Paul Sheehan, Ten Commandments, and why settle for calm when fear mongering and hysteria will do

(Above: a stroll down memory lane, where Paul Sheehan is anxious to take us, courtesy of cartoonist Nicholson. More Nicholson available here, and with a good search engine).

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

The words of course are by John Donne, in Meditations XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.

Here's Paul Sheehan in Refugee lobby's 10 commandments:

1. Australia is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which confers rights and obligations about the treatment of asylum seekers.

2. Australia is a signatory of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which requires that asylum seekers be treated humanely, not as law-breakers.

3. Indonesia is not a signatory to the convention and therefore not an option for asylum seekers.

4. There are thus no queue-jumpers because there is no queue to jump.

5. The number arriving by boat is relatively tiny.

6. Most would risk grave danger if they were returned to their country or origin.

7. Australia, a wealthy nation, is morally obliged to help the desperate poor.

8. Detention of boat people is racially discriminatory.

9. Criticism of humane asylum policies reflects xenophobia.

10. Criticism also encourages or reflects Islamophobia.

Re point 1. in a discussion arising from Tamil refugees from the Sri Lankan civil war? How about instead:

10. Criticism also encourages or reflects Sheehanophobia?

As for 9. Criticism of humane asylum policies? What's the alternative? Inhumane asylum policies based on xenophobia? And so on. The tendentious, tedious list is silly, illogical and offensive, as bizarre in its way as Miranda the Devine's desire to join Fred Nile in boat smuggling in Christians.

A clarification in case you came to these ten commandments here, 'cold' so to speak, without the benefit of reading Sheehan's preceding rant - no one in the 'refugee lobby' actually wrote those ten commandments.

That's Paul Sheehan channeling the 'refugee lobby'.

With his spin, and a kind of mere macho grandstanding, and a sanctimonious hubris. How else to explain the line that there's no queue jumpers because there's no queue to jump? And then attributing it to the 'lobby'.

I guess setting up straw arguments which you can then easily traduce makes a column light work for the day, and then it's off to the Paddington lifestyle.

Here's one comment on Sheehan's column:

Tabloid rubbish typical of the Telegraph or Herald-Sun.
I'm so glad I cancelled home delivery of the SMH after many, many years and no longer buy the print edition. What has happened to this paper that I once held in high regard? Is is secretly controlled by News Ltd?

Welcome to the club, Daphon.

Here's Michelle Grattan in the same paper under the header An ugly, divisive debate.

Despite the surge of boat arrivals, only a few weeks ago it seemed inconceivable we could return to the bad days of the asylum-seeker debate. It is still on balance unlikely. But the tone is getting nasty and this is alarming. The Government, worried about its inability to control the water-borne influx - 1700 people so far this year, predominantly Afghans and Sri Lankans - and also about the politics, has launched into both frantic activity and hyped rhetoric.

The embattled Opposition is seizing on an emotive issue that played for it politically in the past - before causing it trouble. But that could be a dangerous tactic: this is something that divides Liberal ranks.

A nasty tone? Well look no further than Sheehan in Fairfax.

As for divided ranks? Not really, not in the current climate, when Malcolm in the middle is clawing around looking for something, anything that might stick, and when the likes of Piers Akerman can stand shoulder to shoulder with Paul Sheehan, and they can, as handsomely paid smear merchants, go about their dirty work in the trenches with a smell of righteous indignation.

The result will likely be an increasingly dirty bout of wedge politics, as the opposition try to out-tough the government, and the government feels the need to out-tough the opposition, and soon enough, we'll end up back in the fatal days of the Amnesty-badge wearing Ruddock, lickspittle lackey to the man of steel.

Yet as Zhi Yan points out in Hardline faction peddles fear and punitive policies for asylum seekers, Australia isn't even in the eye of the storm:

It is myopic to look at Australia's asylum numbers in isolation from the rest of the world. The number of asylum seekers worldwide has increased significantly over the past two years. When comparing 2008 figures with 2007, for example, asylum seeker numbers rose by 122 per cent in Italy, 121 per cent in Norway, 89 per cent in the Netherlands, 70 per cent in Turkey, 53 per cent in Switzerland, 30 per cent in Canada and 20 per cent in France, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

In the same period, Australia had only a 19 per cent increase.

Australia's numbers are small in absolute terms, too. About 1700 asylum seekers have come by boat this year, but Italy had 36,000 boat arrivals last year, while most asylum seekers prefer the United States (49,000 in 2008), Canada (36,900), France (35,200), and Britain (30,500).

But of course Sheehan is really peddling fear and loathing. Having set up his straw man ten commandments, he is then in the privileged position of being able to dismiss them out of hand and assert that all that's at stake is principle:

The problem with these 10 commandments is most are based on mere opinion, and none are relevant. The debate about boat arrivals is not about ethnicity, numbers, poverty or methods of arrival. It is about principle. There is no such country as the United Nations. No one lives there. UN charters do not override authority. Australian laws are sovereign. Australia has no obligation to accept a single non-citizen not in danger of persecution.

If you follow Sheehan's logic, you could just as easily end up arguing Australia has no obligation to accept a single non-citizen in danger of persecution.

After all, all that do-gooder nonsense comes from being a signatory to agreements, and what's an agreement worth when it's just a piece of paper with a non-country, and can be torn up as easily as you might tear up a pact declaring peace in our time.

Yep, we're back with John Howard:

This principle is the bedrock of Australian law and politics. Non-citizens are not entitled to self-select as residents before their bona fides have been established.

Or put it another way, we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come, especially if they come by boat, which allows for dramatic images of people in dangerous circumstances, and involves naval action, and leaky boats, and explosions, and criminal activities and cover ups, and not really if they come by air and overstay their visa, which is dull, hard to detect, and lacks any kind of visuals.

According to Zhi Yan and others, some 96% of asylum seekers (queue jumpers, whatever) turned up by plane, but it's the mindless mediocrity of the media chooks that they should concentrate on a few leaky boats on a perilous voyage, and decide to write their alarmist hysterical columns on that basis.

As a descendant of boat people - the ships came from Hamburg and Liverpool - I often wonder how my ancestors were driven to hop on a leaky boat under the power of wind, and sail half way around the earth, to end up in the middle of nowhere in a landscape which would have struck them as passing strange.

No doubt they were greeted by people who thought the country was going soft by allowing in Irish thugs and German speakers designed to ruin the harmony of the Anglo-Saxon way of life (okay, okay it's one of those profoundly funny ironies that the English way of life references the pagan Angles and Saxons, but leaves out the Jutes. Bloody Germans. Hey, just live with it).

It's one of the marvels of the modern world that people think of Australia as an island, apart from the world, distant from the upheavals around it, a sheltering paradise, perhaps even a lucky country, and blame the problems on the 'do gooders', soft cock liberals, weeping sentimentalists, while cheering on the despatch of soldiers to sundry points around the world to advertise the benefits of Australian civilization. Then wonder why some folks in Afghanistan or Iraq might actually want to join us here, in much the same way as the Vietnamese turned up to run the dry cleaning business.

Well here's hoping that the hardline, tough guy, churlish curdmudgeons don't manage to revive what was an ugly, divisive debate under Howard, through the use of fear mongering and gutter trawling and the deployment of xenophobia and parochial prejudice. In troubled times a little rationality and generosity of spirit needn't go astray.

Where's P. J. O'Rouke when he's needed? Instead we get Sheehan, the sort of chappie happy to fork out fifteen bucks for a loaf of bread, who doesn't want his lifestyle upset by contemplation of the problems of others in this unhappy world, or the thought that they might - unbidded - make their own way to these girt by sea shores.

Well no man is an island, just as no country is, and paying for Sheehan to ram his prejudices down my throat reminds me that when it comes to paying for digital content, Fairfax Media's editor shouldn't wonder for whom the coins won't tinkle, because with Sheehan on board, they won't tinkle for thee.

(Below: a couple more Nicholson cartoons, one of the few benefits of The Australian - website here - followed by a bonus discussion starter suggesting that xenophobia is timeless, and of use when inclined to get nervous about the teeming millions of boat people from Asia swamping Australia. Remember the ten commandments are only useful for defining the sin you're about to commit!)