This is a recap of a previous post, but
I think it's worth reiterating.
Australia is being manipulated and
poisoned because politicians can now exploit what we know, and didn't know in an earlier age.
In the 1970s – as I once confirmed
with a researcher – Australia had no idea about the refugee boats that
didn't make it.
That meant the refugee debate could be
framed in terms of the boats that did make
it. They were made – at least by sympathetic journalists like Ita
Buttrose – into personifications of bravery, people who were so
fearless, and Australia such a beacon, that of course
we should accept them.
Australia
back then crafted a policy to stop the boats by getting people here
without the boat. Not by blocking them: by trying to process their
refugee status quickly, and bring them.
Australia
now has this burden of knowledge, which becomes a burden of guilt,
which becomes the burden of political speech, which becomes the
burden of atrocity.
Now,
the world knows that some boats don't make it. The cynical racists
among our politicians – of both sides – have used that knowledge
against us, which doesn't make sense.
Think
about it: if you tend to the Right, you're supposed to believe in
individual agency as a core article of faith. Fretting about dangers
is hypocrisy: the individuals leaving wherever they're leaving are
doing so of their own free will.
When
the Right witters on about deaths at sea, they do it solely to wedge
the Left: because, forty years later, now we know that refugees might
die on the trip, we agonise about it.
They –
the Right – don't agonise. They don't care
– any government that can send refugees back to their torturers is
a cynical liar when it talks of preventing deaths at see.
It's
the Left that cares, agonises, and lets itself get wedged by the idea
that we can prevent
the deaths at sea.
Here's
the cold equation: we can't prevent
the deaths. Preventing arrivals, transfers at sea, three-word
slogans, “Border Force”, no-comment press conferences – these
things do nothing to
prevent people leaving, and some of them will be in boats that sink.
(Remember
for a moment that mandatory detention was an ALP idea that must live
in infamy forever).
And
it's the ALP's mandatory detention plus the “Leftist” concern
about deaths at sea creates the opportunity for the wedge: if we make
Australia sufficiently odious the boats won't leave, goes the
argument, when actually the Monsoon is the only thing that seems to
change the boat departures.
And if
we didn't know at all – if, as in the innocent 1970s there were no
satellite phones, no call-for-help – our moral choices would be
both simpler and, in local political terms, so much more wedge-proof.
We would only have to concern ourselves with arrivals, not
departures.
There
is my solution to The Left's dilemma. We can't stop the departures.
What people flee is too much beyond our ken. Stop being caught in
the “stop the boats” question and instead, insist that we deal
humanely with those that arrive.
Don't
let the political debate be poisoned by our knowledge that some don't
survive the voyage. Honour the dead, but give our efforts to the
living refugees.
After
all, they are heroes.
