Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani education activist ruthlessly shot by the Taliban last month for the “crime” of promoting education for girls, has become an inspiring symbol of courage against tyrannical oppression and a martyr for women’s rights.
As someone who is involved in the higher education sector and passionately believes in the benefits to society of research and education, it is hard not to feel anything but contempt for the Taliban and the deepest concern for Malala and her ongoing plight.
If anyone in the world deserves an education, particularly a higher education, it’s Malala.
Meanwhile in Australia, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition leader Tony Abbott have used their own exceptional educational opportunities to climb to the leadership positions of their own political parties, and help mould the legislation that governs our lands.
Our Prime Minister was fortunate enough to attend the excellent government school, Unley High in Southern Adelaide. In her graduation year, she was part of an outstanding group of graduates, many of whom went onto careers in Medicine, Dentistry, Law, Academia and of course, politics.
Tony Abbott also had outstanding educational opportunities, culminating in a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Their lives were gifted by circumstance and empowered by their respective educations.
So if Malala’s father decided he’d had enough, sold everything and placed his family on some leaky vessel to try and get his daughter to a country (Australia) where women had outstanding educational opportunities, how would she be dealt with by our two major parties at the end of her voyage?
The Government and Opposition seem hell-bent on trying to prove who can be the biggest bastards towards any asylum seekers, with Tony Abbott recently suggesting arrivals could expect to spend at least five years on Nauru.
Instead of dodging Taliban bullets in the Swat Valley, or picking up the Nobel Peace Prize for her outstanding courage, Malala could watch the best years of her life wasting away in Nauru, denied the right to an education, not by an ignorant gunman, but by the appalling similar policies of a Rhodes scholar and one of Unley High’s finest.
Craig Minns
Self-employed
At present, any girl has twice the chance of obtaining a university qualification as the boy sitting next to her at school. When that obvious failure of our domestic system is fixed I'll worry about Pakistan.
Stiofán Mac Suibhne
Contrarian / Epistemologist
Emotive & absurd. The answer to the systemic failures in developing countries, in this case an Islamic society, can't be to get on a boat. There could never be enough boats or enough destinations. As horrid as Islamic gender apartheid is, the answer can't be shipping the unfortunate girls to Australia or if shot in the head the UK.
It is entirely understand able that those with sufficient resources to pay people smugglers in order to escape the vision of hell being created around them would do so. It is clear there is no quick fix to the problem. Off shore processing is not the key issue here.
Fred Pribac
logged in via email @internode.on.net
Thank you for reminding us of our privelidged position and contrasting that with our inhumane and massively expensive off-shore processing policies.
Are we that frightened of a perceived possible erosion of our privelidge that we must resort to what amounts to torture of victims?
Dianna Arthur
Dianna Arthur is a Friend of The Conversation.
Environmentalist
Thank you Fred, I was stunned into silence at the callous responses thus far.
It is good to know that others do care if children are being shot for the temerity of wanting an education. Meanwhile there are children being held indefinitely in off-shore processing who also are having their rights to a well rounded education denied them by our successive governments' determination to be tough on asylum seekers. We are hardly in a position to cast judgement on the Taliban, while our own concern for children is little better.
Craig Minns
Self-employed
I don't much like the offshore processing policies of either side of politics, but I'm at a loss as to what could be done much differently. What do you suggest, Fred, as a highly privileged member of this privileged society?
Fred Pribac
logged in via email @internode.on.net
Hi Craig,
you ask: "What do you suggest, Fred, as a highly privileged member of this privileged society?"
I would suggest that Australia needs to attend to resolving the problems with the, now ancient, UN Refugee Convention as a matter of urgency. We need to update international refugee conventions so that we have systems that are not only more comprehensive, more flexible and more attuned to the greatly increased intensity of the present day situation but also as just as possible.
In the…
Read moreCraig Minns
Self-employed
Thanks for the reply Fred, but all you really said was "I don't like it". What precisely should we do and how do we reconcile the demands of refugees with the needs of our own people? How much do we spend and what numbers do we take? How do we feed and house people in a manner acceptable to your sensibilities, when we already have a housing shortage for the people who live here now?
Do you know many people who'd be prepared to stump up the extra tax that would be required to do these things…
Read moreFred Pribac
logged in via email @internode.on.net
Craig: "Thanks for the reply Fred, but all you really said was "I don't like it"."
No ... that's far from all that I really said! By the standards of summary you have applied to me I could equally well concoct an un-flattering and incorrect assertion in regard to your arguments ... but I won't.
I've followed this opinion piece and readers comments so far and I've made my comments also - thank you for taking the time to make reply. I'm going to move onto some other stuff now.
Craig Minns
Self-employed
Fred, you're right, I apologise. Blame it on the relative lateness of the hour (by my standards).
Fred Pribac
logged in via email @internode.on.net
Thanks Craig - I appreciate your last comment.
Mahdi M Disfani
Lecturer
We need more of these articles to remind us and how cruel politics can be toward humans seeking asylum.
We are happy to cheer for Malala, listen to her story and blame Taliban, but the question we need to ask ourselves is “are we humane enough to help them as much as we can”?
It is easy to blame Taliban, or Fundamentalism, but our responsibility as a developed nation is to tackle this issue and invest in solving the problem.
For those of us who believe why we should care about Pakistan, it is good to look back at the experience of Afghanistan and remember that in today’s world we cannot benefit from stability at home if the rest of the world is in chaos.
Craig Minns
Self-employed
We are a country of 20 million, there are 190 million people in Pakistan. We have our own groups that are missing out on opportunities, especially young men and even more especially young men from low SES backgrounds. Apparently we have money to pay for middle-class women to have someone else look after their children and to take time off work to have those children, but we don;t have the funds to assist those young men to access the opportunities that created the middle-class women in the first place.
Pakistan is not our problem and there is little that we could do if we wanted to and I for one have no interest in doing so until some of our own inequities are taken seriously.
Stiofán Mac Suibhne
Contrarian / Epistemologist
Diane it is quite clearly absurd to give moral equivalence to the Taliban shooting girls in the head for aspiring to be literate with the immigration processes in Australia.
The emotive point that Malala's near brush with death is grounds for changing immigration policy is flawed. She is in the UK and one would presume she would need to claim asylum in the first country of safety. The tens or hundreds of millions of girls / women oppressed by various social systems can not all be helped by getting on a boat to Australia. That is not a solution.
Mike Hansen
Mr
Your argument is deceitful.
You are posing the abstract - the strawman or more aptly the bogeyman - the great Australian fear - stoked by shock jocks and pandered to by Gillard and Abbott - that millions of Pakistanis/Afghanis could be on boats headed to Australia against the reality that only a few thousand attempt the trip each year.
We treat the few thousand who make it here like shit because we are terrified that a few more might come. Yet we welcome hundreds of thousands of students here from Asia because there are education entrepreneurs who can make a quick buck out of them.
What should we do? Start by treating the refugees who make it here like human beings. So it encourages a few more to come - big bloody deal.
Second - get the hell out of Afghanistan. When in living memory has the West been successful in implanting civilization in a country by blowing the crap out of it.