History never repeats - or does it?

You've got to hand it to the Australian government for sheer ingenuity, and for the wide-ranging research they clearly do to find solutions to percieved problems. In the latest bid to control the touchy issue of border security, the idea of a floating asylum centre has been - and I hate to say this, but feel I have to - floated. Yes, that's right. Not content with processing those who arrive here illegally in off-shore centres on nearby islands like Nauru, it has been decided that these people don't even deserve to arrive on land, instead shunted straight to a mobile, floating dentention centre. Clearly, the federal government have turned to 18th century England for inspiration on how to treat a mass of desperate people, many of them pitifully poor - especially when compared with the people who are telling them they can't come here.

The floating detention centre is intended to limit the back-tracking required by boats that are rounding up the boat-people and illegal fishermen poaching in Australian waters. Where once they would have been taken to a northern Australian port, or to Nauru or Christmas Islands as part of the "Pacific Solution" (the name of the enormously costly program of keeping people from Australia unless they are willing to work for peanuts in factory jobs that the locals are apparently considered unqualified for - but I digress nto other controversial waters), the proposal would see them off-loaded onto a boat. Civilian tenders have been called for to supply the boat.

Can anybody else say "prison hulks"? Because that's what I'm thinking.

A little history lesson might not go astray here, for those people who never read any of Colleen McCullough's book Morgan's Run, or Dickens' Great Expectations (not to mention any o the many texts written about the convict transportation era). Not too long after America declared its independence, and therefore stopped being a dumping ground for the flotsam and jetsom of English society, a decision was reached to relieve the overcrowding in jails by putting some old ships to a new use, anchored in a river, housing prisoners until such time as they could be shipped off to that other great big prison, Australia (OK, I know,I've taken quite a few liberties with this version of history.I know the hulks were around before Australia was even considered as the new dumping ground for convicts. I know lots of things that don't get included here. This is an overview. Anyone wanting more information is refered to Google or Wikipedia for much more accurate impressions of prison hulks and transportation.) Sure, this version won't be anchored in the Thames like the original hulks were, and I'm sure we won't be hearing any horror stories about disease and over-crowding (although that doesn't mean it won't be happening, just that we won't hear about it). It seems to me that, after looking to the 1950s for inspiration for so long, the goverment has finally moved past that era. Well past it, in fact, and have found the ideal solution to dealing with large numbers of unwanted people who have somehow transgressed - mostly by wanting something better for themselves and their families.

That's right. Put them in a boat, and nobody really needs to care about them for years at a time. They've one-upped the 18th century English with this plan though, the the boats they're talking about now aren't dis-masted naval vessels anchored in the Thames where the stench was apparently appalling. Instead, this incarnation combines the best elements of the transportation system with the hulks - civilian contractors (in the original version this offered a handy opportunity for those who were finding the slave trade umprofitable to have government sanction for the moving of large numbers of people with little or no sanitary precautions and even less food) supply the vessel, and by keeping it far offshore (for the convenience of the navyand customs officials, obviously) asylum seekers get taken right out of the media spotlight to be treated as they so clearly deserve - locked up in conditions in breach of humanitarian regulations for years, left to rot, before being shipped back to countries that, for whatever reason, are unable to provide healthy living conditions.

So hats off to the Australian government for proving, once and for all, that a democratically elected government can embarass so many of it's own people. And apologies to anyone who thought that I was going to be able to keep my own, decidedly leftist leanings completely out of the equation when maintaining a blog...