In spite of the Rudd resurrection, the refugee debate in Australia is still framed in the odious game of gaining political mileage by demonstrating a certain chauvinist pride in protecting borders.

To that end, to convey that the assessment of refugee status is not tough enough, that too many unworthy people may gain entry to this boat-people-besieged-country, the Foreign Minister Bob Carr claims that as many as 100 per cent of Iranian asylum seekers may only be “economic migrants”.

Yet, in crowded camps on the Thai Burma border, the values of refugees and their supporters suggest that if Australia wants to build a fairer society, much can be learned from refugees – people so easily stigmatised as unwanted and unworthy.

Evidence from Jim Chalmers’ recently published book Glory Daze shows Australians bemoaning their financial lot even when most enjoy the benefits from an affluent economy. On this issue there is a chasm between the values of refugees and their supporters and the priorities deemed important by politicians.

Different attitudes towards entitlement to health and education services are an indication of the width of this chasm.

Kachana, the director of the Burma Children’s Medical Fund, describes her work:

Of course we provide medical services as a right, not just because our patients are poor. We do depend on donors to finance our services but how could you talk to sick people about costs when our responsibility is to meet their needs?

In the Thai border town of Mae Sot, the Mae Tao clinic provides medical services for hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrant workers. The director of the clinic, Dr Cynthia Maung, gives me her interpretation of a common good:

During the funding crisis of last year, we were $650,000 short, but we could not afford to charge patients. To combat that crisis, all the staff agreed to take a 20 per cent cut in their meager wages.

A supporting Australian doctor, Kate Bruck, explains:

That reduction was uniform because of an equity in pay policy: same wages for surgeon, nurse, social worker, fund raiser, accountant, librarian or manager of sanitation.

My interpreter and guide in the Ma Lae refugee camp was a 41-year-old Karen named Law La Say, whose salary for his job to train camp residents to be therapists for drug addicts is $250 per annum. To the question, “How do you mange to be so optimistic?”, he answered:

I survived 17 years in the jungle, always on the move from the Burmese army. There was no time to cry. Laughing expresses my feelings. This camp may seem like a prison, but we know one another, we can support one another.

Law La Say’s thoughts are echoed by Naw Nweh, a member of the camp’s Women’s Support Group:

I also lived in the jungle. This camp is better because it is our family home. We know we are refugees but we have hopes for our children, even for repatriation to Burma.

With a shy smile she adds:

But don’t believe what they tell you about the reforms in Burma. The people in charge are the same people who drove us here.

In Australia, in the controversy over the Gonski report, state premiers still calculate the difference between their political fortunes and a commitment to children’s future education. The pugnacious Premier Newman of Queensland seems to favour his short-term political interests over any long-term vision about the quality of education for all children irrespective of their parents’ means.

Karen children also want the opportunities provided by education in good schools. The Bangkok Post journalist Phil Thornton records:

On the Karen side of the border, the schools have no buildings and no desks. In small groups children cluster under the shade of a large teak tree. Their teacher explains, ‘Time is precious for our children. They are desperate to learn but our biggest problem is malaria.’   

A final contrast in values concerns food. While Australian television is saturated with programs on how to cook, how to extend knowledge of nutritious dishes, and even how to lose weight because you have eaten too much, UN reports about Burma identify problems of hunger and food security. In their report Chronic Emergency, the Back Packer Workers Team from Mae Sot concluded that hunger and malnutrition has drastic effects in eastern Burma where one in 10 children will die before age one and more than one in five before their fifth birthday.

A refugee, Naw Doo, explains that she and her two teenage children are used to going without food:

Many times we only have rice and chilli. We eat twice a day. We get sick but that’s normal for people here. Look how thin I am.

In Australia’s election campaign, reference to a common good is unlikely. We are likely to hear derision about asylum seekers, probably talk about the benefits of privatising public hospitals to make them more efficient, and attacks against trade unions for eroding individual freedom.

Ironically, several significant projects on the Thai Burma border are financed by the humanitarian arm of Australia’s trade union movement, Apheda, whose staff value the ideals of a common good. To achieve such a goal, economist Jeffrey Sachs writes that perhaps the best we can do is to appeal to enlightened self-interest because it is everyone’s interest to care for the vulnerable and for the planet.

If the impressive Dr Maung became the campaign manager for Kevin Rudd or for Tony Abbott, she would emphasise why refugees who are thankful for small mercies have so much to teach those in a lucky country who might regard refugees as a threat to their well being.

On the hustings for either party, Dr Maung might start by explaining why health care should be given according to need and not according to an ability to pay:

If you want a healthy society, all people have to be treated as equals. If people are to live and work as equals, the barriers that divide them have to be removed.

Professor Stuart Rees travelled to the Thai Burma border in mid-June on an exploratory mission for the Sydney Peace Foundation. Stuart Rees is Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation and Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here.

This article was first published by ABC’s The Drum on 3 July 2013

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It was billed as a triumph of law enforcement and cooperation between security agencies from Mexico and the United States: the arrest of Jesus Alfredo Guzman, alias El Gordo, or “The Fat One”. A senior figure in the narco-trafficking underworld, Guzman is also the son of the biggest of the lot, Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s most wanted man with an estimated personal fortune in excess of $1 billion.

Except he wasn’t. Guzman, that is: the man in custody was actually one Felix Beltran, an innocent car dealer from the outskirts of Guadalajara, as the federal attorney general’s office admitted shortly afterwards. What started as a story of derring-do by the Mexican Marines, who carried out the raid, had come perilously close to bearing out a famous dictum of Marx (Groucho): “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms”.

There could be no starker illustration of the basic folly of a society declaring a “war on drugs”. Sooner or later the drugs will declare war back. Mexico goes to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, after six years in which the present incumbent, Felipe Calderón, has expanded the armed federal police sixfold, with assistance from across the border in the shape of “Plan Merida”, US government funding to buy aircraft, surveillance software and military training.

What is sauce for the goose, of course, is sauce for the gander; there is one rather conspicuous shopping mall for cashed-up narco-traffickers looking to upgrade their capacity to fight back.

Sure enough, investigations by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms show a large percentage of weapons used in violent incidents involving the cartels also come from the United States. Estimates of the death toll vary, but all agree there has been a huge upsurge in the number of killings since Calderón took office. His drug war may very well have cost 60,000 lives, including many innocent bystanders and a steady trickle of journalists who asked the wrong person the wrong questions.

The front-runner in the race to succeed Calderón is Enrique Peña Nieto, a scion of the family that established post-colonial Mexico and candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (which sounds like another contradiction in terms, but hey, this is Mexico). He’s vowed to deliver more of the same, with still greater intensity: security spending, having already doubled since 2006, would treble under a Peña presidency.

There is another way, and more and more Mexican voices are being raised in its favour. I visited Eduardo Gallo y Tello at his sumptuous house and gardens, high in the southern suburbs of Mexico City, to hear about his campaign for drugs to be legalised and regulated, instead. The opulent surroundings testify to the fruits of his successful business career, running a chain of hotels — but they belie the sadness in his life. His daughter, Paola, then 25, was kidnapped and killed 10 years ago by members of a drug cartel.

Determined, he told NM, not to let her become just another “statistic number”, he short-circuited the bumbling efforts of police to investigate the crime himself, and devoted his considerable energies to researching the political economy of the drug trade. At first, few, if any of the rehab agencies working in the country would back his call for legalisation. Now, it’s finding growing support.

Declare a substance in demand to be illegal, he explains, and you make it more difficult to produce, move and obtain. That forces the price up, in turn attracting people who want to make money and are willing to break the law in order to do it. The same logic lay behind prohibition of alcohol, in the US itself, and that didn’t work, either. “We have to find a way to make the cartels reconsider, that this is not as good as they thought it was. And that means regulating drugs,” he said.

The reasons why Mexicans join the cartels are not difficult to figure out. Not from the perspective of Ciudad Juarez, which sits on a key border crossing (read “smuggling route”) with the United States. The iconic Texan town of El Paso gazes down from the other side, across the dried-up bed of the Rio Bravo (the Americans call it the Rio Grande). The water is stored in reservoirs upstream in New Mexico. The US is bound by treaty obligations to give its southern neighbour a prescribed share, but that does not make up for the dusty desolation of a city deprived of its river.

Juarez has seen more than its fair share of violence, much of it drug-related as rival cartels battle for control. Alternative livelihoods are unattractive. Agricultural labourers, in the surrounding fields, have few rights: they can find themselves paying to travel to work, only to be turned away if weather conditions, or employer whims, prove unfavourable.

To have farm workers returning empty-handed to their wives who live in the cheap concrete boxes, baking in the sun, that pass for housing developments, is a significant contributory factor to high levels of domestic violence, according to veteran local campaigner and scholar, Professor Manuel Robles Flores.

Still flush from successfully seeing off a Clinton-era proposal for a US nuclear waste dump just across the border, Flores held forth below the picture on the wall of his museum from a visit by Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista peasant rights movement. “To live and die with dignity,” is his aim; he and local farmers are now petitioning for water rights, and a renegotiation of those treaties with Washington.

Another version of the future for youth in Juarez is to enter a maquila, the factories that owe their existence to the North American Free Trade Agreement, under which US-owned firms can benefit from cheap labour while avoiding any tariffs on the goods they export into the world’s richest market.

Theresa Almada runs a community centre, the Casa de Promoción Juvenil, in a tough barrio of Juarez. It offers after-school classes to keep local kids off the street, and she scrapes together funding to pay for the most promising to attend university. One of them, Eric Poncé, was drifting towards a life of crime, but now expresses his anger, at the depredations of police and gang-bangers in his community, through energetic rapping, and articles for the college magazine. “Theresa-Mama paid for my enrolment”, he declared, “otherwise I’d be dead or in a factory earning 500 pesos a week [about $35] without any dreams”.

Such notions have featured in the presidential poll, but not as prominently as they should have. Until they rise further up the political agenda, the good people I’ve met here seem destined to have to carry on picking up the pieces.

By Jake Lynch, Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.

This article was first published in the New Matilda on 28 June 2012.

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