Stop the world we want to get off...

By Richard McEncroe – PNG solution July 2013

 

So much has been spoken and written about Kevin13’s “solution” to the asylum seeker “problem” in recent days.  Opinion websites and newspapers have devoted enormous space to picking apart the perceived merits and costs of the plan.  Shrill rhetoric, rubbery facts, and odious comparisons of bad options, have combined with old truisms so toxically that a sour soupy public argument has crowded out reasoned public policy debate. 

 

Forget for a moment about the politics of the day, or the year.  Forget about whether Manus Island is a less bad option than Nauru, Malaysia better than PNG, or tow-back better than drowning.  Forget for a minute that Christmas Island is a flaming hell hole.  Forget about slogans, forget about Charters, Conventions and Courts. Forget about elections.  Forget about Howard being more or less right wing than Rudd.  Consider for a minute just two things that for me go to the heart of the issue.

 

Australia cannot be a part of the world and not a part of the world at the same time.  We are in it whether we like it or not.  We owe our very existence to being part of the world.  We trade, get rich, have access to whatever we want because we are in the world.  Being a part of the world is a great thing.  But the world has problems.  Wars between and within nation states and religious and/or ethnic based divisions force some people out of their homes.  There are millions and millions of people who through no fault of their own are displaced, loose and floating in the world.  That means they can’t stay where they are, you know… can’t stay.  Like a woman being beaten by her husband can’t stay; as much as she might wish she could.  Millions of people are right now being driven, they are not being drawn. 

 

When you live in the world, or are part of a successful relationship of just about any kind, you have to learn to take the crunchy with the smooth as the great Billy Bragg would say.  By ‘outsourcing’ and quite literally off-shoring the processing of asylum seekers who arrive by boat to PNG, the Australian government is trying, pretending, to deny our very existence.  Like a child covering its eyes and hiding under the bed, we are trying to pretend we are not here.  But we are here.  We are here when we want the good stuff.  We love getting rich because China is in the world and buying our iron ore.  If we huddle very still here for a while, we can slough off the spill-over people to our (really poor) next door neighbour and maybe they will just go away.  Hardly an example the oft invoked Australian way.  So that’s the first thing.

 

The second is that at the heart of this problem is racism.  I know nobody likes to talk about it, but imagine even for one second that the people arriving by boat were more your Nordic type and less your Afghani type. Imagine they are white, blonde, English speaking and, well, you know, just like us.  Do you reckon they would be rotting in camps and being sent to one of the poorest nations in region? I don’t.  I reckon the people in the Western suburbs of Sydney would be bursting out of their tracky dacks to adopt their very own Hans or Svenda.

 

A country that treats one group of people differently than they would treat another group of people because of their race is, well… racist.  If it isn’t I don’t know what it is. A country that shirks its responsibilities is cheating.  Adopting a cheating racist policy position might well win Kevin13 the election.  His acceptance speech might well begin “this is the hollowest victory of them all...”