A Fair Go For All

Sr Susan Connelly*

Tampa Day Rally
Newtown Square
25.08.02

You know the story of Narcissus, how he fell in love with his own reflection in the pool and daily languished on his knees at the sight of his own beauty. He leant too far over one day, and drowned. I think this is what is happening to Australia.

We are so wholeheartedly in love with the image we have manufactured of ourselves that we are falling over frontwards to get a better look.

And yet so often we are looking in the wrong pond for information on what we are truly like.

Most of our political parties appear in turn lifeless, inept, complacent or self-destructive. Our Churches seem compromised, paralysed, far too calculating of the cost of what they say they believe. Big business is apparently gorging on itself, choking on its own deceit and self-congratulation, its next generation of dreadful little executives seemingly incapable of anything resembling work and apparently unable even to add up. Many of our sporting heroes and Clubs are over-paid, over-rated and over-exposed, becoming more and more mere automated advertisements.

Of course, there's nothing new under the sun. There's no golden age to which we can hark back, as though people at any other time were any different. We're all pretty ordinary and tame.

But we do have traditions which are worthy of reflecting on and of passing on to our children, and one of these traditions is that of the "fair go". Of course, we kid ourselves if we think that everybody always got a fair go in this country. The Chinese on the goldfields certainly didn't, the Aboriginal people still aren't getting one, women have had a battle over it, migrants fought the "wogs and dagoes" slur for years and Asian Australians are still wondering what a fair go might look like for all of them. I don't know whether Muslim people could even imagine yet that that may, one day, get a fair go. Still, the concept of "giving a fair go" remains a broad description of what we'd like to do.

It's crunch time for the "fair go" brigade. Our political leaders must be taking great satisfaction this weekend in reports that their abusive policies regarding asylum seekers and refugees appear to be working. The Australian Government's policies of denying a "fair go" to these people have worked.

The boats have stopped. The willingness to shrug off the drowning of 350 asylum seekers, the processing of others offshore, the punitive and abusive mismanagement of people in detention centres has successfully stemmed the tide of humanity trying to escape from their own nation's woes, caused, more often than not, by the destructive policies of the West.

Is there to be rejoicing in the streets at this wonderful victory? Will the enormous benefits to Australia flowing from this huge success be documented? Indeed not.

We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars keeping these people out of our hair. Some of the great institutions of our democracy have been enlisted to support these policies: e.g. the legislature, by passing laws disowning parts of Australia for migration purposes; the Armed Forces, by sending them last year at this time to turn these families away at the point of guns.
The Parliamentary process itself is implicated as electoral prospects drove the capitulation by the major parties.

No matter how successful this operation has been, and regardless of the truth or otherwise of Mr Ruddock's claim that the European nations are now seeking to copy Australia's policies in regard to their asylum seekers, the fact remains that it is wrong to treat people as things, as means to an end. It is simply immoral.

Public opinion on this issue has been manipulated by fear and secrecy. There is a furtiveness, a narrowness, a mean streak creeping into Australia. It is a spirit suspicious of difference, of change. It paints itself as the victim, somehow under threat from all these unarmed families on leaky boats. It is a denial of our tradition of hospitality and welcome. The sprawling good-humour of Australia is being traded for shrinking, dispirited self-pity.

What is happening in Australia is the antithesis of our truest self. It is the total opposite of the "fair go" mentality. Our Government and their media chums have manufactured false threats to our way of life in the person of refugees, ensuring that the fear and energy of the population at large is directed at these imaginary enemies. What we should be doing is investigating why there are so many refugees in the first place, and addressing Australia's role in the economic and political systems responsible.

"What does it profit a person to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of the self?" (Matt 16:26)

* Sr Susan is a Sister of St Joseph and outspoken advocate of East Timor issues and change in our national culture towards more morality and principle in governance and character. Her latest book is Questions from the Asylum, Otford Press, 2002.

[Published with permission]