Red Rag

Interesting blogs: fridaysixpm, funferal, Gulfstream.

I think I’ll have a stab at the Lateline History Challenge, by chopping down and touching up an essay I wrote about Hugh Mahon. He was the Member for Kalgoorlie and the Minister for External Affairs during WWI, and is the only MP ever to be expelled from the Federal Parliament. Officially it was due to “seditious utterances” (he opposed Britain’s policy on Ireland) but it was probably more to do with his relationship with Billy Hughes. Mahon supported conscription during the 1916 referendum, but was annoyed by Hughes’ sectarianism and changed his mind during the 1917 referendum. He carried a large Irish vote with him, and I don’t think Hughes ever forgave him.

Bitchy Media Watch-style memo to Stanley Gudgeon: you, sir, are a moron.

Actually, that’s not fair. While his recent post about Dark Victory resembles the work of a year nine who just can’t figure out exactly what the word problem is asking, we have no reason to believe the Bunyip is an imbecile. On the contrary, we have every reason to believe he has been deliberately misleading with his manipulation of fractions:

“Of the 302 [from the Tampa], 79 were found to be refugees,” says the Age. “…and 26 were Afghans, including today’s group, who are expected to come to Australia in the next few weeks.”

Bitchy Media Watch-style memo to Wilkinson and Marr: 26 is not “most” of 302.

There were a couple of things that made me wonder what the Bunyip was up to. First, the report claims that 26 of the 79 asylum seekers whose claims were accepted were Afghan. We don’t know about the nationality of the other 223 inmates, so his conclusion (that only 76 of the 302 were Afghan) is not necessarily correct. In fact, it’s probably incorrect.

But the Bunyip’s figures are even less damaging to Marr and Wilkinson when the rest of what The Age reported is considered. Here’s the full paragraph:

Of the 433 asylum seekers on the Tampa, 131 were accepted by New Zealand and 302 sent to Nauru. Of the 302, 79 were found to be refugees – 53 were offered asylum in other countries, and 26 were Afghans, including today’s group, who are expected to come to Australia in the next few weeks.

Dark Victory claimed that the majority of the Tampa asylees were Afghan. That is, it referred to the full 433, not the 302 we sent to an island prison. And what do we know about the 131 that went to New Zealand?

New Zealand has granted refugee status to all but seven of the 131 Tampa boat people it accepted as part of Australia’s Pacific solution.

Six of those yet to win approval are from family groups and the seventh is an unaccompanied minor.

New Zealand’s Immigration Service checked the background of the refugees by sending audio tapes to Sweden to ensure the speakers were from Afghanistan. The Government was so cautious about the possibility of Pakistanis attempting to pass themselves off as Afghans that $NZ86,000 had been set aside to deport up to 30 to Pakistan.

So nearly to a person, the New Zealand Tampa refugees were Afghan, and verified as such. And before the Bunyip jumps up and down about the accuracy of the Swedish language test, let’s refresh our memories about his other favourite asylum seekers, the Baktiyaris.

The determination that the Baktiyari family are Pakistani was made on the basis of a language test. This involved recording a sample of their speech, then sending it to an outsourced language expert – a firm in Sweden!

The Swedes can hardly be accused of leniency, then.

It’s hard to believe that the New Zealand sample would be of a vastly different ethnic makeup than the rest of the 433 Tampa prisoners, and yet that’s what the Bunyip wants us to believe. He suggests, without a skerrick of evidence, that “much of the Palapa’s human cargo consisted of ‘Afghans’ who had never set foot in that country in their lives.” Well, that’s one way to explain the rejection of their claims, but I’ll defer to Michel Gabaudan, the regional representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, seeing as he was actually involved in the process:

If they had been disembarked immediately (from the Tampa in August [2001]), most of them – and I say most because there are some who clearly are abusers – would have been recognised as refugees because they had claims relating to the Taliban.

In other words, it was the fall of the Taliban that caused their claims to fail. They had a claim when they fled the Taliban (and even when they were held on the Tampa), but circumstances intervened to (potentially) make life safe for them again.

Let’s go back and fix up Stanley’s maths.

• Of the 131 who went to New Zealand, 130 were accepted as Afghan refugees, meeting the high standards of the famous Swedish language test.
• Of the 302 who went to Nauru, the UNHCR says “most of them” would have had a valid claim at the time they left Afghanistan. To give the Bunyip the benefit of doubt, let’s read “most” as 50% plus one, or 152 asylees.
• The total number of asylum seekers on the Tampa was 433.

Now that we’ve got the data sorted, let’s have a stab at the sums:

• 130 + 152 = 282
• 282 / 433 = 0.6513

So taking the barest minimum possible, 65% of the Tampa asylum seekers were Afghans fleeing the Taliban. What was it Stanley objected to, again?

“The family was fleeing the Taliban,” they write, adding with moral certainty: “So were most of the people on the Palapa.”

I don’t know about moral certainty, Professor, but they’ve certainly got mathematical certainty on their side.

I got on the train this evening after spending the day in the library, and the driver made some kind of muffled announcement over the dodgy PA system. Nobody could work out what he said, but one bloke thought he heard something about a thirty minute delay.

Sure enough, the security guard confirmed that there had been an accident near Warwick Station, and the power had been disabled as a precaution. As a result, the train wouldn’t be able to leave Perth for about half an hour.

Almost an hour later, and we got another muffled announcement. We apologise for any inconvenience, etc, etc. Again, the security guard filled in the details, and this time it was worse: there was somebody hanging from the bridge at Warwick, and they were trying to coax him down. They didn’t know how long the train would be delayed.

At that point, I went to the payphone and arranged for Mum to pick me up in Perth. She would have to put a tape on for Jamie Oliver, but she’d be there as soon as she could.

By the time we’d reached the Warwick freeway exit (which is right next to the train station), there was nobody threatening to jump. There was a flashing orange light, some transit guards walking around on the track, and a couple of firemen up a ladder to the bus platform, but it didn’t look like anybody had jumped.

I haven’t heard anything since then, but I hope they saved him.

Warwick has something of a history in this regard. After a group of schoolkids jumped off a pedestrian bridge onto the freeway, some of their friends tried to copy them.

Consequently, they covered the footbridge with a kind of cage — but only on one side. The determined suicider would simply walk fifty metres from the northbound side of the bridge to the southbound and carry out their plans unhindered.

I’ve often wondered why they bothered to put up that cage.

I hope they saved him.

Some of you may have spotted me on Ten News…