like nazis in our treatment of asylumseekers

Australia declares war on boats of people for whom we should have compassion

GREG BARNS
Mercury
January 13, 2014 12:00AM

JOSEF Goebbels, Hitler's trusted propaganda lieutenant, subscribed to the view that it "would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle".

"They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise," he said.

It was a sentiment used with devastating effect in the 1930s and beyond.

Governments from the left to the right, totalitarian, authoritarian and democratic, manipulate and create enemies for their own base ends.

In Australia the Goebbels' approach to propaganda manifests itself in the way in which the ALP and Coalition parties, along with pliable allies in the media, have made asylum seekers a dark force.

The individual people who flee torture to come to Australia on boats are to be seen as a national security threat such that Australia runs off to its pathetically weak client states, Papua New Guinea and Nauru, and for a few million dollars opens jails to hold men, women and children.

To be clear, it is not suggested in any way political parties in Australia support Goebbels.

We declare a war on boats of people for whom we should have compassion.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, a man who appears to keep his moral compass locked in the bottom drawer of his ministerial desk, refuses to tell the media what is happening and strides alongside a senior Army official who is running the absurdly named Operation Sovereign Borders, a name straight out of the political propagandist's lexicon.

Until recently the media allies of the propagandists in Canberra screeched (their vocal cords are rested now they have helped get their favoured politicians into power) whenever a boat was seen from the vast coastline of this nation.

"We are being invaded", seemed to be the crude message from those media outlets.

This plays on the primitive fear in Australia that somehow because we are an island this makes us vulnerable to beach landings by dark-skinned people who are "not like us".

Ministers in both the former ALP government and the current, increasingly problematic and unpopular Coalition Government following the lines of former Prime Minister John Howard and Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock, the architects of this hateful campaign against asylum seekers, tell the public that asylum seekers are not really genuine. That they pay evil people smugglers and jump the official queue.

Let us deconstruct this nonsense. It is desperate people who get onto leaky boats, pay a few thousand dollars to someone they don't know and try to get to a rich country that could take millions of asylum seekers if it wanted to.

People smugglers are not evil. They are a market response to regulatory failure. The so-called official channels are not viable.

Australia and other wealthy countries do nothing to assist the UNHCR and other groups that process claims. The queues simply do not exist.

What do exist are vile refugee camps about which Australia does nothing.

As for the genuineness of asylum seekers who come to Australia, around 90 per cent are found to be genuine.

The misuse of language, symbolism and the resort to lies by politicians and some media outlets has had the desired effect with a poll out last week indicting the majority of Australians want even harsher treatment for asylum seekers and do not believe that they are genuine refugees.

Cynical propagandists would no doubt think that Canberra has done an excellent job in the way it has for a decade and more lied to the people, fed propaganda to sympathetic media and denounced asylum seekers and those who bring them to Australia.

Australians would be offended if it was said that they had fallen for what Goebbels described as believing that a square is in fact a circle. But the truth is that many have done so.

This is why so many Australians have become utterly callous about the fate of their fellow human beings.

It is why so many Australians tolerate the objectively cruel and inhuman policies of both the ALP and the Coalition.

It is why so many Australians allow their Government to secretly detain asylum seekers in PNG and Nauru even though there is evidence of abuse of women and children in particular in those centres.

It is why the Abbott Government is being allowed to get away with a secret military operation that sees the Australian Navy towing back boats in circumstances where despite the propaganda from Mr Abbott, there is no guarantee about the safety of the occupants of the boat.

The art of propaganda and manipulation was the forte of Goebbels but let us not be too ready to see it as simply as tool of historic authoritarianism.

Democratic governments are more capable of convincing their community that black is white. Australia, from the shameful Tampa incident in 2001, is a case in point.

Greg Barns is a Hobart-based human rights lawyer.