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Asia Buzz: No Worries
Australia's human-rights may be shaky, but she'll be right, mate!
By TERRY McCARTHY
August
9, 2000
Web posted at 6:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 6:00 a.m. EDT
Australia, antipodean to the end, has a funny way of standing things on their heads. In some ways, Australia is one of the most tolerant and open-minded countries in the Pacific. Since it opened its arms to Asian immigrants in the last two decades, racial relations have been smooth and harmonious. There is little inter-ethnic crime--even among Sydney's large communities of Serbs, Croats and Bosnians. Sydney's Mardi Gras sees the largest gathering of gay and lesbian people in the hemisphere. And the country as a whole is marked by a distinct absence of ideology--if you exclude sport, which functions as dogma, religion and guiding light to everyone born under the Southern Cross.
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Why then, would Australia have such a bizarre record on human rights? After all, this is the country that jumped right in to help the poor citizens of East Timor when they were being massacred by Jakarta's thugs last year (let's put aside the fact that Australia was the first country to recognize Indonesia's 1976 annexation of East Timor).
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Australia's ambassador extraordinaire, Richard Butler, spent many long and anguished months trying to ferret out the truth about Iraqi missile programs--until he had the carpet whisked from underneath his feet when it was revealed that U.S. intelligence was using the UN inspection teams as a front for their own purposes. No fault of the Aussies, though. And in Cambodia, Australia was one of the leading voices for a peace deal to end three decades of civil war that had ravaged the country.
Sterling record, you might think. Aggression reserved for the rugby field, unruly behavior confined to the louts on Kuta Beach in Bali, and rudeness limited to florid language in parliamentary exchanges. Otherwise a wonderful place.
So, one wonders, how could Australia possibly find itself commiserating with China on how both countries are unfairly criticized for their human-rights record? Never, you might protest. But, fair reader, such was the case when Australia was hauled over the coals recently by the United Nations Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination, known by its acronym CERD. Australia, CERD reported, has draconian mandatory sentencing laws, particularly in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, which lead to people being thrown in jail for relatively minor offences like shopkeeping. And, surprise surprise, the number of Aborigines who fall victim to mandatory sentencing is disproportionately high. The result: jails in the North and the West full of Aboriginal teenagers, doing six months for stealing a chocolate bar. With disturbingly high level of suicides, too.
Something wrong here? You might think so. In fact, even Prime Minister John Howard, otherwise a conservative in the old mould, thinks so--but has said that he will not intervene because it is up to individual states to make their own laws. And if the rednecks in Darwin want to incarcerate Aborigines for infractions that in other countries might merit a few stern words from a policeman and nothing more--so be it. That's federalism for you!
The Chinese delegate in Geneva, of course, was full of sympathy for Australia's position. Beijing is regularly picked on for its enlightened treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, for its efforts to enrich the life of Tibetans, for its careful preservation of social order and protection of the weak and impressionable from the cancers of Falun Gong and other such undesirables. So it was natural that the man from Beijing and the man from Canberra should be seen conferring in the halls of the UN in Geneva. As they say in a different part of the world--my enemy's enemy is my friend.
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