Recently, the Federal Opposition spokesperson on Immigration, Richard Marles addressed a Refugees &
Immigration Forum held at the Marymac Centre in Annerley. He cited the “appalling debate” we have had since the Tampa affair in 2001.
He lamented Labor’s then failure to articulate its values - compassion,
fairness and generosity.
So what next? "The
right thing" and the "right politics" will follow, he counselled. Basically: continue
to speed up community detention and get children out of detention centres; hold
the government to account on the off-shore “hell holes”; and vehemently oppose
the re-introduction of Temporary Protection Visas. But there was a tacit surrender
to 'Stop the Boats', in a roundabout way, to "stop people from drowning at
sea".
Katherine Gelber, Professor of Public Policy, spoke profoundly
on our international obligations and ended her address thus: It was not a
failure in the articulation of values, it was a failure of leadership (that
gave us that 13-year appalling debate)!
Kim Beazley failed us in 2001, when Howard opportunistically
severed bipartisanship with the Tampa affair. Beazley’s surrender on stage, with his hand on
Howard’s shoulder and the words, "we are at one on this", has since become a
festering legacy.
Compassion, Fairness, and Generosity. Did we not abandon these in 2001? Will jaded
voters now hear these as motherhood and apple pie puff? At any rate, how do
they stack up with the Manus Island “hellhole” we created, our “no advantage” deterrent
that denies those in community detention the right to work; the trumped up nobility
taped double-sided to the convenient prop of stopping people from drowning at
sea, when cruelling these “despicable” people off our shores has all been but the
political imperative?
Leadership means doing the unthinkable, or simply scruffing us
back to the righteous path.
Malcolm Fraser with the Vietnamese boat people; Bob Hawke following the Tianamen Square tragedy;
Ben Chifley giving the nod to Arthur Caldwell to break his trumpeted promise to
bring in 'ten Brits to every Balt'. And there’s Gough Whitlam, calling the historic joint
sitting of the two Houses, on the heels of a double dissolution, to get
Medibank through.
Compared with the monumental obstruction to Gough’s
Medibank, the Stop the Boats duplicity is no more than spruiking yesteryear’s hotted
up xenophobic soup on a culturally bleak winter’s day. All the same, to stop offering
“other” people as political scapegoats will exact much the same “ticker” from
our present leaders.
Bipartisanship worked well before 2001. We need that moral
vision and courage, more than ever, to stop “the fight between two bull
elephants” when it is the reeds that hold their habitat together (or fortify our
moral framework) that get thrashed.
Chek Ling
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