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What does our treatment of asylum seekers say about national character?

By Justine Toh - posted Tuesday, 7 July 2015


We don’t have an issue with gun control like North America, and our minimum wage looks extravagant in comparison with theirs. Then there’s our weather. Bliss.

Our eulogy virtues, however, are more mixed. A fair go and lending a helping hand are intrinsic to the Australian mythos, and you can see the generosity of individual Australians on display in, for example, the $6.5 million (and counting) pledged to World Vision Australia alone to aid its efforts to relieve the devastation of Nepal’s April earthquake. But somehow there is a curious disconnect in the mindset of many Australians when it comes to refugees.

The Federal Government may have severely restricted media access to the cruel reality of offshore detention but we as a community have proven pretty adept at keeping the routine dehumanisation of people out of sight and out of mind. And the fact that increasingly draconian measures to deter asylum seekers, from both sides of government, have passed with the tacit approval of many in the Australian community suggests that we are more than willing to switch off our empathy for others at various points.

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It’s not only our treatment of asylum seekers either: significant slashes to the foreign aid budget and the entrenched failure to ‘close the gap’, despite the high-sounding rhetoric, between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians show how much we struggle to care for vulnerable people. 

No one doubts that any of these issues are incredibly complex and present intractable problems for any government. But the cost of our actions is measured in human lives. If those eulogy virtues are really the ones worth striving for, our basic failure to be kind and neighbourly to those at our mercy is a searing indictment on us.

Back on Palm Sunday, Australian author Tim Winton lamented that our fear of poor strangers and the horrors subsequently visited upon them in detention imperilled the national soul. He spoke of the gulf between our present attitudes to refugees and his recollection, as a young man, of the way Australia welcomed thousands of Vietnamese fleeing their war torn country. “We used to be better than this,” he said. “For the sake of this nation’s spirit, raise us back up to our best selves.” Rather than seeking to ‘turn back the boats’, Winton said, “turn back from this path to brutality.”

Winton suggests that in hardening our hearts against asylum seekers we have become estranged from our better selves. We still manage to live with ourselves but whether we actually like ourselves is another matter. But if Brooks is right and we wish to cultivate the kind of individual (and, more broadly, national) character that’s worth eulogising, then there’s something to be said for reconsidering our callous treatment of the dispossessed in our midst.

Because no one desires a legacy built on the suffering of others. If we want to be remembered well, we will want more from each other than this.

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About the Author

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and an Honorary Associate of the Department of Media, Music, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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