There is a boat load of asylum seekers off the coast of Australia. A lot of them need medical attention and they want admittance to the country. There are 438 of them. Australia has an area of 7,682,300 square miles and a population of 15,000,000 people. Australia is a Christian country. The asylum seekers are Afghans. In Afghanistan the Taleban have imprisoned Christian aid workers and are threatening to execute them for prosetylising.
Question: Can Australia turn away the boat people and still legally call itself a Christian country? Are the Talebans right to regard Christianity as a dubious religion?
Unless there is an amendment that i’m not aware of, the fact that Christianity has always predominated in Australia does not make the country offically Christian.
If the intention of your post is to exhort the Australian government to help these refugees, i’m with you 100%. But appealing to some notion of Christian hypocrisy is not the way to do it. How about an appeal to simple human decency?
I was appalled by this too on a humanitarian basis. I understand that Christmas Island is preparing to receive them, setting up tents and preparing food. I did a google.com search on Christmas Island and learned the following: “…Today most residents are Chinese followed by Australian/Europeans & Malay. All are permanent residents of Australia and the majority hold Australian citizenship.”
So Australia won’t receive them but an Australian tributary (I imagine the island is similar to Guam, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, etc. are to the US) will?
The Taliban has to be the most deranged group of despots since Idi Amin’s reign. I’d gladly accept the refugees here and imagine our Canadian neighbors would as well. And yeah, I do put my money and volunteer work where my mouth is.
That would make Australia about two and a half times the size of the US - i don’t think so. It’s actually 7,682,300 square kilometres, or about 2,966,000 square miles.
And the 1998 estimate of Australia’s populaton ran to just over 18 million.
None of this is germane to the argument - it’s just FYI.
(By the way G Nome, “the Taliban” is a collective noun which is already plural in form, from Arabic “talib”, “student”. You mean “followers of the Taliban” or “Taliban Afghans”, not “the Talebans [sic]”.)
As for the main point of your OP, mhendo is right: Australia cannot “legally call itself a Christian country” in any case, because it has no law establishing Christianity as its official religion. (Moreover, according to the Religious Freedom World Report, the Australian population is only about 76% Christian, significantly less than the corresponding percentage in the US.)
The question of what Australia should do about the refugees is already being discussed in the Refugees thread, and also in the What should happen to asylum seeking refugees? one. It is pointed out there that the refugees were rescued from an Indonesian boat which was apparently trying to smuggle them illegally into Australian territory. As argued on the other thread, political asylum should have been granted them in Indonesia, the country that they fled to. Moving them on to Australia makes them “economic refugees”, to whom countries are not bound to offer asylum on a human rights basis.
Mind you, I agree that Australia should help them and not leave them stranded on an overcrowded Norwegian freighter with their own boat sunk. I’m just not convinced that Australia is legally or morally bound to offer them political asylum instead of escorting them back to Indonesia.
Thank you Mhendo for that correction. I was aware of that on some level believe it or not although I am also aware that the situation is not as straightforward as the Constitutional cite would suggest. I guess I’d like to appeal to Christian hypocrisy if I may. I’d like also to appeal to Gary Zukav disciple hypocrisy, Buddhist hypocrisy and Humanitarian hypocrisy. For God’s sake won’t anyone put their hands up and take these people?
GN:For God’s sake won’t anyone put their hands up and take these people?
Well, which country do you think should do so, and why? If all you’re saying is “These people have had it rough and somebody should give them some help!”, I don’t think you’re going to get much of a debate, because we all seem to agree with that.
In a television poll tonight 87% of New Zealanders said No to taking the refugees. It was a non-random, largely unscientific sort of poll - there lies New Zealand’s only redemption (in my mind at least). The laws of NZ come out of the Judaic Christian tradition. The fact that the country is strongly multicultural doesn’t change that. Hypocrisy rules.
The first post I made on the Straight Dope went something like: China has 116 people per square mile whereas NZ has 12. Is there any international law under which NZ can be considered uninhabited? How many American Indians, Aborigines and Maoris per square mile in the New Worlds allowed Europeans to think in terms of colonisation? Did it work that way? If so could it still work that way? Most people seemed to think that was a really stupid question but I got quite a few replies. It’s not that stupid.
GN: *In a television poll tonight 87% of New Zealanders said No to taking the refugees. It was a non-random, largely unscientific sort of poll - there lies New Zealand’s only redemption (in my mind at least). The laws of NZ come out of the Judaic Christian tradition. The fact that the country is strongly multicultural doesn’t change that. Hypocrisy rules. *
Does anybody know why G Nome is talking about New Zealand all of a sudden, in a thread that I thought was devoted to Australia’s treatment of a boatload of refugees?
Whichever of those British Commonwealth countries you’re talking about, G, its law actually derives from the English legal system, which was influenced by the Roman legal tradition and the early Anglo-Saxon common law that was also partly inspired by Roman law. So the laws that you vaguely describe as “coming out of the Jude**o-**Christian tradition” are really derived in large part from the legal tradition of pagan Rome. They are also influenced by Judeo-Christian law, of course, but they in no way bind the citizens to accept any particular set of so-called “Christian” morals or ethics.
Moreover, does your notion of what constitutes moral behavior for a country imply that they must accept everybody who wants to immigrate there? Do you support opening the U.S.-Mexico border to unrestricted immigration by Mexicans fleeing economic hardship in Mexico? If not, why do you think Australia should be required to accept refugees from Indonesia, which was the country that the Afghan refugees originally fled to and which seems to have simply passed them on to Australia?
Mind you, I personally think that more open immigration policies worldwide would be a good thing in many ways, and that economic refugees deserve more aid and sympathy than they often get. I just don’t buy G Nome’s fuzzy reasoning that the Australians are somehow being particularly “hypocritical” about this specific case. If he really meant to change the subject to some separate situation in New Zealand, of course, that’s another question.
Kimstu, G. Nome lives in New Zealand, so the analogy to the US/Mexico border may not have the impact you’re looking for. And I may recall incorrectly, but I believe G. is female.
What Christian hypocrisy? We’ve established that the government of Australia is not Christian, nor obligated to act in a “Christian” manner, even if most of its inhabitants are. It is up to the government of Australia to decide whether or not to accept the refugees, not the individual citizens of Australia. The poll you cited is for New Zealand, and therefore may or may not reflect the attitude of most Australians, we don’t know. If the inhabitants of Christmas Island are in fact setting up tents and suchlike for the refugees in the event that they land, well, then those people are obviously behaving according to their consciences. If you feel that Australia ought to take on the refugees, your arguments really should be based on something other than religious speculation.
G. Nome is from New Zealand, and thus probably hears about opinion polls in New Zealand, which is close enough to Australia that people may see it as a spot for the refugees. Also, it is pretty low in population density, which she seems to think would make a good case for it to accept refugees.
Personally, I think any nation should accept anyone who tries to enter in good faith (i.e. not on the run from justice, or for fraudulent purposes), regardless of whether or not the person is a refugee. So my answer is that any country they stop at should welcome them.
So, all that WASPishnss in my country is just an Animist front. I suspected as much. Put down the crucifixes and move slowly away Animists. Conditional charity has been your undoing. No more tax concessions for you.
Well before I get physically ill at the amount of bleeding-heart, left-wing, tree-hugging sentimentality floating around I’ll try and introduce some background.
We have no idea who these people are. We can charitably assume that they are genuine asylum sekers, but that would run counter to the known facts and probabilities. In recent years there has been a trend for people froma range of countries, but notably the middle easetrn region to pay peolpe smugglers to get them to Australia. These people don’t get onto overcrowded junks and set sail from Libya to Australia all by their lonesome. They aren’t '70s Vietnamese boat people. The current crop of illegals catch commercial flights to either Malaysia or Indonesia, both of whom have extremely open immigration policy for Islamics. They spend sufficient time there to gather enough numbers to make it worthwhile for someone to take a boatload to Australia, a service for which they pay upwards of A$10,000. I won’t get into a debate about how exactly a person in Afghanistan saves $10,000, but you can speculate on that by yourself. These people arrive in Australia on boats that are barely seaworthy and destined for the scrapheap. The Indonesian/Malaysian sailors are deported promptly when caught, with or without a fine. Needless to say the penalty is very minor compared to the profits involved. This has been the origin of over 90% of the illegal immigrants arriving in Northern Australia over the last 5 years or so. In the last two years about 100 people a month have ben arriving this way.
The illegals are then taken to a detention centre for processing, and if thier request for refugee status if refused they appeal, a process taking about six months. Then if the second appeal fails these people have access to the Australian court system simply by virtue of being on Australian soil. The latest trend has been for these people to sue the Australian government and immigration service, a process lasting about 4 years. This is a very costly procedure for the Australian taxpayer. Added to this in the past couple of years we’ve had instances of mass breakouts from detention centres and two riots where guards were seriously injured, all perpetuated by middle easter ‘asylum seekers’.
I hope this puts a little context on why the Australian public and the Australian government are more than a little sceptical about the refugee status of this group. The claims that people are deathly ill have also been refuted by Ausralian doctors who have examined them all and declared that no-one on board is in need of urgent medical aid. Given that they were probably at sea less than two days this is hardly surprising.
So as much sympathy as I have for genuine refugees, and as much as I believe these people should be given the benefit of the doubt and processed by Australia as rapidly as possible, you’ll forgive me if I don’t immediately rend my garments and begin wailing about Australia and New Zealand requiring “redemption” because the population feel that this latest load are just more of the same freeloaders.
The real debate is how many times and how often you have to be beaten over the head with a begging bowl before you can be forgiven for avoiding beggars?
And just to clear something up, Christmas Island is an Australian Territory mainly for political reasons. It’s too small to have its own government and too far away to be effectively represented by WA or the NT. For this reason it’s made a territory rather than being tacked on to a state. It is however subject to Australian law, is Australian soil etc. It as much a part of Australia as Manhattan Island is a part of the US. There’s another bigger Australian territory called the Northern territory that makes up around 1/8th of the total landmass. Like Christmas Island it’s not a state, but it is very much covered by Australain federal law. Christmas Island can’t unilaterally accept these illegals any more than the people of Tasmania can because immigration is very specifically the province of the Commonwealth government. Once these people land on Christmas Island they are as much bound by and protected under Australian law as if they landed at Sydney airport.
Gaspode: Nice background - but you forgot to add that it was an Australian Search and Rescue Team that made the request to the Tampa to pick the refugees up in the first place. You also forgot to the fact that when the Captain of the Tampa followed procedures after being ignored for two day after requesting medical assistance, called in a Mayday and headed in to port, the reaction was to board the boat with SAS troops. (Sure, the Captain might have been misled over the illness of the people he had picked up, but he’s not a medical doctor - why did he have to call a Mayday and head in to port before aid was given?). Yeah, we don’t yet have a good system for dealing with refugees at the moment, but the racist and anti-islamic reaction of little Johnny sure ain’t the solution.
OK - I realised how idiotic that last sentence was about 3 tenths of a second after I’d hit the submit button. Please ignore my last sentence. John Howard’s still a bigot, but that’s a personal opinion I can’t back up with fact and not worthy of this forum.
What Gaspode fails to point out, for those who are unfamiliar with Australia’s treatment of asylum-seeking immigrants, is that these breakouts were due in large part to almost concentration-camp-style conditions in some of the detention centres, and a denial or delay of the due process that Gaspode quite rightly points out is the right of asylum-seekers under Australian law. And international law, if i’m not mistaken.
And i’m trying to work out why asylum-seekers would all choose to break out in the middle of easter. Or maybe he meant middle eastern, in which case i’m trying to work out whether this unnecessary reference is meant to imply that all middle easterners are somehow untrustworthy or a threat to the safety of Australia.
And spare me the whining Australian taxpayer stuff, please. If a wealthy country like Australia can’t/won’t afford to take a few hundred fleeing refugees, then we’ve got moral problems that desperately need fixing.
