In the wake of distressing news of James Foley's murder this week by ISIS terrorists, I venture critically to visit the concept of Team Australia, a phrase launched by the Prime Minister a few weeks ago during the debate on weakening the anti-racial vilification laws, and in recent days revived in the context of proposed tougher new anti-terrorism laws ('everybody faces the choice now whether to join Team Australia').
Team Australia, as the term is employed by the Prime Minister, is the antithesis of multicultural Australia. No amount of explanatory glossing or qualification ('whatever your background, we want you on Team Australia') can escape the fact that the term divides people into Us and Them.
It postulates that the world is a competitive environment of nations that win or lose. We are being encouraged to get on the winning team. Games can be friendly or unfriendly, but they are unavoidably about winning or losing. You can't belong to Team Australia and at the same time belong to Team Italy or Team China or Team India , or even Team Israel. You can't play for Team Australia and play for Team Islam or Team Hinduism, because Australia is a Christian (or occasionally a Judaeo-Christian) society. You have to choose your primary loyalty or affiliation: 'He who is not with us is against us'. The more one unpacks the term Team Australia, the nastier it gets.
The wisdom and humanity of multiculturalism is that it recognises the reality that people's loyalties and affiliations are complex and often contradictory. We live with and celebrate those contradictions. For example, by virtue of my birth, citizenship and ethno-religious background, I could be said to belong to Team Australia, Team Christianity, Team Judaism and Team Ireland. I'm still not sure if I am on Team Labor or Team Greens, and probably never will be now.
Abbott has recently reminded us that he also belongs to Team Britain, or perhaps more accurately Team England (his birthplace and source of political values) in his emotive and unhelpful entry into the Scottish independence referendum question. He showed there a remarkable ignorance of the serious and responsible nature of that vital debate in Scotland – a source nation for many Australians – and its possible outcomes. This did not stop him barracking aggressively from the sidelines for what he imagines to be Team Britain: a concept of a nation that no longer exists except in Abbott's own sentimental, 'Boys' Own' imagination.
An irony in this is that, having recently been walking in Scotland for three weeks, I thought I recognised more recognisable 'British' traditional values there, of compassion, fair play and social justice, than in the frenetic, distracted, money-driven culture of London and its surrounds.
As for me, my membership of Team Ireland has led me naturally to side with Team Scotland in the coming referendum. Had I a vote, I would vote 'Yes' for independence.
All this might suggest how intellectually and morally limiting the 'Team X (insert your preferred term)' terminology quickly becomes. My core values tell me that if I had to choose just one team, I would choose to play for Team Humanity. But that term itself trivialises and debases the seriousness of these matters. It turns us all into flag-waving fools.
Because of the fraught global context in which we now live, in a world where Islamic-based extremist fundamentalism has become a terrifying reality in several countries, we need to be especially mindful and respectful of the hurt and harm this phrase is causing to Australia's diverse Muslim communities, many of which go back many generations. Abbott's breathtakingly insensitive words and actions were demonstrated last week, when he invited Australian Muslim community leaders to a meeting to discuss anti-terrorism law. The revelation that his government had already drafted bills in detail, which Muslim communities were expected to endorse, led inevitably to a boycott by many of those leaders, who rightly complained it was not a serious dialogue but just a public relations stunt.
This boycott provided the opportunity for savagely bigoted 'news' coverage by the Daily Telegraph which juxtaposed images of ISIS terrorists about to behead victims with that of Australian Muslim leaders, some of whom were wearing turbans. The general message to readers is that Australian Muslims were – yet again – refusing to join wholeheartedly in the national fight against terrorism. And that article, in turn, provoked a torrent of hate-filled and abusively Islamophobic reader comments which were published. I can only imagine and try to empathise with the distress that the article and reactions to it would have caused in Australian Muslims.
This, I suggest, is where Team Australia rhetoric leads us: to a thoroughly ugly place. The term hurts and divides, rather than unites, our national community. The Opposition is forced to say that it, too, supports Team Australia. Anyone who does not express loyalty to the concept is, by that very fact, marginalised as disloyal or potentially disloyal.
These days, I sometimes find myself falling into the trap of thinking in such divisive categories: of the Compassionate Australia Team that feels and expresses deep distress at the cruelties our nation is inflicting on innocent boat people families, and the Hardheaded Australia Team that claims those huge cruelties are necessary in order to deter other boat people from coming.
I am losing my sense of a national community of shared civic values, and I am struggling to hold onto the belief that it is possible to persuade fellow Australians away from prejudice and deliberate cruelty to our fellow human beings: that there is actually a wide spectrum of views, and the task is to move enough people to make a political difference along that spectrum towards compassion and decency.
It's time to expunge Team Australia from our political vocabulary.
Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Poland.
Image via the Sydney Morning Herald.