I had planned to write about how the federal budget, handed down on Tuesday, had stolen $375 Million dollars of foreign aid to fund locking up refugees closer to home. Turns out this budgetary sleight-of-hand could be worse than just misdirection with funding spent on prevention programs closer to home.
I had planned to write about these issues because I felt they reflected poorly on Australia's national character. Perhaps more importantly, I wanted to write because I believed this was not who we are.
I’m struggling to process the enormity of this move by both the government and opposition. More than anything I feel it’s a stain on Australia’s national character that one of the few bipartisan moves our politicians can muster is to systemically deny desperate people protection.
Australia sells itself on many ideals, one of which is an egalitarian spirit. We call it a 'fair go'. We evoke it everywhere from the sporting field to the national debate on welfare funding. It's about what people deserve by virtue of their being human.
Today we eroded that for some trumped notion of 'border security'. As parts of the world suffer through real strife, we have invented calamities that don't exist. Any threat to Australia comes, not at the hands of those seeking asylum, but from our own small-minded, isolationist view on the world.
It’s telling that the Green’s amendments designed to ensure transparency were voted down. Aware of our culpability in making this move we prefer collective denial.
This can not stand for long.
Only five years ago we apologised as a nation to the stolen generation. A generation of children and families that were wronged because of bigoted policies and a misguided notion of right. We stand again at the precipice between compassion and bigotry and once again have chosen the wrong path.
Who then will bear the burden of this mistake? Who will voice a national apology to Ranjini & Paari, and so many other children who will suffer as a result of this policy?
The shame of this move has been buried beneath the perceived ‘national will’ that drives it. If Australian’s en masse do not cry out against this move then perhaps we are guilty as much as our leaders. We are the first country in the world to take such a move, Amnesty International has condemned it. We are taking a lead that should not be followed.
National security means nothing if we give up all that is worth protecting..
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