ARA Oration
21 June 2013
To be a decent citizen
Your Excellency Rear Admiral Kevin Scarce and Mrs Liz Scarce, ,Mr David Linn, President of the Australian Refugee Association and Mrs LizLinn,my wife Julia and other distinguished guests.
Some of you will have experienced great suffering. But on average those of us gathered here in this beautiful hall have an historically unprecedented level of privilege. I encourage you to remain mindful of that as you listen to me speak this evening.
As we rightly pay respects to the indigenous owners of this land, on an occasion dedicated to refugees we should also reflect on other displaced indigenous peoples. I draw your attention to the plight of other indigenous people, in the old and new worlds; my thoughts go to the millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza.
To the staff, Board and members of the Australian Refugee Association, that has given nearly 40 years of wonderful service to refugees, thank you for inviting me to give this fourth ARA oration.
Last year’s orator was Catherine Branson QC, president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, who spoke of the compelling evidence of real and lasting damage done by closed detention environments. Since then, things have gone backwards with the reintroduction of offshore processing. On arrival, and after initial processing, most asylum seekersdo not go to Nauru and Manus, where there is capacity for less than 1000 detainees[i]. There are currently 8797 people in immigration detention on Christmas Island and the mainland,[1]in immigration detention centres, or in a so-called alternative places of detention, which still means being unable to leave the grounds of the facility, except under guard. It is positive that, although there are nearly a thousand people who have been in detention for more than six months, the average for people held in immigration detention facilities has significantly decreased from 277 days in November 2011 to 86 days in April this year.
Another 2752 asylum seekers are in community detention, where they do have relative freedom of movement and receive support services, albeit from under-resourced agencies. Around 6000 are released on the new bridging Visa E.[2] What is most worrying is that every single arrival after August 13 2012 issubject to removal from the Australian community to be placed in Nauru or Manus.
In spite of affirmation in the migration act’s modification in 2005 that minors should only be detained as “a measure of last resort”[ii] and ALP policy in 2008 stating that “children, and, where possible, their families, will not be detained in an immigration detention centre” on 30 April 2013, there weremore children locked up either in immigration detention centres or alternative places of detention than ever before (1632[3]compared to 842 at the height of the condemned Howard/Ruddock regime).[iii]Another 1200 children are in community detention.
In the second ARA oration in 2011, Hon Malcolm Fraser summarised Australia’s vulnerability to failing the human rights of refugees, tracing our indecent behaviour back to Billy Hughes.He movingly recounted the story of Tampa, and was rightly critical of both major political parties failings, bemoaning the ‘demeaning and miserable debate’ and regretting that politicians behave with contempt towards we citizens – appealing to the meaner side of our nature. I share Mr Fraser’s perplexity that we do not do more to support UN and other initiatives that deal with refugee problems closer to their source.
And the inaugural ARA orator was Hieu Van Li, a great friend of ARA, whose story since arriving by boat in 1977provides such a wonderful example of what can be achieved when asylum seekers are treated with decency, as they no longer are. It is up to us here to work towards re-establishing a decent response to refugees.
Decency
Decent is a difficult word, and everyone might not interpret it in the way in which I want to use it. But I think that difficulty is worth tackling. Decency is a cousin to kindness and generosity, but it is not the same as either. There are several definitions; one that I am eager to avoid is “in accordance with a satisfying the general standard of propriety or good taste”; I see this as a degraded decency – a kind of buttoned up attitude, for example, dressing decently. And there is a meaning of indecent that is far from what I intend, as in indecent behaviour, which might be a way of rebuking legitimate protest or a sexual peccadillo that is not one of your own.
The meaning that I am after is the notion of behaving in a way that is “appropriate, or proper to the circumstances or special requirements of the case” or “fitting”.[iv]
a decent person cannot be a person who’s gotten away with something. A decent person cannot have what it is not appropriate for them to have.”
“The life I live is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification.”
“if it’s appropriate for [us] to have the share of things which in fact [we] have, … that means that it is … appropriate for all of the others to have the share which remains. You know that what you have is what you deserve, and that means what they have is what they deserve. … it’s appropriate for [a child to be born and raised in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya], just as it’s appropriate for you and your friends to spend your life deciding which products you would like to buy and upholding high standards of performance in art. The way the world works is fundamentally not unjust, so the people who want to preserve the world are basically good, and the ones who want to tear it apart, the ones who steal on the street, the thieves, the destroyers, are basically bad.”
[I must acknowledge that] the fact that I have [lots of money] isn’t a fact about me like the color of my skin. Through a series of events, the money came to me, but devoting my life to defending my possession of something that came to me is not an inescapable destiny. Keeping the money is just a choice I’m making, a choice I’m making every day. I could perfectly well put an end to the whole elaborate performance. If people are starving, give them food. If I have more than others, share what I have until I have no more than they do. Live simply. Give up everything. Become poor myself.[v]
I quote the American playwright Wallace Shawn. Impractical as Shawn’s solution may be, in that dividing his limited wealth will not contribute much to overall well-being,I value his formulation because it is imperative that each of us keeps the wound open; that we be reminded that the livesthat you and I lead are irredeemably corrupt because almost everything material thatwe have is a result of ourexploitation of others.
This is as a call to action rather than a rationale for giving up.I think we can attenuate our guilt by using our privilege to do something good. And it is also a call to give something substantial to others, though except in times of local tragedy,that does not seem to be the Australian way. In 2011, the Bhutanese community in South Australia collected nearly $2000 for Queensland flood victims. This followed an earlier contribution to the victims of the Victorian bushfire when the first Bhutanese arrivals in Australia had not yet celebrated their first annual settlement day. Perhaps the Bhutanese know better than we do just how goodit feels to give to people even when those people are not ‘just like us’!
Given that we Australians per capita consume massively more than an equal share of resources, and emit more greenhouse gasses than anyone, what should we each give, either to those who are deprived, or to contribute to repairing the environment? Recognising that giving has tax advantages as well as moral ones, I envisage a sliding scale, starting at 5% of gross salary at, say, $80,000, true tithing at10%from $150,000, and 20% above $250,000. Since the very rich don’t pay much tax, their contribution should be as a percentage of real disposable income, and at least 80%isproportionate and therefore decent, representing only a fraction of net assets, and falling significantly short of Warren Buffett’s undertaking to give away 99 percent of his total wealth.
Decency is not something that is owed like a duty or right. This is illustrated by the fact that we cannot make a claim in a court of law on someone to behave decently. If my identical twin is dying of renal failure and I refuse to give up a kidney, this is a failure of decency on my part, but no one has any grounds to bring action against me.[vi]
In some ethical discussions, it is suggested that because to act decently demands only what is proportionate, it falls short of more virtuous acts of kindness and generosity. But this fails to take account of the fact thatwe may have to go out of our way to act out of a basic concern for others, so that “at times, it takes a great personal sacrifice to do what is, objectively, only proportionate.”[vii]In Nazi Germany, to behave decently towards a Jew could be heroic.
Consider two employers, the first of whom is wealthy and has a profitable business, while the second is on the verge of bankruptcy. Both take care to ensure that employees are paid a fair wage for the work performed. On the surface their behaviour is indistinguishable, and so may be their character and intent but we would only describe the struggling employer as decent, though we would not make negative judgement about the rich one.
The concept of decent intentions holds very little weight; we are judged by our actions. I cannot be confident that I would have behaved differently from the average German in Berlin in the 30s. I have not found it expressed better than by Billy Bragg, when he sings, “Virtue never tested is no virtue at all”.[viii] Just now, we are being tested.
Soin order to demonstrate decent behaviour we need not only to have basic concern for others, and recognition of the need to act in proportion to what we judge to be our responsibility toward the other person, we must do all of this in the face ofsome significant pressure not to do so.[ix]
I want to mention three forms of indecency that I think compromise us as a society.
- Nationalism
To quote from one of the few poets that I can understand:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The Latin phrasequoted by Owen from Horace's Odes (III.2.13), can be translated as: “it is sweet and decent to die for your country”,[4]indeed one of the great lies that has cost countless lives.There is exactly nothing decent about dying for your country; one should only die for an idea, a friend, or justice. So too, we should think twice about the absolute priority we set for ‘the national interest’. Is loss of life, suffering or joy across the border a lesser event? Like ‘putting my family first’, nationalism is often a rationalisation for personal greed and hostility towards aliens.
- Globalisation
That the underwear I am wearing cost me so little is a product of the same circumstances the led to the death of a thousand people when an eight storey sweatshop collapsed in Bangladesh in April. The dead were amongst the 3.2 million Bangladeshis sewing garments with a minimum wage of not much more than a dollar a day.[x]
Post globalisation, how will we respond to the potential millions of refugees that might be created by the impact of climate change in Bangladesh? As that country sinks below higher oceans (and water supplies in coastal areas are already being spoilt by salt water incursion), is our debt for having the highest per capita carbon emissions exonerated by taking 100 refugees, 1000, 1000000?
- Neoliberalism
Can one be decent and rich? Perhaps, but there is certainly such a thing as indecent wealth. I find the rich indecent when they fail to adequately credit luck for their wealth. We find few parallels in Australia to Norway’s thoughtful investment of its windfall from oil on the basis of theirbelief that ‘luck is loaned, not owned’.Compare this with Gina Rinehart who is quoted as saying “there is no monopoly on becoming a millionaire. If you are jealous of those with more money, don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make money yourself - spend less time drinking, or smoking and socialising and more time working”.
Rich people seem to me to want have it both ways. The same prominent financiers who had earlier claimed to have eliminated luck from investment, blamed the GFC on ‘bad luck’.[xi]
Attributing events to luck does not sit comfortably in our society. We have such a strong sense of agency, and we are forever looking for somebody to blame –Muslims, Julia Gillard,people smugglers. It is interesting that we get much more angry about the harm done by people smugglers, who bring us a commodity that we don’t want (refugees), than we do with sweat shop owners, who give us commodities that we do want (cheap underpants). Anyway, due to a variety of circumstances, some of which are our outside our control, but many of which are of our making, we find ourselves in the unlucky situation whereby people are coming to Australia in ways that we would prefer them not to.Might the decentthing be to respond compassionately to these asylum seekers, offering permanent refuge to those who deserve it? At the same time we could direct the resources and energy that we are currently wasting on offshore processing[5] intoworking collaboratively and energetically with our neighbours and the UN. We might end up with a hundred thousand more people in our country than we wanted. That might be a bad thing, but perhaps it might turn out to be good. But even if it created a burden for us, it is only a burden we are sharing across the world, and a reasonable ransom to pay for the spoils that each of us has accumulated through globalisation.
All of us, not just nationalists or neocons, are prone to retreat from decency and to act according to fear and greed, whereby the ‘other’ is perceived as hostile and dangerous, thereby justifying ruthless self-interest.This survival state is adaptive in early infancy and also under extreme threat throughout the life cycle, but should give way to a very different attitude at other times – the empathic concern for others, and a desire to make reparation for damage done, both of whichcharacterise decency.
Empathy can come easily – when I walked into Woomera IDC, the first thing I saw was sad children who looked just like my own daughters, locked behind razor wire. I was hooked on the injustice straight away. But the kind of empathy that is needed for most of us in order that we might behave decently towards refugees is more (expensive) and requires that we put ourselves in the shoes of the faceless alien.It requires active imaginative engagement with other people’s feelings and stories to stop us seeing asylum seekers as a problem requiring a solution (isn’t that an historically unfortunate word to use about the unwanted?), rather than as people.It is not enough to be concerned at a distance; we must directly act towards people with humanity. But many factors conspire to keep asylum seekers at a distance.There isa disconnect between the flow of asylum seekers and Australia's role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistancombined with the fact that most Australians have little experience of the reality of war.Media and government dehumanise refugees under cover of their 'right to privacy', a rare exceptionbeing the coverage of the funerals of some of the victims of the first Christmas Island shipwreck.
Being, and working to become, empathic is potentially painful, especially for those who struggle to tolerate healthy but potentially uncomfortable feelings like anger, shame and sadness. Because it is painful, we are all subject to retreating, perhaps to a state dominated by fear and self-interest, or to despair, or manic excitement and the reckless pursuit of personal happiness and achievement.
John Howard was expert at leading Australia towards (or at least not steering us away from) a stance of fear and greed. We were encouraged to be fearful of foreigners, terrorism and focused on amassing wealth ‘for our family’ (that convenient rationale for personal greed). In that environment, it was a small step for him to exploit a willing media, through ‘children overboard’ and other shameful misrepresentations, to skilfully manufacture public support for the cruel treatment of asylum seekers.
Who else has failed the decency test in relation to asylum seekers?
- Amanda Vanstone and Phillip Ruddock for explicitly setting out to use the suffering of children to deter asylum seekers (more of this later).
- The editor of the Australian newspaper, Chris Mitchell, and his journalists, notably Greg Sheridan, who have consistently misrepresented the nature and motives of asylum seekers in terms ofreligious extremism, violence, and resentment at the cost burden of processing asylum seekers. A recent example wasSheridan’s characterisation of asylum seekers as manifesting a ‘determined Muslim immigration’.[xii]
- The subsequent Labor government, while it has done decent things, such as the various apologies and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, has increasingly lacked courage to stand up against (largely manufactured) public opinion.[6]
Decency does not imply passivity in the face of adversity. Protest and vigorous advocacy are markers of decency. But authorities don’t like it when victims protest; our children get labelled with ADHD, psychiatric patients get sedated, and so do asylum seekers. Nobody much seems to recognise that protest is a sign of hope, and that it is when people stop protesting that we should worry.