The latest “campaign” promise from the man of steel is all about protecting those ever fragile borders of ours:

I am pleased to announce today that the Australian Government has awarded $135m worth of contracts to ensure the continued effective monitoring and protection of our maritime borders.

Involving five Dash 8 aircraft, three Reims 406 electronic surveillance aircraft, and a Bell 412 helicopter, these contracts will strengthen Australia’s aerial surveillance capability.

These assets, which operate from bases in Broome, Darwin, Cairns and the Torres Strait, provide around 136 million of the 148 million square nautical miles of total surveillance coverage every year.

I love the way that this gets referred to as “protecting our borders”. You know what, though? Our borders are fixed in relation to our coastline. They don’t move. Our borders aren’t really under that much threat. Nobody is going to be able to sneak out there at night and move the surveying pegs.

I guess the other ways of describing it aren’t as readily saleable - defending our territory, securing our coastline (which summons a mental picture of people hurriedly sandbagging the beaches to prevent the sea from washing them away)

That is a lot of money, lot of fire-power and a lot of defence bucks. There must be some really potent threat to call for such a high level surveillance of such a large area. A threat from a northern neighbour, perhaps? Reliable information that hostile combatants intend to invade from the North?

Well there certainly have been some major threats highlighted:

Coastwatch surveillance aircraft play a vital role in detecting activities including … attempts to import prohibited goods, illegal fishing, illegal trafficking in flora and fauna and environmental pollution.

I must say, that it is great that the Howard government is ready to step up the surveillance to prevent environmental pollution, demonstrating once again that it is an important key value for the coalition, and an integral part of border protection. Of course, I did leave one thing out of the above quote.

People smuggling. Apparently this phrase has replaced the less suitable “boat people” description, which apparently led too many to concentrate on the people actually in the boats. “Boat people” of course was originally introduced to stamp out the nasty habit of referring to those in the boats as “refugees” or “asylum seekers”. And in the manner of the cane toad, the artificial element introduced to fix a problem has given rise to problems of its own.

Namely, how to justify spending $135m and an impressive range of military technology and fire power to protect us from a marauding hoarde of people on leaky boats with no food. Now, we are enlightened that the people in the boat are not what is important (and won’t bother us as soon as we ship them off to whatever pacific island nation we are using for the purpose at the moment). No, it is the mean, nasty and criminal “people smugglers”.

It is a good thing that we haven’t gone and frittered this money away on health or education or streamlining of immigration processes or any of those less important factors.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2004 at 11:42 am by dan and is filed under campaign 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.