in remote deserts or remote Pacific islands; the failure to rescue hundreds of refugees who perished in the Siev X refugee boat disaster; and sustained public diminution and victimization of refugees and Muslims.
White Australia has militarily supported the UK-US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan but there has been an almost comprehensive political and media failure to report the horrendous human cost of the Coalition passive genocide in these countries - the latest UN data show that the post-invasion avoidable mortality and under-5 infant mortality in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories have totalled 1.9 million and 1.5 million, respectively, in the continuing context of negligible provision of medical and other life-sustaining requisites by the Occupying Powers.
Several months ago White Australia was rocked by the revelation that a mentally-ill, WHITE Australian woman of German orgin, former air hostess Cornelia Rau, had been wrongly detained for nearly a year in total in tropical Queensland and thence abusively in a desert Immigration detention centre.
Now it has been revealed that in 2001 a BROWN Australian citizen, Vivian Alvarez (Solon) (married name Vivian Young), was taken from a Lismore hospital (in a wheel chair, confused from mental illness and with her head bandaged from car accident injuries) and fairly promptly and secretly deported by plane to the Philippines. She was not heard of since UNTIL LAST WEEK (when, thanks to media reportage, she was fortuitously found to be in a Catholic hospice in the Philippines), even though Immigration became aware of their mistake several years ago. Vivian Alvarez has family in Australia including her 2 young children. The conservative government refuses to have a proper judicial inquiry (for details see transcripts from ABC Radio National: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1362258.htm and ABC TV: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2005/s1362107.htm).
There are hundreds of thousands of "non-White" Australian citizens (mostly deriving from the post-White Australia Policy era) and about 0.4 million indigenous Australians (who have only been counted since 1967 in White Australia). All these Australian citizens are clearly at risk of precipitate, State-less, friend-less and penniless deportation to a Third World country if they become confused for medical reasons and fall into the hands of ignorant, incompetent or racist White Australian officials.
Of course even worse is to come in racist, bigoted, delusional White Australia. The conservative government will gain control of both Houses of the Australian Federal Parliament in July and have foreshadowed draconian extensions of hysterical, post-9/11 anti-libertarian legislation. Thus they have proposed that talking twice to a person (e.g. a salesperson, a stranger on a train) associated with a proscribed (typically Muslim) organization should attract a mandatory 3 year prison sentence with ignorance being no defence.
Dr Gideon Polya 29 Dwyer Street, Macleod, Melbourne, Victoria, 3085, Australia
e-mail: gpolya@optusnet.com.au
website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html
Day & night telephone: +61 3 9459 3649
Credentials: Dr Gideon Polya published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality - numerous articles on this matter can be found by a simple Google search for "Gideon Polya" and on his website: http://members.optusnet.com.au/~gpolya/links.html
