Australia considers fast-track visas for white South African farmers
Home affairs minister Peter Dutton says the group deserves ‘special attention’ due to the ‘horrific circumstances’ they face at home
White South African farmers “deserve special attention” from Australia due to the “horrific circumstances” of land seizures and violence, Peter Dutton has said.
The home affairs minister told the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday his department was examining a range of methods to fast-track their path to Australia on humanitarian or other visa programs.
[...]
“The people we’re talking about want to work hard, they want to contribute to a country like Australia,” Dutton said.
“We want people who want to come here, abide by our laws, integrate into our society, work hard, not lead a life on welfare. And I think these people deserve special attention and we’re certainly applying that special attention now.”
[...]
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n ... an-farmers
Bell identifies two further important features of the Victorian discussion of empire. One relates to the reimagining of empire as ‘Greater Britain’, something Bell explored at length in a previous book. The other to the place of settler colonialism. Crucial to the Victorian imaginary was an emergent distinction between empire, as represented by India, and colony, as represented by the settler sovereignties of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA. Again, Seeley is to the point: ‘The colonies and India are in opposite extremes’ (quoted at p. 143). The modalities of rule required to govern India were thought to be very different to those required in settler colonies. Again, theories about history played a part in how the two modes of government were conceived. India, it was alleged, was backward, stuck in the past. The colonies, on the other hand, were really just offshoots of the ‘mother country’. As Britons transplanted to the colonies, they were believed to be capable of upholding commitments to democracy and constitutional liberty nurtured in the motherland. In fact, John Stuart Mill, whose early enthusiasm for settler colonialism would late in his life be displaced by what Bell calls ‘melancholic colonialism’, described the colonies in 1856 as the ‘most prosperous and rapidly progressive communities’ (p. 222).
As Bell makes clear, this distinction could only arise on the basis of a racially encoded imperial imaginary (p. 96). But it was precisely this imaginary that led Victorian liberals to envisage a global British polity or ‘imperial federation’ in which Britain and its settler colonies could reorder the world, or at least the ‘globe-spanning colonial empire’ (p. 233), along liberal principles. Though the political architecture proved impossible to achieve, the Victorian theories and practices of liberalism and empire have endured through the project of the ‘Anglo-world’ (ch. 8).
The ‘Anglo-world’ legacy remains strong in the Antipodes where ties to Britain have not been completely cut. Australia continues to share its Head of State with Great Britain (as does New Zealand), and perdures under a constitution that to this day fails to recognize the original owners of the land – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Australian constitutional monarchists remain as enthusiastic about Queen Elizabeth II as the Victorians did for their ‘patriot queen’, Victoria. But the Australian Republican Movement, set back by a failed referendum in 1999, has not been extinguished. In fact, it is on the rise again, and the current Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is a former Chairman of the Republican Movement. Additionally, calls for constitutional reform aimed at including a ‘First Nations Voice’, a representative body, in the Australian parliament have been given powerful expression in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, an exhortation issued by the First Nations Constitutional Convention on 26 May 2017.
On a recent visit to Australia, British Foreign Minister, Boris Johnson, stoked memories of Greater Britain, promising to put Australia ‘at, or near, the front of the queue for a new Free Trade Agreement with Britain’. In the present context, that Brexit Britain is left mawkishly to entreat its old colonies testifies not just to the disastrous decision to leave the European Union, but to the enduring legacy of Britain’s imperial imaginary in some quarters.
https://thedisorderofthings.com/2017/08 ... the-world/
Liberalism, Empire, and Utopianism (Dr Duncan Bell) [13:45]