The SBS program on Go Back where you come from has certainly caught the watchers by surprise, World -wide viewing by tens of millions and it even made some people change from watching Footie, Alan Jones or Derryn Hinch.
Last night’s episode was shown to even have two Australian men helping the Malaysian ‘Polisie’ ferret out some hidden hapless refugees and the Australian Girl ‘Raquel ‘waxing about how we should do the same in Australia.’ Let’s forgive and just think it was Stockholm syndrome. The same Raquel baulked at using the toilets at the African refugee camp and seemed determent not to go to the toilet for the next few days. The best of luck to her. It was riveting viewing when she was interviewed on what she actually did in Australia, “nothing”. Do you work? “No”. What do you do? “Nothing”. The interviewing UN official smiling and nodding, he fully understood.
Did anyone not feel the humaneness and warmth of those refugees in Kuala Lumpur, especially the kid’s eagerness to go and learn at schools? The place, despite the terrible overcrowding, kept spotless, kids in clean clothes and big smiles.
We have our three flush toilets, surround sound and plasma, our recycle bins full of empty wine or coke bottles just out of sheer luck of birth and that’s all that separates us from the African refugee with his hacked up face and missing limb.
Of course the program is very ‘Big Brother” and similar to the format used on many of those type of programmes, including many of those cooking competitions and seems mostly based on some form of humiliation, expulsions or put-downs. We all become in a way perverts on failures, misery and bullying.
The good thing about watching so much world misery unfolding has been the opposite of it and the joy and emergence in our garden of the bulbs which I keenly planted some weeks ago. A single jonquil has almost started to flower and at least another dozen or so are getting buds. Can you believe it? Each morning I go out and check both front and back. The back garden where we have the cloth line, I planted both tulips and Dutch Irises. The twelve Irises have all come up and I am now waiting for the tulips to poke through any day. The shortest day is now behind and already we have more sun, the volcanic ash has moved on and the carbon tax is now more likely to get the go ahead. Life goes on.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I’ve only watched one episode where refugees work about 10 hours/day in the fields for just a roof and some food. When asked, why not get a job in construction, etc, the reply was, “They’ll shoot us! At least we are safe here!”
I’m ashamed every day of the way we treat refugees/ asylum seekers. As Emmjay says, it is a f%$#in’ disgrace.
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Yes, it’s sad.
Here is a response from an Australian working in Bangladesh who liked my ABC Drum piece on Turkey:
Quote:In Tunisia locals were driving hundreds of kilometres with home-made food to feed those who’d fled Libya, off their own bat. Among those who fled were Bangladeshi workers. I am Australian but live in Bangladesh and it was reported in the newspapers here.
And if you step across the border from here into West Bengal you will find millions of previously Bangladeshis (mostly Hindus) who moved there when things were not as tolerant for Hindus here as they are now. Not all of them are refugees, there are also economic considerations; and from my understanding they are not processed at all. Just absorbed into the local communities (and I believe at one point India was giving ‘resettlement’ money though I am not 100% on that). But around Kolkata are massive communities of non-citizens and having spoken to my friend who is one, he says the Indian authorities don’t harass them. His kids go to school there. Whole towns could be deported back to Bangladesh if they were strict about it.
Unquote.
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That is a beautiful piece of writing Gez. Passionate. So straight from the heart. I love the structure. I am uplifted. Thank you. The content of television this week has seen me texting to a friend crying in words for immediate conversational relief specifically because of the misinformation and slant put on the most serious of subjects by journalists who seem to have taken all leave of their senses and therein might be the clue to why these miseries are being perpetuated.
A program about the prosperity of Brazil this week had me so angry and dispirited at the ABC televising such drivel. Thank you again for this piece. It is truly a gift.
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You are very kind Shoe. There is nothing like getting praise. Thank you. Am looking forward to your next piece!
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Gez, FM absolutely refuses to watch. She says it’s just too desperately sad and it makes her feel ashamed, powerless and angry in equal measures. When we had the Rodent as PM, it was kind of unsurprising. But since we have a second term Labor government with even fewer ideas and certainly nothing constructive for refugee policy – quite the opposite, it’s hard to argue that there is any hope available in this land of plenty.
Fuckin’ disgrace.
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