This is a new kind of human rights abuse - except they tried this shit ten years ago and it backfired.
Mr Bolvaran, who turned 42 on Thursday, came to Australia as a one-year-old when his family fled the Pinochet regime in 1974 and lived in the country since.
During his time in Australia he met and fell in love with Rachel Delucia, with whom he has three sons, two of them under the age of 10.
But his life in Australia was not always so idyllic, as Mr Bolvaran freely admitted.
He fell into the wrong crowd, racking up a petty criminal rap sheet that included drug possession and stealing.
Unfortunately for Mr Bolvaran, who lived in Brisbane on a permanent resident visa, he got caught up in changes to the Migration Act that saw visas cancelled if the holders were sentenced to 12 months or more in prison.
Those legislative changes have proven to be a sore point between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and his Australian counterpart Malcolm Turnbull, given the number of Kiwis affected.
Mr Bolvaran, who could only speak limited Spanish and had no family support network in Chile, was deported last month.
"I miss my kids … It's my birthday and I miss the hell out of my boys and my partner," he said.
"I'm so far away from her and everyone. This is where I was born, but I'm lost here. I don't know what to do with myself."
Mr Bolvaran was jailed in July after he pleaded guilty to a string of offences, including drug possession, possession of a knife in public and receiving tainted property.It's terrible policy. First of all, it metes out a second punishment to the time served. Obviously the punishment doesn't apply to a citizen, so it means there are de facto two sets of laws for the people of Australia: one for the citizen and another that is far more destructive and punitive for permanent residents.
After serving time in the Brisbane Correctional Centre at Wacol, Mr Bolvaran was transferred to Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney to await deportation.
It also makes the Criminal Justice system merely a partial criminal justice system and the Department of Immigration gets to punish somebody for the same crime, a second time (i.e. forget "double jeopardy") just based on their visa status. You wonder how the esteemed judges feel about that, should it ever be brought in front of them. If a government body that wasn't the judges handing out legal punishments, you'd think judges might "take a very dim view of that sort of thing". I'm sure it violates something called "the Separation of Powers". Hmm... let me think now.., yes, yes it would.
If the punishment is meant to be a deterrent for crime, it's not going to work because it targets a socio-economic group that is likely not to come in contact with the information. None of the cases that have been reported on the issue show that such legislation has any deterrent for criminality. It's imaginary, and prejudicial.
What's worrying is that the ALP are saying they're in lockstep with the government when it comes to this astoundingly stupid legislation. This make you wonder just how good a mind these idiot politicians have, when even a legal novice like this blogger can spot the obvious legal problem with enforcing such bad laws. So much for Shadow AG Dreyfus being such a legal eagle. The thing that make your citizens and permanent residents really lose faith in government as an institution, is when it gives bipartisan support for bad laws.
This is a bad law. Somebody needs to challenge it.
Wrapping It Up In Paris
It would appear that Paris meetings to deal with climate change ended successfully. Maybe 6 years of even more extreme weather events persuaded more governments. In some subtle way, this is what has happened in Australia over the last decade. There are holdouts who still believe that climate change is not real or a UN conspiracy, or has stopped, but in most part the middle of the electorate thinks it is real enough and needs to be dealt with.
Of course, the Paris Summit and its global climate agreement has nothing in it that is binding or demands accountability, so it is a little bit like everybody agreeing to a wishlist for Santa, and if everybody's good, we'll get global warming under control.
When you think about what happened at Copenhagen in 2009, and how it led to the demise of Kevin Rudd, followed by massive infighting in the ALP government, and the subsequent denialist stupidocracy of the Abbott Government, only to see the return of Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party mere 3 months ago - and therefore offering some hope of serious climate policy - it's been a terrible, terrifying, 6 years.
It's 6 years of missed opportunities; it's 6 years of stalled investments; it's 6 years of more carbon being pumped into the atmosphere that could have been restrained; and 6 years of having to live with people who have utterly unscientific views about climate science and having to argue with them as if they had a leg to stand on or had any intellectual merit. The 6 years of extra arguments, extra discussions, extra politicking, extra effort, all makes me feel faint when I reflection it. And this agreement merely gets us to a starting line that might help us get on top of the challenge.
And with Greg Hunt as the minister for the environment still, I have to say I have absolutely no faith that we'll get anything done.
More Budget Cuts To Come
We are - on the whole - way too complacent about the Australian economy. Especially with the collapse in commodity prices for iron ore, nickel, and oil, a lot of our major export earners are suddenly hitting the wall where they can't be profitable digging stuff up form the ground. If you wanted proof the mining boom was well and truly over, then look no further. BHP of course is taking a double punch because of the dam bursting in Brazil, so its shares have slid down from $25 to $17. The resources sector has been in a two year retreat, but lately it's becoming a nosedive.
Clive Palmer is suddenly running around looking for line of credit to keep his nickel refinery going, and that's obviously because of the collapse in nickel prices. All of this decline in income has now shown up with diminishing revenue for the government. This in turn is going to mean the Coalition Government's favourite thing, more budget cuts.
The Treasurer's task of finding spending offsets will be made more difficult by a sharply worse picture on the revenue side of the budget, which has been hammered by plunging commodity prices and stagnant wage growth.
Leading economists believe the government will be forced to reveal a worsening of the budget deficit of between $33 billion and $39 billion over the next four years.
The grim picture was a focus of Mr Turnbull's talks with state and territory leaders on Friday. The Council of Australian Governments' joint communique warned of "emerging budgetary pressures across all levels of government, particularly in the health sector".
On Sunday, Mr Morrison said MYEFO update key forecasts to present a "realistic outlook for economic conditions moving forward".
"As was demonstrated by the recent National Accounts data, our economy is transitioning from resource investment led growth towards broader based growth," he said.
"Part of this transition involves dealing with the challenges of lower commodity prices and a declining terms of trade from their historic peaks in the wake of the mining investment boom.
"The government will continue to restore the budget by controlling expenditure and supporting policies that grow the economy. The budget will not be restored by increasing the overall tax burden on Australians."So says ScoMo. A lot of this stuff killing revenue is outside of the government's control. Yet the fixation with budget deficits will mean there will be a fresh round of razor gang activity but really, they'll probably find they have to spend the money anyway. It's like the domestic violence thing. The Abbott Government cut $300m out of domestic violence related expenditures. Turnbull has had to go back out and spend $100m. When it's all said and done, he'll probably have to spend the other $200m anyway, because there were probably very good reasons that $300m was earmarked for the program.
If you think it through from a historic perspective, at this point in time these razor gang exercises in austerity are redundant, if not futile. Certainly since the second budget of the Gillard government, there's been significant cuts to government programs. Add 2 of the Coalition's own efforts and you'd have to say 4 years of cuts would have been pretty deep. It's very visible that the Federal Government is running pretty lean these days. What the government has to do is get more serious about tax reform.
The problem is, it's not a government that likes wage rises, seeing that they represent the employers' lobby. All the talk of raising revenue has been around raising the GST, another regressive bit of policy-talk. In that sense it's a government of vested interests that won't talk its own constituents down from their fighting-a-class-war posture. It would rather just hand over the bill to the wider community and be proud they're trying to balance the books. It's only 3 months or so of Malcolm-In-The-Hot-Seat but this government is looking sclerotic already. When the slowdown hits the wider electorate, and it will, I doubt Malcolm Turnbull is going to stay so popular.
No comments:
Post a Comment