National Observer Home > No. 51 - Summer 2002 > Articles

The Debates We Had To Have

John Stone

The 11 September terrorist attack on America is rightly said to have “changed the world”. But Australians’ world had already begun to change a fortnight earlier. When, on 27 August 2001, the Prime Minister ordered the Tampa to leave Australian territorial waters off Christmas Island, taking with it the bunch of illegal immigrants whose vessel, organised by people-smugglers, had foundered off Indonesia, our world embarked upon a massive process of change.

That change, which will involve, as my title says, the debates we have to have, has barely begun, and our commentariat has as yet barely begun to acknowledge that it is in train. That is, perhaps, partly because the commentariat is genuinely unaware of what is happening; it is also because, even when it is, it will be most unwilling to concede it. After all, that world is very much of the commentariat’s own making. The last thing which the serried ranks of our New Class chatterers — be they in our universities, our schools, our “welfare” agencies, our political parties (of all complexions) or our media — will wish to acknowledge is that the House That Whitlam Built, and which they have been sedulously tending these past twenty-five or thirty years, is now falling into ruin.

The strongest evidence for that is not that John Howard — and note that I say John Howard, as distinct from his Liberal Party — won the election, vital though that was. It is, rather, that the Labor Party, after a brief period of opposition to Mr. Howard’s views on the illegals, was literally forced to adopt the “Me, too” position also. Meanwhile, the electorate offices of its members had been inundated by a torrent of telephone calls from Labor’s traditional supporters demanding to know why Labor was not immediately backing the Prime Minister. And the rest, as they say, is history . . .

As it happens, The Samuel Griffith Society was scheduled to hold its thirteenth conference shortly after the Tampa incident emerged. In my introductory remarks to that conference on 1 September 2001, I said:

“We meet here this morning after a week in which that issue of national sovereignty has been more forcefully drawn to the attention of Australians generally than at any time, I think, since World War II. So what has been their reaction?

If one were to judge by the editorial attitudes of our so-called ‘quality’ press, one would have to say that Australians have failed the test. True, even that section of the media continues to pay lip service to Australia’s sovereign right to maintain the sanctity of its borders; but that principle is then immediately overborne by appeals to the so-called ‘human rights’ of the illegal immigrants involved. Meanwhile ‘our A.B.C.’ — and even more shrilly, ‘our S.B.S.’ — have gone into over-drive in their accustomed roles as Australia’s own Fifth Column.

All that is, of course, depressing. It is particularly so in this year 2001, as we celebrate the Centenary of our Federation, and of the great work — the Australian Constitution — which underlies that Federation. Yet, underneath that media and chattering class froth — or should that word be ‘scum’? — the real heart of Australia continues to beat. In the letter columns of our popular press, in every opinion poll so far taken (no matter how prejudicially the polling question may have been constructed), in talk-back radio particularly, we have seen a massive rallying of public opinion in support of the actions so far taken by the Government. Meanwhile the Federal Opposition, after having initially provided full and praiseworthy support to the Government in those actions, has since been told by the New Class crowd who run it to ‘roll back’ into line and put so-called ‘human rights’ first.”

The election campaign focus on the illegal immigrants question per se was understandable, as has been the continuing discussion, to which the election outcome has given rise, on the so-called “sustainability” of the Government’s “Pacific solution”. Important though such questions are, however, they give rise to some danger of diverting the debate from the more fundamental issues which underlie them. In what follows, therefore, I wish to focus upon three of those issues, namely:

• The whole question of national sovereignty, of which a country’s right to protect its borders from unwanted incursions forms part (but only part);

• The nature of Australia’s official immigration policy, including the so-called “refugee” component thereof; and

• Associated with that, our officially sponsored policy of multiculturalism (read non-assimilation).

National Sovereignty

The issue of national sovereignty is also, as it happens, one to which The Samuel Griffith Society has recently been devoting some attention, having been the principal issue considered at the Society’s twelfth conference, in Sydney in November 2000. The full proceedings of that conference are now available on the Society’s Website (www. samuelgriffith.org.au), or in printed form as Volume 12 of the Society’s Proceedings, Upholding the Australian Constitution. Here I wish to consider, briefly, the sovereignty issue, drawing in doing so upon my own paper to that conference, “Setting the Sovereignty Scene: Use and Abuse of the Treaty Power”.

The concepts of sovereignty, on the one hand, and of the nation state, on the other, are two sides of the same coin. When the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) ended in the Treaty of Westphalia, the Holy Roman Empire finally foundered. In its place there arose a bevy of European nation states, each proclaiming its full territorial sovereignty and its full independence from the “world governance” hitherto imposed (in varying degrees) from Rome.

In recent times it has become fashionable in some circles to say that in this increasingly “globalised” world the nation state has had its day; and that, as a consequence, national sovereignty also is an increasingly out-dated concept. Shallow views of this kind typically emanate from such bodies as the World Economic Forum; the United Nations; bodies of international lawyers; the Foreign Offices of (much of) the world; and other such obviously self-interested quarters.

By contrast, I take the continuing existence of the nation state, and the importance which (most of) its people invariably place upon preserving its sovereignty, as given — a view which, I believe, has been forcefully affirmed in Australia’s case by the recent election result. That being so, I want to examine four questions:

• Why do nation states enter into treaties?

• In particular, is entering into treaties in the national interest, or merely an expression of the moral vanity of those persons (foreign affairs officials, government Ministers) who do so, ostensibly on behalf of the people of their nation?

• What is the effect on a nation’s sovereignty when it enters into a treaty?

• Does treaty-making have implications for the democratic processes of the nation (e.g., via contributing to the so-called “democratic deficit”)? In particular, given the abuse of the external affairs power (section 51(xxix)) of our Constitution both by successive Australian Governments and successive High Courts, and the corrosive effects of those abuses both upon the federal nature of our Constitution and, over time, upon Australians’ respect for the rule of law, is it not time to re-assess the treaty-making process as a whole?

It is useful to begin by asking why Australia enters into treaties at all. It is no part of my case to suggest that we should not do so. No sensible Australian would question the desirability of our entering into treaties where, on all the evidence, it is in our national interest to do so. Clearly, for example, a significant trading nation like Australia finds it advantageous, on balance, to belong to the World Trade Organisation, notwithstanding the discomforts which W.T.O. membership can also bring from time to time. But, to go to the opposite extreme, how do Australians benefit from our becoming a party to the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child?

Australia today is a party to something like two thousand treaties — about three hundred of which we “inherited”, so to speak, from our British origins up to the point where, by the Statute of Westminster (1931), Australia became a fully independent, and hence fully sovereign country. Many of these treaties are of the “technical” variety, such as our membership of the Universal Postal Union, or our numerous bilateral treaties governing (double) taxation. Many, perhaps most, of these “technical” treaties represent a sensible engagement with the wider world in our national interest, and in that sense can even be seen as “necessary” usages of the treaty power. Others, while perhaps not in that sense strictly “necessary”, may be deemed as being at least “useful”, such as our adhering to the Convention of the World Meteorological Organisation. Beyond these again, however, is yet another category of treaties, our adherence to which can only be ascribed to “moral vanity” on the part of those, both Ministers and officials, responsible for their ratification. Consider, as two of many such examples, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Australians have long enjoyed all the civil and political rights enumerated in that International Covenant. Australian Parliaments have long made their own judgments (and, unlike the United Nations, have been accountable to their electors in the process) as to the economic, social and cultural “rights” appropriate to be bestowed upon the citizenry. As to the crime of genocide, and notwithstanding the fevered imaginations of people like Sir Ronald Wilson and Mr. Pat Dodson, that is not, thankfully, a crime about which Australians have ever needed to be concerned within their own country. Why then — moral posturing apart — has Australia seen fit to ratify a United Nations Convention which has nothing whatsoever to do with us?

The general answer sometimes given to questions of that kind is that, although there is no real need for Australia to be party to such treaties from a domestic viewpoint, we should nevertheless sign up to them in the interests of being “a good world citizen” (that is to say, of being able to strike moral postures in places like the United Nations). Alternatively, there is the ad terrorem argument that, were we not to accede to such treaties, Australia would become “an international pariah” in the eyes of “the international community”. But since there is no such entity as “the international community”, there can be no need for concern about being regarded as “an international pariah” by that non-entity. As it happens, Australia has earned a reputation in the world for having, by and large, comported itself rather well internationally during the century of our national existence. And needless to say, that reputation has nothing to do with our having adhered to a bunch of morally vain pronouncements in the shape of treaties of this kind.

Such reflections lead naturally to the question: how do we decide when it is in the national interest for Australia to accede to a treaty? The answer, I suggest, is that it is in Australia’s national interest to enter into a treaty (a) when doing so provides us with something we need; and (b) when we cannot provide that “something” solely by our own actions. Even if those two necessary conditions are satisfied, that may not be sufficient reason to enter into the treaty if the obligations we undertake by doing so outweigh the value of the desired benefits.

Against that yardstick, many of the treaties to which Australia has adhered would not qualify, and clearly should never have been acceded to by the Australian Governments of the day. In particular, very few, and perhaps none, of those treaties earlier categorized as “morally vain” pass this national interest test. Indeed, it is fair to say that they differ only to the extent to which they fail that test. By way of example:

• Do Australians need the United Nations to instruct us not to torture each other (or any one else, for that matter)?

• Again, do we need the United Nations to instruct us not to discriminate against our fellow Australians but rather to treat them equally? There can be few more genuinely egalitarian countries than Australia in the world.

• Again, do we need the United Nations to instruct us in how to bring up our children? I defy anyone to advance a single instance of the beneficial effects upon Australians of our adherence to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

What is the effect upon a nation’s sovereignty when it enters into a treaty? The official (Department of Foreign Affairs) view is that, so long as any treaty into which Australia enters contains within its terms due processes for its possible future denunciation, then no loss of sovereignty is involved. Ratification of a treaty is, in the Department’s words, “an exercise, not a relinquishing, of sovereignty”.

By contrast to such slippery double talk, my own view — and the view to which, I suggest, the overwhelming majority of Australians would subscribe — is that when Australia enters into a treaty, some sacrifice of sovereignty is involved (in varying degrees, depending upon the scope of the treaty). The only question is whether that sacrifice of sovereignty is justified in the national interest by the benefits which accession brings to Australians.

Take, by way of example, the United Nations Convention on Refugees. Whatever the merits of our accession to that Convention may have been thought to have been in 1954, the obligations under which Australia apparently labours today as a result are, to the average Australian, as amazing as they are democratically unacceptable. The pass to which we have been reduced — and which must make Australia’s name a laughing stock wherever any group of people-smugglers is gathered together — is nothing short of extraordinary. It simply does not make sense, under such circumstances, to assert that, those facts notwithstanding, our sovereignty has been in no way impaired merely because the Convention in question contains provisions for us to withdraw from it!

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it is also clear that treaty-making does have implications for Australia’s domestic democratic processes, and that those implications have been seriously malignant. For one thing, the process of treaty-making has resulted, when taken in conjunction with the enormously expanded interpretation which the High Court in the past twenty years or so has given to the “external affairs power”, in a huge expansion in the powers of the Commonwealth at the expense of those of the States. Anyone who believes in the old adage that “power corrupts” can only deplore that — as well as the fact that, by removing decision-making from the State peripheries and focusing it in Canberra, the Australian people have been relegated to one further remove from that process.

Another way in which this “democratic deficit” between the decision-makers and the people has been widened via the treaty-making process derives from the fact that, increasingly, activists among the ranks of our judiciary, both State and Federal, are disposed to seize upon the fact that Australia has ratified a treaty in order to rule for (or against) certain outcomes. The most notorious example of this proclivity to date has been the High Court decision in the Teoh Case in 1995; but there is a growing list of other examples.

The Teoh Case, which involved the Court’s refusal to allow the deportation of a convicted heroin smuggler because, allegedly, it would have inflicted hardship upon his children (and hence be contrary to Australia’s obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child), is a perfect illustration of how Australia’s adherence to this totally otiose, morally vain treaty has curtailed the power of our elected Government to exercise sovereignty. As a result of the Court’s decision, it was adjudged that we no longer possessed the sovereign right to kick out an immigrant who, having sought our national hospitality, then proceeded to abuse it by smuggling heroin into the country.

Which brings us to the question of immigration policy more generally — and, with it, the official policies of multiculturalism which, for the past twenty years or so, have gone hand in hand with immigration policy per se.

Immigration Policy and Official Multiculturalism

In a recent article in The Australian (26 November 2001) I observed that, in the aftermath both of the Tampa episode and the World Trade Centre terrorist attack on America, Australians must fundamentally rethink the stupidities which, for two decades now, have dominated our immigration policies and, along with them, our official policies of multiculturalism (read “non-assimilation”). Now the election is behind us, this is a long overdue debate we have to have. To that end, let me set down, staccato-fashion, a few propositions from which that debate needs to begin:

• Australia’s immigration policies during the thirty or so years after World War II — initiated by the Chifley Labor Government and carried on by successive Coalition Governments — were enormously successful.

• These policies essentially comprised two requirements. First, that the new Australians we were welcoming would assimilate into the mainstream and, second, that those we were choosing (chiefly, then, from war-torn Europe) would be culturally capable of, and disposed to, doing so.

• By the mid-1970s, Australia had emerged from that process a more cosmopolitan, broader-minded, more outward-looking and in most respects better country than before.

• Shortly thereafter, the Fraser Government accepted a relatively small number of genuine refugee “boat people” fleeing the Vietnamese Communist dictatorship (those “f . . . ing Vietnamese Balts”, in Gough Whitlam’s graphic words). This was a principled consequence of our own earlier, entirely honourable contribution to resisting their oppressors, and was accepted as such by a generous Australian people.

• The much wider extension of that decision which then followed, by both Coalition and Labor governments, and which opened our doors to all and sundry irrespective of their cultural background, was not in the national interest, however well-meaning it may have been.

• Fatally compounding that error were the official multiculturalism policies imposed along with it. Abandoning the previous “assimilationist” approach, official policy strongly encouraged the “separate development” of different cultures on an equal footing side by side within our boundaries. In Geoffrey Blainey’s famous phrase, the “nation of tribes” — a concept so internally irreconcilable that it only has to be stated to be seen as a contradiction in terms — had arrived.

• Worse still, as Blainey’s name reminds us, both these errors were then effectively shielded from almost all effective public criticism by the elitist thought police in our academies and in the media.

• This shutting-down of debate — with charges of racism, no matter how gross, quickly hurled at any critic — was aided and abetted by a “conspiracy of silence” between both sides of politics (of which, later, both Liberal and Labor Immigration Ministers were to boast).

• And the result? The previously supportive attitude of most Australians towards a large, nation-building immigration programme — an attitude which, until about fifteen years ago, I shared — has been transformed to one of widespread hostility, demands for scaling back the size of the programme, and increasing inter-ethnic suspicion and distrust within our previously cohesive society.

Note that I have nowhere referred to race. In that future debate, any reference to “race” should be immediately challenged; not race but culture is the issue.

So that there be no (honest) mistake, let me repeat that. Our future immigration policy should have nothing to do with immigrants’ skin colour or ethnicity. It should have everything to do with whether those concerned are capable of assimilating into Australia’s basically Judeo-Christian culture, and disposed to do so.

Note, again, that reference, not to Australia’s predominantly Judeo-Christian religion(s), but to the associated culture. Unlike Americans, we are not a particularly religious people; yet we all live within a core culture shaped by, and part of, a Western civilization having its origins in Judeo-Christianity.

In that coming debate, another distinction will be essential. There is all the difference in the world between respecting another person’s right to adhere to some other culture, and respecting that culture equally with our own. All the past brainwashing to the contrary notwithstanding, all cultures are not equal, and it is ridiculous (and since 11 September, much more obviously dangerous) to keep insisting that they are. (This comment, incidentally, has equal — and if anything even more obvious — application to the whole issue of Aboriginal affairs in Australia, but that is a topic for another day.)

The most sensitive aspect of that future debate will be our attitude towards further Muslim immigration — towards which, I must openly say, I have the gravest reservations (while noting that the calls for Australians to refrain from harassing our existing Muslim community are, of course, entirely proper). This too is a debate which cannot be avoided because, in the end, it is the crucial relationship between cultural compatibility and national cohesion which lies at the heart of these matters.

Meanwhile business organisations, such as the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, have been calling for a major increase in our immigration program. They should understand that there can be no hope of widespread public (and hence, now, political) support for that unless the policies of the past twenty-five years or so are fundamentally rethought. The election has confirmed that, in spades.

Conclusion

As we enter this New Year, the Prime Minister shows no sign of backing down on his Government’s recent approach to illegal immigrants (though I suspect the same could not be said of all those sitting behind him on the Government benches). The “sustainability” of his “Pacific solution” seems unimpaired, despite the wearisome barrage of claims to the contrary from the commentariat. In mid-December Nauru agreed to receive, if necessary, another four hundred illegals, thereby giving rise to perhaps the most Goon-like front-page headline of the year (“Nauru saves P.M. again”) in The Australian.

Since my own article in that newspaper in November I have had the honour of being publicly attacked by Dr. Gerard Henderson in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age; by Greg Sheridan in The Australian; by Mr. Christopher Pyne, the Liberal Member for Sturt in South Australia (addressing the Australia/ Israel and Jewish Affairs Council); by a swarm of (principally abusive) letter-writers to The Australian; and so on. All of which promises well. In 2002, these are the debates we have to have.

 

National Observer No. 51 - Summer 2002