Cross posting: Post No. 733 - The Battle for the Soul of Australia

This is an even older post, from around four years ago, on my main blog, originally published at https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2015/07/post-no-733-battle-for-soul-of-australia.html.

I recently did something I don't often do: watch some television. Even more rarely, I actually listened to an ad (mainly because I forgot to mute it), one for an SBS programme called "Go Back to Where You Come From", which aims to educate xenophobic people by showing them the conditions that refugees come from - which suffers from the dual flaws of assuming that all xenophobes (a) have compassion buried somewhere in them, but accessible by the experiences of the programme (I think it is buried much deeper than that), and (b) don't know this already. At any rate, during the ad a xenophobe accuses a whistleblower, someone who had brought out the truth about Australia's abuse of children and other asylum seekers, of being a traitor.

It was all a bit (stereotypical) teenagers squabbling in the schoolyard, as so much TV is, but ... in the sense that the xenophobe - who has been stirring up quite a bit of attention her small-minded self of late - meant, I also am a traitor to "Australia" - specifically, I am a traitor to her xenophobic Australia, an Australia that is so fearful, insecure and small-minded that it has no compassion, hospitality or caring for anyone else. Two of my ancestors were shipped out from Ireland in the early 1800s for "defending their mother's honour against some English soldiers" (i.e., stopping them from raping her), and they were renowned for their hospitality and welcoming of travellers and strangers (including indigenous people). In general, I suspect the Irish traditions of hospitality contributed to the Australians view of ourselves in the 1800s and early 1900s as a welcoming people (flawed though that was, with the notorious White Australia policy that, infamously, contributed to South Africa's apartheid policy), a view still surviving in the view of us as being "neighbourly" .. which is not, and often has not been, true.

The Australia I support is truly generous, welcoming and compassionate - truly "neighbourly", but in a sense that is not focused on the small, one that looks at all humanity (actually, all life) and has room in it's heart to say to the small numbers of refugees who reach us "I acknowledge and am touched by your suffering: let me heal you". The xenophobe is traitor to that Australia.

It all brought to mind a problem I've observed in this battle of late: those who are advocating for refugees know it is important - vital even, and it is: a battle for Australia's soul - but they do not have the eloquence and/or awareness to say that, or to talk of spiritual principles (sadly, those are often either confused for religious principles, or ridiculed). We have no Martin Luther Kings here - or even people who can overcome their emotion enough to come up with a riposte along the lines of the one I just wrote about.

The situation is, ironically, better in the case of the battle for LGBTIQ rights: there, advocates have known that we need to build support by educating people - which was a key part of the reforms I was part of in the late 1990s. There was no focus on marches and demonstrations and numbers, which is a flaw I find too many activists have: there had to be a focus on educating people. Now, both sides think it is a case of big numbers in public demonstrations, whereas it has to be more than that.

Numbers will demonstrate what people think, but that isn't necessarily right. The letter writing campaigns of Amnesty International, for example, are not based on "numbers in the street": they are based on issues, and what is right - and have been remarkably successful.

If numbers in the street were the sole issue, we would not have had anti-discrimination legislation passed in the 1970s.

In the case of recent demonstrations on this issue, as I wrote above, the behaviour has been deplorable, and both sides have been focusing on numbers to put pressure on politicians. The media has been publishing the comments of the xenophobes, but I haven't seen any cogent arguments against xenophobia in the media. I don't know whether that is because the media is choosing not to publish them, or such arguments are not being made, or a combination of those and perhaps other reasons.

In any case, most such arguments are based what is effective for the speaker, not the listener. Arguments about spiritual principles and human rights and human values such as compassion sway me, but they don't sway the xenophobes. If Australia is to become a better nation, arguments on this issue have to be addressed to the listener.

As an example, I know many blue collar xenophobes fear the loss of jobs. When that issue is raised, those advocating for refugees have often been quite glib - e.g., oh they only take jobs few people in Australia want to do anyway. Yes, and it those people who are feeling the threat of competition by people who are desperate enough to accept lesser work conditions. The issue is a valid concern, and needs to be addressed. How about pointing out that many refugees are actually quite educated people, and if Australia was less discriminatory towards such people they would be able to spread throughout the workforce and thus not get forced into competing for jobs that the poorly educated (and that is a reflection on the limited vision of our education system and the politician's who fund it, not the people themselves - for instance, get ridding of tech schools in Victoria was a mistake) find themselves having to compete for.

Then there is the fear over security - sovereignty. Well, leaving aside for the moment the issue of "which Australia?" that I raised above, and the sovereignty of humanity and of life, counter this with facts. Perhaps something along the lines of - with relation to fears around terrorism, for instance - the number of Australian born terrorists vs. the number that come here from overseas, the discrimination and abuse which forces those people into terrorism, the FACT that the majority of refugees are not terrorists, the facts that the majority of people illegally in Australia come in via airports (if that is true - I don't know what the current and recent numbers are), etc.

What about fears of changing the nature of Australian society? Well:

1. change is inevitable - look at the changes brought about by the Internet and technology advances in recent decades: a better approach is to manage the change, not try to stop it; 
2. some changes are good - for instance, anti-sexism laws allowing women to keep working after they are married (and the better coffees - initially in Melbourne, but now spreading through the rest of Australia) as a result of the European influx to Australia after World War Part Two; 
3. some changes are bad, for sure - for instance, the change in Australia away from hospitality towards xenophobia.

What about the view that people should stay where they are - for instance, fight against Da'esh? Well:

1. I'm still here, fighting the xenophobes; 
2. that view ignores the reality that people have ALWAYS been mobile - starting with the initial movement out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago, and continuing with the movement of Europeans to Australia over the last few hundred years; 
3. if I had kids, I also would want to get them out of conflict zones; 
4. the fact that people want to come here is an acknowledge of the economic advantages (there are depressingly few social advantages nowadays) of Australia, and has to be managed in a way that does not destroy those advantages - which the current xenophobia is doing, by destroying Australia's soul.

In terms of people in Australia turning to terrorism, how about finding out why they do that, rather than making assumptions? A big issue here is that Australia's current predominant lifestyle continues to alienate so many people - and the solution is not to slag off at people about them being party poopers. 

How about countering such arguments with the value of mostly young refugees on Australia's ageing population problem? Or even raise the issue directly of the sort of Australia we want?

I don't consider my arguments to be necessarily good in terms of trying to change xenophobes, but someone has to make an effort on this, so I'll start the ball rolling ... with my very small audience. * SIGH *

This is a battle which has been going on for the last couple of hundred years, beginning with the violent white invasion of Australia, going through the struggles against racism and for worker's rights, the social progressiveness and economic disaster of the Whitlam government in the early 1970s (which helped, as much as the social upheaval of the 1960s, in breaking us out of the "white picket fence" mentality of Australia in the 1950s), the gross materialism and greed of the 1980s, and the politics of fear introduced by the evil John Howard in the 1990s and continued by far too many politicians since then.

It is a battle which needs to be fought and won in every generation - after all, the fight against slavery has been going for several millennia, and against racism for centuries, and they are still going - partly because of the basic them of this post: that activists fail to aim their work at the audience, and also because of denial - thinking that once something has been done (such as the various instruments of anti-discrimination legislation), it does not need to be addressed again. (Mind you, given my utter exhaustion after having been involved in such work, I have sympathy for those who do make the latter mistake.)

It is, at its heart, a battle for spirituality.

I may post more on this topic over time ...

Here are a couple of other links which might be of interest:

• http://www.moirarayner.com.au/articles/02workpl/antidisc.pdf; 
• http://www.equalitylaw.org.au/elrp-guest-blogs/reflections-on-reforming-discrimination-laws-in-australia.