Droppie [infosec] 🐨
BY:
John Minns is emeritus professor of politics and international relations at the ANU and a member of the Refugee Action Campaign in Canberra:
Expect to hear a lot about "Australian values" between now and the next federal election.
Liberal leader Angus Taylor has made it clear that immigration policy will be a central part of his push to win back voters from One Nation. His first speech as leader called for immigration based on "Australian values", claiming that "standards have been too low".
Taylor argued that some people have come to Australia who should not have been allowed in.
"Our borders have been opened to people who hate our way of life. People who don't want to embrace Australia, and who want Australia to change for them", he said.
This is clearly not simply an argument about the size of the immigration program. It is about the people who come, some of whom, he suggests, do not subscribe to our "core beliefs".
His likely future challenger, Andrew Hastie, made it clear that it is the culture of some of those new immigrants that is not acceptable - saying that Australians are being made to feel like "strangers in our own home" - not simply that our home is overcrowded.
The phrase echoed a line from the UK Prime Minister last year which suggested that immigration was making Britain an "island of strangers". Both comments are reminiscent of an infamous 1968 speech by the anti-immigrant politician Enoch Powell in which he warned that non-white immigration would lead to "rivers of blood" and that the British would be made "strangers in their own country".
As Hastie put it while speaking to Peta Credlin on Sky News, "numbers are one thing but who we bring to our country is fundamentally important. They have to sign-up to our values - which are fundamentally Judeo-Christian values".
Both Taylor and Hastie targeted "radical Islam" in the wake of the Bondi massacre. Neither was as blunt as Pauline Hanson who said that there was no such thing as a "good Muslim", but they are all seeking to profit politically from the same constituency.
While Muslims in Australia are bearing the brunt of these attacks, the insistence on a Judeo-Christian ethic also points an accusatory finger at Hinduism - the third largest religion in Australia with probably about 3 per cent of the population - and Buddhism - which is the fourth largest.
There is a utopianism about these demands from the Liberals and One Nation that people should sign-up to Australian values or the door will be shut to them. How exactly, will it be possible for an immigration official to determine whether a prospective migrant has them? Will there be a questionnaire? In which case, how will it be certain that people have answered it truthfully? In the worst-case scenario, would a potential terrorist tick a box saying that they intend to perpetrate violence once they get here? The idea is absurd.
The call for an immigration program based on Australian values might win some votes and perhaps even claw back Liberal voters from One Nation. But it is political posturing which cannot be practically implemented.
Another possibility for excluding those who might make Andrew Hastie feel like a stranger in his own home is to adopt a system which excludes migrants from certain countries and regions - for example from countries with a large Muslim population. It is something which US President Donald Trump has already announced - and he included other countries he doesn't rate highly as well.
The largest Muslim population in the world is in Indonesia. India has more Muslims than Pakistan. Of the alleged Bondi terrorists, one was born in Australia, the other came originally from India. And there are significant Muslim populations in most countries. For those with a fixation about keeping Muslims out of Australia, this must be a truly perplexing problem. Again, it is a utopian demand. It might win some seats, and it will certainly cause harm to many immigrant communities, but it cannot be implemented.
Above all, what are the "values" that we are supposed to hold and to which prospective migrants are to sign-up? Hastie mentioned equality as one. The facts show that Australia has become more unequal over a long period. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was the equivalent of 8.4 per cent of GDP in 2004. Twenty years later it was 23.7 per cent of GDP. Meanwhile, the poorest 20 per cent of the population owned only 0.4 per cent of total wealth. The level of equality that we should have is a value that has been fought over since European settlement - between trade unions and business owners, social reformers and conservatives, and many others.
What about tolerance as a quintessential Australian value? Academic Stephen McInerney made a widely reported and, in some circles, admired speech in Sydney at a March for Australia protest in August last year. In it he argued that the founding prime ministers, war-time leaders and Australian soldiers were: "fighting for a people - a people bound together by the crimson thread of blood, a distinct people, a unique people, an irreplaceable people, derived from the British Isles and Europe and forged on this continent through ethnogenesis into a new ethnic group, Australians".
The sentiment that we should be fighting for the same thing today - a racially-discriminatory immigration program - is repugnant to me. But he does express clearly what has been behind this "debate" - he wants to reduce the number of non-white people in the country. And he is right in one sense - our history since 1788 is one of racism. The White Australia policy was the first measure passed by the Australian parliament in 1901. It was only phased out from 1966 and not really removed until the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. Australian Indigenous people were not even counted as Australians officially until 1966. Is this long history of open, biologically-based racism an Australian value? If so, hopefully, most of us don't still hold it.
Is a Judeo-Christian ethic something which has a great record historically? European colonial empires, the destruction of Indigenous societies and many other brutal and inhumane periods were, at least, part of that record.
Australian history is not a simple story of unanimously agreed values - they have always been a contested space. People fought for women's rights, for gay rights, for Indigenous rights, for labour rights over many decades. They had different values from those they fought against - those who were in power and who also had majority popular support at the time. Which side embodied real Australian values?
What values we should have is being contested still. While clearly support for an immigration program based on race or religion is growing, there are many others determined to prevent that happening. This Palm Sunday - tomorrow - a broad range of organisations, including the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn, the Uniting Church, St Vincent de Paul Canberra/Goulburn, many other churches, UnionsACT and other unions are supporting a rally under the banner "Refugees and Migrants Welcome Here" - a direct challenge to those who have marched recently under the banner of "Australia for Australians".
The values we as a country and people will hold in the future - perhaps those which we will call "Australian values" - are still being contested today.
#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead
John Smith
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