Boat People Policy ‘Is Seriously Bad’
On the loss of the humanitarian significance of evidence in Australian Refugee and Asylum Seeker Policy
Paul Tyson
- 1. Introduction: The Significance of Evidence
Evidence is never simply data.[1] In a governmental context, evidence is always significant data where the parameters of significance are defined by the political agendas which set policy goals. Further, when it comes to welcoming or excluding foreigners, powerful mythic narratives within the polity deeply shape the prevailing political agendas. In this paper I will seek to understand the manner in which the significance of evidence in asylum seeker policy concerns has undergone three dramatic shifts over the past 40 years. I will look at the relation between historical events, mythic constructs and the evolution of political agendas which defines these shifts. Then I will offer a critique of the manner in which significance defines evidence as framed by the asylum seeker policy concerns of our current government.
- 2. Myth, power and the alien
A myth is a compelling collectively assumed narrative that has the power to shape cultural meanings so as to orientate and define common conceptions of good and evil, and to validate the normal order of any given cultural life-form as a genuine reflection of right cosmic order. Myths are read into world changing historical events, and remain integral with macro-political dynamics in the civilizational world-order established by key historical events, until a new set of events needing collective interpretation arises. We will very briefly examine the mythos integral with three world-shaping events that have defined post-war asylum seeker policy in Australia: the holocaust, the collapse of the gold standard, and the destruction of the World Trade Towers.
2.1 We are not Nazis – the mythic significance of the Geneva Convention
The defeat of the Third Reich is still understood by the Allies as a moral victory of goodness over evil, and as a cosmic victory of right order and just power over tyranny and atrocity. Within this narrative it is the Holocaust that most centrally defines the evil which the Allies stood against. A mythic self-understanding embedded in the moral difference between us and the Nazis deeply shaped the war generation in Australia.
Thus, the Geneva Convention, the Declaration of Universal Human Rights, and the establishment of the state of Israel were often seen as moral monuments erected to protect human dignity from barbaric tyranny so that the evils of World War Two would not be repeated. Moral realism – where good and evil are primary realities – was largely assumed in the general populace who had been so deeply and sacrificially involved in World War Two.
In Australia, the anti-Nazi resonance of the Allied victory had a very tangible impact on immigration. In the 1940s and 50s we were deeply afraid of Asia and Communism, so because we needed labourers to build our public infrastructure and work our factories, and we needed a larger population to defend ourselves from the ‘Asian hoards’ and the Communists in Asia, we threw our doors open to the displaced peoples of war ruined Europe. And, of course, we took in large numbers of Jews. The British Isles insularity of Australian ethnicity was changed forever.
After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s a new, more racially egalitarian post-war ethos finally dismantled the White Australia policy in 1973. After the Vietnam war was lost, South Vietnamese people fleeing the new Communist government for their lives were naturally seen as cold war allies by the US and Australia. To the Fraser government, our commitment to the Geneva Convention was integral with a post-war humanitarian moral vision of who we as a nation were, so Fraser opened Australia to Vietnamese refugees, a considerable numbers of whom arrived by boat.
2.2 The demise of the gold standard – the financialization of politics
The next world changing event to shape asylum seeker policy was the demise of the Bretton Woods system with the collapse of the convertibility of one ounce of gold to $US35 under the Nixon administration in 1971.
1971 signalled the end of the post-war boom and began a period of global financial turbulence that settled down into a new equilibrium by the mid 1980s. During this time the US switched from being the key surplus nation at the heart of post-war global re-construction, to being the key deficit nation at the heart of what we now call the global economy.[2] Significant ideological signatures of Regan/Thatcherite political ideology were imported into Australia in the Hawke-Keating era, keeping us firmly in step with the new imperatives of global economic viability.[3]
The 1980s was a fundament rupture with the entire ideological landscape of post-Federation Australian politics. The egalitarian social welfare agendas of the political left, the conservative moral agendas of the political right, and the transparency and power limiting agendas of the political liberals all became – and remain – sidelined within Australian politics. In the new political landscape that emerged, protection for local industry was removed, public assets built up in the post-war period were sold off, and the firm desire to integrate the Australian economy with the big league of global corporate power became our new guiding star.
Manning Clark describes the period from 1969 to 1986 as the era when the nation lost its moral commitments to an egalitarian and humanitarian Australia.[4] The early post-war trend in whole-of-society financial betterment with a relatively small differential between rich and poor gave way to the squeezing of the middle class and increasing disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor.[5] Key government departments became ideologically captive to positivistic economic reductionism, producing a shift within the high mechanisms of government from the politics of morally framed values directed towards building the common wealth of a good society, to the priority of economically framed necessities directed towards the advancement of private wealth.[6] This process was largely complete by 1990.[7]
In mythic terms, the public framing of good and evil became limited to personal economic advancement. We simple left behind a collective vision of ourselves that was unswervingly and sacrificially committed to the requirements of moral decency, as befitted the courageous opponents of Nazi evil. This was an era where we had few boat arrival asylum seekers, so the change in the undergirding moral and ideological commitments of the populace in relation to asylum seeker policy went largely unnoticed, and largely without any policy impact. In reality, the moral realism that undergirded the Geneva Convention faded to a fuzzy and ill-defined grey. Yet the return of black and white, in a very different political landscape, was not far away.
2.3 September 11 – the politics of fear
9/11 gave good and evil back to Australian politics. After two decades of econometric politics, with little if any moral realist idealism, we were now able to ennobled the politics of greed with the politics of fear and righteous wrath.
To the Howard, Rudd, Gillard and Abbott governments, the political agenda framed as defending Australia’s territorial sovereignty now defines our asylum seeker policy. For, apparently, we too are under threat, just as the US is under threat, from the plans of evil terrorists. In this context, data concerning the incompatibility of tough border protection objectives with our obligations under the Geneva Convention has no significance to our policy setters. Indeed, it is consistent with the Abbott government’s “border protection” policy objectives that Australia gains an international reputation for refusing to honour its Geneva Convention obligations to boat arrival asylum seekers. For the Abbott government has made it clear that asylum seekers entering Australian waters by “unauthorized maritime” means will now be indefinitely detained in degrading and unsafe conditions without any hope of being able to realize an asylum claim in Australia.[8]
In this climate of invasion fear, the plight of non-standard arrival asylum seekers has lost its humanitarian significance for all Australian governments since 9/11.
How should we evaluate this loss?
- 3. Is this shift in Refugee and Asylum Seeker Policy a degradation of political morality or simply a pragmatic adaptation to a different historical context?
In today’s political climate there is moral sounding rhetoric, but there is no objective moral reality. Morals are cultural constructs which we generate and use in order to get what we want. In this context political rhetoric is a screen concealing the personal career interests of politicians, as situated within the realities of party and electoral necessity. Here, any media release or policy statement is – in the end – a tool for advancing the vested interests upon which that politician and party relies in order to hold power.
In this climate, let us be frank concerning the real nature of the Abbott government’s refugee and asylum seeker policy. To the prevailing policy, Australia’s international obligations to unauthorized boat arrival asylum seekers under the Geneva Convention have no moral realist significance. The rhetoric the Abbott government give us about protecting our boarders and ensuring fairness to ‘legitimate’ asylum seekers has no genuine moral content either but is essentially about the manipulation of public fear in the cause of advancing the Abbott government’s own political interests.[9]
The interests being advanced here are a function of our government’s uncompromising support for both US global military hegemony, and the global economic order US military power polices, in the wake of 9/11. Within Australia’s defence policy commitments to strategic dependence on the US, our leaders have naturally responded to 9/11 as if our own freedom is under threat. We see ourselves as threatened by diabolically violent terrorists who are foreign religious extremists, either covertly within our own ranks, or seeking to invade our boarders from Asia.[10] Hence, no ‘un-Australian’ outsider that is or looks Islamic can be trusted, and no infringement of the rules of legitimate territorial movement (which we control) will be permitted, for any reason. This mythos of the invading alien is situated within a vision of reality which is starkly survivalistic, which is amorally pragmatic in terms of the use of power, which has no humanitarian concern for people fleeing for their lives from the fall out of US global military imperialism, and which is determined to preserve our dominance within our own territorial sphere at any cost.
It is not clear that the Australian polity really appreciates the implications of the above mythos.
If moral reality does not exist and political realism is valid, then at least four things follow. Firstly, the distinction between terrorism and legitimate power is arbitrary. Secondly, the humanitarian motivations of the human soul are sentimental illusions. Thirdly, we are all suckers if we believe any moral sounding rhetoric our politicians construct. Fourthly, liberal democratic governance in itself offers us no protection from the dark wraiths of hyper-racism, total surveillance, non-accountable financial and military power, and the cults of martial nationalism which now, as in the 1930s, stalk our political landscapes.[11] Remember, Hitler was democratically elected.
Liberal democratic government not undergirded by substantive moral commitments is a merely procedural form of government that cannot resist the rise tyrants.[12] Given the now prevailing mythos of cosmic conflict[13] we find that the fostering of genuinely moral commitments in the polity is increasingly difficult. This, coupled with the spiritual superficiality promoted by the crass materialism of consumerism, makes our polity ill equipped to combat calculative political realism within our party machines and our politicians, and this dynamic degrades the vitality of the moral claims which are necessary to undergird humane and transparent democratic politics.
Yet, the obvious reality is that most people do not live as if morality is a merely instrumental social construct. Nor could we actually live as if political realism was true, for human sociality would be destroyed if we all merely appeared to be moral and compassionate people but were really ruthless self-interested power freaks.[14]
In sum, it is clear to me that the movement of refugee and asylum seeker policy over the past 40 years towards a merely instrumental and realist approach to power signals a true degradation of the moral calibre of our politics. As a result of this degradation our policy setters now see no moral significance in evidence regarding our systemic mal-treatment of boat arrival asylum seekers. This is seriously bad. Protecting the human rights of all asylum seekers entering our territory, processing their claims rapidly and humanely, and re-affirming our universal humanitarian responsibilities under the Geneva Convention should be most strenuously revived. Otherwise, not only will we be guilty of abusing the most vulnerable people of the globe, we will rapidly become ruled by amoral tyrants who, sooner or later, will come to treat us just as badly as we treat “unauthorized maritime arrival” asylum seekers.
Texts Sited:
Clark, M., A Short History of Australia, London: Penguin Books, 2006
Fraser, M., Dangerous Allies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014
Fraser, M., “Manus Island: so many questions, one simple answer.” Sydney Morning
Herald, February 21, 2014; http://www.smh.com.au/comment/manus-island-so-many-questions-one-simple-solution-20140220-333sn.html .
Greiner, N., “Australian Liberalism in a Post-Ideological Age”, Alfred Deakin Lecture, Melbourne, 1990
Jaensch, D., The Hawke-Keating Hijack, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, 152–177.
Keen, S., Debunking Economics, London: Pluto Press, 2001
Koenigsberg, R., Nations have a Right to Kill, New York: Library of Social Science, 2009
Lake, M., & Reynolds, H., What’s Wrong with ANZAC?, Sydney: New South, 2010
Polanyi, M., Personal Knowledge, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974
Pusey, M., Economic Rationalism in Canberra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991
Pusey, M., The Experience of Middle Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003
Ricoeur, P., Symbolism of Evil, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969
Ronson, J., The Psychopathy Test, London: Picador, 2011
Stretton, H., Economics, A New Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 2000
Varoufakis, Y., The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013
Virilio, P., The Administration of Fear, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012
[1] See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974. Polanyi, a world class theoretical chemist, unpacks the manner in which knowledge is a communal process and in which evidence is never simple objective but is always also a function of what researchers are looking for.
[2] Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013, 90–112.
[3] Dean Jaensch, The Hawke-Keating Hijack, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, 152–177.
[4] Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia, London: Penguin Books, 2006, 322–351.
[5] Michael Pusey, The Experience of Middle Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[6] See Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 for a close historical analysis of how ideological change presented as positive economic realism was pushed forward within Treasury, Finance and the Prime Minister’s office in the 1980s. A number of Australian economists have also pointed out that the economic theory characteristic of the 1980s and 90s was dogmatically reductive to a distortive degree, fraught with philosophical incoherence, and a carrier of a hyper-capitalist political ideology which strongly favoured policy objectives that promoted private financial power at the expense of government commitments to the flourishing of the public’s common wealth. See Steve Keen, Debunking Economics, London: Pluto Press, 2001; Hugh Stretton, Economics, A New Introduction, London: Pluto Press, 2000; Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books, 2013.
[7] I remember hearing Nick Greiner’s 1990 Alfred Deakin Lecture, titled “Australian Liberalism in a Post-Ideological Age” – I recall it as a watershed moment signalling that the ideological re-framing work of the 1980s was complete. Greiner claimed that “the Australian people have never had much time for political theory” and then went on to tell us how wonderful it is that Australian politics is simply about winning office, and mixing and matching whatever ideas and techniques works to make the economy prosper. We are all mature post-ideological economic pragmatists now.
[8] After the February 2014 riots on Manus Island that resulted in 60 detainees being beaten up and one detainee being murdered, Scott Morrison explained that this riot would not have occurred “had there been no protests.” So though the detention facility was crowded; though detainees had only basic access to essential facilities; though detainees were subjected to undetermined time horizons in having their claims to asylum even assessed and were relentlessly pressured to claim that they were not legitimate refugees; though detainees had just been told that even if they were found to be genuine refugees, they would never be settled in Australia; though policing and many of the services were not provided by Australians, but by locals who were not keen on having the detention facility on their island anyway; though the wanton and indiscriminate violence of the local response to detainee unrest astonishingly out-stripped the level of disorder demonstrated by detainees: none of that – according to Scott Morrison – had anything to do with the cause of the riot. Hence, Scott Morrison took no responsibility for the injury and death which resulted. Indeed, when the riot occurred, this provided MP Morrison with a dual opportunity to internationally advertise how horrible and hopeless conditions were in Australian instigated off shore detention facilities, at the same time as claiming that he had nothing to do with the bad behaviour of either local thugs or frustrated detainees. The riot was – if not overtly promoted by Australian refugee and asylum seeker policy – a welcome means of proclaiming the Abbott government’s “strong message” to would be boat arrival asylum seekers, making it crystal clear that they would be met with nothing but unmoving callous sternness if they broke our rules of authorized arrival.
[9] See Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.
[10] It is interesting to note that Malcolm Fraser was a firm supporter of the Australia/USA alliance in the post-war 20th century era, but has now come to see the relationship as deeply problematic for Australia. See Malcolm Fraser, Dangerous Allies, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2014. In terms of my analysis, Fraser had strong moral sympathy with the moral framing of the post-war reconstruction era, which was, indeed, undergirded by American economic and military power. However, when the US decisively shifted its mythic narrative of good and evil away from human rights, transparent democracy and a global lifting of humanity as a result of winning the Cold War and then responding to the 9/11 event, Fraser found that he no longer had any moral empathy with the driving values of the new politics of fear and ruthless self-preservation which the world’s dominant superpower now embodies.
[11] The rise of racist ultra-right movements in economically traumatized post-2008 Europe, the growing obsession with public surveillance (the mascot for the London Olympics was a security camera), the symbiotic rise of martial nationalism at home (see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with ANZAC?, Sydney: New South, 2010) and movements like IS abroad, and relentless narratives of violence and destruction in the media all bode ill for our future. In this context Richard Koenigsberg’s Nations have a Right to Kill (New York: Library of Social Science, 2009) is a stark warning to us that the ritual mythic undertow of human affairs is a lot more powerful than any rationalist Realist vision of logical and calculative self-interest. If Koenigsberg is correct – and his case is carefully documented and powerful reasoned – then over 200 million people were quite literally sacrificed in violent rituals of devotion to the civic religions of their Nation in the 20th century. Thus Modern Man makes the Aztecs look like armatures in the art of ritual killing.
[12] See Malcolm Fraser, “Manus Island: so many questions, one simple answer.” Sydney Morning Herald, February 21, 2014; http://www.smh.com.au/comment/manus-island-so-many-questions-one-simple-solution-20140220-333sn.html . Transparency facilitating the accountability of power to the people, and the use of power to uphold humanitarian values are integral with Malcolm Fraser’s understanding of democratic government, because, on these matters, he is a moral realist.
[13] Paul Ricoeur in Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, 175–198) famously recounted how deeply ingrained in the power dynamics of imperial civilizations the myth of redemptive violence is. The dynamics of the overcoming of the evil of chaos by the good of uncompromising violent power so powerfully articulated in the ancient Babylonian cult of Marduk, has as much appeal today amongst political realists as it had in the civic cultus of ancient Babylonian times.
[14] See Jon Ronson, The Psychopathy Test, London: Picador, 2011. Fortunately amoral self-seeking pragmatic psychopaths are a small minority in society. Unfortunately, Ronson discovered, far too many of them end up as CEOs, on Director’s Boards, in senior management, in politics, and being just generally attracted to power.