Australia, your delusions are ready.

Hi, we're Australia. Our policy on asylum seekers is completely stupid.




Australia, your delusions are ready.

We're an interesting country. All these years of being tied to the foreign policy yoke of the US, has infected us with their herpes-like madness. On the Age website today Julian Burnside talks about the current policy on asylum seekers and reflects on the ten year anniversary of the Tampa scandal. The comments fall into two categories - praise, and the usual gamut of facile nonsense.

Very few other issues - climate change being the next most likely candidate - illustrate just how deeply mad Australia as a nation has gone. You need only say 'asylum seeker' online for 'ozforozzies' from Paramatta to start frothing 'Their ilegal, anyway we dont have room, and their ilegal, why dont they go back to arab-land were they come from?'

That's a good question, Mr Average Australian Citizen. I would debate this with you, but you have demonstrated a fundamental disconnect from the basic capacity to process data in anything approaching a baseline sapient way. This is the real problem we face. Nit-picking over policy decisions - should refugees go to Malaysia or Nauru or Christmas Island - is largely irrelevant. The essential facts that lie before us are the very things we can not, will not and point-blank refuse to accept.

Facts: We are signatory to a 1951 declaration on the rights of refugees. The world is a turbulent place, some nations face purges, massacres, genocides, mass murders, mass rapes - we don't. You can't get a visa off a government that wants you dead. There is no 'queue'. Numbers of refugee arrivals by boat are miniscule. Offshore processing is a violation of the aforementioned agreement. People smugglers do not care what our policies are.

Fictions: That you can 'stop the boats'. That people being raped, tortured and murdered do not 'deserve' to come to a place where that doesn't happen. That being 'tough' on the victim, makes the exploiter think twice. That we take more refugees than any other country.

The fundamental disconnect we suffer as a nation is this: we can be presented with people who sew their own damn lips shut, or kill themselves when their application is rejected. We can listen to stories of the Taliban raping and murdering Hazara women, and forcing their men at gunpoint to kill their own or be killed, and say 'so what?' We can see hundreds of people board a boat meant for 20 people, and ignore the desperation that involves. We tell them they should have joined a neat, orderly queue that doesn't exist, to go back to a country that will see them dead, or that they should have applied for a legitimate visa from a government that wants them dead.

Things like this ARE the issue. It's called human suffering. More than any national allegiance, we share a basic allegiance to being human, and needing a life of integrity and dignity.

How did we get here? Good question. Malcolm Fraser let in thousands of Indochinese refugees with little consternation, so what changed? Howard. The Howard era ushered in US style politics, where an issue could be shallowly framed as 'left' or 'right' for political gain. The Tampa should have taught us this: a shameless politician cares only for human suffering if it brings him votes. Our policies ever since have been stuck in the groove of chasing the absolute lowest common denominator.

Let me make it plain. I do not give two tugs of a dead dog's c*ck what some bogan racist thinks our foreign policy should be, and neither should any self-respecting government or opposition. We should not base policy on a willingness to ignore fact, and the pursuit of blind ignorance. Human suffering is not a 'left' or 'right' issue. It is not a 'hard stance' or 'soft stance' issue. Easing the plight of those who have undergone torment we simply cannot imagine, is the duty of any living, thinking human being.

To prevaricate with talk of legality or illegality, with queues and 'encouraging' people smugglers are facile diversions, employed by the sinister to dupe the simple.

Australia, it is time to wake from your simple, childish delusions, and put your grown-up pants on.