Loosing the Dogs of Xenophobia

“Human beings in particular cannot be discarded. They remain in some way to haunt us.” (Christopher Koch, Out of Ireland, 1999)

It’s a truism that once a society treats one group of people badly, it makes it easier to repeat the dose again and again, and then to ramp it up by increasing the callousness, and then to extend the treatment to another group, and another, in an ever-widening process of normalising brutality.

When John Howard effectively demonised the Tampa refugees twelve years ago, deliberately dehumanising them by falsely claiming that they threw their children overboard, he successfully revived xenophobic and racist prejudices among a politically significant minority of the Australian population, enabling his increasingly unpopular government to turn a likely defeat by Beazley Labor into an electoral victory in the 2001 federal election.

A new documentary, Leaky Boat, which uses material provided by former high-ranking military personnel, including a senior SAS anti-terrorism squad officer, a head of military public affairs, an admiral and a head of Defence Department publicity, details the lengths to which the Howard government went to dehumanise the Tampa refugees. The template had been set for the future.

However, the backdrop to Howard’s electoral success on the back of the children overboard scandal was the earlier success of Pauline Hanson in the 1990s, when she won a Queensland senate seat on the basis of populist xenophobic views that Australia was being swamped by Asian migrants and that indigenous Australians were a pampered minority. Howard was able to burst the Hanson One Nation bubble by swallowing her support base in one fell swoop, but it is questionable that Australians at the time seriously thought that 1990s Hansonism would trigger a new era in which views previously regarded as bigoted and ignorant would be seen as legitimate, and would provide the main agenda item for the 2013 federal election.

Back in August 2001 the notion that an Australian government would totally refuse to accept refugees arriving in extremis by boat, was not completely formalised, until now. The Howard government always stopped just short of abandoning Australia’s commitment to international agreements about refugees, agreements extending back to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

All the measures taken were bad enough, from off-shore “processing” in harsh conditions, to soul-destroying indefinite detention in centres selected in remote and harsh environments in Australia, to go-slow assessment procedures, to ignoring the impacts of prison life on children, and to publicly condemning the suicide attempts, the hunger strikes, the self-mutilation and destruction of property as attempts at “political blackmail”. But none of these measures went to the final stage of eliminating the possibility that asylum seekers could be accepted as genuine refugees. And the overwhelming majority of boat arrivals up to 2012 have been assessed as genuine refugees.

There was nothing to suggest, back in 2006-7, that the “Howard brutopia”, as Kevin Rudd described it, would survive in its various manifestations with the election of a Labor government. One of the reasons why Rudd won the 2007 election, and why Maxine McKew removed a sitting prime minister from the federal parliament, was because Rudd espoused a political philosophy based on concern for the disadvantaged, including refugees. He made much of his admiration for anti-Nazi Christian activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, intimating that the values central to Bonhoeffer’s defence of human rights against Nazism would underpin his own behaviour as prime minister. During Rudd’s first term in office we soon learned that what he wrote about his political philosophy and values bore no relationship to policy implementation, but that’s peanuts compared to what we’re now seeing Rudd implement with the “New Guinea solution”.

Rudd has adopted a policy position which incorporates all the precedents introduced by the Howard-Ruddock-Reith team and extended them. Just as Howard enveloped the Hanson support base in 2001 and afterwards, Rudd has taken the envelope one step further, to a position which argues for the dismantling of the 1951 UN international agreement – at least as far as Australia is concerned.

Tony Abbott has responded in kind, dredging up the full Hansonist policy kit that even Philip Ruddock stepped back from. The current positions taken by Rudd and Abbott are a throwback to an era in Australia which most of us – I would have thought – had regarded as something we would never return to. They are policy positions which have been terrible curses to Australia in all sorts of ways. Racism throughout the last two centuries has ensured that apart from a small minority of non-indigenous Australians who have acquired some of the knowledge that Aborigines developed over thousands of years, most of us remain fundamentally ignorant about the place in which we live.

Our innate racism has prevented us, generation upon generation from understanding the ways and means that Aborigines managed the land – to our continuing cost. We are not even close to understanding the use of fire and the control of fire that indigenous people knew throughout Australia at the time of European invasion over 200 years ago.

The same innate racism was writ large when the Japanese invaded south-east Asia at the end of 1941 and early 1942. No Australians paid any attention to Japanese militarism during the 1930s, with the result that over 20,000 Australian troops went into captivity from Malaya through to Rabaul in rapid succession in early 1942, overwhelmed by an enemy superior in strategy and tactics and leadership in every way imaginable. If anything should have jolted Australians from their notions of racial superiority, it was this experience, but that has not been the case.

In 2013 we are once again demonstrating our xenophobia, our self-defeating fear, contempt and ignorance, this time in relation to asylum seekers. Once again, we choose the low ground, as we have done so often in the past. The absurdities of this have been demonstrated again and again, but we refuse to learn. We give no credence to the overwhelming evidence that those with the greatest need to seek refuge outside their own countries are likely to be the best and brightest of their own people, those who are persecuted for their courage. We give no credence to the fact that those who Bob Carr would describe as economic migrants are likely to be similar to the best and brightest who have fled Tasmania for a better life elsewhere, and continue to do for obvious reasons.

We give no credence to the evidence that each successive wave of migrants to Australia, from the 1850s gold rushes to the mass migrations from war-torn Europe after 1945 to the post-Vietnam War immigration in the 1970s, and so on, has added immense value to Australian society. Through all those events racism persists as an enduring thread, alive and well across the spectrum of Australian multicultural society, like an inter-generational tumour.

However, 2013 enters new territory – or at least plumbs previous inglorious episodes in Australia’s past. Unwanted immigrants from China during the 1850s gold rushes sparked racial riots and prompted legislative arrangements to hasten their return to China and exclude others from arriving, foreshadowing the first piece of legislation passed by the inaugural federal parliament in 1901, the Immigration Restriction Act. Some Chinese managed to stay in the Australian colonies. The descendant of one in Tasmania was my high school principal in the 1960s, and he exerted a profound positive influence on me and many other Tasmanian teenagers.

Rudd and Abbott are joined at the hip in their policy approaches to asylum seekers, policies which are arguably the most inhumane to be proposed/implemented since the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers, but they fit the same racist mindset. Their sublime message to Australians everywhere is that it is okay to treat men, women and children of particular racial and ethnic backgrounds with brutality. It is okay to hold them in detention indefinitely, to put their lives into an abhorrent limbo, and to treat them worse than convicted criminals.

The centuries’ old principle of habeas corpus, meaning that a person could not be held in indefinite detention at the arbitrary whim of the state, has been abandoned in relation to asylum seekers who arrive by boat without visas. There are those who would use all sorts of arguments to justify arbitrary detention, just as authoritarian regimes through time immemorial have always done, on the basis of the “national interest”, “security of the state/kingdom”, “protection of borders” and so on. Usually, such justifications have no basis beyond political self-interest, and are standard ploys to remove perceived threats to those holding the reins of power, or those seeking to gain the reins of power.

The current Labor-Liberal nexus on this issue is not only abhorrent in the way that it can destroy the lives of real people, including children, but in the potential it has for extension and broader application, especially through the specific role-modelling provided by the political system. It has been demonstrated again and again – and not least during the most blood-thirsty period in human history, the twentieth century – that state-endorsed brutality flows irrevocably inwards, ripping apart democratic values and practices, destroying egalitarianism at its most important base, the acceptance of difference, and wrecking the capacity for civilisation beyond some sort of stultified and hackneyed quest for approval from the power elite.

The current Labor –Liberal nexus seeks to provide a faux morality position for its policy prescriptions in various ways, such as suggesting a “message” to people smugglers and attempts to stop people drowning at sea. This is baloney. Neither the Howard government nor the Rudd and Gillard governments ever demonstrated any compassion in their incarceration of refugees on the basis of age, from the youngest child to the most elderly. As Antony Lowenstein has outlined (Age 3/8/13), both Liberal and Labor governments have outsourced contracts to private companies to run detention centres, contracts which have cost the public purse – in the case of one company – nearly $2 billion since 2009. According to Lowenstein, in January 2012 this company made a cool $2.5 million profit from just one detention camp in the Northern Territory. How so? Lowenstein points to issues of price-gouging, including understaffing and undertraining and a culture “instructed not to report problems” which could interfere with profit margins.

The price we will pay for our folly in supporting the inhumane, punitive and cruel Labor-Liberal “solutions” to desperate people arriving by boat will be far greater than the enormous waste of resources ploughed into detention at home and abroad. We are creating a new legitimacy for discrimination and prejudice within our society, fostered by the national leadership of both major political parties. We are clearly at a crossroads here in terms of our ability to call ourselves a civilised society.

We have already seen how the dog-whistling jingoism of the Howard era fuelled the Cronulla beach racial brawls between flag-draped young “white” Australians and those identified as “other”. There is other evidence that we have passed the point of no return. Sectors of Australian society have been arguing for the permanent establishment of detention centres in local areas – such as Brighton in Tasmania – on the basis that such centres create jobs in the local community.

Profiteers of human misery often take their cue of justification from political “leadership”, and once the dogs of xenophobia are let loose at the highest political levels, where will they go from there?

Ed: Comments are not being taken on this article.

• The Guardian: Malcolm Fraser on Coalition asylum plans: no limits to the inhumanity