Gerard Henderson, and using unhappy history to justify a sordid present ...

(Above: the Sydney Morning Herald, bringing you the stories that count).

How's this for one of the cliches of our time, drummed in to learner drivers since time immemorial?

Before moving forward, have a look in the rear-visi0n mirror.

Penned in the spirit of demonstrating that you have to know how to flourish a cliche to take a decent swipe at a cliche user?

Julia Gillard's address to the Lowy Institute last week was titled "Moving Australia forward", one of the cliches of our time. No doubt it will be given a thorough workover before the election. In the interests of formulating policy on the contentious issues of immigration, refugees, asylum seekers, unauthorised boat arrivals and all that, it is appropriate to look backwards and confront some prevailing myths.

Uh huh. Now it becomes clear. That portentous prattling Polonius of columnistic prose, one Gerard Henderson, is going to take his usual stroll through history, and arrive at conclusions, derived from convenient distortions, and glib omissions, that suit his current purposes.

Henderson catches out a few asylum-seeker advocates in the process, but a few minutes cursory googling would achieve the same insights, and produce a few immediate variations on Henderson's conclusions, as in 30 years ago today, the first Vietnamese boat people arrived, or the stories to be found at VietKa, an archive of Vietnamese boat people stories.

As usual, the preening pompous prattling Polonius of commentariat prose portends that he is in the possession of profound historical truth, and so he tackles the task of explaining Vietnamese boat people.

He does this without reference to the White Australia policy, emblazoned on the mast head of The Bulletin for the first half of the twentieth century, or the casual racism embedded in the Liberal party, and Australia at large, pausing only to ponder on the even more deeply embedded racism in a strand of the Australian Labor party, and associated unions:

In the 1970s it was the left of Australian politics who opposed Indochinese refugees, primarily because they were anti-communist. As the former Whitlam minister Clyde Cameron pointed out in his book China, Communism and Coca-Cola, Gough Whitlam said the would not tolerate "f------ Vietnamese Balts coming to this country with their religious and political hatreds". In my correspondence with Whitlam, published in The Sydney Institute Quarterly in 2003, the former Labor prime minister did not deny Cameron's assertion.

Yes, yes, Gough Whitlam might have hated South Vietnames Catholics, and in my neighbourhood, they've taken over one of the churches, heading towards dereliction, to make a last stand in favour of the Pope and Christ and the whole damn thing. But then the Labor party for much of the twentieth century had stood in favour of European migration and against Asian migrants, on clearly racist grounds, and we don't have to resort to Arthur "two wongs don't make a point" Calwell to prove the point.

This would, if taken to a logical conclusion, have removed my enter current cuisine, from Faheem's Fast Food, though the dozens of Thai and a few exemplary Vietnamese restaurants in the neighbourhood, a taste first formed when as a child I was sent over to collect the free 'luck' soup that the Chinese restaurant owners generously gave to the white trash across the road.

Never mind, the question, in these times, is whether the kind of explicit racism which bedevilled Australia in the past, is now a sustainable basis for a sustainable policy?

Henderson is of course keen to establish that there was little resistance to the Vietnamese and little fuss made about the boat people:

About 97 per cent of Indochinese who settled in Australia during Fraser's prime ministership were processed in offshore centres in such places as Indonesia and the Philippines and arrived by air with valid visas. One of the reasons there was so little opposition to Indochinese refugees in the late 1970s and early 1980s turned on the fact their arrival was authorised.

Actually Vietnamese boat people provoked a storm, what with the deaths, and the trauma, and the Thai pirates, and when Vietnamese people arrived in Australia, there was the usual casual 'dim sum' prejudice to be found (in my family amongst many other families).

But there was also an over-riding sense of guilt, since Australia had freely participated in a war that fucked over Vietnam, and in the fall-out of its epic failure, many people suffered.

Henderson of course isn't so keen to contemplate the actual cause for boat people taking to the high seas in desperation. Rather he's keen to establish the obvious truism that the Labor party, in appealing to its core of battlers, was always ready to get down and dirty in its policies, especially compared to the patrician Fraser:

On the eve of the 1977 election Bob Hawke (then ALP national president) opposed the unauthorised arrival in Darwin of the Song Be 12 and declared: "Any sovereign country has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population". John Howard used similar terminology before the 2001 election. After the coalition's 1977 victory, there was effective consensus on the issue for the remainder of the Fraser government.

An effective consensus? Yet before the war and Fraser, the population in Australia of Vietnamese people was under a thousand, and now they number 200,000, close enough to 1% of the population, and around my town, they've cornered the bread baking store and dry cleaning markets, and nothing wrong with that. And yet at the time there were all kinds of dark mutterings about the way people of colour had been let into the country by Fraser ...

Contrary to Fraser's undocumented recent assertion, there is no documentary evidence that Howard opposed Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s. However, he did call for a reduction in the percentage of Asian immigration a decade later.

Which rather proves the point, since Howard was happy to kick the Asian can in the way many politicians before him did, just as Hansonism rather proves that there was a deep groundswell against Asian immigration, continuing a long line of anti-Asian immigration begun during the nineteenth century goldrush days ...

In 1992 Paul Keating's Labor government introduced mandatory detention for unauthorised arrivals, including children. This was a response to a new stream of asylum seekers from Vietnam. Many asylum-seeker advocates who pilloried Howard over mandatory detention said nothing at this time.

Uh huh. So Keating got away with it. But what's the difference between now and then? Dare we whisper the word 'war'?

In 2001 Howard hardened the provisions designed to prevent unauthorised boat arrivals. His actions included offshore processing. Howard was responding to arrivals numbering 3721 in 1999, 2939 in 2000 and 5516 in 2001. The coalition eased the administration of this policy after 2004, following a steep decline in the number of arrivals.

Eased the administration? What, you mean the sewing of lips, and the fall out from the visible treatment of asylum seekers, locking them up behind barbed wire, in exotic and remote locations, and watching them go mad, as if in a Herzog movie, had nothing to do with it?

Moving right past Henderson on Siev X - who knows what actually happened, or could have happened - we arrive back in the present, as if riding Doc's magic vehicle:

Last week the Prime Minister announced her government was discussing with East Timorese leaders the possibility of establishing a regional processing centre for asylum seekers. Labor is responding to a spike in unauthorised boat arrivals of about 2750 last year and about 3000 this year so far.

Yep, on Henderson's own figures, the spike is way less that that endured by suffering Australians during the Howard years, yet the unseemly and unholy squawking from the Liberal party, and their demonising fear mongering, would make the casual observer sense that the apocalypse is close by Australian shores, and travelling by boat from Indonesia.

But hey, first it's time to take a jab at the Kiwis:

New Zealand is sometimes presented as a more welcoming country than Australia. Under the refugee and humanitarian intake, Australia accepts 13,750 settlers each year. The relevant figure for New Zealand is just 750. To match Australia on a per capita basis, New Zealand should have an annual intake of at least 3500.

And now here's the point of all this waffling, which attempts to present a bold bi-partisan consensus at work:

As Gillard has pointed out, unauthorised boat arrivals are not high when compared with Australia's total migrant intake. Yet the fact remains, since Federation in 1901 the largest number of such arrivals occurred on Howard's - and now Gillard's - watch. As democratically elected politicians, it is understandable both coalition and Labor leaders - in their differing ways - have decided they should respond to public concern.

Despite the current emotion, offshore processing has worked in the past and it may work again. A sense of history should be of assistance in helping to resolve the matter.

Okay, how's this for a sense of history. When Fraser embarked on his exercise of accepting Vietnamese refugees - whether from guilt or from a sense of obligation or from a sense of humanity - he did so on the basis well known amongst shopkeepers dealing with chinaware.

You break, you buy.

If we had the same policy settings today, then people fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq in a quest for a decent safe and secure life should be given privileged access to Australia, on the same principle, since we've spent many years participating in the turmoil of Afghanistan, and while John Howard was very careful to keep Australian troops out of harm's way, nonetheless the commentariat tribe were always gung ho on the benefits of storming through Iraq to topple a dictator. No matter that thousands marched against that unpopular war, in its own way Australia has joined in the latest bouts of post-colonial adventurism, for little profit and much ensuing unhappiness ...

You break, you buy.

But that's where a sense of history is very handy, since if all that's charted is a race to the gutter, with Fraser discounted and made irrelevant (was he ever a true Liberal, Liberals must wonder), then we can all cheerfully continue on the race to the bottom ... and so Australian politics will be as it's ever been, since John Forrest first noted:

[It is] of no use to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a great feeling all over Australia against the introduction of coloured persons. It goes without saying that we do not like to talk about it, but it is so.

And the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 was introduced.

These days we still keep fighting our Battle of Broken Hill. Yep, there's history and there's history, and what a brave battling cultural warrior Gerard Henderson is when he comes to contemplate that history ...

(Below: oh I know, the battle of Broken Hill involved a couple of Turks, but hey, we're not into pedantry in the Henderson style here at the pond, as a way of disguising our naked prejudices and inclinations, but if you care to wander down this odd little by way of Australian history, head off here).