Five years ago I first saw Australians protesting against asylum seekers being imprisoned in their local community.
Frighteningly, they weren’t protesting about these innocent humans being locked into detention indefinitely; instead, these citizens were annoyed that the detainees were locked up so close to their comfortable, quiet neighbourhood. News footage at the time even showed a young child holding a sign that said, “sink the boats”.
Related: Two more asylum seekers have attempted suicide on Manus Island.
I decided that I didn’t want my own children growing up in a nation where it is socially acceptable to teach our children to fear and to exclude people who are different to them.
I wanted to do what I could to help people live as the tangible evidence of the Australia that I believe is possible – welcoming, compassionate, inclusive and fair. That’s why a few friends and I began Welcome to Australia.
My dream is that thousands of persecuted people can find protection, belonging and opportunity here in Australia. I despair of that dream being realised as long as our leaders are happy to manipulate public concerns through misinformation, baseless hysteria and the demonisation of people they’ve robbed of a right of reply.
Such people are willing to use the world’s most vulnerable people as expendable pawns in their political games. They’ll use fear and prejudice to gain popularity. They won’t hesitate to erode both our social harmony and our humanity in order to win elections. And I believe that as long as fear, prejudice and xenophobia attract voters, these people will employ them as weapons.
More on this: Two more asylum seekers have attempted suicide on Manus Island.
So, for the sake of the children we read about recently in the Forgotten Children report, for the sake of our national character and for the sake of the thousands of refugees that we could be offering protection to — the opportunity for this anti-asylum seeker dog-whistling and baseless fear-mongering must be removed.
For more detail: This is the horrific effect of keeping children in detention.
There are two pathways to this outcome. The first is Welcome to Australia’s ultimate goal of radical social change – creating a society in which prejudice is unpopular and cruelty hurts at the polls.
When images of asylum seeker vessels on the evening news elicited our collective empathy rather than our contempt, we’d know we’d arrived at this goal.
Sadly, while 70% of Australians approve of our treatment of asylum seekers despite well-publicised reports of rampant abuses of human rights, it seems we are many years away from the kind of cultural transformation we continue to strive for.
Related: This is the front line of the REAL asylum seeker emergency.
The second pathway to our goal, then, is a bipartisan commitment to closing the ocean route to seeking asylum in Australia.
I don’t like this conclusion anymore than any other progressive activist. But unless we acquiesce to this uncomfortable reality, we’ll be stuck in an endless cycle of elections that measure leadership in cruelty, continuing to take our asylum seeker policy on a downward spiral of injustice and inhumanity.
Asylum seekers, refugees and our national character will continue to suffer for as long as the arrival of boats can be used as a political tool.
Related: Finally, some good news for these young asylum seekers.
It’s time to build a policy framework that gives thousands of people protection in Australia every year – and protects the asylum seekers who have already arrived – while robbing the fear-mongers of the opportunity to ply their trade.
This framework would include closing the ocean route to Australia; protecting people from the damage done in detention centres through transparent independent oversight; protecting people from the mental anguish of indefinite detention through legislated mandatory processing time limits; and – essentially – offering a better life to thousands more people every year by dramatically increasing our annual intake through the UNHCR’s humanitarian resettlement program.
This is the “safe alternative pathway” that we have demanded our government provides for asylum seekers – the safest pathway for thousands more people to find a home in Australia, and the quickest way to stop the rapid erosion of our social cohesion accelerated by every injection of anti-asylum seeker vitriol.
Our leaders have taught us that brutality is the only possible way to address a complex global issue, dehumanising us, and the people coming to us for protection, as part of the lesson.
They’re wrong.
An asylum seeker policy is possible that sees many thousands more people finding projection in Australia without being welcomed by a cacophony of dog-whistling – or children holding up signs calling for their death at sea.
To achieve that, it’s time to move beyond the indefinite, mandatory debate that has led us to this point and realise that despite today’s ugly social and political realities there are realistic, humanitarian outcomes that can be achieved.
Tens of thousands of refugees, and the communities they’ll live in, will thank us for doing so.
More information on Welcome to Australia can be found here.
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Top Comments
The thing that drives me to distraction about the arguments about people wanting to protect the Australian way of life, is that our way of life is what it is because of successive waves of immigration which included a huge percentage of refugees.
Our coffee and cafe culture comes from the wave of Europeans fleeing post-war Europe. Vietnamese refugees gave us an amazing food culture, hard working people and a Saigon Hot Bake in every shopping centre. Even the fact that every town has a chinese take-away is down to the legacy of the gold rush. Australia is what it is because of immigration.
I completely agree with the author, we do need to stop the ocean routes but we need to do it through pro-active positive action to stop the routes. I think we should be helping Indonesia identify the leaders of the smuggling gangs, the actual owners of the boats are usually as much victims of their lies as the poor people on them.
It is my true wish that we can embrace this as an opportunity to grow our country but all I see is politicians making capital out of fear and it leaves me filled with despair for the good hearted people that I know we really are. Lets remember that unless you are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander your family were at some point immigrants. I hope they were welcomed better than we are doing now.
In an ideal world they would all be lovely law abiding people who will appreciate the freedom and opportunities Australia has to offer them.
Unfortunately we know that is not the complete picture. For every genuine refugee there are people who don't come with honest intentions and that is why we need to be very careful before we open the door to them. We are experiencing violence and crime in our suburbs that simply weren't an issue 20 years ago. There is a common denominator with this and we need to be careful. These people come from a culture where a peaceful way of life is foreign to them and women are treated as possessions. This is not the Australia I want my children growing up in.
If we don't learn by the mistakes of other countries who haven't exercised caution we only have ourselves to blame.
You make very valid points. I agree.
How do you know any of this? Have you actually checked crime statistics? Do you know who is behind most crime and what kinds of crimes are being committed??
Before you make generalised claims about crime and attributing the rise in crime to people coming in from elsewhere, might I suggest you familiarise yourself with the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) crime reports and stats.
And in terms of women being treated as possessions and misogyny, this is not something that is a given or exclusive to other cultures ... in fact, look at the DV stats close to home.
This whole "our lifestyle" argument is bogus and ridiculous - for every argument against "these people", we only have to look in our own white neighbourhoods and find the same thing. Comments like yours are the perfect example of the fear and xenophobia this article is talking about.
Except instances of violent crime have decreased in the last decade, so nice try, but your opinion is based on ignorance. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/...
Chillax actually knows very little but reflects the sad, xenophobic, suburban views that are very common. Never let facts get in the way of good old bigotry.