D-Day on Christmas Island

By Terry Lacey writes from Jakarta

(December 23, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) Is Christmas the right time to keep the door to Australia shut, of should Prime Minister Kevin Rudd dress up as Father Christmas, open the door with a cheery Ho Ho Ho and let all the asylum seekers in ?

The Australian government says it is doing its bit and will accept 13,750 migrants under its refugee and special humanitarian program for 2009-2010, but the country faces persistent waves of desperate illegal boat people organized by gangsters and people smugglers running a lucrative business.

But “high profile Australian opposition law-maker” William Tuckey (Jakarta Post 23.10.09) added a Molotov cocktail to this explosive political brew when he said there was a three-to-one chance these Afghans, Iraqis and Sri Lankans could be terrorists. His mathematics are breath-taking, perhaps he was a Woomera rocket scientist before he entered politics.

This Dunkirk from the devastation of world under-development could mean D-Day on Christmas Island as the massed landing craft full of hirsute weary warriors from Waziristan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Sri Lanka and Somalia might throw themselves in suicidal waves upon the cliffs and beaches, threatening to overwhelm the post office, souvenir shops and public lavatories.

So Wilson Tuckey may be onto a winner. All these people invading Australia look like losers, having had the governments they deserved, terrible foreign food, probably with funny tummies and doubtless pursued by debt collectors. They’ve probably all been in jail as well. Certainly the people smuggling them should be in jail.

Sounds like a winning platform for the next Australian general election and then Wilson Tuckey could be put in charge of keeping Australian bogs brilliantly white, a symbol of his apparent fundamental beliefs.

Being myself well traveled in lands where bearded people often walk around dressed in bed sheets festooned with artillery, I have been to the Holy Land and seen the Wall of Jericho. At least, what`s left of it, since it fell down.

From which I reached the conclusion that the Wall of Jericho, the Berlin Wall and the Israel-Palestine Wall would all end up in the same lamentable condition, reflecting that foreigners often have relatively short memories on why they build walls and no maintenance culture.

And a wall around Australia may not work very well either, so more fundamental solutions are also needed.
Lex Luther when he was bargaining with the evil ones from a far off planet to betray Superman famously remarked that his needs were modest, he loved waterfront property and only wanted Australia.

Looked at the globe Australia seems quite large and with a small population, next to Indonesia which looks short on land (it has lots of sea) but with a humungously large population.

So by the time Indonesia has 285 million people in 2040 or so, and Australia might have about ten per cent of that, then Indonesia will be the seventh or eighth biggest economy in the world.

That’s a lot of clean lavatories which Mr Wilson Tuckey could help install via an Oz export program to Indonesia. It’s a big market.

Seeing that the population of Australia is now only about 21 million, there is going to have to be a mind-boggling amount of sexual activity in the next three decades for these already busy Australians, or they would have to let more people in the door to keep up with the target of 10 percent of the Indonesian population.

Following extensive foreign travel, I have reached the conclusion that you can only cope with so much of a good thing. So over-doing the sex is out of the question, especially in-between surfing, sun-bathing and lots of lager, which leaves a more liberal immigration policy as the only other serious option.

After all if the EU gets 333,000 asylum claims a year, and Australia got 4,740 in 2008 then the Land of Oz has not quite reached Doomsday yet.

So hang out, relax, and share it out a bit with the asylum seekers with that Christmas Island spirit. At least they´ve got balls and if they really have been throwing grenades, then some of them might make good spin bowlers for a cricket team.

Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.