There. I said it.
Yes, we’re hearing reports of people traumatised by lack of access to drinking water, injured in riots, held in detention with nothing to do and little hope of a future reunited with their families.
And yes, I’ve seen the graphic novel on the Immigration Department website – the one depicting despairing young men cowering under the shadow of the Australian military. I’ve seen the pictures that reveal a trip to Australia by boat to be a ticket to a world of suffering. We look menacing. We look cruel.
It’s pretty awful. I don’t deny it. BUT IT IS WORKING. The boats are stopping. The message is getting through.
No more lives are being lost at sea and surely that makes the tough measures worthwhile. Because sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.
This is the message that’s out there in the Australian community, shadowy and poisonous in the minds of good-hearted people who by and large, according to many polls over the last ten years, feel compassionate toward refugees. Sure, they worry there’ll be a flood if we ‘open the gates.’ They’re concerned that not all refugees are genuine. But mostly, they’re not racist bastards who couldn’t give a damn. They’re reasonable people being sold a lie.
And the lie is this.
It doesn’t matter how hideously you behave if you think the outcome is worth it.
This is a lie and deep down we all know it.
We could repeatedly punish our toddlers when they misbehave until they learn to be the perfect offspring. But we don’t.
We could probably get better literacy scores out of our school children by keeping them ‘chained to their desks’ twenty/four seven and pumping them full of info. But we don’t.
We could torture prisoners until they give us the information we need to win wars. But we don’t.
So why do we think it’s regrettable (but necessary) to make life so unbearable for people who come here by boat that they’ll stop trying? Sure, it works. But just because something works doesn’t make it right. The end doesn’t justify the means.
That’s because there are basic principles of justice, respect and human dignity that demand not to be broken lest we break ourselves in the process. And right now in Australia, we’re all right on the brink of breaking point. Many in offshore detention centres are already well and truly shattered.
Yes, it’s fair to argue that to be broken is better than to be dead.
But there are better ways to save the lives of refugees – if that really is our aim- than by locking them up indefinitely to dissuade them from coming here by boat.
First, we need to face up to the fact that there are millions of people world wide looking for safe places to live and that number is only going to increase. World-wide, this isn’t a situation that’s going away any time soon. Sure, we can get people to die somewhere else instead of on our coastline, but is that really who we want to be?
This is a short term, brutal solution that harms everyone involved and solves nothing. There are better alternatives.
Migrants have always added to Australia’s culture and economy. We’re one of the wealthiest countries in the world with the capacity to absorb those who are eager and able to contribute.
With some good leadership, we could actually build on our population’s natural inclination toward compassion and provide proper support to refugees in our region. This includes:
helping resource countries to tackle the causes of conflict that create refugees in the first place by increasing spending on effective aid and development
encouraging others in our region to sign onto the Refugee Convention so that more countries help support refugees adequately
modelling what that support really looks like in practise: increased refugee intake, rights for asylum seekers to work and providing adequate health care.
Most urgently, we could spend some of the billions of dollars it costs to keep people in offshore detention on safely transferring asylum seekers to community detention where their claims can be quickly assessed and they can contribute to the community while they wait.
Most Australians – including our Governments – aren’t racist, cold hearted people. They want reasonable solutions to what has become a terrible, tragic problem that will only become larger.
Our country runs the risk of losing its soul as we swallow the lie that in order to achieve a good thing, we must all look the other way while awful things take place.
It simply isn’t true.
As individuals, communities and the deeply fair-minded people we know ourselves to be, it’s time we took a deep breath and said together:
“Enough. There IS a better way.”
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