Good reason to be scared
BRACE yourself for Tampa 2.0. Be prepared to be terrified and provoked.
A federal election looms and border security is back like King Kong on the Empire State Building, bigger and hairier than ever.
Brace for a repeat of the fear and loathing that gripped the nation in 2001 when the Howard government refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa to bring to Australia 433 refugees it had rescued in international waters.
Be ready for talk of unruly, unwashed hordes — of caravans and terrorists, drug dealers and gangs — writhing on Australia’s border like eels in a bucket.
Close your eyes and listen. You can almost hear their alien cussing as they do dirty deals with people smugglers so they can splash and crawl, slide and creep, and scuttle like earwigs aboard rickety illegal boats in the dead of night.
The invaders, poised to throw their kids overboard, kneel on prayer mats plotting how to steal our jobs, scoff our tucker, bomb our malls and join our dole queues. OK, I’m exaggerating. But be warned, the King Kong scare tactics have commenced.
A federal election looms and the Federal Government is on the ropes, desperate for a miracle knockout punch after losing the public’s confidence due to its instability, infighting and self-obsession.
On resumption of Federal Parliament this week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison came out swinging like a badly beaten contender, dazed and unsure why he’s still standing in the final round.
The PM announced that Australia’s borders have been weakened by the passing of the Medevac Bill this week. He said he will reopen Christmas Island detention centre for new arrivals who will be tempted to seek asylum here by our newly relaxed borders.
His message to Aussie voters, people smugglers and families fleeing war and persecution is that our borders are now weaker.
He failed to mention the Medevac Bill only applies to asylum seekers already held in detention, and allows only current detainees with medical conditions certified by two doctors to be brought here.
Mr Morrison telegraphed a roundhouse right, a political haymaker, that is ready to be thrown if and when any new images emerge of vessels floundering in the Indian Ocean, or of asylum seekers being frogmarched by uniformed security patrols on to Christmas Island.
Images like these, made public in the impending election campaign, could provide the Coalition its king hit, just like the Tampa did all those years ago.
The awful truth, however, is the potential threat posed at our border pales against another far more terrifying reality facing Australians: growing old.
The aged care royal commission started in Adelaide this week and has already exposed a litany of horror. Tears and anger flowed as ordinary Aussies told heartfelt stories of abuse endured by loved ones in the aged care system.
The commission has flushed out reports of an unsettling overuse of psychotropic medication on dementia sufferers in residential care facilities.
Australian and New Zealand Society for Geriatric Medicine president Edward Strivens told the hearings that 80 per cent of people in residential care with dementia are prescribed such drugs, including antipsychotics, antidepressants and sedatives, but that only 10 per cent benefit from them and that the side-effects “often outweigh the benefits”.
Surely not. This is an outrage.
This is not a potential threat like that posed by a boat of desperados hundreds of kilometres off northern Australia, this is immediate. It’s in our suburbs and it is real.
An astonishing 376,000 Australians live with dementia. The debilitating and progressive condition is expected to be the leading cause of death by the 2020s. It is already the leading cause for women.
This is a huge issue for all of us. We’re all ageing.
I don’t want to be drugged and forgotten in an institution in my final days, and I don’t want my loved ones treated this way either. But this is apparently happening in our neighbourhoods. Now.
The commission has been told of rocketing rates of noncompliance in residential aged care facilities, where services fall short of acceptable standards.
And if you want to stay at home in your old age, getting care delivered is a marathon.
Combined Pensioners and Superannuants Association of NSW policy co-ordinator Paul Versteege told the commission 127,000 Aussies are waiting for home care packages, and they wait up to two years.
Some had already died waiting, revealed Older Persons Advocacy Network chief executive Craig Gear.
Fixing aged care will take more than a king hit in the throes of the final round. It requires long-term thinking and prudent decisions by government — the very reason we pay taxes throughout our working lives.
So, brace yourself for a fear campaign about a remote potential threat posed by asylum seekers arriving by boat that even in a worst-case scenario is unlikely to affect you.
And prepare to be abused as you get old, safe in the knowledge you are likely to be drugged up and will find it difficult to distinguish whether your horror is real or just a wicked nightmare.