The socially corrosive effects of fear and prejudice as public policy

I agree with Paul Keating that we have moved from being on the brink of creating a tolerant, creative society in which xenophobia was on the wane to one in which "tolerance looks frailer and xenophobia more robust". As he also said in the third Manning Clark lecture in 2002: "this government [the Coalition] has consistently looked inward and backward" and its predominant theme is captured by its actions in closing borders and keeping people out. The emphasis is on exclusion rather than inclusion, on fear rather than hope.

In deliberately portraying asylum seekers as a threat, the Howard government has succeeded in gaining traction for the bizarre notion that desperate people in leaky boats were somehow a threat to our national security. He counted on being able to arouse our fear of being overwhelmed by strangers envious of our good fortune, to speak to our old dark fear of invasion. Perhaps our own deep knowledge that we are alien invaders who have stolen the land we occupy allows him to feed this anxiety.

As Anthony Burke pointed out in In Fear of Security, Australian political figures have often portrayed Australia as vulnerable to loss of sovereignty and have generated levels of fear and anxiety that are disproportionate to the actual threats. It is no accident that Ruddock chose to represent the arrival of an increased number of asylum seekers during 2001 as an "urgent threat to Australia's very integrity" and invoked the phrase "national emergency" to describe the increase in numbers. The government began with the assumption - no doubt carefully tested in publicly funded opinion polling - that to simply mention "illegal migrants" to some Australians would cause them to lose their grip on reality.

As Burke sees it, a community which sees itself in terms that emphasise threat and vulnerability "is always an exclusive one, bounded by a power which seeks to enforce sameness, repress diversity, and diminish the rights (and claims to being) of those who live outside its protective embrace".

Burke posits the question that I regard as the crucial battleground for the hearts and minds of the Australian people: "Whether an 'Australian' community would be thought of on the basis of a walled and insecure identity, or a generous and outward looking diversity?" Successive governments have often justified their actions by the "awful moral calculus", as Burke puts it, of defining our security in such a way that it justifies the massive insecurity and obliteration of others.

In all of his pronouncements about the need for Australians to attack Iraq, Howard returned again and again to the threats to our security, even invoking the Bali bombings, despite the absence of any convincing evidence that we were threatened by Iraq.

Ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full flight, although it may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians' normal "stock in trade". But it seems that now, more than ever before, we are invited to feel insecure - worried about becoming victims of crime or disease, afraid of terrorist attacks and invasion by hoards of greedy strangers.

Those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us. Such appeals to fear are used simultaneously to justify restrictions on our civil liberties and the detention of persecuted asylum seekers. It reached its hilarious zenith in the "fridge magnets" mail out.

We're encouraged to believe "it's them or us." Such fear is functional. It is needed to justify such policies and distract from policy failures. And it's clear that fear always serves the real elites - as opposed to those concocted by the conservative commentators - the privileged who throughout history have claimed to be uniquely positioned to identify the "dangers" from which they must protect us; witches, Jews, blacks, Muslims, communists, terrorists, illegals.

Fear sells and it gets people elected.

Fear also sows mistrust in the community and reduces people's desire and ability to come together for constructive social change. How can we work together if we do not trust one another? If we come to trust the experts and mistrust our own judgments, we are less likely to see the point of being involved in political life. Those in a high state of impotent anxiety are likely to feel overwhelmed and withdraw into their private worlds. As many authoritarian leaders have well understood, a populace is best controlled when it's afraid - controlled and diverted.

Without a moral dimension to public policy, we are all vulnerable to appeals to self-interest over co-operation and hostility over empathy. And we know from history the consequences of such deterioration in civic life.