The government's assurance that it will move most of the remaining refugee children from Nauru by the end of the year is welcome. It came after doctors, nurses, judges, Wentworth voters and Coalition backbenchers had responded publicly to the evidence of acute mental health issues among children on the island.
The policy of preventing the children of people seeking asylum from coming to Australia is increasingly seen by ordinary Australians as cruel. It is no longer an electoral asset but a potential liability.
The decision is particularly welcome as Christmas approaches. Australian Christmas focuses on children. Children count down the days till it comes, and families try to make it a magic time when children feel loved and can return love through gifts. It is an appropriate time to free refugee children from hopelessness.
Christmas, and particularly the first Christmas, also raises broader questions about Australian refugee policy. It makes us ask why adults are left to languish on Manus Island, Nauru and in Australian detention centres. They, too, were children once. It also makes us ask why the government had so strongly resisted transferring to Australia children so clearly at risk.
To distant observers the hesitation and delay are hard to understand. They ask how it is possible to look on idle and unmoved at children in despair when you are in a position to address the causes of their despair. Their question can be heard as a reproach, but it is better understood as asked out of curiosity. What is it that enables us to pass by damaged children, untroubled?
The answer may lie in the quality of our moral imagination. What do we see in our mind's eye as we consider the children on Nauru? It is possible to see them abstractly as members of a class — asylum seekers, illegal immigrants or security threats — and not as unique persons, each with their own dignity and inner life.
If we see them in this way, we shall more easily approve of treating them instrumentally. We set them in a chess game in which as pawns they may be sacrificed in order to save the queen. The suffering to which we have condemned children on Nauru is then seen as unfortunate but also as necessary to deter other people from coming to Australia and so to preserve the integrity of our immigration policy. We might even pride ourselves that we have had the strength of character to overcome our natural sympathy and to focus on the larger good.
"When we imagine the children on Nauru and the men on Manus Island we look into their eyes and see scars from their being treated as means to someone else's end. And we count down the days until they are free."
More commonly, though, we dismiss the extent of the suffering and the worthiness of those who suffer. This was notoriously the case with the Webbs and other fellow travellers who visited Stalin's Russia during years of famine and purges, lived the handsome lifestyle of the Party leaders, were confirmed in their faith in the great Russian Utopia, and returned to deny reports of starvation and of the exile and execution of millions of ordinary Russians.
Tony Abbot recently described Nauru as a pleasant place to live, as if his privileged experience was relevant to the experience of children who suffered there and to our responsibility to them.
Fellow travellers are often accused of dishonesty. The reality is more complex. They suffer from an atrophy of the moral imagination that can affect all of us. It is a form of willed blindness to reality which does not necessarily involve dishonesty
A more expansive form of the moral imagination sees each human being as precious, each with her own destiny and inherent value, and so demanding of respect from others. It is outraged when it sees human beings treated as instruments for policy goals extraneous to them. When we imagine the children on Nauru and the men on Manus Island we look into their eyes and see scars from their being treated as means to someone else's end. And we count down the days until they are free.
These two forms of the moral imagination are represented in the stories of the first Christmas. They offer the expansive vision of a God who loved the world and each person in it so much as to enter it as a little child dependent on other people's love and respect. The story invites people to treat one another as precious and with respect for their inherent worth.
The instrumental vision is represented in King Herod. In order to remove a perceived threat to his rule and to the security of his people he had all the small children in his kingdom killed. He saw their deaths and the grief of their parents as an acceptable price for larger goals.
At Christmas time we might rejoice with the children brought from Nauru to Australia. We might also hope that their release reflects a change in the moral imagination of politicians, and not simply a changed instrumental calculus. And we should continue to press for the children and their families to find a permanent home in Australia and for the release from Manus Island and Nauru of all people who have sought our protection. Christmas puts human beings first.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Australians rally for refugees in February as asylum seeker families faced deportation (Chris Hopkins/Getty Images)