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Selective compassion

By Greg Barns - posted Friday, 27 February 2009


The community and political response to Victoria's bushfire tragedy has borne out two concepts - that compassion is a relative concept, and that Australia has a very ugly vengeful underbelly.

The circumstances of these fires - affecting mainly Anglo-European Australians living in bush blocks and in small country towns - are those with which many Australians can easily identify and empathise. It is our people who have suffered.

But consider this. For many years the Australian community - the very same people, including our political and media leaders, who are today wearing compassion on their sleeve - backed a policy which saw thousands of desperate men, women, and children who risked their lives to come to this country in leaky boats, detained behind razor wire in the South Australian desert and on godforsaken Pacific islands.

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Many of these asylum seekers, particularly the young, have experienced immeasurable physical and mental suffering as a result of conditions of incarceration which, like the bushfires last week, shone the international media spotlight on Australia.

There was, in that case, with notable exceptions, little collective compassion for these people who, like fire victims, had lost everything. It is ironic, and sickeningly so, that some on the media are now calling fire victims “refugees”.

Compassion is a relative concept. It is much easier to be compassionate when the person suffering looks, speaks and lives like us. We can identify with that individual. Our response is not laced with any sense of fear or suspicion because these are people like us, who live like us.

Compassion, said political theorist Hannah Arendt, is inherently selective. And in a sense that is its great limitation and potential evil. That this is the case was manifested in the appalling aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

White America cared little about the plight of the mainly African American population displaced by that disaster. One can speculate quite reasonably as to whether or not the Australian body politic, media and broader community would have been as moved if the bushfires had wiped out an Indigenous community or an area of Australia where the population was mainly Middle Eastern.

The true test of a nation's capacity for kindness and giving is not in an easy case like the Victorian bushfires, but when it confronts us. When we cannot readily identify with those who are suffering, but yet can let go of our fears and our hard-wired stereotyped thinking, and extend our generosity to them.

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Recent history would suggest that we have some way to go in meeting that challenge.

As we do in understanding fundamental rights. The vigilantism that has accompanied the arrest and charging of Brendan Sokaluk with arson offences last Friday week has shown the world just how ugly and ignorant many Australians can be.

The conduct of the tabloid media, and social networking sites like Facebook, in allowing comments that clearly constituted threats to kill and incitements to violence - both serious criminal offences - has been shameful. The media has a responsibility to ensure that it does not create violence - and in this case, it failed to meet that responsibility.

Mr Sokaluk is entitled, like every person in our democracy, to a presumption of innocence. That entitlement has been torn to shreds, courtesy of the media giving airplay to ignorant and nasty vigilantism.

The ugliness of Australia has reared its head again, just as it did in the notorious Cronulla riots in 2005. Reporters like Channel Seven's Chris Reason wandered around Churchill in Victoria, from where Mr Sokaluk hails, asking people what they wanted to do to him. Their answers were nasty, vengeful, and ignorant. As were the shameful comments left on Facebook and on news websites.

And how about the trashing of the right to innocence by Tim Blair, a right-wing blogger with Sydney's Daily Telegraph? On February 13 he wrote, referring to the charges laid against Mr Sokaluk, "Arson and child porn. This bloke is a real winner." One might have thought that a supposedly educated person like Mr Blair would know better than to write this. But it appears not.

The self-congratulatory tone of media commentators and politicians in patting themselves and everyone else on the back for being such wonderful generous Australians in responding to the bush fires risks becoming nothing more than an exercise in jingoism.

The reality is a little more salutary. We showed our true colours when we allowed vigilantism to take hold and our leaders did nothing to close it down. And we are still selective in our compassion.

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First published in the Hobart Mercury on February 23, 2009.



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About the Author

Greg Barns is National President of the Australian Lawyers Alliance.

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