Stop the Boats!!!! A GLOBAL PROBLEM

"Stop the Boats" has caught the imagination of the media and the Australia public as if it as something we can actually achieve.

Below is a full transcript of Greg Sheridan's opinion piece in The Australian today. The views expressed in it epitomize the very reason why I no longer buy the Australian and indeed resist all offers from the News Ltd stable via the internet. For me the ABC and the SBS media will give me what I can trust for news and balanced opinion.

I am reasonably confident that those wanting to stop the boats have reasons other than an altruistic concern for the welfare of those who would take the risks associated with that crazy short trip from Indonesia to Ashmore Reef. The claim of altruism is used to give validity to their proposals which have nothing to do with the welfare of people fleeing persecution in their home country.

The greatest single "Push Factor" as people like to call it is not the fact that people can no longer go home because of civil strife. The places where people gather as refugees, bush camps or city slums, are places that offer no hope. In Malaysia and Indonesia, refugees who try to leave the camps are arrested as illegal immigrants, but in the camps there is so little processing of refugee claims, if any, that there is no hope of resettlement. The only thing they can count on is spending 10s of years in that place.

Hope is the big push factor - hope that if they get away they might have a chance at resettlement somewhere, anywhere, and for those in Indonesia and Malaysia, the closest somewhere is Australia. None of the Asian countries where we think there would be a closer cultural and religious fit than here have any programs of humanitarian settlement of refugees. Thailand has made room for many many Burmese and Cambodian refugees but always in the hope that those people would sooner or later be able to go back home across their common borders. That is what Temporary Protection Visas so enthusiastically advocated by the Liberal Party are offering - safety until you can go back home. Once again, there is no hope in such offers and they will not diminish the push factor.

Given that we have a global refugee problem it stands to reason that we need a global solution. The fact that the UN offers definitions and conventions that govern people's international rights only goes part of the way. The sad fact is that when the number of places for resettlement each year is put alongside the number of people displaced from their homes because of their race or religious or political beliefs current levels of humanitarian resettlements in third countries is a drop in the ocean.

What is needed is a global mobilization of countries willing to offer humanitarian resettlement to the millions who need protection. At the moment very few countries offer resettlement - just 10 countries, and per capita Australia us pulling its weight alongside the others. But the reality is that the number of places we offer is minsicule compared to other migration places offered, and other forms of entry for work etc, not to mention the number of working or touring visitors who have overstayed and are now lost in the fabric of our society. I think Australia could cope with a whole lot more refugee settlements and I think it would do our economy far more good than harm, but that is a minor issue.

But what if a whole lot more western countries could be persuaded to open their doors to refugees? What if between us we could all offer say a million new refugee resettlements a year, or even two? That would begin to offer hope to people who wind up in refugee camps, not just in Asia, but in various parts of Africa. This is what will reduce the push factor and put the people smugglers out of business.

Yes, it makes me mad that the people who organised the latest tragedy walked away with $1.5m perhaps for outlays of very little on a decrepit boat that was a single-use investment and a few peasant crew members who probably knew very little about the risks they were taking. But that does not diminish my concern for the refugees and the need for the rest of the world to offer them resettlement. If they truly are refugees they cannot go home. Our experience is that 9 out of 10 who come are indeed refugees, and they often come from countries in which our military has been actively involved in the civil unrest from which they are fleeing.

Jesus once met a lady who asked him to help her. She was a foreigner from Phoenicia. Jesus at first refused, but she responded that even dogs were entitled to the crumbs from under the banquet tables. The current social and political response to refugees in Australia seems to me to be like that - we have so much that even the crumbs from under our banquet tables would make refugee people happy and passing them on would do us no harm - BUT WE REFUSE HOSPITALITY.

Everything the Immigration Minister and his opposition counterparts talk about and do is designed to score political points and it will make no difference to the push factor - in fact it will only increase the pressure.

You wait and see!!!!!

BY:GREG SHERIDAN, FOREIGN EDITOR
From:The Australian
December 24, 2011 12:00AM

A TITANIC battle of wills took place yesterday between the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition and, as far as we can see, the opposition is not going to remove its veto on the Malaysia Solution to the illegal arrival of boatpeople.

The only way that would change, one presumes, is if the nature of the Malaysia Solution changed: that is, the Malaysian government signs the refugee convention or institutes similar guarantees into domestic law, or at least gives them a much greater degree of formality than they have now.

If that happens the opposition will be able to claim it has greatly improved the quality of the Malaysia Solution.

The government has had some success in getting commentators to blame the opposition for the recent policy impasse. But really, the whole illegal immigration-boatpeople fiasco is the government's problem, the government's fault and the government's responsibility.

Yesterday's events in a way make the government's position even more incoherent. Yesterday, the government was publicly prepared to open an offshore processing centre on Nauru. If the opposition maintains its veto on Malaysia, what then is the government's position? How can it be that Nauru was OK yesterday but no good today?

The absolute failure of the Gillard government to show any conviction, consistency or policy coherence on the boatpeople matter is at the heart of its failure to manage the issue effectively.

No one, least of all the people-smugglers, believes, or takes at face value, or invests with any sense of consequence, a single word the government says on this matter, so all the serially contradictory and wildly varying policies it has adopted and then discarded end up achieving nothing.

There are many layers of complexity and contradiction all through this business.

In Wayne Swan's letter to Tony Abbott on Thursday, he spoke of "our No 1, shared, overriding objective: to stop men, women and children from risking their lives on leaky boats."

The tragedy of those people who drowned is indeed an appalling human tragedy. They were all human beings and they all have an absolute claim on human rights. In my view there is no one in Australia, at any point of any spectrum of this debate, who does not want to stop such deaths.

Surely all of us involved in this debate can afford each other this much goodwill: that there is no one who wants, or who is directly responsible for, these tragic deaths.

And it is absolutely correct that avoiding these deaths must be an extremely high priority of policy.

But if it is the only policy priority, then the Greens' policy is the logical one to follow. Indeed, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only consideration of policy, you could quite reasonably be a lot more radical than the Greens.

The Greens want us to take tens of thousands of people from Malaysia and Indonesia. If we did that it would certainly, in the short term at least, prevent deaths at sea.

Why would anyone get on a boat when they knew they would come to Australia in short order in perfect safety? It would also massively increase the numbers coming to Indonesia and Malaysia.

More than that, if avoiding deaths at sea is the only priority, if the people involved really are refugees and have a right to claim refuge in Australia, then we should send our navy out to meet the boats and help them as early on their journey as possible.

I am not being sarcastic or ironic here. This was the position I took on the Vietnamese boatpeople of the late 1970s and early 80s. I believed they were genuine refugees. I strongly supported Medecins du Monde, which sent out boats searching for Vietnamese in the South China Sea. I helped try to set up a branch of MDM in Sydney, wrote columns about it, held a meeting for it in my home and on several occasions was invited to join its expeditions in the South China Sea.

If you believe these people really are refugees, and really are entitled to resettlement in Australia, this is the only logical response.

I have 100 per cent changed my view since then because I believe that overwhelmingly we are dealing today with determined illegal immigration, not refugees. The bureaucratic process to decide who is really a refugee is completely unreliable, especially when people throw away their documents before landing on Australian soil so their stories cannot be verified.

Middle-class Iranians, Pakistanis pretending to be Afghans, Afghans who have only ever lived in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils who don't want to join the tens of millions of Tamils in India: all of these people may reasonably want to live in Australia. Overwhelmingly, they are not refugees.

So a serious object of policy also has to be to prevent people from confronting Australia with an unmanageable problem of illegal arrivals by boat.

This is a perfectly sensible objective, which the vast majority of Australians want upheld. But it is almost impossible to achieve while ever the ultimate prize of permanent residency in Australia is available.

That is why those who claim it is hysterical for us to get worried about relatively small numbers of illegal immigrants are misguided or disingenuous. Once the route to Australia is established, the numbers will increase inexorably.

In the first half of December we had the highest rate of arrivals for many years. We have had more than 14,000 boat arrivals since late 2008, when Labor changed the successful Pacific Solution policies John Howard had implemented. The arrival rate is accelerating and all these people will bring relatives under family reunion. This is an immigration outcome, pure and simple, and one that the government has completely lost control of.

Offshore processing by itself will not stop the boats and, therefore, will not stop the drownings.

Once people are detained at an Australian facility, be it on Nauru or Manus Island, there will be strong calls from within Australia that they be processed quickly. If they have got rid of their documents, and are determined to live in Australia, the government will find it very hard to send them back and ultimately most will be accepted into Australia.

The boats thus will keep coming. This again would be a failure of process and a defeat for Australian sovereignty and the will of the people of Australia and of their government.

Ultimately, solving this problem must include a determination that if you arrive illegally by boat, whatever your circumstances, you will not get permanent residency in Australia. This is why the opposition's approach of offshore processing combined with temporary protection visas, with no family reunion rights, is likelier to work than the government's approach.

The fact that the Abbott opposition, like Howard before it, looks as if it really would enforce these policies means it would have a better chance of staring down the people-smugglers and their clients.

Credibility, which on this issue Julia Gillard has entirely lacked across her whole prime ministership, is crucial.

The Rule of Law and a Civil Society

Two quite separate events in the media this week have caused me to think about these principles.

The death of Libya's Colonel Gaddafi may well have been nothing more that the death of the Commander-in-Chief in the front line of a civil war.  He certainly had caused the death of countless civilians both during his 42 year reign of terror in Libya and during this most recent civil war.  But there are international rules of engagement in war, especially in relation to those taken prisoner, that mean that once taken prison a person should expect to be taken into custody and dealt with through a military justice or international justice system.

Given that the people's army in this civil war were not in any way really trained for combat it is not beyond the realm of possibilities for the situation to simply have gotten out of control because people really didn't know the rules nor were they under a proper system of command.

Nevertheless, I feel disquieted by both the end result - his ignominious death and the ensuing lack of respect for his remains - and the almost gloating tone of Western leaders suggesting that the world was better off with him dead.  This is a not-too-faint echo of the circumstances surrounding the death of Osama Bin Laden in an insurgent military operation by US troops without the official sanction of the Pakistani government.

The man was a bad man, but the West loses all its moral authority if it allows others to sidestep the rule of law in dealing with bad people, just because they are bad and this way is much easier.

The second event, and one much closer to home concerns the removal by police of unarmed non-violent demonstrators from a number of our city centres, firstly in Melbourne this week, today in Sydney, and I expect again in a few days from now in Perth, in what can only be described as a heavy-handed response to the situation.

I have no doubt that some of the occupiers are what might be called "professional protesters" given that their faces pop up again and again regardless of the cause - wild rivers, anti-forestry, coal-seal gas, you name it.  I also have no doubt that while permission may have been sought and granted for a "two-hour" protest with a clear intention of making the protest go way beyond that time frame, protest in an orderly (but not necessarily quiet), non-violent manner in a public place is not something that a civil society should allow the police to shut down just because a city by-law had been breached.

I don't believe the protesters were preventing citizens from going about their business.  I don't believe they could be regarded as having trespassed on private property.  They were simply using this centuries-old means of getting a point across and they weren't finished yet.

But armed police, some in riot gear, some on horses decided it was time for them to finish and so man-handled hundreds of people to get them out of there, some of whom may now face charges.

I actually don't really agree with the point these protesters are trying to make, but I feel very uncomfortable when the authorities of my society take to themselves the right to silence such criticism and protest in this way.

What do you think?

Have a heart

Asylum seekers at Lombrum Naval Base, Manus Island. Shipping containers surrounded by cladding and fitted with air-conditioners are their accommodation. Photo: Angela Wylie via Sydney Morning Herald

I find it hard to reconcile the determination of the Gillard Labor Government to be as harsh on boat-arrival asylum-seekers as the Howard Coalition Government ever was. They have spoken words of differentiation between their policies and the previous regime, but their actions are entirely consistent with the barbaric practices that Phillip Ruddock as Immigration Minister normalized.

Chris Bowen has now put in place off-shore processing options for anyone arriving by boat in two separate countries that are not signatories to the UN Convention on Refugees and if Nauru eventually comes on stream, which I think is most likely, that will be a third country. He thinks that by putting people in hopeless situations they will stop taking the boat-pathway to gain entry to our country. So long as he does nothing to speed up the exit-pathways from the miserable camps, especially for the Afghanis in Malaysia, they will continue to choose this option. As an aside I remain convinced that the use of the term "people smugglers" is intended to imply that there are border-security issues at stake and that refugees are being mercilessly exploited, but it is simply a ploy to side-step a racist concern that says we don't want people "like that" coming here.

Last week, the Head of the Immigration Department invited Senators to seriously consider that option of community-based on-shore processing of claimants, not for humanitarian reasons, even though these are many, but for economic reasons. The cost to his Department of managing the situation last year was $750m compared with $150m three years ago, and a large part of the cost is related to trying to do departmental work in remote areas. It would be much cheaper and in no way compromise our security concerns to have people in community-based detention in the cities where departmental services are easily accessed.

Sadly, the senators will not investigate this question, I fear. This new committee is simply a platform for the opposition to score points and to politicize the issue rather than inject considered policy proposals. I wish it were otherwise.

What do you think?

Presenting an Alternative View or Trolling?

Over the past month I have enjoyed participating in some internet forums about the National School Chaplaincy Program.

I had several motivators in doing this.

Firstly, I wanted to see what the detractors were saying - to keep up with the issues they thought would bolster their case.

Secondly, I wanted to put some of the evidence in support of the program before people, to offer an alternative view and at times to correct misrepresentations.

I also wanted to hone my skills in clarifying what the issues were and then responding in a coherent way.

I have been involved in several public forums as well as participating in a discussion page on Facebook.

My involvement on Atheists Federation of Australia forum on School Chaplaincy felt a bit like jumping into a fish tank filled with piranhas. People did not want to listen to an alternative view point and took great delight in referring to the things of faith in the crudest of terms. Some contributors were clearly intent on total disrespect for anyone with religious world views. And after a while, I found that what they wanted to say was filled with generalisations as well as utterly repetitive. They tickled each others ears with the same things over and over again.

I then got involved with with a GetUp discussion page on the NSCP. I found some of the same contributors making the same kinds of comments, the same kind of sweeping generalisations, the same kind of reluctance to engage with evidence that contradicted their point of view and the same repetitive droning on. But at least they were polite about it.

I have more recently been following a page in Facebook called "The High Court Challenge to the Constitutional Legality of the NSCP". Every day they would post links to various newspaper stories that were generally antagonistic to school chaplaincy and there would follow a litany of oooo's and aaaahhh's as people would join the chorus of outrage at the state of affairs.

Now I have to admit that the evangelical stance of some other school chaplaincy providers in Australia is a great liability in this climate and one or two stories recently have been a bit like giving away an "own goal". But I have consistently tried to offer evidence that chaplaincy can be done well, and that the program is wanted by schools.

On Friday, however, the administrator of the page decided that my close connection with YouthCARE meant that I was no longer entitled to contribute to the debate. My connection to the page was closed down, I became invisible (all my previous contributions disappeared) and even though I can follow the page I can no longer directly contribute to it.

I guess that says it all, really, in regard to the willingness of opponents to listen to alternative points of view.

Have you had any similar experiences?

Government Funding for Religious Organisations

On 19 April, Scott Stephens published a blog on the ABC Ethics & Religion Web-site in which he advocates that Churches should say no to government funding. It is a well-reasoned argument in many ways, but I think it makes a significant omission, resulting in what could be a travesty of justice.

Religious organisations, particularly but not only Christian religious organisations, have a very long history of engagement in the Community Sector, delivering a wide range of social, welfare and community development services that benefit the whole community, not just the members of the particular religious community.

At all three levels of government in Australia there is a general principle that denies funding to religious and political organisations for activities that are either intended exclusively for their members and/or are intended to promulgate their particular religious or political views. It is an interesting paradox, in my view that a sporting club is not ineligible for government funding in the grounds that the services are only available to the members of the sporting club.

I think I generally support that principle.

However, there is a debate in the public and political sphere right now about whether or not Government Funding should be given at all to religious bodies. The focus is particularly on the National School Chaplaincy Program but the outcome of this debate has much wider ramifications than just the NSCP.

Secularists on the one hand want the public domain to be religion-free and any use of public funds to achieve outcomes of religious organisations is illegitimate, and the Religious "exceptionalists" (as Scott Stephens describes them) believe they are entitled.

I believe that both extremes in this debate are wrong: the "secularists" because they assume that once religion is removed from public-political life, and consigned to interiority (where they assume it belongs, if anywhere), the secular space that is left will be neutral, benign and inherently just; and the Christian "exceptionalists" because they think that God's providential care of the world can be mediated through political coercion, and because they do not believe that being on the payroll of the State is hazardous to the soul of Christianity itself.

I agree that both are wrong. The removal of the religious from public political life not only fails to create a neutral and benign space, it creates a space that does not reflect the nature of society. And the government funding can indeed be much more than providential because of the political obligations that are so often attached to such funding.

But to conclude, as Scott does, that religious bodies should deny themselves access to government funding, while perhaps noble and perhaps also a strategy that keeps the church in total control of its destiny, cuts across another important principle of contemporary democratic societies - the principle of equity and access.

I am unable to identify a source that would be specific about this, but a very significant part of the Community Sector is in the hands of religious organisations - Anglicare, the Salvation Army, even generic organisations like Mission Australia and World Vision which began out of a religious vision. These organisations make both a significant and valued contribution to the whole community. If Governments decided that they should no longer fund them because of their religious basis or heritage, it would amount to a scandalous example of discrimination on the basis of religion.

The dichotomy is wrong - the secular and religious. Indeed, if it were a valid dichotomy, the removal one from the public space would give the other an inappropriate advantage. the two live together, and indeed must live together giving each other the respect they deserve as each making valued and significant contributions to the welfare of the whole community.

What do you think?

The Yindjibarndi People versus Fortescue Metals Group

Hypocrisy is only worth doing when you do it well. Here is one of the best examples I have seen for a long time.

The Saturday West Australian newspaper had a great little opinion piece this weekend by Andrew Forrest, Managing Director of Fortescue Metals Group, telling us all of his grand vision to free indigenous people from their dependence on government welfare. It was a gratuitous piece of self-agrandisement, and every claim he made is at odds with the accounts I have seen on video and heard from someone who was there. So I wrote a short note to every member of the Western Australian Parliament today. Here is your copy:

In our current climate it seems sacrilegious to speak critically of anyone involved in promoting the resources base of our economy, and especially one of our local heroes. Indeed in yesterday’s West Australian Andrew Forrest makes the claim that “Fortescue Metals Group is passionate about working together with people and communities to improve their lives and livelihoods. In aboriginal communities this means real engagement and not simply replacing government welfare with mining welfare. Writing a cheque is easy.” (p.66)

I was recently made aware of a meeting between the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp. and Fortescue Metals Group on 16th March in which the behaviour of Andrew Forrest and FMG seems to be very much at odds with this statement.

Please take some time to watch this video – it takes about half an hour – and you will see what I mean. It was posted by the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp. only a few days ago and it portrays quite clearly the tactics used by Andrew Forrest to secure unfettered access to the lands of the Yindjibarndi people.

Ostensibly the meeting was called between the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation and FMG to mediate difficulties the parties were having in coming to a resolution in their discussions. Each party had their legal representatives and the meeting was supposed to be chaired by an independent legal mediator, Mr Graham Castledine.

However, his role as mediator was compromised by the determination of the lawyer representing FMG to take over the meeting and he withdrew from the meeting, leaving it in the hands of one party in the debate.

FMG had some very carefully prepared resolutions and had bussed in enough outsiders who claimed to belong to the Yindjibarndi people to win the day whenever the resolutions were put to the meeting. When the real Yindjibarndi people realised they were being stitched up they took no further part in the meeting. None of the bussed-in people spoke to any of the resolutions, yet by those resolutions they were given the power, previously vested in the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corp., to make decisions about the Yindjibarndi native title claims. All this challenges Andrew Forrest’s assertion in the article mentioned above, that through this meeting the strong and independent Yindjibarndi people voted overwhelmingly in support of FMG’s proposals, thus regaining control of their destinies through the power of democracy.

I wonder if you can answer me a few questions about this.

Firstly, do you think this meeting and the resolutions passed at it would be regarded as legitimate by the relevant authorities in consideration of the Native Title rights of the Yindjibarndi people? I hate the thought that it might be, and every reasonable bone in my body says it shouldn’t be, but somehow I feel that the FMG lawyer has decided this is the way to get what they want.

Secondly, if you think that FMG has achieved its objectives in this way, what is your view of the probity of FMG’s behaviour in this situation?

Finally, does this incident change you views about the integrity of Andrew Forrest and FMG, particularly in regard to his often stated passion for the welfare of indigenous people?

If you feel as badly about this as I do, I would ask you to do whatever is in your power to draw attention to these matters, and protect the interests of the Yindjibarndi and other aboriginal people when they come into conflict with big mining companies that think that if they promise them a few million dollars a year they will sign away all the sacred rights they have to their country.

As I write, two MPs have already replied, The Member for Ocean Reef doesn't know much about it and thinks I should take it up directly with FMG, and the Member for Cockburn said that there has been a lot of discussion about this within his party already and he awaits developments.

Toxic Waste

Loy Yang Power Station - Photo courtesy The Age

The effects of the huge earthquake and tsunami in Japan on its nuclear power stations has rekindled the debate on whether Nuclear Power is in fact a clean alternative to oil or coal-fired power stations.

We have developed a voracious appetite for power in the West and in emerging economies and because this is clearly associated with gradually improving living standards we are compromised in our ability to address the issue of reducing our consumption as a strategy to help the earth cope.

It occurred to me the other day that it is something of a tragedy that the easy option for us as we explored power generating options was to dig up a clearly finite resource and in using it to generate power create a toxic residue that has to be put in a safe place or it will poison us.

We gushed coal and oil smoke into the air for years but then cottoned on to the way of removing the particulates from the air as it goes up the stacks, but then we have to put them somewhere safe - it is a toxic waste.

Even gas-fired power consumes a resource that will one-day run out. The by products of burning natural gas is water and carbon dioxide, so we are still contributing the carbon problem even if it is cleaner.


Lucas Heights Nuclear Power Plant Photo courtesy The Age

Nuclear power seems clean in contrast to coal and oil-based power, but it still involves the digging up of a clearly finite resource and transforming it in the power-generating process into a toxic waste that we have not yet really worked out how to dispose of safely for the long term - nobody wants the waste "in their back yard."

I think that the purpose of a carbon tax is to create some cost-pressure that will not only reduce our demand for power but also provide a cost-incentive in pushing renewable technologies for power generation up to a scale that will make a significant contribution - hydro-power, geo-thermal, wind, solar and wave have all demonstrated their capacity to generate clean power. We now have to scale them up so that they can carry most of the load.

Base-load power might still need to be provided by coal/natural gas but a power system that follows our hybrid-car model that reduces the need for carbon-based fuel by about 70% sounds like a worthy goal.



I know that arrays like this are not the most cost-effective form of renewable power but I have been wondering if we could add the cost of a relevant sized array to the purchase price of a reverse-cycle air conditioner so that the addition of this power-guzzler would end up being power neutral to the home. By just making the PVC array part of the cost will put some downward pressure on our love affair with them,but also add to our renewable power capacity in the long run.

What do you think?

Religiously Defending the Right to Remain Secular

Leslie Cannold provided a piece in The Age today in which I believe she stepped quite outside her journalistic brief of reporting or commenting on matters - in this case the High Court challenge to Commonwealth funding of school chaplaincy, particularly in public schools.

In her second paragraph she doesn't mince her words, saying that we should all be hoping this challenge succeeds and she concludes the article with the suggestion that this matter this matter goes to the heart of what she loves about Australia.

I decided to write directly to her and I offer my thoughts on the matter for your consideration.

Dear Leslie,
I am conversant with the many lines of argument in support of and against the federal funding of the National School Chaplaincy Program and in your article published in The Age today you mostly reflect familiar territory to me. However in two matters I believe you are in error and perhaps even intentionally misleading.

Firstly, you claim that the government is being less than transparent by placing the annual funding for the NSCP within general supply bills rather than in specific appropriation bills which would be subject to specific parliamentary debate and approval. Your implication is that this is sinister, a strategy to prevent the proper scrutiny of the matter by the parliament.

However, the parliament did have its say when the matter was fully debated in 2006/7 thus establishing the program, and as a result of that Bill being passed, the Federal Government through the Department of Education, Employment & Workplace Relations entered into contractual relationships with individual schools across the nation to provide funding for three years, contracts which were subsequently extended until the end of 2011. Since the funding being provided to these schools was now subject to a contract and no longer a matter for parliamentary debate, provision for the funding was made in the general Supply Bills.

The establishment of a new program beyond 2011, which the Government and the current Opposition promised to do in the lead-up to the recent election, will provide the appropriate place for the program to be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny.

This is not sinister in any way. It is not an abuse of power by anyone. It is simply the proper way government is carried out every day in this nation.

Secondly, in your second but last paragraph you have, I believe, misrepresented the meaning and intention of Section 116 of the Constitution by suggesting that this Bill is requiring "an Australian to be a person of faith ... to get a job."

The statement in the Constitution is clear - The Commonwealth shall not make any law establishing any religion, or imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

I assume it is the last clause of this Section that Mr Williams and you think is being contravened by this program and the Bill establishing it. The Bill does no such thing. It simply provides special-purpose funding to schools, public and private, right across the nation. With this funding schools are able to purchase the services of a chaplain from a third party. Public schools are not allowed to employ chaplains directly and I suspect that this is because in that case a chaplain could be regarded as holding an office or public trust under the Commonwealth. Having said that, if state (not Commonwealth) schools were the employers then it would still have to be argued that this constituted an office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

The only places I am aware of in which such public officers could be at risk of contravening this provision is in the armed forces and in Commonwealth-run Health and Correctional services where chaplains have been part of the furniture since times pre-dating the establishment of the Commonwealth. No-one in politics or society in general has ever raised a question about the legitimacy of this.

I am not sure if the High Court judges will take into account the historical context in which Section 116 was crafted in their interpretation of it, but the clause you seem to be relying on relates to standard practice under British Law that prevented people who were Roman Catholic holding certain offices or public trusts, a practice this clause and our Human Rights and Equal Opportunity legislation equally abhor.

Finally, I wonder if I might offer you an observation. The "religious neutrality of the state" that you desire does not require that all public places and publicly-funded institutions be what I call "religion-free zones." The religious neutrality of the state is reflected in the universal provision of freedom-of-choice in matters of religion.

Officers in the armed forces are not rquired to confide in the chaplains nor are they required to attend the religious services they provide - but they can.

Patients in hospitals are not required to consult chaplains or attend services in the hospital chapels - but they can.

And students and staff of schools are not required to consult chaplains - but they can. Indeed, in the public schools in my state, Principals are required to ensure parents are given the opportunity to withdraw their children from school events at which prayers, sacred songs and writings are going to be used, as well as from formal religious education classes - whether or not those classes are provided by school teachers or visiting religious people.

Equally important is the fact that no school was required to appoint a chaplain. Indeed the Federal Legislation specifically required school Principals to demonstrate that they had consulted their school community about the matter and that the request for funding reflected the views of the school community.

Having said all this, and by way of being completely transparent, I must make it clear that I am a senior manager of an organisation that provides chaplains into public schools in Western Australia. Consequently, on behalf of our members (which are churches, not individuals) and our exisiting employees, I have a vested interest in the continued funding of the NSCP.

I am of the view that the matter before the High Court is very similar to a previous case challenging the application of Commonwealth Funding to Private Schools, particularly those that are faith-based. In that case it was decided that it was not improper, nor contrary to any law or provision of the Constitution for Commonwealth funds to be provided to faith-based organisations for the purposes of education.

NSCP funding is explicitly provided for the pursposes of providing pastoral care - proselytising and some religious activities in public schools are explicitly prohibited. But over-riding all this is still the matter of freedom of choice. Mr Williams has exercised his choice by not just withdrawing his consent for his children to meet with the chaplain or attend any events at school in which the chaplain plays a part, he has remoeved them altogether to a school where the school community has chosen not to have a chaplain at all. I would religiously defend his right to make that choice, but not the subtext of this case which seems to me to be to seek to confine religious faith and expression entirely to private settings.

It will be interesting to see how this matter pans out in the High Court and what, if any, consequences there are for the many chaplaincy services provided in our community.

What do you think?

Australia Day

We are all enjoying a short break from work to celebrate Australia Day. It is a time of immense national pride as we honour those citizens who have lived out what we believe it means to be an Aussie - Australian of the Year, Simon McKeon, Young Australian of the Year, Jessica Watson, Senior Australian of the Year,Professor Ron MacCallum and Local Hero Donald Ritchie all offer inspirational examples to us of what any of us can do to make this country great.

But we all know that around the edges of this celebration there are grumblings. Many in our indigenous community see this day much less positively - as the day that marked the beginning of their dispossession of land they had owned and cared for for over 50,000 years. Then there are those living outside New South Wales who feel that celebrating the foundation of that state's initial settlement has nothing to offer them.

So long as we celebrate our National Day on 26th January the focus will be on the issue of settlement, and with it the dispossession of our first-nations people from their lands. Any attempt to ignore the dispossession would result in simply writing our indigenous brothers and sisters out of the story - and what is there to celebrate in that for them?

I have long maintained that the date upon which we became a nation as January 1, 1901 - the beginning of the federation of our states into the Commonwealth of Australia. If we were to celebrate Australia Day on that date (and there are other countries that celebrate their national day on New Year's Day) the symbolic focus would be on all of us, first nations people and immigrant settlers, coming together as one people, under one flag.

Now that I could celebrate. What do you reckon?

Agricultural Economics

In the wake of the severe flooding on the eastern states, particularly Queensland, there will be an enormous and costly task of cleaning up and making good all that was damaged by the water.

Insurance may pay for the restoration of houses and businesses but who is paying for the cost of cleaning up roadways and restoring power and sewerage systems. Well, in most cases the government will simply pay for it. Money may need to be borrowed to do this, and of course we, the taxpayers, will eventually be the ones who pay for it.


Photo source: Daily Telegraph

The economic irrationalists in Opposition, Federally, are beginning to argue that in order to pay for all this, the Government should cut back on unnecessary expenses - "We just can't afford the National Broadband Network now" says Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott. Well, if I recall it, according to him we couldn't afford it before the floods happened, so the call is a bit hollow.

I would like to suggest that the solution to the current situation is found in the practices of a key constituency of the Opposition, a group of people whom the Opposition believes they alone can represent, and even defend - farmers. When farmers have a bad year they go and visit their bank manager and secure a new loan or an extension of their terms to enable them to manage.

If the farmers of this country adopted the proposed practice of the Opposition in running the country there would be no agricultural industry anywhere. A flood would come and the farmers would pack it in, because if they borrowed money it would so increase their costs that they could no longer be competitive.

The reality is that borrowing money in such circumstances enables everyone to spread the enormous cost of this event to be spread over many years, thereby reducing the cost of it - reducing all your other costs in order to pay for something like this up-front will simply lead to the collapse of a whole lot of infrastructure plus the opportunity cost of lost production.

Government debt in Australia is minuscule and despite Opposition protests is not at all toxic. We all live with debt and so long as the debt ratios are safe, which they are, borrowing is actually the best thing to do.