Back in 2002, Bill Heffernan, a member of the Howard Government, explained his government's post-Tampa strategy starkly and simply. Having been a local councillor and being a lifetime farmer, he described the moral dilemma that confronts you during a major bushfire. You have to build a firebreak. You have to choose someone's property as the firebreak. In destroying their property, you will save the neighbourhood. 'It's not pretty. These are hard moral decisions. But you have to do it.'
The government's boast a year later was that the firebreak worked. The boats had stopped coming. The borders were secure and Australia could choose those refugees to whom it wished to offer places under its generous offshore refugee selection program. Our politicians finally responded to community pressure to alleviate the harsher aspects of the policy. A handful of government Members displayed fine conscience and great resolve. The ascendant Labor Party made a commitment to make the treatment of asylum seekers more humane.
Things are looking more humane onshore. But the situation offshore is more doubtful. Being an island nation continent, we do not share any land borders. We are not used to a steady stream of unauthorised arrivals. Our political leaders touch deep into our national psyche when they outdo each other with their anti-asylum rhetoric. First we had Kevin Rudd telling us that people smugglers, those who offer risky transport on the high seas for a fee, are the 'vilest form of humanity', 'the scum of the earth' and that they should all 'rot in hell'. While ever there are asylum seekers with initiative, dreams for their children, and a dollar left in their pockets, there will be people smugglers.
Now, the new Opposition Leader Tony Abbott talks about the need to turn boats back. He says, 'An Australian Government that doesn't have the option of turning boats back in the right circumstances is a government that is not doing enough. It's got to be part of your policy arsenal.'
None of this full blown political rhetoric helps to answer the question whether we are doing enough to take responsibility for the situation in Indonesia where many asylum seekers are awaiting refugee determination under processes much inferior to those used in Australia. Persons directly fleeing persecution deserve our protection and assistance.
Admittedly, we do not have the same obligation to asylum seekers who have already reached a country where they can be afforded protection and the processing of their claim. Who is to say that the protection and processing in Indonesia is adequate for Tamils, Iraqis or Hazaras from Afghanistan? We pragmatic Australians may be on the cusp of yet again making simplistic assessments of these people, presuming that they are anyone's responsibility but ours. We should be able to work through the complexity of these issues without simplistically demonising asylum seekers or people smugglers.
We Australians are very ready to leave hard issues to our politicians unless we are directly hurt by their decisions. We marched in our hundreds of thousands against the Iraq War. But once it started, we were far more accepting than were the British and the Americans of the rationales offered by our political leaders despite there being no weapons of mass destruction and no increased threat from Iraq to the United States and her allies. For us, it is now ancient history. We have just moved on. There is no point in raking over old coals.
Meanwhile next week in London Tony Blair will face more than five hours of questioning by a committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Sir John Chilcot who has been charged by government with 'considering the UK's involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned'. The UK Government has told the public, 'Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.'
Is it just that we consider ourselves a small time player in such an alliance, contenting ourselves that the real strategic and moral thinking is done in Washington and Whitehall? Or do we too have things to learn before government commits our young men and women to war once again?
For a while we were out there leading the world on climate change with Kevin Rudd telling us, 'Climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation'. But once Copenhagen collapsed he felt the need to assure us that 'Australia will do no more and no less than the rest of the world'.
The lowest common denominator is not usually the solution to the great moral challenges. That's why they are great moral challenges. Given that our productivity and prosperity has been built, in part, on the quarrying and exporting of our not so clean energy resources, we need to do more.
I dare to suggest that most Australians want to do more. There are not many of us who are experts on the science, or on the economics or on the international relations required to forge an appropriate global response to the risks of global warming. But enjoying the natural bounty and prosperity we do, we hope that Australia will give leadership and not just be a follower, a lifter and not a leaner as Menzies would have said.
Fr Frank Brennan SJ is professor of law at the Australian Catholic University's Public Policy Institute. This is an extract from an article that first appeared in Insight in Melbourne's The Age on Saturday 23 January 2010.