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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27741 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Following on from the defeat of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice referendum (seriously can we just include Torres Strait Islanders in the definition of "Aboriginal"? The whole phrase is too many words) Aboriginal leaders declared a week of silence to mourn the result.

Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the silence is now over. The leaders of the Yes campaign have published an open letter to the Parliament, and it is salty. So salty that reportedly some people refused to sign on to it - and perhaps that is why it appears without any names attached.

It opens by describing Australia's decision to vote no as "appalling and mean-spirited". It asserts that "It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around." It says that "the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act". So on and so forth.

In short, it is very much filled with the sort of resentment and hostility that turns people off, hard. Even on the normally far left /r/australia subreddit, posters are tearing strips off it.

This is of course a terrible time for the Yes campaigners to be acting in this way. With the failure of the Voice, indigenous policy is in a state of flux. The government is licking its wounds and weighing how to respond. These activists could not have made a better argument for why they should be sidelined in those deliberations.

You'd think being a very immigration friendly nation would prevent blood and soil rhetoric like:

"It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around."

But apparently not for all groups. I guess the brown "occupiers" just stay out of this stuff?

It has been very striking as well, at least to me, the way that rhetoric has blamed the result specifically on white Australia, and not on multicultural Australia.

There are significantly more Chinese-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. There are more Indian-Australians than there are Aboriginal Australians. But they apparently don't merit a mention?

You know, I find the implication that there's something wrong with "blood and soil" a bit odd. Citizenship is always jus soli or jus sanguinis.

It's not about whether it's wrong to me. As a migrant it's not in my interests but I don't really see it as inherently wrong.

The point is that many pro-immigrant regimes and the most cosmopolitan amongst their number tend to, for obvious reasons. Except when they apparently don't.

It's always been ethnonationalism for me but not for thee with these types.

I don’t think Australia is best described as “very immigration friendly.”

Australia is the only country in the world with a policy of mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers who arrive without a valid visa.

Whether or not that makes sense, it’s been a point of contention.

One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.

Australia is around 30% immigrants. They are excessively immigrant friendly.

Asylum seekers are a small and special subset of would be immigrants. Making them stay on Asylum Seeker Prison Island is a good choice.

More than a quarter of the population are first generation immigrants. Expand that to second generation and it's almost half of us.

We are extremely immigration friendly. Including for refugees. We just insist on people following the rules.

What about economic migrants though? I think asylum seekers are their own kettle of fish.

(Canada, for example, has a lot of both forms of migration but would still be incredibly immigration friendly by most standards if they just stuck to economic migrants and foreign students).

... yeah, a lot of what people think of as immigration-friendly is mostly the backpacker's / working holiday visa, and that's really a short-term labor thing that's near-impossible to turn into long-term residence.

Yep, Australia actually has a pretty restricitve immigration policy where if any single one of your family members has a medical condition the Australian government deems too expensive to treat, every single one of you can get your visa refused.

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