“I hate this issue.
It breaks my heart. So
complicated.”
So streamed this tweet, as a recent Q&A episode on ABC television again tackled the issue of
refugee incarceration.
Within that simple tweet lies the intense but contradictory
strands of a newly-emerging public response to the treatment of asylum seekers.
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| An image that calls up many responses - in each of us. Courtesy SMH. |
Yet the response does not look like the freshly-minted
righteous anger – for or against - we first witnessed.
Simply, many of us are now prepared to admit solutions like
incarceration on Nauru are cruel. And
many of us are also prepared to let it go.
It causes us genuine anguish to see these ordinary yet
determined people placed in a proto-jail.
But our distress makes us want to look away, and hope the issue will die
down or simply go away.
These are the threads I am sensing.
Firstly, many of us have built up empathy for refugees and
asylum seekers. Most Australians are now
more likely to take a refugee into their home, or give them a chance at a job.
Secondly, our national response does embarrass a surprising
amount of us. “Fortress Australia,”
sneered another Q&A tweet. “The rest of the world is laughing at
us.” I know, we know.
Thirdly, we will not take to the streets to fight against
incarceration.
Are we accepting this new development because it takes it
off the front pages? That bringing back
the Pacific Solution actually deprives the strident and vituperative nationalists
of an opportunity to air their xenophobic views?
And here’s a fourth strand.
The articulation that refugees who arrive by boat should get no advantage compared to those stuck in
refugee camps elsewhere, is popular.
It calls to our sense of fair play, even though many of us
logically know that it isn’t fair. It
isn’t a case of who was first, and who is pushing into the line.
There is a surging mass of millions of displaced people all
over the world, and they cannot stand in an orderly line like they are waiting
for service at a coffee shop.
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| A refugee camp - Australians understand the urge to flee. www.elpais.cr |
As the tweet said, it is heartbreaking and complicated. As well as personally confronting.
We could say “the boat people” matter is a fault line that
divides people in Australian politics, but too many of us see it is a personal fault
line within us.
On Q&A Federal
Minister Peter Garrett bravely said “no one takes comfort” in the Nauru
solution.
A more profound defence than that is impossible. He could only focus narrowly on the simple
retort that the new solution stops lives from being put at risk, and punishes
people smugglers.
Singer Billy Bragg said on Q&A that “a country must be judged on how the weak and
dispossessed are treated”. We know we
cannot meet this test.
That is another burden to put on our heavy hearts, but it
won’t be enough to break their new hardening.
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