The “Boat People” and the 1977 Election (Part II)

The radical-progressive journal Retrieval, which had church links and was available at Australian Council of Churches offices and reading rooms, published various pieces during the Vietnamese boat-refugee crisis on the refugees and on the benevolent nature of the Hanoi government. The issue of October/November 1977 claimed protests about “re-education camps” in Liberated Vietnam were based on “inaccurate information”. It said most of those named in a letter of protest to the Hanoi authorities as being detained in the camps had been “intimately involved in maintaining the system of repression of the Saigon regime and favoured continued US war in Vietnam”. It was as if they deserved it, a claim few on the Left had dared to make openly. It continued:

90 to 95% of the 1.5 million of Thieu’s army have returned to civilian life. There have been no allegations of torture in the camps. Prisoners get the same austere rations as the rest of the population. And releases are taking place all the time.

The Retrieval article did not state the source of its statistical information nor the source of its information regarding the absence of torture.

Repatriated US prisoners from the North Vietnamese prison “Hanoi Hilton”, including future US Republican presidential candidate John McCain, would testify that torture and ill-treatment had been general there, as had been the case with the French soldiers captured after Dien Bien Phu in the first Vietnam War, and there seemed no reason to suppose that officers of the defeated army should have been treated differently. (McCain was hung up by his arms after they had been broken, resulting in permanent disability.)

Wilfred Burchett and others had, during the Korean War, published accounts in the Communist Party of Australia newspaper Tribune of the idyllic conditions enjoyed by inmates in prison camps in North Korea. In fact the death-rate there was about the same as in Japanese camps in the Second World War—about 40 per cent—and over a shorter period.

After the fall of Saigon, an estimated 1 million to 2.5 million people were imprisoned with no formal charges or trials. According to published academic studies in the United States and Europe, 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s re-education camps. Thousands were tortured or abused. Prisoners were incarcerated for as long as seventeen years, with most terms ranging from three to ten years.

Retrieval claimed a “Human Rights Protest Letter” complaining about the conditions in re-education camps had been promoted by individuals associated with the US government and “a right-wing Vietnamese refugee journal”. The article was signed “V.N.”, presumably for Val Noone, a former Catholic priest who was to continue to be associated with defences of the Vietnamese regime and attacks on right-wing refugees. In the same issue Noone published a feature article attacking and generally tending to discredit refugees under the heading: “Refugees—Some Bring Gold, Others Are Their Servants”. A number of its themes were to occur again in the future.

As with previous attacks along the same lines, this article ignored the fact that, given the regime in Liberated Vietnam was a revolutionary communist one, “rich” people, professionals, senior military and civilian officials and what Stalin had exterminated as the kulak class, were more, not less, likely to be genuine refugees. It seemed to presume an unusual extremity of ignorance or stupidity on the part of its readers. The article claimed:

Some of the 47 Vietnamese refugees who landed at Broome in July brought gold bars, says the WA regional director of the immigration department, Mr J. N. Mackay … it is not up to me to divulge their personal finances … [the] manager of the Graylands Hostel in Perth where the 47 refugees stayed, said, “We had one family here for only a week and then they went out and bought a $50,000 house. Some of them have their own servants …”

This allegation, repeated in attacks on refugees, that some had their own servants, makes no didactic sense. How could refugees escaping by boat at the peril of their lives—criminals, “pirates” and outlaws from the point of view of the Hanoi regime—bring servants with them, pay those servants or enforce any contract of service, unless the “servants” agreed to come and share the perils voluntarily? (One is reminded of what is said to be one of the oldest known jokes in the world that is still wryly funny: a rich man on an ancient Roman ship foundering in a storm told his terrified slaves: “Don’t worry, I have freed you all in my will.”) The article quoted Toby Richmond in Nation Review (a radical leftist journal of the time), who had written:

As I talked to them, each in turn, I began to suspect that this group was a small core of upper caste Vietnamese who had assembled a handful of expert seamen and marine mechanics to ferry them safely across to the gentle western society. Those who were not fitters or engineers were fishermen, ex-soldiers or “Students” well into their 20s or 30s.

What exactly was suspicious or illegitimate about “ex-soldiers” wanting to escape? How exactly could “expert seaman and marine mechanics” be assembled and induced (and presumably bribed—but with what?) to undertake a perilous ocean voyage to an uncertain destination, a voyage which was also illegal, under the nose of a government with a pervasive security apparatus which would impose Draconian punishments if they were caught?

The whole sum of the allegations made no sense and fell apart when considered. And why were Retrieval and Noone, an ex-Catholic priest, publishing material plainly intended and calculated to exacerbate hostile feelings towards the refugees, rather than calculated to create friendly, supportive and Christian notions towards them?

The article continued: “According to Richmond most of the so-called refugees [emphasis added] had not heard of Australia before reaching Malaysia”—which made them very ill-informed for members of an alleged “upper caste” or thirty-year-old students:

but one recent arrival, Miss Sweenie Wong, gave a different account. Asked why she and her friends had decided to escape to Australia, Miss Wong said: “We had heard on the radio news that people on boats from Vietnam will get very good treatment from the Australian government …”

Nothing was made of the fact that Wong is a Chinese, not a Vietnamese, name. There was then a cross-head: “How Spontaneous is the Refugee Movement?”

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited Melbourne in February 1977 to win support for the “boat people”. Thich Nhat Hanh had been working in Singapore on the “boat people project” of the so-called [emphasis added] World Conference of Religion and Peace. However, he was asked to leave by the Singapore government because he was so actively encouraging refugees to leave Vietnam. In a speech at the Anglican church in North Fitzroy, Thich Nhat Hanh asked for sympathy for those leaving Vietnam. When questioned on his co-operation with Nguyen Ngo Bich [right-wing] journal mentioned in the preceding item, Thich Nhat Hanh urged his listeners not to be naive in their political judgements. He also mentioned in passing his view that the Americans had brought land reform to Vietnam.

Thich Nhat Hanh will be known to a number of readers as the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who contributed to the anti-war movement. The logic of his speech is hard to follow. He seems willing to grow vegetables on his French farm but unwilling to go to work in the fields of Vietnam. [emphasis added]

Thus, according to Retrieval’s peculiar set of values, it was illogical to prefer living and working in a free society to an unfree one. The article concluded:

He and his companion, Sister Phung, spoke for a long time about the “boat people” and cited many faults of the Vietnamese communists. It was in this context that they spoke of the refugee problem.

The same issue also carried an article, signed “V.N.”, supporting the anti-American fanatic Noam Chomsky’s contention that the USA’s alleged concern for “human rights” in Vietnam was merely “a moral-sounding excuse for aggression”. That is to say, America had spent 50,000 of its soldiers’ lives and astronomical amounts of treasure (ruining its space program, its “Great Society” program, and much other infrastructure investment) merely for the sake of doing so.

Americans and the Saigon regime were like Nazis, so America and South Vietnam, not North Vietnam, were responsible for making aggressive war, and further America and South Vietnam were evidently responsible for systematic extermination. Retrieval also attacked and tried to discredit the human rights campaign. The article continued along the lines that although there were no atrocities or violations of human rights committed by the communist regime in Liberated Vietnam, the anti-war movement which had worked to install that government was not responsible for them anyway:

Above all, the US rulers want to [maintain] the original myth about Vietnam—namely that it was a case of aggression against the South by the North. It is in this context, Chomsky suggests, that we should assess the human rights campaign … Chomsky views the newspaper atrocity stories as unreliable … for example the widely reported photos of Khmer Rouge atrocities are fakes. [emphasis added]

The Left was forced to do another flip-flop a little later when it was became clear that the photos of Khmer Rouge atrocities were not fakes and about 1.7 million people had been murdered. Liberated Vietnam invaded Liberated Kampuchea and put the Khmer Rouge to flight. Even John Pilger, perhaps for the first time, on that occasion used his polemical talents to criticise communist atrocities. The article continued:

Tales of communist “atrocities” are meant not only to prove the evils of communism but also to undermine the credibility of those in the West who opposed the war and might oppose future such wars. People who opposed American aggression in Vietnam have no special responsibility to determine whether the victims of American (and Australian) violence are guilty of evil practices, just as German resisters to Nazism had no special responsibility with regard to the behaviour of the French resistance or Jews. He writes, “We must bear in mind the simple truth that any public political act must be assessed in terms of its likely consequences, in particular, for those who are suffering or will suffer from oppression … ignoring those points, many honest opponents of the American war are trapped into tacit support for the propaganda juggernaut,” Chomsky says. [emphasis added]

False, to the point of obscene, analogy could hardly be stretched further, or a more morally decadent argument produced. This, of course, accounts in part for the hatred and fear which the Vietnamese refugees aroused on the Left in Australia and which made it a psychological imperative that they be discredited: by their very existence, they were evidence that the tales of communist atrocities were true, and, furthermore, were of such a nature that masses of people were prepared to risk their lives to escape from them, as they had not under the Saigon regimes.

Even if they were condemned and stereotyped as capitalists, bourgeoisie on the run or “black-marketeers” this might remind some people that Saigon had at least had an economic life with considerable liberality, and that in the jungle re-education camps of Liberation, there was no market at all.

Whitlam at this time called again for at least twenty new patrol boats for the Navy, referring to ALP policy on refugees. Frank Knopfelmacher, Nation Review’s token conservative, a political philosopher and psychologist of Czech Jewish background, whose family had been murdered by the Nazis, wrote:

When I heard the ALP leaders refer to them as “yellow Croats” (Whitlam, being a patrician, with a royal sense of humour prefers the expression “yellow Balts”), I shuddered, for the implications were gruesomely obvious.

The pogrom against resident Croats in 1973 did not harm anybody very much. A pogrom against floating wretches not yet on land may be lethal.

Knopfelmacher concluded: “A vote for Labor is a vote for death.” This was probably the only pro-refugee piece published in Nation Review, which otherwise published material contributing to the stereotyping of refugees as brothel-keepers, black-marketeers and bourgeois exploiters on the run.

In Darwin, Waterside Workers’ Federation leader “Curly” Nixon threatened a waterside strike unless the Song Be 12 was returned to Ho Chi Minh City, preferably, as National Times correspondent David Leach jocularly put it, loaded with “reffos”.

The Labor Party spokesman on Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Ted Innes, said the nation’s “migrant” community was “aggravated” by the government’s refugee policy and by what they saw as refugees jumping the queue. He added that migrants in Australia “see that their relatives or their immediate families are precluded from coming across here because of the economic situation and that’s the criterion that’s being applied in preventing families from coming together”.

Mr Whitlam blamed Singapore for helping Vietnamese to reach Australia, and accused Singapore of providing refugee boats with plans, maps and petrol. Clyde Cameron, however, was to commend Singapore for placing Vietnamese refugees in detention camps.

On the same day the Deputy Leader of the ALP, Mr Hayden, in a statement again obviously aimed at the government’s policy of accepting refugees, attacked the poor state of Darwin’s defences, saying that it was almost as easy to arrive in Darwin undetected as to cross Sydney Harbour in a Manly ferry. (Ironically, when Darwin was bombed in the Second World War, its defences were incomplete because of union strikes.)

On November 23, Whitlam said South-East Asian governments were using Vietnamese refugees as a weapon against Australia, moving them on to Australia in order to “twist our tails” because of their dislike of the Fraser government’s policies. Plainly if this argument was accepted by the community it would tend against the refugees being welcomed.

Mr Al Grassby, the Comm­issioner for Community Relations and a former Labor Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, and thought to have connections with organised crime, made a statement attacking right-wing racist propaganda, which he said was being put out by groups such as “White Power” and the National Front.

The diaries of Mr Cameron for this period, published in 1990, in recounting ALP strategy during the 1977 federal election campaign, show the ALP was counting on using anti-refugee sentiments in the community for political advantage. Cameron used the words refugees and illegal immigrants interchangeably. His hatred of the refugees and contempt for any notion of compassion towards them shone through the pages:

Bob Hawke has now bought into the Vietnamese refugee question. He has issued a very sensible statement on the matter. And he can count on the overwhelming support of the majority of the Australian public for his demand that the Government put an end to the entry of illegal immigrants …

Yesterday was a good day, too, and for that matter so was Sunday. If we can maintain the scoring points we have been able to make over the last three days we will more than retrieve the ground lost last week. The Vietnamese refugee issue will, if it means anything at all, count more against the Government than the opposition …

[Deputy Prime Minister] Anthony conceded that the Vietnamese refugee situation was creating difficulties for the Government, but sought to minimise the effects by dragging out the old Communist bogey, saying that Australia had a duty to protect people from the ravages of Communism. The Government’s position won’t be improved by the Vietnamese Government’s demand for the return of all the 151 “pirates” as they are being described by the Vietnamese Charge d’Affaires in Sydney.

This third extract can be seen as an unintended tribute to the government’s humanitarianism and political courage. Whatever the later shortcomings and confusion displayed by Malcolm Fraser, this should not be forgotten. As my own employer, a federal minister, said at the time, “We can’t just let them drown.”

Cameron, meanwhile, who apparently thought the Australian electorate shared his own callousness, gave no evidence of caring if refugees drowned or, if forcibly repatriated, were shot as “pirates”. He continued, in a passage showing contempt for concern over “human suffering”:

The Government is clearly worried about the Vietnamese refugees. Andrew Peacock and Michael MacKellar issued a joint statement in Adelaide yesterday saying that Australia’s acceptance of refugees must not be allowed to become an election issue, adding, “The basic question of human suffering involved transcends partisan advantage.” Australia, they said, was committed to accepting a regular flow of refugees from Indo-China, but priority would be given to refugees who met normal migration requirements.

Following Labor’s second consecutive landslide defeat at the 1977 election, Cameron recounted:

The phone hardly stopped ringing today. Tony Mulvihill … complained about Gough’s public statement declaring that Vietnamese refugees landing illegally on Australian shores would not be deported. This, he declared, was contrary to his own public statement in which he had made it clear that a Labor Government would see that illegal immigrants were deported. [emphasis in original]

The various communist parties in Australia then in existence—the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) which had broken from Moscow, largely over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the Socialist Party of Australia, which remained aligned with Moscow; and the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), aligned with Peking—though feuding bitterly, all attacked Vietnamese refugees, as did other small far-Left groups. These attacks were on the grounds that the refugees were capitalists and enemies of Liberation and that they were that “cheap labour” which had long been portrayed as an enemy of the labour movement and unionism, the spectre of which had been responsible for the creation of the White Australia policy. How they could simultaneously be rich capitalists and cheap labour was not explained.

The CPA’s national newspaper Tribune headlined a story on December 7, 1977: “Wharfies Stop Work Over Fake Refugees”. The story stated that the refugees were illegal immigrants from the privileged classes. They could not be refugees, it argued, because the war had been over for two and a half years. According to Tribune they were soft-life seekers who could not stand the fact that in Liberated Vietnam they were having to do honest work for the first time in their lives instead of exploiting the down-trodden. The absurdity of this statement was self-evident and catering to a mythology: in the modern world, and perhaps especially in Asia, no class of any considerable size except a tiny number of millionaires and some Western university students can live without working. Tribune stated:

Waterside workers twice stopped work over the arrival of Vietnamese refugees. WWF Secretary Kevin Manski told Tribune why they acted. “Originally it was on the basis of our security, since the first two boats simply sailed into the harbour. Second it was because of the quarantine regulations.”

That a communist-aligned union should be concerned with Australia’s security was a novel idea. The WWF in Darwin had been notorious for strikes even in the darkest days of the Second World War, deliberately damaging Australia’s security and the war effort. Manski repeated the claim from Retrieval that refugees had landed with gold bars and servants, despite the lack of any evidence and the inherent extreme improbability of this. He went on:

Thirdly, we said they weren’t refugees, they were illegal immigrants because the war had been finished for two and a half years. Nor were they displaced, they were leaving because the Vietnamese Government was sending them to work and they didn’t like it.

They were, in fact, from the privileged classes. “If they didn’t have they wouldn’t be here,” said Manski. [emphasis added]

“We’ve learned about the ones in Western Australia who landed with bars of gold and servants. Since then we’ve seen them ourselves. There’s stories floating about all over the place about the gold.”

Note once again the presumption underlying this story that if people fleeing from a revolutionary communist government had money they could not be genuine refugees, and, by implication, because of this they were undeserving of any help, even when they were in peril of their lives. Further, any very rich people in South Vietnam should have been able to get out by safer and more comfortable means earlier. Tribune continued: “He agreed that some people in Darwin supported the stoppage for racist reasons. ‘Their reasons were totally different from ours. These racists have got on the same bandwagon.’”

In other words, the Vietnamese should be abandoned to perish or be forcibly be repatriated to their ruthless government not because of race but because of class. The statement emphasised the essential and historic moral bankruptcy of Marxism and communism. Tribune continued:

What did he think of the latest boat, the stolen Song Be 12, which the Vietnamese government has demanded be returned?

“This ship has been hijacked. They should all be sent back to the Vietnamese government. At present we’re trying to get a better deal for the guards imprisoned on the ship.” (Three soldiers were seized when the ship was hijacked in Ho Chi Minh City.)

“All those mugs get up and talk about humanitarianism. But where’s the humanitarianism towards these people locked up?” Kevin Manski asked.

On December 6, 1977, the Brisbane Courier-Mail quoted the president of the Queensland Trades and Labour Council, Mr Hausenschild, to the effect that the sudden influx of refugees was a plot to smuggle in cheap labour for the mining of uranium—thus pressing two buttons simultaneously.

This attack was made on the opposite grounds to those claiming the Vietnamese were rich gold-laden capitalists and soft-life seekers. It claimed the refugees were “without homes, possessions or jobs” and were thus a ready-made cheap labour force. It was more than a coincidence, he also said, that they were leaving liberated Vietnam two years after the war had ended.

He did not elaborate on the question of how he thought this plot had been arranged, presumably between capitalist Australian uranium mining interests, the federal government, the Vietnamese penniless/gold-carrying refugees, and the government of Vietnam. And how did it square with Whitlam’s claim that the ASEAN governments were using refugees as a weapon to punish Australia, or Cameron’s gloating that the refugee issue was embarrassing the federal government? Once again, the argument was absurd and without even a veneer of either common sense or consistency, let alone humanity. All that mattered was that the refugees be attacked and stigmatised:

The Federal Government wanted to use Vietnamese refugees as a stand-by workforce for the mining of uranium, the Trades and Labour Council President, Mr Hausenschild, claimed yesterday.

He said the government was allowing boat-loads of refugees into Australia deliberately. The government knew Australian unionists were opposed to uranium mining at present. It would be virtually impossible to recruit Australian workers to mine Northern Territory deposits.

Mr Hausenschild said the refugees, without homes, possessions or jobs, would provide an immediate manpower source of mining and exporting yellowcake. “It seems more than a coincidence that the Vietnam War has been over for two tears and the influx of refugees begins now,” he said.

“It was also more than coincidence that immigration officers were being sent to Malaysia and Singapore to process refugees to Australia at a time when unemployment in Australia was the highest since the depression.”

On May 3, 1978, Tribune published a leader attacking Vietnamese refugees under the heading: “The Vietnamese Ustasha”. This leader described Vietnamese refugees as “fascists” and “criminals and queue-jumpers”, escaping with their private “booty”. Some, it said, were killers. It implicitly equated them with white supremacists from South Africa. (Its suggestion of a “flood” of the latter being imported by the Liberals for domestic political purposes indicated that Tribune was not fully conversant with Malcolm Fraser’s ideas on the matter.) It suggested dire consequences for Australia if Vietnamese were permitted to enter. It also made the surprising charge, in the absence of any evidence, that they had often hijacked boats from other refugees, though without explaining how hijackers and hijackees were to be told apart:

While yet another flotilla of Vietnamese refugee boats heads for Darwin, those already here are organising para-military secret societies. Last week, fully 200 of them met at Sydney RSL club to plot the Vietnamese government’s overthrow by military force … if they are as lucky as the Ustasha [an extreme right-wing or fascist Balkan group] the Australian government could even help them.

What can be done to stop these fascists encouraged to enter Australia?

Firstly, the Government must stop encouraging the “boat people”. Many of them have hijacked boats, often from other refugees. Some have killed or thrown overboard people who stood in their way.

These people are criminals and queue-jumpers.

The Australian Government must co-operate more closely with Vietnam in arranging family re-unions … Most are “economic” refugees, escaping from the poverty of Vietnam with their private booty. It is therefore important to aid Vietnam and demand that America pay its promised reparations. If this were done some would return to their homes. [What? Criminals, queue-jumpers and all?]

… The Government must disband any group forming an army to fight the Government of Vietnam, a government supported by most Vietnamese who fought 30 years to win national liberation.

Tribune went on to state that the real plot of ultra-right Liberals was to use a Vietnamese para-military force in Australian politics “as they have used the minority of fascist refugees from some other countries”. (Tribune in 1956 had also described anti-Soviet Hungarians as fascists.) It concluded: “Just imagine what would happen should the Liberals next support a flood of white supremacist refugees from Rhodesia and South Africa.”

The Vietnamese refugees were also likened to Ustasha by then ALP Deputy Leader Tom Uren, President of the pro-Hanoi Australia-Vietnam Society. After a demonstration by anti-communist Vietnamese in 1979 outside the Sydney Trades Hall against a concert by the “Young Socialist League” to raise money for Vietnam, Mr Uren called on the federal government to rid Australia of “violent extremists” among the Vietnamese refugees. He claimed in a letter to New South Wales Labor Premier Neville Wran:

There is an immediate need to maintain close surveillance of the extremists among the Vietnamese refugees.

You will recall that it took some considerable time to convince the relevant authorities of the seriousness of the attacks by members of the Ustashi on their political enemies.

It was only after a number of bomb attacks that effective action was taken. The situation among the Vietnamese refugees is also capable of escalating as a result of the activities of extremist elements.

Uren led a delegation of unionists to lobby Wran further on the matter. The Australia-Vietnam Society was to raise allegations of violence by anti-communist refugees frequently in its publication Vietnam Today, to which the Rev. Mr Noone was a frequent contributor.

In the September 2010 issue of the left-wing magazine the Monthly, academic Robert Manne wrote, quite bizarrely:

The success of the settlement [of Vietnamese refugees] relied on the existence of a bipartisan consensus within the Australian political elite. With the boat arrivals, the Labor Opposition under Whitlam, and then Hayden, resisted the temptation to exploit underlying racist or anti-refugee sentiment for party political gain. Even the Cold War ideological divide was blurred. The Right supported the refugees as escapees from communism; the Left as part of the project of burying White Australia.

How Manne could write this in the face of the public historical record is baffling.

The 1977 federal election brought a second landslide defeat for the ALP, virtually as overwhelming as that of 1975. The ALP’s and the Left’s campaign of hate and fear against refugees, based on racism, anti-anti-communism and xenophobia, had failed to gain traction with the Australian voters, who responded to the plight of the Vietnamese refugees largely with humanity and compassion, and supported the Coalition’s policy of receiving them.