Let Them In

(Events are moving quickly in Europe. The borders are opening and the refugees are being waved through. Perhaps now is a good time to reprint this article I wrote five years ago.)

Let us try to be wise. Let us at least try to be logical.

Boat people, more sympathetically known as asylum-seekers, pose no security threat to Australia. They are risking their lives, running for their lives, to get here.  They are simply trying to get somewhere safe. Why would they want to hurt us? Why do we treat them so badly?

Our politicians assert their hairy-chested security credentials by making these people prisoners - guilty until proven innocent. This is insanity elevated to policy and law. The loss of dignity we suffer as a nation is incalculable. The blame is shared by both major political parties, and by their most Christian leaders, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott.

If MPs were forced to sit in a quiet room for one hour each day viewing scenes of human suffering and reading history, perhaps then they might be capable of thinking and acting with compassion and imagination.  Then they might understand something of the human heart and the desire for freedom, shelter, peace.

If my attempt at eloquence is too sissy for our politicians, let me try to put it another way. We are not winning any friends in the world with our current policy. A radical change of policy will help to win friends and hearts and minds.

ASIO’s astute assessment, in a nutshell, is that some asylum-seekers may bring their prejudices with them. In other words, if you’re a Tamil from Sri Lanka you might still be a bit touchy about the people who burned your house down. Who wouldn’t be?

A history lesson: Serbs and Croats who migrated here after WWII brought mighty and ancient prejudices with them.  They didn’t like each other much but they got on with making new lives here for themselves and their children. There was an occasional brawl. A group of fantasists called the Ustashi blew up some letterboxes in the 1970s. That was it.

Over the past thirty years or so many white South Africans have migrated here. Some of them are lovely and sweet people. Some of them are the most obnoxious and bigoted people I have ever met. They are so appalling that I have felt physically ill talking to them. They came here because their world of brutal privilege had collapsed. We let them in because they were white and had money.

We cannot screen people on the basis of their prejudices. Thought is not yet a crime. 

If security is not a credible issue, what do we have against the boat people? That they are queue-jumpers?  How quaint.  As if it were a case of bad manners to be running for your life.

Let’s go back to the beginning. People-smuggling is a cruel form organized crime.   It is a problem above all for the people being smuggled.  Let’s get really tough and take over the business.  We can have a plane waiting at Djakarta airport every Friday afternoon and charge asylum-seekers something like $10 each for their fare.  All aboard! We can offer them hope and safety and a welcome.

This would be compassionate, and imaginative, even noble.  To balance the numbers in the mythical “queue” we should simply cut back the quota for other intending migrants, those who come here on little more than a whim to live in a sunny climate and see kangaroos. We should give priority to the fearful and the desperate.

When our safe and hopeful asylum-seekers are here, where will we put them? If we must put them in camps in the desert for some symbolic reason we can at least take away the security guards and the fences. The refugees have nowhere to run. They have already escaped.

Otherwise we can reopen or rebuild transitional hostels of the type that were common in our cities sixty years ago. From there they can be assisted into other accommodation and jobs (as were my own English family who came here as ten-bob Poms in the 1950s).

From there our new Australians can get on with the job of creating a new life for themselves and a newer Australia – as our parents and grandparents did.

We have done all this before. We imagined our future and welcomed the new. We can do it again.