Can’t have a Wollongong blog without mentioning The Stack. Here it was in November 2012 on the left edge of this photo – a really obvious landmark.
Yesterday it was spectacularly demolished. Chilby Photography set up a nice visual comment on Facebook – just kidding!
But it is true that concerns about asbestos and other toxic ingredients in the stack and the dust cloud following its fall were expressed.
Here is a video from some who opposed the demolition. It also tells you more about the structure.
On to things I find so sad, shaming and frustrating.
There is a great article by Waleed Aly in today’s Herald: The whole point of detention for asylum seekers is horror, whether it is acknowledged or not.
Sorry, but we don’t get to be outraged at this. The fact that a person is dead, that another has been shot or that yet another has a fractured skull doesn’t change anything.
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison is undoubtedly right when he describes this violent episode on Manus Island as a ”terrible tragedy”. In fact, he’s more right than he knows. Tragedy, in the Greek sense, unfolds as an inevitability. The very thing that makes the tragic hero so tragic is that his fate is sealed, his demise is clear, but he continues to take every step that leads him there. And in the case of Manus Island, that is exactly where we are.
We don’t get to be outraged because this violence, with its brutal, deadly consequences, is inherent. We chose it, even if we’ve refused at every stage to acknowledge that. It is the very logic of our asylum seeker policy – which is built on the sole rationality of deterrence – to create horror. We’re banking on it.
So now, let us make this calculus finally explicit: whatever these people are fleeing, whatever circumstance makes them think they’d be better off chancing death on boats hardly worthy of that description, we must offer them something worse. That something is Papua New Guinea.
The worse it is, the more effective it is destined to be, and the more it fulfils the philosophical intentions of the policy. This tragedy is not any kind of evidence of policy failure. It is, in fact, the very best form of deterrence. This is what it looks like when the policy works.
For now, we’re busily piecing together exactly what happened. Hence the immediate calls for an inquiry. We assemble the facts as a necessary ritual, but it’s ultimately an irrelevance. If it turns out that these asylum seekers were set upon by the PNG police or by locals, what difference will it really make? It will merely have demonstrated what we have long known: that PNG is a highly dangerous, deeply unliveable country, racked by lawlessness and violence. The capital, Port Moresby, is routinely listed among the least liveable cities on the planet. Last year, The Economist had it third-worst, besting only Damascus and Dhaka, and therefore ranking below most of the cities these detainees have fled. And that’s the reason the policy of transferring boat people to PNG is meant to work: because we’re pointedly not offering these people protection if they’re found to be refugees…
We respond to a detainee killed, but seem far less moved by the several to have committed suicide, as though they are somehow less dead.
Through it all we maintain the heroic ability to exonerate ourselves through the fiction that we played no part in their misery, or that those who riot are immorally cynical. But the cynicism is ours. Even the briefest sampling of commercial talkback radio this week revealed a streak within us that sees a detainee’s death merely as comeuppance. The political truth is that there is almost nothing any government could do that the electorate would deem too brutal, which is precisely how we got here.
A poll last month had 60 per cent of us urging the Abbott government to ”increase the severity” of our policies towards asylum seekers. That’s not a pragmatic policy judgment. We find something cathartic about this official form of violence.
The truth is we’ve never really come to terms with why it is people get on boats, and why it is that, faced with hopeless inaction once they’re detained, they protest. In fact, our public conversation isn’t even terribly interested in knowing. That’s why, when we do finally discover the facts of Manus, they will mean nothing.
And so frustrating because we have been shown better again and again. See for example: Leaky Boat: the documentary; Disordered reflections on the special QandA on Leaky Boat; Pub talk, reality TV, reality and “Go Back to Where You Came From” (2011) Go Back to Where You Came From 2012–revisited–Part 1; Go Back to Where You Came From 2012–revisited–Part 2; Go Back to Where You Came From 2012–revisited–Part 3. All of which seem ultimately to have failed really to make a difference.
Looking to our north from another perspective, Singapore blogger “Yawning Bread” has an interesting post today: Let others have their heroes. It concerns the naming of an Indonesian warship after two Indonesian marines hanged by Singapore during the “Confrontation” of 1965.
… The trouble with Singapore is that every time we throw a fit like this, we look terribly immature and petty as a country, and paint ourselves as too self-important by half. Our government does us no favours.
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Even more sickening through this whole episode was the behaviour of our mainstream media. Lengthy columns were generated to re-milk every last drop of anguish over our victimhood. A two-page spread appeared on Sunday, the eve of Ng Eng Hen’s bombastic parliamentary announcement. Perhaps this editorial focus was at the behest of the government, for it occurred to me that the thumping of old news stories also served to drum up nationalistic solidarity.
I am highly suspicious of government-orchestrated nationalism. Such flag-waving is often meant to rally people behind the ruling party, or distract citizens from the real issues of the day. Such efforts too sacrifice the longer-term interests of the country (peace and good relations with neighbours) for the short-term boost to party popularity….
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