On the politics of criminalising the persecuted

Okay I agree with practically everything that’s been said here but we have to talk about what hasn’t as well.

On Doug’s comment I’d be cheered to hear that this was in fact the case, and not entirely surprised. I recall that even during the Howard years after the departure of Mr Burns when Amanda Vanstone took over immigration she did one radio interview where she explained much the same reality. At the time I had been unaware of very much information about the numbers only that there was a vigorous debate and that people I took to be generally quite xenophobic hated refugees. So I was surprised to hear that one way or another we were taking in most of the boat arrivals almost whether we liked it or not. Later this became an argument showing up the Howard government’s record of tough talking for the hollow manipulation of racist public opinion for the deceit that it really was, but it also fed the demand for deterrence.

I’ll skip the gruesome details of how the Gillard government have barely progressed beyond that point, but mention the fact now for the sake of those who’ll berate me if I neglect to. I suspect the same thing is happening in terms of the intake of refugees approaching and occasionally exceeding our quotas under Labor and I’m glad, I guess, that some sort of humanitarian program persists despite the base nature of the political conversation we’re still having in this country.

In either case I find it absolutely despicable that we don’t have any love for our humanitarian program, that we fail to take pride in the good we can do, and most of all that we fail so miserably to stand up to the tacit racism, call it xenophobia or just isolationism that has been allowed to fester and subvert human rights at the beck and call of a long line of dog whistling scum from Billy Hughes to Hanson to Morrison.

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The second thing that goes largely unsaid is that this is a broken humanitarian program that the international community needs to get together and fix. We’re not alone in the world in having problems with refugees and we’d be somewhere between stupid to purely ignorant if we didn’t recognise that first World Countries being the only destinations for displaced people is problematic. Globally there are simply too many displaced people and too few destinations that will take them.

We can talk about how humanitarian programs should do better to respond to problems at the source and why dispersing people to far flung places of refuge may be culturally devastating in precisely the way persecutors intended. We may be forced to talk about greatest need when dealing with higher numbers of displaced persons. And here in Australia we need also to talk about the obsessive fear we have of not quite white people borne across the seas to our north in boats.

My feeling now though is that we need to talk about why we have things like migration exclusion zones and deterrents and why we even bother to process people if as it happens most of the time we know of no way to say No to people. When they arrive here by means that bigots falsely describe as illegal and humanitarians rightly rebuke, then the argument is by no means over. We still have to figure out what to do with these people. And when it comes to understanding the reasons why we haven’t then I have a nagging suspicion that as with the information I described being surprised by when Vanstone explained herself we might find allowing something other than racism to inform the conversation opens up questions as to why we’re weaselling out of our obligations instead of finding better ways to meet them.

My understanding is that unlike the global community at large we’re not faced with a humanitarian crisis of proportions with which we couldn’t deal were we willing to drop the basically racist rhetoric. I’ve often said take the 6,000 increase we announced, post the Houston report, directly from camps in Indonesia and then let’s see what happens. I’m not at all convinced by the pull factor argument, but nor am I against properly planned population growth. Measures like indenturing some migrants of any category to go and be put to work in regional areas for example may have a certain pragmatic appeal. The fact that we have any kind of immigration policy without a population policy is a joke, and the fact that without as much as asking those questions we’ve assumed the right to incarcerate people, including women and children, without justification is a crime in itself.

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As Jennifer says, we cannot and must not continue to do this.

I think we need to meet the moral challenge with some practical answers too.

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