Fortress Australia slams door on nice guy image

CANBERRA, June 11 — Australia is slamming the door on its nice guy image, sealing its borders to asylum seekers and turning its back on international pacts to tackle global warming and punish war criminals.

Conservative Prime Minister John Howard won a third term in office last November on a ''fortress Australia'' policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks in the United States and analysts say he his now entrenching his long-held nationalist, domestic agenda.

''This is a radical departure from Australia's open foreign policy of the 1990s,'' political analyst Tony Burke from Adelaide University told Reuters.

''There is a faction within the (ruling) Liberal party and cabinet that is very right wing which has decided -- probably since September 11 -- to become far more isolationist.''

Since September 11, Howard has used the threat of terrorism to justify an existing policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers, many from the Middle East and Afghanistan, in outback camps.

Last Friday, he toughened the policy by removing thousands of islands from its migration zone, preventing arrivals there from applying for visas.

Howard has also moved Australia towards closer links with Washington and Europe, visiting the United States this week for the third time in a year.

Mirroring Washington, Canberra this month abandoned the Kyoto climate pact to cut greenhouse gases saying it would hurt local industry and reversed a decision to endorse the new International Criminal Court due to sovereignty concerns.

Analysts say Howard's pro-Washington stance has failed to endear Australia to its Asian allies, which believe Canberra is trying to be Washington's ''deputy sheriff'' in the region.

Australia was first with its hand up when Washington asked for help in its ''war on terrorism'' after the devastating September 11 suicide attacks and is one of a handful of nations to back the U.S.'s controversial missile shield project.

The United Nations has regularly criticised Australia over the past few years for its mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

But Howard has shrugged off the criticism, arguing his government will decide who comes to Australia, branding the 5,000 boatpeople each year as ''queue jumpers.''

''The outside world sees Australia going back to its 1950s isolationism with Australia only really comfortable with the United States first and Britain second,'' political analyst Nick Economou from Melbourne's Monash University told Reuters.

''But this anti-internationalist approach is not surprising with Mr Howard well aware of Australians' fear of outsiders and regional Australia's economic needs and opposing globalisation.''

Howard's isolationist policies and closer ties with the United States are also seen as a repudiation of his arch-rival and predecessor, former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who focused on Asia and globalisation during the 1990s.

The shift away from globalisation has done Howard's popularity wonders in the island continent of 20 million people.

Analysts do not expect any shift in policy near term with no election due until 2004 and opposition Labor in disarray.

Howard has said he'll review his political career at age 64 in July 2003 but, if he does step down, his heir apparent Treasurer Peter Costello is likely to continue the same focus.

''Costello is hard to read at the moment but he is no longer projecting any cosmopolitanism and knows where the votes are both within the party and with the electorate,'' Economou said.

,,, I like the way things are going in Aussie. Take a look at this [courtesy of Madfly]...

Australia Calls the UN's Bluff

Bureaucrats from the UN have been strutting around the globe sanctimoniously criticizing countries for their failure to uphold UN treaties. This criticism is carried out by way of the UN's Treaty Monitoring Committees to which countries must report every several years to indicate their compliance with the treaties.

The problem is that these UN Treaty Monitoring Committees, in accordance with a secret arrangement made December, 1996, at Deep Cove, New York, between the heads of UN agencies and radical feminist NGOs, are to "re-interpret" UN treaties so as to read into them feminist, anti-family provisions that were never written into the treaties in the first place. The Committees were also instructed at the meeting to send out "special rappateurs" (reporters) to cross the borders into countries which had ratified the treaties, to investigate personally whether compliance with the treaties was actually taking place. This arrangement was made in order to impose a more radical agenda world-wide, especially the promotion of abortion and other anti-family policies, including homosexuality, liberalized prostitution and adolescent access to abortion and contraception without parental knowledge or consent - while pretending that these treaties call for such extreme policies.

The reason for this charade is due to the fact that most of the UN treaties came into existence and were ratified years ago, well before the western powers' feminist, anti-life agenda had coalesced at the UN. As a result the treaties, e.g., the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which came in effect in 1981; the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights both passed by the General Assembly in 1966; and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which entered into force in 1976, did not include politically correct, anti-family, feminist provisions.

Because of this, the Treaty Monitoring Committees began to "re-interpret" these treaties to the feminist agenda. These Treaty Monitoring Committees, by the way, are supposed to be selected by way of secret ballot by the ratifying countries, but by some mysterious process, known only to UN officials, the Committee members have, with few exceptions, all been feminist activists.

The CEDAW treaty has been especially proven to be a great boon to the Treaty Monitoring Committee as it lends itself well to "re-interpretation." Some examples of the Committee's re-interpretation include:

· The CEDAW document does not mention abortion, but mainly Catholic countries, such as Ireland, Nicaragua, Colombia, have been criticized by the Treaty Monitoring Committees for their restrictive abortion laws.

· The CEDAW document condemns prostitution, but the Treaty Monitoring Committee has directed China and Kyrystan to liberalize their prostitution laws. (Feminists object only to the trafficking in women and regard the sex trade as an acceptable occupation for a woman - either by choice or from necessity).

· The CEDAW committee criticized Belarus for instituting Mother's Day (an undue emphasis and sexual stereotyping of women, according to the Committee).

· Libya was directed by the Committee to reinterpret the Koran to abide by the Committee's new feminist "guidelines."

Another example is the Treaty Monitoring Committee for the Convention on the Rights of the Child criticized Canada, Britain and Australia for permitting the spanking of children, although there was no such prohibition included in the Convention.

Further, it is bizarre that although these self-important Committees have no power to enforce their guidelines, they are becoming more effective in implementing them, by their working closely with sympathetic NGOs in countries that have been subject to criticism. Also, feminist NGOs frequently run investigations of their own against their own governments and then approach the Treaty Monitoring Committees with their list of alleged failures. This occurred in Canada, in November, 1998, at Toronto's York University, when feminist groups met to organize a report to the CEDAW Treaty Monitoring Committee to ensure that the Canadian government be criticized by the Committee for its perceived failure to strictly follow the feminist agenda. (It's difficult to believe that there are any grounds for complaint by feminists in Canada that the Liberal government in Ottawa has failed them on any issue.)

Australia Calls the UN's Bluff

The Australian Coalition government of Prime Minister, John Howard, encouraged by pro-family organizations, especially our sister, pro-family organization, in Australia, Endeavour Forum, announced in September that Australia would no longer report to UN's Treaty Monitoring Committees. The government said it was capable of monitoring its own human rights record.

Australia's decisive action came about because of a stinging UN criticism over Australia's handling of refugees and its aboriginals. The government was outraged by the Committee's strident criticism about matters which Australia regarded not only as outside the Committee's competence, but as beyond the terms of any international agreement.

The Australian decision was based on a review by its Parliamentary Committee, established in March to access the problem of such Committees overstepping their mandate. The Australian report concluded that the UN must:

· Ensure adequate recognition of the primary role of democratically elected governments and the subordinate role of NGOs;

· Ensure that committees and individual members work within their mandates;

· Improve their operational effectiveness and responsiveness to states' concerns.

This is the first time that a government has pulled away from the Treaty Monitoring Committee's compliance system. Hopefully, this will encourage other countries to do the same!

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