In a reflective article in the Fairfax Press, Shaun Carney argued that it is not helpful to expect that politicians will treat the arrival of asylum seekers as a moral issue. Their decisions almost always involve compromise and conflict between professed values and actions.
I would like to argue that, whatever of political practice, we should ask politicians to consider the morality of their policies, and that to divorce politics from morality damages Australia.
Carney argues that although the refugee issue has moral aspects, governments can never fully embody moral positions. Politics is about compromise, so that moral rhetoric betrays government action and only alienates its support base. Nor does moral reflection resolve the questions which the government must grapple: the conflict between the needs of Australians and those of refugees, the decision about how many refugees we can take, the encouragement that generous policies may give to people smugglers who will then put more people's lives at risk, and our relative responsibilities to asylum seekers from different nations.
Carney canvasses the idea that governments should be expected to treat refugee policy as 'just politics', so removing the moral dimension in the way that business people do when they speak of 'just business'. This would avoid the inevitable disillusion that attends politicians whose actions do not match their words.
In this account moral reflection appears to be identified with simply insisting on universal principles. I would argue that moral reflection extends beyond this to negotiating how moral principles apply to the circumstances of each policy and decision. I have argued elsewhere that the universal moral principle at issue in our response to asylum seekers is that we have a responsibility, as persons and nations, to respect the human dignity of those who make a claim on us, and to help them live with dignity insofar as that is reasonably possible for us. Political decisions then need to consider the moral and other dimensions of 'what is reasonably possible'.
In making these decisions we need to take into account the wealth and resources of Australia relative to other nations, the relative burden borne by Australia imposed by on-shore asylum seekers, the needs of the Australian population, the relative needs of those who make a claim on us, and so on. In this reflection, the human dignity of those affected by our policy and decisions must remain in the foreground. For that reason, Sri Lankan