Who let in the Sudanese? Amanda Vanstone: Immigration Lunacy in Australia
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
December 22, 2016 8:35am
The crime wave in Victoria by people of African descent has been astonishing, with the latest victim a young woman who was stopped while cycling and carved up by three Africans. I have repeatedly asked of the crime-plagued Sudanese in particular: who let them in? And now we know.
Here is Amanda Vanstone, Immigration Minister in the Howard Government, in January 2007 attacking activists demanding she do more for boat people:
At a time when another major refugee crisis is unfolding in Sudan we should be trying to take a broader perspective.
The latest refugee crisis in Sudan is not the first…
Comparatively little is known of this crisis in Australia. This should be a matter of shame to some refugee advocates within Australia…
Vanstone was Immigration Minister for all that time, having taken over from Phillip Ruddock in 2003:
In 1984, when Labor held government under Bob Hawke, the intake of Sudanese refugees for resettlement was zero. During the ensuing decade just 34 Sudanese refugees were resettled in Australia. The intake jumped to 354 in 1994-95, heralding a rapidly increasing flow of Sudanese every year, rising to 6147 in 2003-2004.
Experts such as Paris Aristotle from the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture say the influx was prompted in part by requests from the UNHCR for Australia to give priority to Africa in refugee resettlement quotas because of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the long-running civil war in Sudan…
But in 2007 a new Immigration Minister realised a disaster was in the making:
Kevin Andrews, who assumed the role of Immigration Minister on January 30 this year, has turned that sentiment on its head. Within a week of starting in the role, newspapers reported that Andrews planned to seek support from cabinet to drastically reduce the intake of Sudanese refugees because of concerns about a rising tide of Sudanese gangs and related crime.
Over the course of this year, Andrews’s concerns about the alleged inability of Sudanese refugees to integrate have become more explicit, culminating on Monday when he made plain that integration was to become one of the key criteria for determining refugee resettlement quotas.
“Some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting to the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope, and therefore it makes sense to … slow down the rate of intake from countries such as Sudan,” he said.
Naturally, moral grand-standers of the Left refused to believe there was a problem:
New England independent MP Tony Windsor is not convinced the latest debate does not have an electoral purpose..
“Philip Ruddock for years, when the boatpeople situation was on, used to say, ‘We’ve got to look after the Africans’.
“They seem to have settled in quite well… Kevin Andrews has got a bit of explaining to do, otherwise people will quite rightly say he’s playing the race card.”
Victoria Police in 2007 spread false information:
But worst was the reaction of Victoria Police, led by Labor-appointed Christine Nixon.
Nixon claimed Andrews was wrong about Sudanese crime rates: “They’re not, in a sense, represented more than the proportion of them in the population.”
A police multicultural liaison officer agreed: “There’s an under-representation of the Sudanese in crime stats.”
Those police claims were false. Figures let slip by Nixon the following year revealed crime rates for Sudanese youth at least four times the state average.
“It has been a long time since I have heard such a pure form of racism out of the mouth of any Australian politician,” sneered Queensland premier Anna Bligh.
The media vilified Andrews, rather than the Immigration Ministers who had put Australians in danger – Vanstone and Ruddock:
The Age accused Andrews of making “unpleasant and inflammatory” comments to provoke “a predictably base reaction from those sensitive to immigration on racial grounds”.
Yet even in 2007, as I wrote at the time, the evidence was urgent and compelling that a grave mistake had been made:
Of course many Sudanese will make excellent contributions to this country. Of course, and of course and of course. But it’s also clear that a worrying number of Sudanese immigrants – coming from a very different culture and a much poorer country with much lower standards of education – are struggling to make their way here and to integrate.
Recent signs of that include a huge brawl, worries by Sudanese parents about their uncontrollable children dropping out, concerns by teachers of a lack of ” life skills“, vicious assaults, and police warnings of gang violence.
A state school principal has also told me how very hard she’s found it to integrate the African students in her school, given how few of them have any English or much respect for authority. What makes her challenge worse, she says, is that she has so many of them, leading then naturally to form a “gang” rather than be forced to assimilate.
We can ignore all this, as we usually, do and shout “racist” at those who point out that we have a problem. But we need to rethink just how – or even whether – we resettle immigrants whose culture is so very, very different.
Even Sudanese defenders of the Sudanese refugees back then were actually admitting that we were admitting people more likely to resort to violence:
On 3AW, a Sudanese community spokeswoman asks for understanding: The implication of this journey (as a refugee) could make people prone to be violent.
Er, OK.
And even then, in 2007, the media should have realised our refugee and immigration program – which had already let in hard-to-assimilate Lebanese Muslims – had exposed us to yet another completely needless danger:
A SUDANESE refugee who embarked on a three-day rape spree and sliced an elderly woman’s throat a month after reaching Australiawill serve at least the next 17 years in jail.
Hakeem Hakeem, 21, was yesterday sentenced to 24 years’ jail, with a non-parole period of 17 years, for a string of depraved sexual attacks in Melbourne’s southeast in March 2005.
The Supreme Court heard that, just one month after arriving in Australia, Hakeem set out on a drug and alcohol-fuelled campaign of terror on the streets of Dandenong.
What have we done? Why don’t we learn?
And a word from Vanstone and Ruddock on how they got the Sudanese intake so horribly wrong would be useful.