The ugly Australian

Harold Pateshall

Sydney The pathetic trickle of Vietnamese refugees now managing to reach Australia in small boats is something this country has not encountered before, and it is bringing out the worst in the Australian character. The racist right want them sent back because they are slant-eyed and yellow-skinned. The left want them sent back because, apparently, they are Vietnamese antiCommunists and probably deserve to be shot. In neither case are their lives regarded as being worth very much.

Spokesmen for the people of Darwin, where most of these foreigners have been landing, have suddenly forgotten their own much publicised sufferings and cries for help when their city was destroyed by a cyclone at Christmas 1974, and they themselves were forced to flee and become refugees in the South.

Both right and left have been mounting loud and organised campaigns to demand the refugees be sent back. To the credit of Mr Fraser's Liberal government, it should be remembered that, despite the pressures of an election campaign, it has so far dealt with the situation with humanity and restraint.

The leaders of the Labour Party have either prudently shut up or reacted nastily. Labour Senator James Mulvihill (the shadow minister for immigration), who recently tried to obtain the removal of Government Literature Board support for Australia's only non-left intellectual journal, has demanded that the refugees be turned back by the navy and threatened that if they are not sent back, there will be 'hostile ethnic community response', and that 'all Sydney's major ethnic community leaders, including Cypriot, Chilean and Lebanese' (who have, incidentally, been accepted in far greater numbers than the Vietnamese) 'are rightly indignant at any dilution of processing.'

Senator Mulvihill had his words echoed by the Communist-dominated Waterside Workers' Federation, which has been suggesting that the Vietnamese landing in Australia are worthless prostitutes and drug-runners when they are not ex American pawns.

The Labour Party has of course always tried to project for itself an image of being Australia's party of humanitarian concern. Its lack of such concern has now reached its highest level. Whitlam suggested darkly that 'someone is encouraging them.' He also tried to make northern security an election issue, suddenly becoming interested in defence. He promised more patrol boats if elected, instead of the long-range frigate which the Fraser government recently decided to order from America.

The extent to which Whitlam was forced to trim his sails to the anti-refugee wind blowing from his party's political left is indicated by the fact that it was his government, from 1972 to 1975, which cut the Navy's patrol boats from twenty to eleven. One was sunk in the Darwin cyclone and not replaced, the other eight given away. In any case, the Fraser government has ordered fifteen more, as well as the frigate (the third of a new class), although defence has not been an issue for the last three elections.

The president of the Australian Labour Party and the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Robert Hawke, has also said that the refugees should be returned.

For the left, the refugees are a hideous disfigurement of their image of a 'liberated' Vietnam. Nobody, they are convinced, could want to leave the paradise of Ho Chi Minh City two and a half years after the war has ended. It therefore follows that they cannot be genuine refugees. To regard them as genuine would imply that the Western intervention in Vietnam was a morally justifiable defence of a pluralistic society against aggression, and this would be simply too shocking to contemplate.

Before the election, politicians' telephones ran hot with calls on the matter, and a quite extraordinary number of letters were flooding into newspapers. A few typical extracts include: 'To the only people in the world who can contribute in stopping this giant con that is the army and navy, I say: "Blow them out of the water".'

'Refugees from any foreign country should be put in labour camps for two years and treated as prisoners-of-war and then sent back.'

'Send the boats and their occupants back to Hanoi. I think these are Vietcont:. and we don't need to allow them a bridgehead here.'

Letters like these, whether spontaneous or the fruit of organised campaigns (it may be significant that the National Front is reported to have sent organisers to Australia recently) have recently appeared in quite unprecedented numbers in Australian newspapers. On the other hand, the still powerful National Civic Council, one of the few big anti-Communist bodies untainted by crude racism, has been campaigning for a more generous acceptance of them. Both the NCC and the left probably see the potential of the refugees in the same way — they could be the nucleus of another antiCommunist émigré group.

The Vietnamese government has been demanding them back and referring to them as 'pirates', which should leave no one in any doubt about their fate if they are returned. Good relations with Vietnam are important for the Fraser government, but so far it has stood by the principle that refugees should be treated as refugees, though some of the boats may be returned.

The UN High Commission for Refugees has so far found homes for 30,000 in the US, 36,000 in France, 7,000 in Canada (which had no involvement in Vietnam) and only 4,300 in Australia.

One hundred thousand remain in Thailand and more continue to escape to neighbouring countries from Vietnam as the opportunity presents itself and the 900 or so 'boat people' who have so far reached Australia do not exactly represent an exceptional claim on that very wealthy country's generosity.

Many who actually helped and fought with Australians during the Vietnam war were deliberately left behind at its end by the Whitlam government, while the US at that time took more than 100,000 , The Sydney Morning Herald, which has consistently supported a humane policy towards the refugees, said in a leader recently: 'People who detest their communist conquerors should not have to prove persecution to gain our help if they choose to risk death to get away to freedom. Here is a test of our democratic idealism. Let us meet it.'

A number of clerics and academics — most of them conspicuously not of the faithful ranks of pro-Whitlam petition signers — have also called for a higher refugee intake, and the government is sending migration officers to Malaysia and Singapore to interview and process refugees there more quickly. For a lot of Australians, however, it would appear that there would be a feeling of relief if the monsoon, which is due to break shortly, washed the whole problem under the waves of the South China Sea — as it indeed may for a season.