Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Christian values and asylum seekers in an election year

By Susan Metcalfe - posted Thursday, 25 March 2010


With an election looming later this year the political lunatics are out hunting for asylum seekers. Christian and family-spruiking politicians are lining up their easiest targets for sacrifice, almost willing the boats to keep coming, and sections of the media are jumping on for the ride.

One of my strongest childhood memories of growing up in Sydney is of Catholic priests at our front door telling my mother she would burn in hell if she didn’t come back to the Catholic Church. The same Catholic Church that had riddled her with guilt and left her with an interminable angst that ultimately destroyed her life. So I can’t really be surprised that so many Christian politicians hold values that are damaging to other human beings but I had hoped as a country that we might have moved on by now.

Senator Fielding from the Family First party is one of the latest to pull out his hammer and nails to deliver his doctrine, “If you're going to try and jump the queue you go to the back of the queue and wait in a refugee camp and wait your turn to come to Australia”. But if Fielding is qualified to speak on the subject at all he must surely know that many people on boats have already been waiting at the back of his imaginary queue, often for years, only to discover that the queue is one of the world’s greatest red herrings.

Advertisement

Fielding has visited the detention centre on Christmas Island so he must know some of the stories of people who have come on the boats. He would be aware of the trauma and pain they have experienced, the dangers, and of the squalor of the refugee camps that he is suggesting they return to with their children. He must know that many refugees are coming by boat because they can no longer bear the separation from their families who are already living in Australia and he would be aware that family reunion, other than for spouses and children, is extremely limited under Australia’s humanitarian program and that boat journeys are often taken as a last resort. But in Fielding’s “family first” ideology it seems that only families with a vote can be offered his support and spared from his eternal damnation. Paul Power from the Refugee Council recently made the point (PDF 109KB):

I am very surprised that a committed Christian such as Senator Fielding is advocating we treat refugees poorly. The Christian churches have a long history of speaking up for the rights of refugees, and have played an important role in Australia’s proud history of providing protection to refugees.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott is another well known Christian who wants to get tough on people seeking safe haven in Australia. Abbott is strongly committed to protecting life inside the womb but not, it seems, to honouring the lives of men, women and children who arrive by boat after their birth. His belief in the sanctity of life is conditional, his compassion has limits, and specific human beings are apparently fair game to be sacrificed for his political aspirations. Like Fielding, Abbott would know of the trauma experienced by people on these boats, he would know that torture victims will be among the arrivals, but from his position of privilege he is willing to devalue their existence, to cast their lives as less valuable, less deserving than other human life.

Abbott wants to reintroduce the punitive temporary visas and he wants to push back the boats in a replay of the disastrous Operation Relex policy enacted under the Howard government in 2001. Under Operation Relex three boats sank during the interception or tow back process and two women on the SIEV 10 drowned - one was a young pregnant woman, the other a grandmother. I know of one toddler who struggled to survive when he was pulled from the water, his face was pushed to one side, and he has been left with permanent problems. His father says now that he is “different” to his other children.

If people are successfully pushed back to Indonesia we know that they will be condemned to years of uncertainty and many will endure conditions that are notoriously harsh. In June last year I was trying to help a Rohingya teenager from Burma, an unaccompanied minor with a relative in Australia who was being housed under appalling and dangerous conditions in a camp in Aceh, when I heard from a very reliable source that local workers had come into the camp one morning and beaten some of the men. An International NGO was well aware of the incident, as was the Australian media, but I have so far seen no public reporting of the story. An Indonesian NGO worker said to me at the time, “the Indonesians can be experts at making sure a story never sees the light of day”.

Like others obsessed with traumatised aqua arrivals, Abbott and his new Immigration wing man, Scott Morrison, don’t talk about what will happen to people when they are pushed away from our shores and they don’t ever seem to mention the plane arrivals. Their damnation is only for those who come across the seas. A glance at media releases from Scott Morrison who claims that his Christian faith “remains the driving force for my family, beliefs and values” will reveal that he has little else to talk about other than boats, and boats, and more specifically what he calls “illegal boats”. But why not talk about the planes when even News Limited admitted last year that asylum seekers arriving by plane represent “30 times the number of boat people that are supposedly ‘flooding’ across our maritime borders”. A UNHCR report released this week on asylum applications to industrialised countries notes that the country of origin for Australia’s highest number of asylum applications in 2009 was China (1,186), not Afghanistan or Sri Lanka which are the source countries for most of the recent boat arrivals.

Advertisement

Former Liberal advisor Chris Kenny argues in a recent New Limited article that the reason boat arrivals are more of a concern is because “those arriving by plane arrive legally, with visas in hand ... with authorities knowing who they were and where they came from”. But Kenny fails to mention that a visa is no guarantee of a person's identity. Hundreds of people are turned away from our airports each year (1,284 in 08-09) because of document fraud, or because of doubts about their identity, the largest percentage are denied entry because they are not considered bona fide visitors to Australia and others must at times make it through our airports undetected. Refusals for immigration clearance at our sea ports totalled 229 for the same period.

But by contrast it is the people who come seeking safe haven, whether arriving by plane or boat, who will present themselves willingly to Australian authorities for processing. They are the ones who want to be put through an extensive process to verify their identity, they want to be legitimately recognised by a humanitarian country, and most arriving by boat will turn out to be refugees.

News Limited publications in particular seem all too eager to whip up a storm of bad feeling against boat arrivals in an election year, egging on a divisive debate, making excuses for derogatory language. Speculation from “sources” runs in articles on one day to be followed with the official denials the next. And suggestions that people might be moved from Christmas Island to the Darwin detention centre are now run so regularly, in tandem with the Opposition’s cries, that one can only imagine the excited headlines that will follow if it actually happens.

But this is not news. Numerous transfers from Christmas Island have already been reported for people who were in the final stages of processing and who were considered to be vulnerable, and the government has made it clear it will use the onshore detention centres if Christmas Island fills up. This is just not a meaningful story to keep running every day, although it is perhaps not on the same scale as speculation by most media outlets on whether Lara Bingle’s engagement ring was flushed down a toilet.

Under the Howard government many people were regularly brought to the Australian mainland from Papua New Guinea and Nauru for medical treatment or to testify in court cases, and these were mostly people whose cases had been rejected. In 2005 four men were brought to a hotel in Melbourne even before they were security cleared and in 2007 only 82 of the 83 Sri Lankans arriving on a boat were taken to Nauru, the other person was taken to the detention centre in Perth where he stayed until he later received a visa. I don’t remember the outcries from journalists at the time.

Most disturbing from The Australian in recent times has been its willingness to give voice to Sri Lankan officials who deny the atrocities in their country. “There is no persecution in Sri Lanka … All citizens are equal before the law” said the permanent secretary to Sri Lanka's Foreign Affairs Minister, Romesh Jayasingha, in one of journalist Paul Maley’s recent articles. But the evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary and journalists only need to read the reports. A recent US Department of State report on Sri Lanka in 2009 states:

The government was credibly accused of arbitrary arrests and detentions, poor prison conditions, denial of fair public trial, government corruption and lack of transparency, infringement of freedom of movement, harassment of journalists and lawyers critical of the government, and discrimination against minorities. Human rights observers alleged that pro government paramilitary groups and security forces participated in armed attacks against civilians and practiced torture, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and extortion with impunity.

Former UN Spokesperson in Sri Lanka Gordon Weiss recently told Dateline that between 30,000 and 40,000 Tamils were likely to have been killed in the recent conflict and that the government was “masterful at controlling information and in refuting information”.

For a journalist at The Australian to simply keep offering up the Sri Lankan government's claims that no one is a refugee and everything is safe and democratic, without context or analysis, is extremely dangerous. I don't believe that any, or at least most, Australians would support violence or persecution from either the Sri Lankan government or the Tamil Tigers and this kind of reporting does not reflect an interest in Australia's integrity.

It is just too easy for sections of the media and desperate politicians to keep firing off words without accepting responsibility for the consequences. Many thousands of refugees who arrived by boat to Australia under previous governments are now citizens among us. They are Australians. But when Tony Abbott and Steve Fielding talk about the “boat people” through the lens of their own politics they are condemning these human beings to eternal guilt. They are telling these long term inhabitants of Australia that it was wrong to save themselves and their children, that they should never have come here, and they were never welcome.

According to our Christian politicians these people should instead now be sitting at the back of Fielding’s queue within the stench of a refugee camp. But people coming on boats are overwhelming the victims of past violence and sufferers of post traumatic mental disorders and when the calls come again for the boats to be pushed back at sea, the nightmares start all over again.

Both of my grandfathers were heads of Commonwealth Departments in Canberra, one ran the Health Department for many years, the other was Auditor-General. One was a strict Catholic who, like Tony Abbott, had once entertained the idea of priesthood, the other was the son of a Methodist clergyman. In a time of strong sectarianism in Australia the men were divided strongly by their religion - only one of the men was present at my parents’ wedding - and I can only wonder now if this era of division lives on in some of our more rigid-thinking politicians.

If the values of politicians like Scott Morrison are driven by their Christian faith, as he claims they are, then his beliefs can only be derived from a faith of division, one that condones separating families of less importance and judges harshly those who fall outside a chosen box. A faith that does not represent modern Australia. I am not a Christian - the images of my mother burning in hell were enough to turn me off forever - but I know of many Australians who embody the humanity that I believe is the genuine basis of any Christian belief.

Over the years of the Howard government women like Jane Keogh in Canberra and Brigid Arthur in Melbourne, both Sisters of the Catholic Brigidine order, spent long hours in detention centres offering a human hand of support to other human beings. Their compassion wasn’t conditional or divisive, they saw only human beings in need, innocent men, women and children who were suffering behind barbed wire fences, and they didn’t turn their backs. Their actions were mirrored by many of the Christian Churches which were among the strongest supporters of people detained under the past government’s policies and reflected in Australians of Buddhist or Muslim or no religious faith at all.

The elephant in the room is, of course, the current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who is filmed walking in and out of his church every Sunday morning and who has also claimed he would be willing to turn back boats on the ocean. Tim Costello recently remarked of both Abbott and Rudd: “When they have Christian faith I would just ask them, which boat would Jesus tow back out and leave on its own?”

But Rudd has thus far avoided travelling down the lowly path of forcing back boats, apparently due to the high probability of boats sinking and the limits of international law, and Rudd and his government have by degrees shifted our course towards the right direction as a humanitarian country. We now have one of the best Immigration Minister’s this country has seen in Chris Evans; policies are more humane, and the alternative is just so much worse. I can think of nothing more daunting than a return to the harsh values of the previous government and with Tony Abbott as the leader that is exactly what we would get.

Abbott is now even claiming, in his familiar blood sport style, that “people are dying on the high seas” because of Rudd’s “so-called compassion”, referring to the horrific boat explosion last year when five people were killed and others were badly injured. But if the boat was deliberately set on fire, as is claimed, then it could only have been because the people on board believed they would be forced back to Indonesia. Compassion does not kill people (I can’t believe I have to say that) and John Howard and his government’s lack of compassion has left us with a legacy that will take years to unravel.

My grandfather was the head the Health Department at a time when Australia was desperate for migrants to populate the country and we were happy to take as many refugees as we could find (not forgetting that they needed to be white back then). In his unpublished memoir he wrote: “In the early period of the migration scheme many children arrived in Australia in a ghastly condition. They had come from the refugee camps and were suffering from the effects of starvation, producing a condition of maramus in which they looked like living skeletons.” Many children on the boats were seriously ill and several fatalities were recorded before injections of gamma globulin were introduced by the International Refugee Organisation.

The refugee camps eventually dried up as a source for Australia’s migration program, something that is hard to imagine today as we bicker about keeping tiny numbers of refugees away from our shores, including children, and while millions of refugees (most not white) fill the camps around the world. At least 10 per cent of the children detained in Papua New Guinea under the Howard government’s Pacific Solution in 2001 were underweight for their age but the Howard government’s focus was on making sure they felt unwanted and unwelcome to Australia.

If our Christian and family loving politicians are truly people of faith driven by their Christian values, as they say they are, if they are not simply opportunists who speak and act now and ask for forgiveness later, then they might want to revisit their values and start talking about the millions of refugees in the world who will never find a home, the ones who will die in fear and squalor because the world has decided that their lives are not worth saving. Scott Morrison might consider expanding his understanding of refugees and start writing press releases about something other than boats and Senator Fielding could truly put families first and talk about improving the family reunion component of our humanitarian program, or about increasing our intake so that more families could be given a safe home.

Applications for asylum in Australia in 2009 (6,170) represent less than 2 per cent of the world’s claims and UNHCR notes that despite recent increases “figures in Australia remain not only below those observed in 2000 (13,100 claims) and 2001 (12,400 claims) but also far below those recorded by many other industrialized countries”. This is hardly a crisis.

The Refugee Council (PDF 113KB) has recently called for Australia’s intake of refugees to be increased over the next five years from the current 13,750 places to 20,000 per annum, beginning with the acceptance of an extra 1,000 highly vulnerable refugees from Asia in 2010-11. This would represent a modest increase and would be a good place for all our truly Christian politicians to begin in their advocacy for a better life for all human beings. They might also want to consider the commitment of the Brigidine Sisters:

... we stand in reverence
for the community of life
and we will continue to work
to further compassion and justice
for humanity and the earth.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. 3
  5. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

98 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Susan Metcalfe is a writer and researcher who made many independent visits to the Nauru detention centre during the time of the Howard government’s Pacific Solution policy. She is the author of the recently published book The Pacific Solution (Australian Scholarly Publishing http://www.scholarly.info/book/9781921509940/).

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Susan Metcalfe

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

Photo of Susan Metcalfe
Article Tools
Comment 98 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy