'Ooga-booga' helps refugee

2006-06-02 15:47

Sydney - The use of the word "ooga-booga" in an Australian refugee ruling has helped a Myanmar woman get a second chance at asylum, a report said on Friday.

The woman filed a complaint after "ooga-booga" appeared next to "Definition of Refugee" in the summary of her case by a refugee tribunal, the Age newspaper said.

Tribunal member Wendy Boddison said she inserted "ooga-booga" into the text to test her spell-checker but forgot to remove it.

A magistrate ordered the tribunal to reconsider the case in part because the word appeared to have "overtones of mysticism and racism."

Term insulting

"A fair-minded observer appraised of the facts and circumstances of the ooga-booga comment would entertain a reasonable apprehension of bias," magistrate Grant Riethmuller wrote in his finding, the paper said.

He said there were several examples of its use to back up the Burmese woman's claims that the term was insulting.

One was a US review of Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong which included the line: "Jackson's cavalcade of oogabooga savages makes Memoirs of a Geisha seem like a monument to ethnic sensitivity."

The woman's barrister, Peter Condliffe, said it was rare for the Refugee Review Tribunal's decisions to be overturned.

"But it (ooga-booga) really hits you in the face," he told The Age.

- AFP