Let Them In

(Events are moving quickly in Europe. The borders are opening and the refugees are being waved through. Perhaps now is a good time to reprint this article I wrote five years ago.)

Let us try to be wise. Let us at least try to be logical.

Boat people, more sympathetically known as asylum-seekers, pose no security threat to Australia. They are risking their lives, running for their lives, to get here.  They are simply trying to get somewhere safe. Why would they want to hurt us? Why do we treat them so badly?

Our politicians assert their hairy-chested security credentials by making these people prisoners - guilty until proven innocent. This is insanity elevated to policy and law. The loss of dignity we suffer as a nation is incalculable. The blame is shared by both major political parties, and by their most Christian leaders, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

If MPs were forced to sit in a quiet room for one hour each day viewing scenes of human suffering and reading history, perhaps then they might be capable of thinking and acting with compassion and imagination.  Then they might understand something of the human heart and the desire for freedom, shelter, peace.

If my attempt at eloquence is too sissy for our politicians, let me try to put it another way. We are not winning any friends in the world with our current policy. A radical change of policy will help to win friends and hearts and minds.

ASIO’s astute assessment, in a nutshell, is that some asylum-seekers may bring their prejudices with them. In other words, if you’re a Tamil from Sri Lanka you might still be a bit touchy about the people who burned your house down. Who wouldn’t be?

A history lesson: Serbs and Croats who migrated here after WWII brought mighty and ancient prejudices with them.  They didn’t like each other much but they got on with making new lives here for themselves and their children. There was an occasional brawl. A group of fantasists called the Ustashi blew up some letterboxes in the 1970s. That was it.

Over the past thirty years or so many white South Africans have migrated here. Some of them are lovely and sweet people. Some of them are the most obnoxious and bigoted people I have ever met. They are so appalling that I have felt physically ill talking to them. They came here because their world of brutal privilege had collapsed. We let them in because they were white and had money.

We cannot screen people on the basis of their prejudices. Thought is not yet a crime. 

If security is not a credible issue, what do we have against the boat people? That they are queue-jumpers?  How quaint.  As if it were a case of bad manners to be running for your life.

Let’s go back to the beginning. People-smuggling is a cruel form organized crime.   It is a problem above all for the people being smuggled.  Let’s get really tough and take over the business.  We can have a plane waiting at Djakarta airport every Friday afternoon and charge asylum-seekers something like $10 each for their fare.  All aboard! We can offer them hope and safety and a welcome.

This would be compassionate, and imaginative, even noble.  To balance the numbers in the mythical “queue” we should simply cut back the quota for other intending migrants, those who come here on little more than a whim to live in a sunny climate and see kangaroos. We should give priority to the fearful and the desperate.

When our safe and hopeful asylum-seekers are here, where will we put them? If we must put them in camps in the desert for some symbolic reason we can at least take away the security guards and the fences. The refugees have nowhere to run. They have already escaped.

Otherwise we can reopen or rebuild transitional hostels of the type that were common in our cities sixty years ago. From there they can be assisted into other accommodation and jobs (as were my own English family who came here as ten-bob Poms in the 1950s).

From there our new Australians can get on with the job of creating a new life for themselves and a newer Australia – as our parents and grandparents did.

We have done all this before. We imagined our future and welcomed the new. We can do it again.

New Hope in the World

Dissatisfaction with Tweedledum politics-as-usual is escalating. In Italy the Five Star movement has won a significant number of seats in the national parliament. In Spain 15M (The Indignants) have polled well in local elections. In Lebanon the people have begun mass protests under the slogan You Stink.

Could this happen in Australia?  Independents held the balance of power in our House of Representatives from 2010 to 2013, enabling Labor to govern with a minority. Today independents and minor parties hold the balance of power in the Senate, much to the frustration of the Liberal government.

It's not enough. The pace of change is not quick enough.

As in other countries, government alternates between two major parties which have both become distant from the people, self-serving, and incompetent. Both major parties are locked into a top-down view of the world in which the Economy is a beautifully oiled machine. As long as we fit into its needs the government will be able to balance the budget and the country will prosper.

That's a lie. For many years now the beautifully oiled machine has only served to concentrate power and wealth increasingly in the hands of a few.

One reason is the decline of trade unions. Unions still exist - they just don't do much. They effectively gave up the fight thirty years ago, persuaded by the myth of a trickledown wonderland just over the horizon if they kept the peace. "We" would all roll up our sleeves together in a spirit of co-operation and the country would prosper.

It didn't happen. Union membership declined. Union officials, with nothing much else to do and now very friendly with politicians and business leaders, began to concentrate on winning themselves seats in parliament. It does not take much talent to win a seat in parliament, but there are not enough seats to go around. So the least talented union officials took the next convenient course and began embezzling union funds. Which is why there is now a commission of inquiry into union corruption.

Lacking effective unions to fight for fair wages and decent conditions and job security, we have all been sliding backwards. We are told now that in addition to the uncertainties of casual/contract work we will probably have to re-train and change careers five times in our lives. Which will keep us all very busy and leave no time to form effective unions to fight for fair wages and decent conditions and job security.

And all the while power and wealth have been trickling up into the hands of fewer and fewer people.

You can bet that Gina Rinehart will not have to re-train five times in her life. This is the same Gina Rinehart who complains that Australian workers want too much money for their hard labour and has spent much of her time in recent years trying to swindle her own children out of billions.

That's how the rich operate.

The Tweedledum politicians appeal to our sense of community and patriotism. We must all "share the pain" when they make "difficult decisions". In fact they make these decisions easily and the pain is never shared. We know who feels the pain. We know who feels no pain.

It is a fraud, repeated again and again. Labor or Liberal, that's how they operate.

Am I dreaming to hope that a Five Star army of Indignants might arise in this country, that there might be enough people left with enough hope and energy to fight, to reclaim democracy, to affirm that we are the country, that we are the Economy, that we may govern ourselves in any way we choose?

Twelve-hour shifts will do your head in

I become nervous around people who work twelve-hour shifts. I will tell you why.

Several years ago I worked for a short period as a security guard. One of my first assignments was assisting loss prevention at a Myer store on New Year’s eve. I was teamed with another guard who had been working twelve-hour shifts for weeks. He told me that we would be the last to leave the building after the store closed. We would set the alarms and lock up. It sounded easy enough.

At 8pm he confided to me that he had lost the master key to the store. He was nearly in tears.  He was trembling. We had two hours to find the key.

Closing time came. Other security staff had long gone. Salespeople began to leave. After examining every inch of carpet in the store we still faced the prospect of having to call management, locksmiths, the police and God knows who else to report that we could not secure the premises.

We were alone in the store and he was crying openly as we checked all the changing rooms to make sure nobody had fallen asleep in there, or overdosed.

I had one clue. The master key had no tag to identify it. All other keys to cash registers and workstations had a tag attached. Think. If someone found an unidentified key what would they do? A member of the public would hardly pocket the thing and take it home. A member of staff would take it to the main office. Or would they?

The key cupboard in the main office was half empty. It should have been full. All the tagged keys should have been there. It was New Year’s Eve after all. People wanted to get out of there quickly and go home. We went through every drawer at every workstation in the building and finally found - one beautiful little key that had no tag.

We were saved from disaster. The final nightmare had begun. My colleague, already sleep-deprived and terrified out of his mind for the past two hours, had to set the alarms before our exit from the building. 

There is a sequence of nine numbers to be entered on the alarm keypad. A red light appears on the control board as each number is entered. If you make a mistake you have to start the entire sequence all over again. We got as far as number six several times. My colleague, now unable to even see clearly kept asking me “Is the light on?” I assured him it was and he would say “No, it’s wrong. I can’t make a mistake. I’ll have to start again.”

He kept asking me the same question and I gave the same answer and he started all over again. I remember being thankful that he did not have a gun.

At last he believed me. The sequence was complete. We had thirty seconds to get out. We made a run for it and closed the door behind us. In the carpark he cried again and hugged me.

Twelve-hour shifts make rostering simple for employers, but real people have to work them. We are not toys to be wound up and set in motion.

Long shifts play havoc with your sleep pattern and your digestion. Imagine that you are working from 6pm to 6am. Add an hour each way in travelling time and seven hours for sleep and you are left with three hours. What can you do in three hours? When do you have breakfast? When is your 'evening'? When do you see your friends or your family? If you work this shift long enough you begin to experience a disengagement from the world and people around you. If your shift is switched from 6am to 6pm, which is not unusual, your disorientation escalates. The times when you eat and sleep are inverted yet again. It is not enough to have  three or four days off occasionally to attend to your personal life and relationships with a normal timetable. Normality has gone. You can't get back to normal so quickly.

In 2012 doctors at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health examined data from studies over the previous fifty years and found that working long hours increases the risk of heart disease by 67%.

Our own Griffith University in 2011 studied working hours and rosters in the mining industry and found gastrointestinal problems, domestic and relationship problems, sleeping difficulties, fatigue, depression, increased use of anti-depressants, and higher accident rates were all consequences of working long shifts.

The Better Health web site of the Victorian state government states: "The body is synchronised to night and day by a part of the brain known as the circadian clock. A shiftworker confuses their circadian clock by working when their body is programmed to be sleeping. Common health problems include sleep disorders, digestive upsets, obesity and heart disease."

The consequences are known. They have been known for a long time. As early as 1817 the British factory owner and reformer Robert Owen proposed: "Eight hours labour. Eight hours recreation. Eight hours rest." By 1914 even Henry Ford had introduced eight-hour shifts in his factories.

The fixed twelve-hour shift in any occupation, performing specific repetitive tasks, is an assault on the body and spirit and a slow death for the mind. It should be assigned only as a last resort for essential services when necessary. I leave it to readers to wonder about the state of mind and competence of people who work these shifts routinely and whose lives touch ours - nurses and police, among others.

(Published in Australian National Review 3 December 2014.)