Sixty years on ...

This country used to have leaders ... Now it's got cyphers, driven by the distortions from focus groups and pollsters ... That's why our handling of asylum seekers had been such a disgrace ... Procrustes climbs onto his high horse, which is tethered conveniently nearby 

Six decades ago this country conducted, on September 22, 1951, a referendum for the purpose of amending the Constitution to allow for the banning of the Communist Party. 

On July 28 of the same year, the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was approved at a special UN conference.  Australia acceded to the convention on January 22, 1954, three months before the Convention entered into force.

The seemingly precipitate accession to the Refugee Convention caused not even a flutter. Australia was a long way from everywhere else (that mattered), and in any case, the convention was a sop to international guilt in the light of the Holocaust, and the resistance in the West before 1939 to receiving Jewish refugees. 

But the Communist Party referendum was the stuff of Australian politics in the year 1951. 

In March the High Court brought down its judgment in the Communist Party case, accepting, by 6 to 1, the argument of Bert Evatt, then leader of the federal Labor Party, but also counsel for the unions in the High Court challenge, that the legislation passed at the behest of the Menzies government outlawing the party was invalid. 

The referendum was Menzies' response to the High Court decision.

It was notable that Menzies, unlike some who succeeded him, did not whinge about the behaviour of the High Court. He got on with the business of overturning the result by the only means available: the passing of a referendum altering the Constitution to provide legislative power for statutes banning Communism.

In the immediate aftermath of the High Court decision Menzies began on a solid base: 70 percent, and by some observers 80 percent, of the electorate were thought to support the proscription of Communists.

How was it that six months later, when the votes were counted, only 49.5 percent of the electorate voted to support the referendum?

Evatt: turned public sentiment on the Communist Party referendumThe short answer lies in the courage of Dr H.V. Evatt, who stumped the country in September 1951, addressing public gatherings in opposition to the referendum proposal.

Evatt didn't like flying, but he racked up some 20,000 kilometres by air with his message that attacked ...

"fascist methods of arbitrary government by which politicians would themselves determine who would be declared as a communist ... slandered and deprived of property and civil rights. That is sheer totalitarianism of the right - in other words fascism." (Sydney Morning Herald, September 13, 1951). 

His reward was a defeat of the referendum, leaving Menzies and Sir Charles Spry at ASIO having to conduct the war on Communism by orthodox spookery, and petty executive discrimination, as in the dismissal from the Attorney General's Department by Sir Garfield Barwick of Jim Staples, for having been a Communist.

The Petrov conspiracy, driven by Spry, would turn up handily for the Menzies government in the run-up to the 1954 election.

Evatt's reward long term was to be written off as mad.

We live in a kinder age as regards mental illness, but the benevolence is not made retrospective, and Evatt's hardened brain arteries and resultant mental decay do not now attract sympathy.

Perhaps these mixed fruits of victory underpin the reluctance of Labor leaders who followed Evatt to champion a cause that would involve explaining a moral position and persuading the Australian people away from any seemingly entrenched view. 

The analogy that catches the eye lies with the nostrum which drives policy in both major parties, that refugees are bad news, and must be punished at every turn, in the name of deterrence.

By refugee, the populace understands people who come here by boat, little realising the number who arrive here with visas by plane, and who then make application for refugee status.

Malcolm Fraser was on the horns of a moral dilemma in 1976 with the arrival by boat of Vietnamese refugees, fleeing the aftermath of a war that his political party had been more than complicit in waging.

He moved to ensure their safe arrival and processing. 

Since then, we have, over 35 years, seen an annual average of one thousand "boat people" arrive on these shores. In some years more and some less.

The nation's migration program rolls along, ensuring that a mix of people from all over the world come to live here and become citizens. 

Yet the refugee issue operates as a dark doppelganger to the formal migration program. The now 40-year dead White Australia policy emerges from its grave to contaminate the discourse on boat people.

The political message is that these people (from unmentionable Asian, and probably Islamic origins) "are no good", and it follows that they must be "detained" i.e. imprisoned in holding camps.

Concentration of detainees in a campHoward and Ruddock squealed like stuck pigs when the expression "concentration camp" was trotted out, but if you concentrate people behind barbed wire on the basis of their similarity and not on any criminal conviction, you have a concentration camp. 

You might have seen 4 Corners' investigation on Monday (October 24) dealing with Australia's treatment of asylum seekers in detention. 

The offshore "processing" agenda was driven by responses from focus groups of 20 or so people at a time. The methodology, structure of the questions, and contextual information provided to these groups are unknown. 

Possibly responses are fuelled by misinformation from tabloid newspapers and TV shows that asylum seekers are treated far too generously. 

Focus group at workWhat is known is that those opposed to boat arrivals are concentrated in a few politically vital electorates in the west of Sydney and Melbourne. 

The new expediency has been to justify the offshore policy on the basis that it protects boat people from danger and even death at sea. We're saving refugees from themselves.

Yet if Aziz, Fatima and the kids just happen to be competent sailors and own a boat, in which they successfully sail to Australia, where is the morality in this argument?

As it's transpired, by the combined resistance of the High Court and the parliament, s.198A of the Migration Act remains intact. The "human rights" standards that were introduced 10 years ago in the context of sending people to Nauru, and which the Gillard government unsuccessfully sought to overturn, have forced us back to where we were before the Pacific Solution - onshore processing. 

The government says more boats will come, and this is the "fault" of the Opposition. 

O'Rourke: let 'em inWho will take the Doc's mantle, and set out to persuade Australians to a different view?

The American political satirist P.J. O'Rourke left Julie Bishop gagging when he confronted her on the ABC's QandA (April 23, 2009):

"When somebody gets on an exploding boat to come over here, they're willing to do that to get to Australia, you're missing out on some really good Australians if you don't let that person in. You know, if you open your borders, you don't have people smugglers. You know, I mean it's ... 

Julie Bishop: But the people who make money out of this misery ... 

P.J. O'Rourke: ... The reason America is a great nation is because of immigration. Let them in. Let them in. These people are assets."