It is something of an indictment of our Australian love of ease or at very least the shallowness and attention deficit disorder of the media that the issue of offshore processing of refugees has leapt back into the national spotlight after years of silence and bilateral political support shielded solely on the spurious claim “it works”.
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Our love of ease dictates that if something seems to be working we assume it must be okay, in this case however cruel and inhuman. Our moral myopia longs to continue in our blissful small mindedness fostered by the toxic carapace of dehumanisation. After all they are only numbers; 220 refugees, 37 babies, individuals shorn of common humanity, labelled by race or nation: “them” not us. Even the anodyne term “offshore processing” glibly conceals its intent, and a whole world of maltreatment and misery. Surely this is not our problem; inflicted by other people, committed in another place, the dismal maritime distance of our various bankrupt satellites absolving us from the sweltering spotlight of conscience.
The political expedient of “tough love” has been embraced because it absolves us of blame or alternatives. It is as morally hollow as condoning the torture of innocents for a “greater good” that even the most callous advocates of utilitarian ethics would blanche at having to measure.
It has been argued the magnitude of the Royal Commission into institutional child abuse is enormous not solely due to the atrocity of the original crimes but because so many lies were told in their wake. If it wasn’t the defensive hierarchy of the church, it was the obdurate expedience of other organisations putting reputations and solutions before the inviolable rights of children. Ballarat still wears the dark legacy of that generational lie.
The depressing failure to learn from history continues. Barely two decades after the “Bringing them Home” report and the disgraces of the stolen generation and again it is the plight of children that highlights a lost moral compass. Never again would we allow children to be treated this way, we vowed. Yet this week we hear of a child rape victim potentially being sent back to the camp where the atrocity allegedly occurred. Tales of childhood deprived, images of infant despair; it is depressingly familiar. The gadflys in the community, incessant in their haranguing, have not swallowed the lie. Is this knell of inconvenient conscience from the grassroots, the recognition of what is not justifiable?
