Howard's race card - the begining of a murder

Given that there appears to be rather a seismic shift in the politics of boat people asylum seekers in Australia, now that there's been such cruel, incompetent, and terrible treatment of them in our custody to the point of one of them being murdered in our care, I was interested in looking up that infamous quote of Howard back in 2001. 

This is where our current political poisoning of asylum seekers started. With Howard. This quote:
 "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come".


With that, racism entered the election campaign. Howard stopped the Tampa from docking as it had picked up a boatload of asylum seekers. It was a commercial vessel with no connection to Australian politics, but unfortunately they become a pawn of Howard's election campaign. Howard stoked the fires of fear, insinuating that these people were perhaps terrorists trying to get into the country "illegally". 

Labor lost the election. They were in fact way ahead in the polls before this from Howard. After winning Howard went on to introduce the "never ever" GST claiming he had a mandate to do it, despite the election campaign being about race. The Lieberals realised they were onto something, an election winning formula it seemed. Labor licked it's wounds after losing/being done over by Howard's racism.

Since then both parties have been in competition with each other to be the toughest on asylum seekers than the other. In fact they've been so gung ho about it that gov's from both sides of politics have drawn strong criticism from human rights organisations such as the UN and Amnesty International over the years. Particularly more recent years, like when Rudd announced that all asylum seekers would be settled in New Guinea (including gay ones who'd end up on jail there for being gay).

Over the years I've often felt like a lone voice in this as many times I'd be the only one in a group talking about such things that thought we were doing wrong to asylum seekers. Like, it's just not right to treat people like this. It was one of the big reasons why I became attracted to the Greens as they seemed the only party left that had a fuckin social conscience. Perhaps that's changing now.

One of the most frustrating things over the last ten years is that at times a party losing or taking gov depends on a few swing seats in western Sydney. To be brutally honest, I could never define the process as a democratic one, that sought to make Australian policy at the behest of western Sydney redneck racist bigots. They are a small percentage of our entire population, yet we have both major parties making policy to placate them as they've decided elections in the past.

Now we have a young man dead, at our hands. Yes we have blood on them. He was murdered in our care, in our gulag. It's time to stop the politicking, to stop the blame game. Time for both major parties to work this out and come up with something that at least fuckin resembles humane. Time to realise these are simply people fleeing for their lives, families with kids. Time to stop being selfish and fearing that they're going to take something from us (you know like all the welfare and free houses and all; lies). Time to be human beings to these people, and not self appointed masters of their destiny. 

Time to get back the Australia we had before Howard's 2001 election. Time to turn the page.