This has resulted in the dissemination of a range of viciously unpleasant ideas, which the Australian people, some of whom still manage to claim that we are a tolerant and welcoming nation with a straight face, have embraced with gusto. We’ve been encouraged to think of asylum seekers as “illegals”, as “queue jumpers”, as “economic migrants” – pretty much anything except human beings. And in a gruesomely comical twist, we’ve even patted ourselves on the back for how compassionate our system of dehumanising abuse is.
But even by the standards of the putrid swamp that passes for the “refugee debate”, there is one line of argument that stands out for its loathsome moral bankruptcy. It was well articulated earlier this week by Senator Ian MacDonald, when he said, “I just wish that the Syrian people could sort out their own problems.”
Somehow, among all our country’s routine xenophobic bigotry, this attitude retains its ability to take the breath away. The idea that refugees aren’t just violating our sacred border security or using their vast wealth to trick their way through our back door: but that they go further by actually abandoning their duty. This horrific logical rabbit-hole bases itself on the notion that if one’s home becomes a place of mortal danger, one has a responsibility to stay and fix it, rather than turn tail and run like some cowardly, you know, foreigner.
You don’t have to search very far to find this opinion. Head to the comments section of any article about asylum seekers. Search “refugee” on Twitter. Read a Newscorp blog. There you will see them, belching their fetid views into the world, belligerently calling out the refugees for leaving when they should “stay and fight for their country”. “If it was me,” these proud warriors declare, slapping their barrel chests, “I’d never run – I’d stick around to fix things”.
It’s a funny thing, but everyone who expresses this view has one thing in common: they’ve never had to fight for their country themselves. In fact they’ve never had to fight for anything much. Just like Senator MacDonald: an ex-solicitor and local councillor who’s never come closer to war than an acrimonious cabinet reshuffle.
Imagine what it would take for a person to say such a thing. Imagine how a human being develops the astounding gall to sit in one of the richest countries in the world, enjoying the stability and prosperity that the accident of their birth delivered them, and lecturing others on their duty to forgo hope of a better life. Imagine being such a slack jawed intellectual trough-licker that you claim a lack of moral fibre in anyone who seeks to escape death and destruction. You might think that a person could easily be seduced into believing that their own lifelong safety and security was a well-earned privilege that those unlucky enough to be born in the wrong place would be selfish to desire for themselves – but imagine being sufficiently lacking in shame to actually say it in public.
But at least that public voicing has the benefit of laying bare the ugliest truth at the heart of our animosity towards refugees: the belief that our good luck is a birth right, that by being born here, we deserve all the benefits that that bestows, and that by being born there, the rest of the world is duty-bound to suck it up and take what they’re given. How attractive is the myth that we deserve what we get – it would wound our self-esteem to admit that we won the global lottery the day we were born – and if we deserve what we get, everyone else must too. So why shouldn’t the damned refugees sort out their own problems? I have to sort out mine, right? And if I can navigate the tricky terrain of being a middle-class white man in a first-world country, it’d just be gutless of them to not let their entire family be slaughtered so save me the effort of thinking about them.
It would benefit every one of us to absorb an essential truth: we are not special. If you have never had reason to fear for your life, or flee your home, it’s not a reward for your hard work and virtuous living: its luck. It’s not an easy truth to accept: it makes it harder to dismiss the problems of people in distant lands; and it makes the practical question of what a country like Australia can do, and how many people it can help, messier. We can’t help everyone, and it’s easier to feel OK with that if you keep thinking that there’s some clear distinction between the deserving and the undeserving. No wonder we see ourselves as generous when we offer the tiniest sliver of our good fortune to others: we’ve convinced ourselves that they’ve got no claim on it, so how noble our sacrifice must be to let them have anything.
Obviously, we’re not going to change. We are proud Australians living in the greatest country on earth, and we will never stop telling ourselves that this is all our own doing. We’ll keep patting our own backs over our great achievement in not being from somewhere else, and we’ll keep wondering why people in circumstances more desperate and deadly than we’ll ever have to face in our smug, self-righteous lives don’t just knuckle down and sort it out for themselves. I don’t hold out any hope that things will get better: I’ve been living in this country too long to believe in miracles.
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