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Greg Barns

"Advance Australia Fairly"

Keynote Speech to Deakin University

May 15, 2002

Last week in the South Australian Parliament a brave MP spoke to a sparsely populated but hushed Chamber. This MP, whom I have had the privilege of meeting, is not what the Right would be able to label a 'chardonnay socialist.' She is a tough, resourceful mother who seems to me to represent her constituents with assiduousness and fairness.

This MP's electorate is based around Port Augusta and Whyalla and takes in Woomera - this is detention centre country. This is an area of Australia where economic hardship has unfortunately become a by-word but where people like this local MP are determined to create a better future for themselves and future generations.

This MP is Lyn Breuer and her speech last week in the grand old building on North Terrace deserves to be read by all Australians. It deserves to be read because it is plea from someone who knows - someone who lives amongst the grimy and Dickensian world of detention where values and ideals become warped and battered by the harsh reality of keeping innocent people, particularly children, behind bars.

It is worth recounting a little of what Ms Breuer said last Wednesday night:

One of the saddest sights I have ever seen, especially as a mother, was a 14-year-old boy lying on the bed, with absolutely no life in his eyes. He was lethargic and listless- his life was hopeless. Why was he not out playing footy or chasing girls like other 14- year-old boys?

I have had enough and cannot stay silent on this matter any longer. It is happening in my electorate. It is absolute child abuse. It is subjecting babies, toddlers, young children and teenagers to abuse, to mental torture and to conditions that I would not let my dog live in. But, I am supposed to shut up, condone it and let it happen. Well, I will not do so because I am a mother. Stuff all those people out there who try to tell me that we have to do this, that we cannot let them go free, that we have to control this immigration and that we have to shoot them out of the water. If they were Australian children, we as a country would be screaming about this sort of abuse, but because these poor little kids have come here with their parents or been sent out alone, we say to them, `Serve you right'. I am ashamed to be an Australian.'

This is not lofty rhetoric - this is humanity at its most poignant. And unlike Mr Ruddock and his fellow federal MPs this is the speech of a person who observes daily the soul being ripped out of our Nation. One hopes that Ms Breuer's parliamentary colleagues can put aside their avid and rather sickening addiction to opinion polls and join with her in forcing change in this area that desperately needs it.

What Lyn Breuer is pointing to, is something that should disturb each and every Australian - the abandonment of the 18th century Enlightenment project of universal human rights. The great achievement of the 18th century thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, Edmund Burke and others was to set out for the first time the fact that there are inalienable human rights that cannot be taken away from human beings without enslaving them and making them less than human.

This universalist project underpins the United Nations, and our principles of law. Yet the Australian government has now abandoned the concept of universal human rights from one key group in our community - the most vulnerable of all, children.

Our juvenile justice and welfare system does not sanction the detention of children - if they under 14. And there is a good reason for this - children are easily damaged, both psychologically and physically by trauma. The sexual abuse cases that plague our churches are ample testament to this fact. Yet, as Ms Breuer points out, over 2000 children are daily behind razor wire. Why is it ok for a group of children in our community who, through no fault of their own or their parents, to be behind razor wire in the harsh Australian desert?

This is discrimination of the most appalling kind and it is unconscionable for a Nation founded on the values of universal human rights to allow it to happen.

But if the opinion polls are anything to go by, and I have recently seen private polling that indicates that the public polls are right, Australians do not seem to care that this discrimination is occurring. They seem to be content to believe the Hobbesian logic of the Howard government and to a great and shameful extent the ALP, that we must protect our borders at almost any cost - and that cost includes human rights abuses and abandonment of universal human rights.

The public disbelieves the claims of many asylum seekers and thinks that children only harm themselves to further the cause of their application for asylum? Can this twisted and utterly cynical view of our fellow human beings be for real? Unfortunately it is- but it is for a good reason. That reason relates to lack of national leadership.

Our political leaders have fuelled insecurity and fear about refugees and asylum seekers in a way that just does not accord with reality. They have pandered to the underside of an Island Nation that has for generations been inculcated with a sense that somehow, sometime, hordes of foreigners are going to overrun us. Something that has only looked like happening once since White occupation in 1788 - in World War 2 when Japan was madly roaming around the Pacific.

And despite the fact that the Head of our key intelligence agency, ASIO, said in Hobart last week that he is not aware of any terrorist coming into the country on a leaky boat and that if a terrorist wants to get in to Australia they can do it in much easier ways.

And in spite of the fact that we are not, any more than we were one hundred years ago, facing 'hordes from the north' invading our continent.

And in spite of the fact that Australia's reputation as a place that takes universal human rights seriously, takes a beating in the international media.

The Nation does not seem to be in the mood for a more compassionate response. The fear merchants have won the battle thus far, but as the former French Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn said recently, 'There is not one vote that cannot be turned around.' Those of us who believe that the universality of human rights is worth fighting for must take it upon ourselves to argue the facts to our fellow Australians. We must do what our political leaders are refusing to do and that is to give asylum seekers a 'fair go.'

So here's an alternative script to the current one being used by Messrs Howard, Ruddock, Crean, Gillard and co.

Australia is a rich, developed world country with a long -standing reputation as a generous nation. We are also a nation that has provided troops and military hardware to the War on Terrorism and we have just spent another $400 million on border protection in this week's federal budget. In short, we are concerned to ensure that the world sees us as strong and responsible when it comes to enhancing the safety and values of democracy.

We are a nation built on accepting other races, creeds and social mores. We have made great efforts in the post-war period to stamp out anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance.

Since the Second World War we have accepted millions of refugees and we have responded to world crises, that have resulted in large-scale displacement of peoples, well – to wit, post war Europe and Vietnam after the USA pulled out in 1975.

Through our daily actions, we accept the reality that today we live in a globalised world – a world that brings us tremendous advantages in terms of new trade links, improved communications, travel, and leisure and work opportunities. In fact, our political leaders spend thousands of hours and dollars telling us how Australia can take advantage of globalisation. And the globalised world that emphasises in rhetoric at least, the need for greater democracy and respect for human rights is one, as I noted earlier, that we are prepared to defend. This is the side of globalisation that Australians are happy to utilise to their advantage.

The flip side of globalisation is that people movement is increasing. The 23 million refugees in the world today represent, in part, this reality. As the renowned European affairs commentator, Neal Ascherson, put it last week:

The poor world is moving into the rich world on a scale never seen before…The realities are that this movement is in the long run unstoppable, that Europe [and for this one can include Australia] is becoming dependent on immigration as its populations age and diminish, and that the distinction between asylum-seeker and economic migrant is meaningless.

As Australians we cannot take the upside of globalisation – cheaper products, new industries and ideas – without taking the other side that is represented by more people wanting to live where the better life and economic growth will be.

Like capital in a globalised world, labour will move to fertile ground – in fact, the Right should have no problem with this concept because it is consistent with their belief in free markets. But it seems that this is not the case – think tanks like Melbourne's Institute of Public Affairs are happy to argue the case for removing trade barriers and champion the cause of global footloose finance, but when it comes to people, they want massive borders in place!

And we must also accept that if we are serious about globalisation it is critically important that we acknowledge our place as good global citizens – that we recognise that our international reputation is important. That our business people do not have to spend time explaining to their overseas clients and customers that Australia is not a racist fortress anymore.

We cannot take pride in the fact that the 2000 Olympics showed us to be an innovative, egalitarian, fresh and magnificently appointed nation but then be beastly careless if we are now seen as harsh and mean.

And we must learn to accept that Islamic people who come to our Nation are entitled to wear traditional attire and practice their religion – just as we came to accept that some Jews wear traditional attire and pray on Saturdays. And we must understand that whilst some of the leadership of the Muslim world behaves in a way that is incompatible with universal application of human rights and democracy, there are millions of Muslims who believe wholeheartedly in such concepts, just as there are autocratic institutions within our community that fail to accord real justice to people.

And just as we are appalled when institutions such as the Melbourne Club reject would- be members on the basis of their Jewishness, so we must ensure that we are equally appalled by outbreaks of anti-islamic sentiment. Instead of throwing millions of taxpayers dollars in psychologically damaging asylum seekers each day, why don't our politicians spend those dollars on building more tolerant communities, or through an advertising campaign that makes Australians feel that refugees and asylum seekers are here to share in what is great about Australia, not to undermine who we are as a Nation.

Above all, we must be prepared to acknowledge that, as liberal thinker Judith Shklar said ten years ago in her important work, 'The Faces of Injustice' (New Haven; Yale University Press 1990), one of liberalism's most important aims is to restrain our propensity to act cruelly. That is why we have the rule of law, why we do not sanction the death penalty, why we have laws against oppressive and discriminatory conduct.

But this restraint on cruelty counts for nought in a democracy if we do not apply it to all who come within our jurisdiction – and I mean all.

As Australians we are currently letting our children and grandchildren down when it comes to our acceptance of the daily cruelty meted out to asylum seekers, particularly children. We have hardened our hearts, and allowed our xenophobic underside to be exposed once again by our politicians – just as we did when we feared the 'Yellow Peril' in the 1950s.

It is our children and grand-children who will one day have to reconcile themselves with what their parents did and allowed to occur – just as we reconcile ourselves with what our forbears did to indigenous Australians. A Prime Minister will stand up and apologise to the victims of the appalling abuse that Ms Breuer so passionately describes.

This is not an 'elitist' view as the conservatives would have it – it is a view based on the universality of human rights. Something to which this country used to subscribe in more than rhetoric. It is a pity that the conservatives don't place the same value on compassion and the worth of each individual – they are ripping the soul of our society apart with no regard to the consequences now or in the future. But, most shamefully of all, they are pulling the wool over the eyes of their fellow Australians in assuming that the globalisation of people movement will end – it won't.

So never lose heart because the opinion polls are against you – they were against Winston Churchill in the 1930's when he was a lonely voice opposing the evil that was Nazism. History will always judge favourably those who stand on the side of defending the universal project of human rights for all.

- Greg Barns is a former Chair of the Australian Republican Movement and a member of the Advisory Board of OzProspect