In the course of his composing career Sergei Rachmaninov
wrote 24 Preludes in three sets: the famous Prelude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 3
No.2, then the ten Preludes Op. 23, written in 1901 and 1903, and finally the
thirteen Preludes Op. 32, written in 1910. Together they span all the major and
minor keys.
They are longer than the traditional musical fragment which
had hitherto been associated with the term Prelude – Chopin’s for example – and
tend to be musically complex and technically demanding. They are beautiful
pieces, and the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter was the master of
them.
As a sampler, try these examples from YouTube, all played by
Richter:
On 28 June 2012 the Prime Minister and the Minister for
Immigration and Citizenship announced that the Governments was establishing an
Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers to provide a report on the best way for
Australia “to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on dangerous boat
journeys to Australia”.
The Panel is being led by Air Chief Marshall Angus Houston
AC AFC (Retired). The other members of the panel are Mr Paris Aristotle AM,
Director of the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture Inc (also known
as Foundation House), and Professor Michael L’Estrange, AO, Director, National
Security College.
It is to provide advice to the Prime Minister and the
Minister for Immigration and Citizenship prior to the start of the next sitting
period in August 2012. The Panel’s advice will be released publicly.
The substantive parts of the Terms of Reference are as
follows:
The Panel will provide advice and recommendations to the Government on
policy options available, and in its considered opinion, the efficacy of such
options, to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives on dangerous boat
journeys to Australia.
As part of its review, the panel will take into account, and provide
policy advice on:
- how best to prevent asylum seekers risking
their lives by travelling to Australia by boat
- source, transit and destination country
aspects of irregular migration
- relevant international obligations
- the development of an inter-related set of
proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to
maintain its borders
- short, medium and long term approaches to
assist in the development of an effective and sustainable approach to asylum
seekers
- the legislative requirements for
implementation, and
- the order of magnitude of costs of such
policy options.
Several things
strike me about the task which Angus Houston and his colleagues have been set:
(1) Although a nicer word is used, we are
talking about deterrence here. The Australian Government has no direct means to
prevent asylum seekers from embarking; what it wishes to do is to deter them
from making that decision.
(2) This raises an important threshold question
about what place there is for “deterrence” in any policy framework that deals
with the quest for asylum by people with “a well-founded fear of persecution”.
The notion of deterring people from seeking asylum by whatever means they might
have to hand seems to me to contradict the whole scheme and purpose of the
United Nations Convention and Protocol on the Status of Refugees.
(3) A second threshold question is what, if any,
responsibility does the Australian (or any) Government have to prevent
non-citizens, to whom it acknowledges no other duty, from taking risks which
those non-citizens themselves have decided, having regard to their own
particular circumstances, it is in their best interests to take? The Australian
Government does not prevent its own citizens from taking risks like smoking, or
risks that travel insurance companies normally exclude from cover: skydiving,
off-piste skiing, or climbing Mount Everest, for example.
(4) If some basis can be discovered for
Governments seeking to deter asylum seekers from risky behaviour, should asylum
seekers also be deterred from crossing mountain ranges, trudging across
deserts, put themselves in the way of potential dangers from bandits, swimming
fast flowing rivers or those containing crocodiles or piranha, etc?
(5) As to the means of deterrence, most of the
options are depressingly familiar:
- Mandatory detention (introduced by the
Keating Government in the late 1980s and maintained ever since). This procedure
flies directly in the face of the provisions of the Convention, which permits a
short initial period of detention for identity and health checks, buts state
that detention should be a last resort.
- Limitation on access to services and right to
work. Again, contrary to the provisions of the Convention, which states
expressly that persons seeking asylum should be permitted to work (and to
practice their profession where they have recognised credentials) at the
prevailing remuneration rate.
- Limitation on prospects for family reunion.
This one flies in the face of one of the principles on which the Convention was
established: the international conference which led to the Convention
specifically recognised the principle of the unity of the family and stated
that is an essential right of the refugee
- Automatic diversion to another country
(“offshore processing”). This too seems to me to fly in the face of the
provisions of the Convention. Each refugee is an individual and entitled to
have his/her claims assessed on their merits.
- Temporary Protection Visas, introduced by the
Howard Government and advocated now by the Opposition. These had, and would
have on the basis that the Opposition intends, a specifically deterrent intent,
and so were attended by inhumane provisions such as no family reunion, right to work compromised by their temporary status, and restricted access to social services, all of which seem to me to be contrary to our obligations under the Convention. They also seem to me to be contrary to
good sense: if we accept that people are in need of refuge, it is in our own
interest to get them out of detention as quickly as possible, and do all we can
to assist them to re-establish themselves and become productive citizens.
- Sending them to another country for the
explicit purpose of placing them “at the back of the queue”. Apart from the
fact that there is no queue, this strikes me as so inhumane, such a shocking
example of dehumanising people and treating them as chattels, that I am amazed
that anyone even thought of it – or at least amazed that anyone who did think
of it was shameless enough not only to admit it but to promote it as a good
idea.
Inherent in many of the policy approaches that has been
adopted over the years has been an underlying approach that harsh treatment of
asylum seekers who arrive by boat will discourage others from making the
journey. The idea of treating people more harshly than they deserve in order to
influence the behaviour of others is offensive in the extreme, and of dubious
legality.
As far as the problem the Government has set Angus Houston
and his colleagues is concerned, my tentative conclusions would be:
- Clearly anything that makes the prospective
treatment on arrival more unpleasant is likely to have an influence at the
margin.
- For the genuine refugee: it is unlikely that
anything we might be prepared to do would act as a deterrent for someone who
thinks “I can’t go back, and I can’t stay here, my best hope is to head for
Australia and hope for the best”.
- Any framework that rules out family reunion
is likely to have the perverse effect of encouraging people to embark on the
boat voyage on the grounds that the only prospect of reunion is to arrive in
the jurisdiction independently.
I wish Angus Houston and his colleagues all the best in a
task which I don’t envy them. I don’t know what the sort of advice the
Government expects will come out of the intensive process of consultation and
deliberation in which the panel is currently involved, but knowing two members
of the panel well and one slightly, I am confident that they will be fiercely
independent in coming to their conclusions, that they will call the issues as
they see them. Where that will leave the Prime Minister, or for that matter the
Leader of the Opposition, remains to be seen.
And
now for a little bit of pure pleasure – the delightful little romance that
Narciso Yepes wrote as a gift for his mother in 1938 and which was subsequently
used as the theme for René Clément’s 1952 film Jeux Interdit (“Forbidden Games”). I don’t know whether Yepes was
coy about being the composer or whether his authorship of the piece was
forgotten, but many recordings list the composer as “Anonymous” – including even recordings
of Yepes himself. For example, his CD Romance
d’Amour lists the composer as “Anónimo” and describes it as “Musique du
film; Arr.: N. Yepes”.
When
you watch the video, take note of the ten-string guitar, which was developed in
1963 by Yepes, in collaboration with renowned guitar maker José Ramírez. The
four additional strings were tuned to C, A#, G#, F#, which resulted in the
first guitar with truly chromatic string resonance - similar to that of the
piano with its sustain/pedal mechanism. He gave this guitar its first outing in
1964, in a performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez with the Berlin
Philharmonic, and from that time on he used that instrument exclusively. I had
the pleasure of hearing him in a solo recital in Canberra, an ABC Concert on 5
June 1976.
