Burmese Muslims granted asylum by new government

A first signal that the gates are being thrown open to millions of "refugees"? The world is full of oppressive countries. Do all the oppressed now sail to Australia?

SEVEN Burmese men held in detention on Nauru for more than a year have been granted refugee status and will be resettled in Australia, Immigration Minister Chris Evans said yesterday. The men, who have been held on Nauru since being found on Ashmore Reef, 610km north of Broome, in August last year, sought asylum because they are Muslims from Burma's persecuted Rohingya minority. The Department of Immigration and Citizenship said yesterday that it had determined the men had been assessed as having a well-founded fear of persecution if they were returned home.

The decision heralds the new Labor Government's first move towards delivering its promise to dismantle the Coalition's offshore processing regime. "We are moving quickly to resolve the status of the people on Nauru as the first step in ending the Pacific Solution," Senator Evans said yesterday. "There is no reason why the Burmese should not have been finalised and resettled by now."

Immigration officials left for Nauru yesterday to finalise the Burmese applications and to begin working out resettlement arrangements. The group of seven, who took the previous government to the High Court to get their applications considered, will arrive in Australia before Christmas and will be resettled in Brisbane.

Senator Evans said the Pacific Solution had been a "costly failure". "The vast majority of those people sent to Nauru and Manus (Papua New Guinea) ultimately settling in Australia highlights the bankruptcy of the Pacific Solution," he said.

However, a far greater political challenge to realising the end of offshore immigration processing will be how the new Government deals with a group of 82 Sri Lankans also held on Nauru. The group includes 74 men who have been found to be genuine refugees but not resettled and seven other Sri Lankans who have been charged over the alleged rape and sexual assault of a local woman. Their case is believed to be returning to court on Nauru this month. Senator Evans said the remaining Sri Lankans would be processed "in accordance with normal arrangements".

Department of Immigration and Citizenship secretary Andrew Metcalfe signalled progress on the matter was imminent. "Further decisions will be made soon about the arrangements for the 74 Sri Lankans in Nauru who have also been found to be refugees," he said. "Decisions on a further eight Sri Lankans on Nauru are pending. One of these people is having a refugee refusal decision reviewed and seven are facing criminal charges in Nauru."

Lawyer for the Burmese refugees, David Manne, from the Refugee and Immigration Legal Centre, said he was "delighted and relieved" that the new Government had moved so decisively to resolve "what has really been anightmare with no real end insight". "The process has been so unnecessarily drawn out and damaging to those detained," Mr Manne said. "This is a policy that has caused profound suffering and abuse and ridiculous expense to the taxpayer - all of which has been completely unnecessary. "This is a commonsense, fair decision and we can only hope that such a damaging and unnecessary process is not inflicted on anyone in the future."

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An obstetrician who hates babies!

Sounds like he needs a sea change

A West Australian medical expert wants families to pay a $5000-plus "baby levy" at birth and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child. Writing in today's Medical Journal of Australia, Associate Professor Barry Walters said every couple with more than two children should be taxed to pay for enough trees to offset the carbon emissions generated over each child's lifetime.

Professor Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits. And he implied the Federal Government should ditch the $4133 baby bonus and consider population controls like those in China and India.

Professor Walters said the average annual carbon dioxide emission by an Australian individual was about 17 metric tons, including energy use. "Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society," he wrote. "Far from showering financial booty on new mothers and rewarding greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour, a 'baby levy' in the form of a carbon tax should apply, in line with the 'polluter pays' principle."

Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said it was ridiculous to blame babies for global warming. "I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create," she said. "There's masses of evidence to say that child-rich families have much lower resource consumption per head than other styles of households.

But the plan won praise from high-profile doctor Garry Egger. "One must wonder why population control . . . is spoken of today only in whispers," he wrote in an MJA response article

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Conservative Australian kids

KIDS are turning away from marijuana and more of them are abstaining from sex as today's youth become more conservative. Previously unreleased data from the State Government's biennial YouthSCAN report has revealed the number of people aged between 10 and 17 who smoke marijuana has fallen from 36 per cent in 2003 to 23 per cent in 2007.

The report, compiled after three-hour interviews with 600 young people across NSW and Victoria, found nicotine use had also dropped slightly. Just 37 per cent of young people reported smoking cigarettes, compared to 38 per cent of those surveyed in 2003.

The report reveals young people are also waiting longer before they have sex. Less than two-thirds of sexually active young people reported having sex before they were 16, compared with more than three-quarters of youths questioned in the previous survey.

Members of the NSW Youth Advisory Council - staffed by young people and founded to advise the State Government on youth policy - said high-school students were becoming more aware of the dangers of drugs and more empowered to say no. "Young people are just so aware now,'' said council member Samantha Dawson, 20. "You can say, without doubt, young people are more mature, more aware and definitely more educated, whether that education has come from a school, or from parents, about drugs.''

Ms Dawson said better education about sexual relationships removed the pressure some young people felt to have sex. "The thing young people do now is to discuss these things with people,'' she said. "Then they can make informed decisions on whether they are ready.''

NSW Minister for Youth, Linda Burney, said young people in NSW had successfully overcome peer and commercial pressure and were making their own decision on the issues of drugs and sex. "Since becoming Minister for Youth I have come into contact with so many young people, and I've been very impressed,'' she said. "I think young people today have more pressure on them than any past generation. "So I'm really pleased with these results, and I'm very proud of young people across the State.''

The YouthSCAN report also found young people measured success by material possessions. For 19 per cent of young people, money is more important than character when measuring success.

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Leftist call to silence conservative dissent

Comment below by Tom Switzer, the opinion page editor of The Australian

SOMEONE asked me recently, in a voice that suggested a certain smug confidence that it represented truth and justice, whether The Australian would continue to publish conservative columnists and contributors in the new political environment. Just as Janet Albrechtsen and Keith Windschuttle occupied precious opinion-page real estate during the Howard years, he suggested, did we not need more commentators on the Left to reflect the Rudd era? "Given that everything has changed," he asked, "can't you, as oped editor, finally get rid of these right-wing ranters who've corrupted the national conversation in recent years?"

Well, leaving aside the unattractive tone of these remarks, the argument is fallacious for two reasons. For one thing, it amounts to a request for the curtailment of free speech and public debate. In the never-ending battle of ideas, a lively opinion page should provide provocative, thoughtful arguments for points of view on a wide range of topical subjects: from what passes for Left and Right, as well as from writers whose politics are difficult to pigeonhole. When governments change, decent opinion pages should still accommodate contrary views. Otherwise, the cultural landscape would become as flat and unvaried as the proverbial Australian sheep station.

During the past 12 years, the press rightly saw its job as one of keeping John Howard accountable. The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, still published Alan Ramsey, Adele Horin, Kenneth Davidson and Tim Colebatch. Indeed, Robert Manne, a leading intellectual critic of the Howard government, penned a regular column in both the Age and Herald for many years. Fair enough, but why should the rules change now? Calls to silence or limit conservatives in the Rudd era, in effect, would amount to a one party-state in the media and, dare one say it, the silencing of dissent.

Australia became a more conservative place in the Howard era, but The Australian still regularly published Phillip Adams, not to mention my colleagues Mike Steketee and Michael Costello, both of whom have political views quite different from those of Alan Wood or Greg Sheridan, to name but two of the alleged "right-wing ranters" we publish on this page every week. Nothing particularly virtuous or unusual about this. It is what good newspapers do, whatever their political orientation.

During the Clinton era, the moderately liberal Washington Post continued to publish syndicated conservative columnists such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Bob Novak. And its longtime editorial page editor Meg Greenfield also filled her pages with regular contributions from former Republican officeholders and advisers such as Henry Kissinger and Bill Kristol. Not much kowtowing to the Democrat White House here.

Likewise, during the Blair-Brown era, the London Daily Telegraph and The Times have felt no need to sack longtime conservative columnists such as Charles Moore, Simon Heffer, Boris Johnson and Matthew Parris as a way of genuflecting to New Labour. So, why should Australian newspapers be expected to behave any differently? Which brings me to my second point: calls to silence or limit conservative voices in the Rudd era fundamentally misread the political and cultural terrain. As much as Labor partisans and the liberal intelligentsia may hope otherwise, the truth is Australia is a much more conservative nation today than it was, say, during the Keating era. And notwithstanding some adjustments to Howard policies on Kyoto and an apology, the centre of political gravity will remain well to the right of where it was a decade ago.

Labor, remember, won last month precisely because its leader sold himself as a conservative on virtually everything from his support for big income tax cuts and anti-terror laws to his opposition to gay marriage and illegal immigration.

To scan the broadsheet newspapers in the 1990s is to understand how Australia has indeed changed. Back then there was almost universal consensus in the media about the virtues of Aboriginal welfarism, separatism, a politicians' republic, zealous multiculturalism, activist judges rewriting our Constitution. And it appeared that the black-armband view of history was the politically approved order of the day. Today, however, things are very different. On the battlefields of history, economics, citizenship, national sovereignty and values generally, conservative ideas always compete and often prevail. Who, for instance, still believes that welfare should be an unconditional right? Or that cultural diversity is enough to sustain a nation? Or that traditional culture alone can rejuvenate indigenous Australians in remote communities?

Look at the opinion formers. Phillip Adams remembers a time in the 1970s when the Left had almost total control of print opinion. He recalls Graham Perkin, the longtime editor of The Age, saying: "We really must get a right-wing columnist." And during the Keating era, only a few well-known conservatives or free-marketeers such as Paddy McGuinness and Gerard Henderson existed in the national media. Today, by contrast, the ranks of the Right have swelled to include Albrechtsen, Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine, Sandra Lee, Michael Baume, Terry McCrann, Michael Duffy, John Roskam, Tim Blair, Christopher Pearson, Paul Gray, Neil Mitchell and best-selling author Paul Sheehan.

Robert Manne has argued that Albrechtsen, Bolt and Akerman represent an interesting new phenomenon. "Even 20 years ago," he laments, "Australia did not have journalists like this in the mainstream press." He is hardly alone in fretting that the Left's near monopoly over the institutions of opinion and information is crumbling.

As Adams himself has written on this page: "Our population in the press is so small as to constitute extinction. We are dead parrots ... giving the illusion of life because we are nailed to our perches." The point here is that we live in conservative times and, if Kevin Rudd governs as he campaigned, he is unlikely to change that much. In any case, the main function of a decent oped page should be not to provide overwhelming support to one political party or ideology but to provide a broader, richer, deeper national debate. And polemicists should always bear in mind John Stuart Mill's warning that he who knows only his own position knows little of that.

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