The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Asylum seekers threaten to sink Australian govt in election Posted: 29 Aug 2013 12:58 AM PDT Clare, in charge of a border circling 12 million square kilometres of ocean, has the unenviable job of stopping thousands of asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia, an issue threatening to bring down Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor government at elections just two weeks away. "People are drowning to get here. It opens up old scars. People say 'please stop more people drowning'," says the campaigning Clare, whose wife is from a Vietnamese family who risked their lives to reach Australia following the 1975 fall of Saigon. Clare grew up in the Western Suburbs, far away from Sydney's glittering harbour and affluent eastern beachsides, in an area long thought to be a centre-left Labor heartland of blue-collar jobs and traditional manufacturing. But his humanitarian reasoning does not go far in explaining why Rudd's minority government is struggling here to avert a Sept. 7 poll rout, with surveys tipping the loss of six election-turning seats, some held for 70 years. In this traffic-choked home to two million, a crucible of Australian multiculturalism where many are new migrants, soaring living costs, groaning infrastructure and disappearing jobs have badly hurt Labor, along with crime and drive-by shootings helping to fuel feelings of insecurity. And as voters lose faith in Rudd's pledge to improve lives through better transport, health and education, they have also grown resentful of new boat people seen as potential security threats, immigration queue jumpers and rivals for jobs. "The issue plays out in every single possible way. Rumours go around about them getting $50,000 for a car, or welfare, or whatever. The refugees are an easy people to blame," says local Labor MP Julie Owens. POLITICAL THORN Immigration has been a political thorn in Australia since its colonial settlement, but more so since the post-World War Two arrival of more than 100,000 non-English speaking Europeans under a government strategy to "populate or perish". In a nation then seeing itself as culturally nearer to Europe than Asia, a wave of Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants fleeing conflict through the 1970s and 80s also stirred unease. But when the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States brought increased border protection globally, asylum worries in Australia were shaped into a political spear, helping conservative prime minister John Howard return to power that year with a promise of uncompromising security. Now, with instability in Afghanistan, Syria and Iran driving refugee numbers globally to near a 20-year high of 45.2 million, asylum boats are again colouring the election race, up with bread and butter issues like the economy and education. Since Labor swept away Howard's conservatives six years ago, more than 50,000 asylum seekers have arrived in Australia, stoking a voter backlash so visceral that Rudd in July promised no one arriving by boat would be permanently settled, being instead sent to live in neighbouring Papua New Guinea or Nauru. Canberra's approach contrasts with moves by key ally the United States to offer a pathway to citizenship for many of its 11 million illegal immigrants, although European countries have also hardened immigration rules amid global financial woes. But while Australia's policy - matching opposition promises of tougher immigration rules - was criticised by the United Nations, political pundits say it could neutralise an issue threatening to send Labor into opposition for a generation. AUSTRALIA FOR FREEDOM In the My Hung fabric shop in Sydney's Cabramatta, an area dubbed "little Saigon" with its myriad noodle shops and migrant families from Vietnam and Cambodia, Thi Duc Diep underscores the problems facing Rudd on Labor's Sydney "Western Front". Located in one of 10 marginal seats held by the government and at risk of loss, almost six in 10 people here were born overseas and average income of $1,030 a week is well short of the national figure, while 10 percent unemployment is roughly double the national average. Greater Sydney, home to 4.6 million people, is not only one of the most expensive cities to buy property, with home prices soaring 6.1 percent this year to a median $640,000, but surveys put it near Zurich and Geneva as one of the least affordable places to live, a fifth more expensive than New York. Diep fled Saigon by boat in 1978, and like many other overseas-born Australian voters now has a deep antipathy to asylum seekers, who she believes are fleeing for largely economic reasons and the promise of generous welfare. "We came here for freedom. We worked hard to be honest," the bespectacled 53-year-old says. "I don't want people who don't want to go to work. They shouldn't just take the unemployment benefits." Along with asylum, Diep blames the soaring cost of living and new carbon taxes championed by Rudd for undermining the $1.5 trillion economy, reflected now in gloomy business confidence and fears of the first recession for 22 years as a China-led resource export boom fades. In an alley around the corner, cafe owner and swing voter Eddie Nguyen also wants Labor out, and says many of his customers are hoping to see conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott become prime minister. "I think Australia's government should have strong rules, a strong commitment to protect Australians," says Nguyen, who spent three years in a refugee camp in Indonesia before being accepted as a refugee to Australia in 1987. "I don't agree with people going direct to the country like this. It's like your family, someone knocks on your door and says I want to come into your house, and you have to accept them. That's just not right. You have to go somewhere and wait until somebody accepts you." LAND OF GOLD AND HONEY Pollster John Scales of JWS Research says much of the anger being directed against Labor has its roots in a kind of racist-tinged envy, with migrant voters worried that new boat arrivals from other countries will lessen their chances of bringing more family members to Australia. Australia's population growth to near 23 million was driven mostly by a doubling in net migration in eight years, from around 120,000 to around 240,000, helping fill mining jobs but bringing fresh problems. "Once you get here, it's not the land of gold and honey. Asylum seekers are where frustration gets vented," Scales says. "It's a different sort of racism to standard Australian Anglo-Saxon racism. But it's still racism." Labor MP Michelle Rowland, whose Sydney seat of Greenway is one of the most precariously balanced, says Labor is in difficulty because Western Sydney has become increasingly frustrated and ambitious. Not helping, she says, has been a frontpage campaign against Labor by billionaire media owner Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, which have been particularly critical of asylum policy switches under Labor. "When you're sitting in a traffic jam on the motorway or waiting for a train that never comes, it's easy to think about the taxes you've paid and the benefits others might get," Rowland says. "Asylum is right up there." Abbott, mindful of the simmering mood for change, has made Western Sydney a top priority, visiting often with a promise of tougher asylum seeker laws, which he says will reduce hundreds of boats arriving now to a trickle, and to reinvigorate economic confidence by scrapping carbon taxes and building new roads. "We will build the roads of the 21st century and we will stop the boats," he told journalists on a recent swing through the area. "The message that I give to the people of Australia and to the people of Western Sydney is that if you want a new way, you've got to choose a new government." - Reuters, August 29, 2013. |
| Scientists grow “mini human brains” from stem cells Posted: 28 Aug 2013 04:15 PM PDT Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab that allowed them to grow into so-called "cerebral organoids" - or mini brains - that consisted of several distinct brain regions. It is the first time that scientists have managed to replicate the development of brain tissue in three dimensions. Using the organoids, the scientists were then able to produce a biological model of how a rare brain condition called microcephaly develops - suggesting the same technique could in future be used to model disorders like autism or schizophrenia that affect millions of people around the world. "This study offers the promise of a major new tool for understanding the causes of major developmental disorders of the brain ... as well as testing possible treatments," said Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research but was impressed with its results. Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, described the work as "fascinating and exciting". He said it extended the possibility of stem cell technologies for understanding brain development and disease mechanisms - and for discovering new drugs. Although it starts as relatively simple tissue, the human brain swiftly develops into the most complex known natural structure, and scientists are largely in the dark about how that happens. This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of what might be going wrong in - and therefore how to treat - many common disorders of the brain such as depression, schizophrenia and autism. To create their brain tissue, Juergen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain's Edinburgh University Human Genetics Unit began with human stem cells and grew them with a special combination of nutrients designed to capitalise on the cells' innate ability to organise into complex organ structures. They grew tissue called neuroectoderm - the layer of cells in the embryo from which all components of the brain and nervous system develop. Fragments of this tissue were then embedded in a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor - a system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids. After a month, the fragments had organised themselves into primitive structures that could be recognised as developing brain regions such as retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex, the researchers explained in a telephone briefing. At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimetres (0.16 inches), they said. Although they were very small and still a long way from resembling anything like the detailed structure of a fully developed human brain, they did contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue. "This is one of the cases where size doesn't really matter," Knoblich told reporters. "Our system is not optimised for generation of an entire brain and that was not at all our goal. Our major goal was to analyse the development of human brain (tissue) and generate a model system we can use to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting." In an early sign of how such mini brains may be useful for studying disease in the future, Knoblich's team were able to use their organoids to model the development of microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which patients develop an abnormally small head, and identify what causes it. Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory. "The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and has a frighteningly elaborate number of connections and interactions, both between its numerous subdivisions and the body in general," said Dean Burnett, lecturer in psychiatry at Cardiff University. "Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in the lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows - there is a connection there, but we're a long way from that sort of application yet." – Reuters, August 29, 2013. |
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