The politics of heart to heart

The Flower Project was a specific and visceral response to a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald on the 22 Jan 2002. In this letter Drs Dudley, Mares and Gale reported some of the things they saw and heard in the Woomera detention centre: the way detainees were addressed, the "evidence of violence and despair", the deliberately dehumanising surroundings and conditions. Some of the children asked them "Aren’t there any flowers in Australia?"

This question can be read as literally pointing to the actual and terrible conditions that both children and adult detainees are being kept in. It can also be read as a question about the humanity or the ‘heart’ of a nation that would incarcerate people in such conditions for long periods of time.

In response I initiated the Flower Project. A small group of us in Brisbane then carried it through. We appealed to ordinary Australians to send flowers and cards to these centres on 21^st March, particularly focussing on the three most isolated.

The Flower Project is an expression of "heart politics". It was designed to allow people who may not agree with the immediate closure of detention centres, or the removal of border protection mechanisms, along with those who do support these positions, to find common ground on the issue of the treatment of asylum seekers. It was intended to allow them to express their compassionate concern for the detained people directly.

Why the 21^st March? This was a day nominated by Philip Ruddock, the Minister for Immigration and Indigenous Affairs as Harmony Day. It is also the UN Day for the Elimination of Racism. Ordinary Australians responded in their thousands; sending flowers and flower cards into all the centres.

According to a Department of Immigration Multicultural & Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) spokeswoman, "flowers were pouring in to all detention centres" on the day. (Courier Mail, 25 March 2002). Those who responded included inspiring numbers of schoolchildren as well as public servants, pensioners, health workers, church workers, small business people, academics and students.

DIMIA’s policy of deterrence played out on the bodies and lives of the detainees, which leads to the kind of actions and conditions witnessed by the visiting doctors, is being highlighted by the hard work of the many thousands of Australians, high profile and of no particular public profile.

These are the people who are actively involved in trying to change the treatment of asylum seekers and of TPV holders released into the community. Thankfully, it is also being reported in some sections of the media.

This policy has been promoted by this Coalition government, and a complicit Labor opposition, as a reasonable way to discourage asylum seekers from making their desperate attempts to reach Australia.

Somehow this present government has sold this policy to the Australian public as yet another example of Australian’s commitment to the ‘fair go’. But as the history of this quintessential Australian quality shows, only certain kinds of people deserved and were given a ‘fair go’.

Like Aboriginal people and ‘Asians’, people of a ‘Middle Eastern Appearance’ who might be Muslim are understood by Howard’s "we" who "decide who comes in to this country" not to be part of this constituency.

But the heart to heart action has a broader context. During the prime of Pauline Hanson many older white working class people, mainly men, were given a renewed sense of mattering.

Many had been marginalised by the creeping rust belt as globalisation policies corroded the jobs and certainties of the lower and un-skilled members of the community. These were the very groups that had produced the models for the creation of the Australian iconic figures, the bushmen, the diggers, and Howard’s battlers.

Even if their individual lives were hard and they were just making do, they saw themselves in ads, heard about lives like theirs in songs and stories. They mattered. The decline in their cultural centrality started with the challenges made by feminist writers and activists.

It was then further eroded by some historical truth tellers, and by Aboriginal and white anti-racist activists. Being a ‘good bloke’, (or his missus), understood of course as a good white bloke, no longer has the innocent ring to it that it had in the 1950’s.

These people not only lost their representative centrality as iconic Australians with the cultural and political changes of the 1960’s and 70’s, with the new feminist services such as women’s refuges, and the decline in the acceptance of domestic violence by governments and the community, often their wives and families as well. And then with economic rationalisation many lost their jobs.

In the face of such felt loss and moral and social disorder many sought refuge in blaming the victim for all their troubles. This cultural environment increased their fear of the other who threatens the Australia where they used to feel at home, and which they would like to reconstruct.

However fear cannot be calmed by righteous indignation. This was my lesson from the Pauline Hanson demonstrations. Yelling "racist scum" at Pauline’s followers, or suggesting racists were "as thick as bricks", expressed a similar anger at the loss of a nostalgic notion of a Good Australia.

In this case threatened by the identified racists. It also had the comforting effect of sliding all the responsibility for racism down from the moral high ground to those below.

Many of those who have been upset by this government’s treatment of asylum seekers and refugees have spoken about being ashamed of being Australian and of wanting to leave. Again, as if there was an idyllic past that is now lost. Maybe they are now feeling the loss of cultural centrality they might have enjoyed under some previous governments in the last 30 years.

‘The racists’ become an easy target for this now retro elite to blame; the target for their feelings of what they see in turn as a growing moral disorder. The fact that most of the identifiable racists are working class, less educated, less cosmopolitan, does not seem to be as telling as it might. This adversarial moral high ground politics entrenches the very feelings and fears that ground racism.

Many Australians are struggling with the issues of border protection and detention centres. For others the struggle is with their fear of difference(s) and the potential loss of Anglo cultural dominance.

These struggles are taking place within a context of rapid and, for the fearful and those not economically protected, often bewildering change. They are certainly not helped in this by the cynical politics of fear of the present government or by the moral wobble of the opposition.

Neither are those who are convinced and frightened by stories of the barbarians at the border who throw children overboard helped to discernment by the politics of blame and scapegoating.

It is hoped that heart to heart action might touch people in a place beyond their fear, where they still wish to be and to see themselves as compassionate people. It is also hoped that the heart to heart action, like the letter writing and visiting of detainees, and the offering of spare rooms so that detainees may be released into the community organised by other groups, will bring some simple comfort to those incarcerated in the detention centres.