The Australian authorities have spent decades convincing us that there are hordes of potential refugees out there, just waiting for an opportunity to enter our nation like a gigantic tidal wave. Harsh anti-refugee laws have been enacted on the rationale that any weakening on our borders will only encourage millions of would-be asylum seekers battering down our gates,

Australian voters are encouraged to be suspicious of darker-skinned and Middle Eastern people. Are they really genuine refugees, or just opportunistic migrants seeking the prosperity and financial riches of our abundant nation? Voters are encouraged to be routinely suspicious of asylum seekers – questioning their motives for fleeing is a national pastime. Funnily enough, Australians did not question the motivations of Eastern Europeans fleeing the Communist bloc during the Cold War.

Each Eastern European refugee, we were assured, had ideological motivations for leaving. Each refugee from a Communist nation was deemed a pure, freedom-seeking individual unconcerned with financial concerns. Cold War anticommunism helped to shape our concerns for refugees; victims of US-sponsored regime change wars are routinely ignored, their motivations for fleeing either minimised or subject to suspicion.

Election campaigns by both major parties have encouraged this ‘tough-on-refugees’ claim, each party attempting to demonstrate its superior ‘toughness’ and cruelty against refugees to the electorate. The mandatory detention of refugees in camps began in the early 1990s, and has been enforced until this very day. Offshore detention is a particularly egregious form of institutional cruelty – out of sight, out of mind, as far as the Australian electorate is concerned.

Leaving asylum seekers in limbo is a calculated policy of discouragement – compel them to ‘voluntarily’ leave to a third country, or their nation of origin. Canberra has paid huge sums of money to Asia-Pacific nations to take asylum seekers, even before they have attempted the dangerous journey to Australia. Advertising campaigns have targeted asylum seekers, discouraging them from even thinking about coming to Australia. Don’t the asylum seekers realise that Australia is a land of dangerous snakes, spiders and poisonous animals?

Well, imagine the turnaround over the last few months, when the Australian government went out of its way to provide fast tracked asylum applications for the members of the Iranian women’s football team. The Iranian soccer team, here to play in the AFC Asian Cup, were immediately offered asylum, jumping the much-touted ‘queue’ that boat arrivals supposedly bypass according to conservative commentators and radio shock jocks.

The Iranian women, we were assured, face certain imprisonment and death should they return to Iran. The fact that Iranians might be fleeing their nation due to the US-Israeli bombardment of Iran, willingly supported by Canberra, never enters the discussion.

The Australian immigration authorities, the Home Affairs Department, all went into a propaganda overdrive to put out the welcome mat for the Iranian football/soccer players. After a number of them accepted asylum, they then rejected those offers. Most of the women’s team have returned to Iran. To the best of my knowledge, only two have remained in Australia, and have signed contracts to play for soccer teams here – I wish them all the success and happiness in the world.

The Australian authorities, in line with other Anglophone nations, have exploited asylum seekers for propaganda purposes in the past. They have helped to manufacture an asylum seeking hysteria, such as the 1950s Petrov Affair. I will not go into all the details of that episode here, but suffice it to say that asylum seekers from official ‘enemy’ nations, are used by Canberra to whip up a hothouse, ‘we love freedom’ media-hysteria.

Manufacturing politically expedient ‘defections’, with the assistance of the police and intelligence agencies, serves to incite pro-war sentiment in the domestic population. Iran, officially designated an enemy nation, is bearing the brunt of US-Israeli military operations. In line with the military requirements of this attack, an ideological campaign of fabricated hysteria is needed to keep the Australian population in a state of high anxiety.

Aided and abetted in this campaign of orchestrated defections is the pro-war Iranian diaspora community. Staging protests and actions in front of the hotel where the Iranian women footballers were held, they cynically wrap themselves in a mantle of humanitarian concern. This purported concern has never been extended to the Palestinians, Syrians, Armenians, or other nations’ refugees – it seems that fleeing ‘mad mullahs’ is the sole criterion of concern applied by the Iranian Shah loyalist community.

While the Iranian football players were having their applications for asylum expedited – presuming they did independently apply for asylum without any pressure from the Australian authorities – there are at least 1036 refugees locked away in onshore detention camps. They have experienced long term detention, and their applications sit unprocessed by the relevant authorities.

Now I am not trying to pit one group of refugees against another. No, I am not suggesting that the Iranian women footballers are undeserving of asylum. I am saying that the fabricated crisis of their alleged asylum request reeks of governmental hypocrisy on the part of Canberra. Please stop deploying the tired old cliche that ‘Muslim women are oppressed by mad mullahs’, when trying to justify the monumental hypocrisy of Australian government leaders and officials.