Former Australian navy captain John Ingram doesn't mince his words. In an interview for the ABC, Ingram, reflecting on his long career in the Navy and his encounters with asylum seekers at sea, described the policy of turning back the boats as 'morally corrupt' and 'absolutely abhorrent'.
It's easy to imagine some readers brushing aside these comments as fanciful and unreasonable. The Australian debate on border control has for two decades been structured such that 'practical' language is presented as the field for 'reasonable argument', while overtly 'moral' language is cast as the domain of 'do-gooders'; and by extension, as irresponsible, because such language is seen as assisting the 'people smugglers'.
Concepts like 'sovereignty' and 'integrity of borders' have become established as 'reasonable' in the context of the Australian discussion — words like these are now decisive in discerning 'good' from 'bad'. Just think of the way asylum seekers are positioned, as infringing liberty — our liberty. We think of our liberty in terms offered by John Stuart Mill: as long as our actions don't infringe other people's rights then we can proceed, but the state can intervene against those whose actions adversely affect the rights of others.
In the Australian debate, political agents like Phillip Ruddock and Scott Morrison have effectively positioned asylum seekers as a group of people whose very existence, in its challenge to the 'harmony' of our politics, is an inimical 'other regarding action' against which the state has the right to intervene.
The historical reality of states controlling borders can be used to shut down conversation about the moral relationship between those who maintain borders and those who seek to cross them. So one academic commented to me recently that he was a little confused by the philosophical literature that focuses on border controls: 'I don't understand the point of this ... states have always sought to control their borders'. The implication was that discussion about the rights and wrongs of stringent border controls was literally nonsensical.
Of course most people wouldn't accept that there is no further fundamental moral discussion to be had about border controls — but it is a challenge to maintain in public view the ethical difficulties that arise at borders, places where people sometimes die, and sometimes in great numbers. Language, including concepts like 'integrity', can be used to restrain different kinds of discussion, to normalise one particular form of speaking.
In the Australian migration control debate, language is an instrument and occasionally a weapon. The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, referring to a report of one prospective asylum seeker who had acknowledged that the route to Australia is now 'closed', responded: 'Well, thank you sir, the way is closed.'
I'm struck not only by the 'closing of the way', but by Abbott's use of the word 'sir'. One of the marks of a modern liberal democratic society is that we use such titles to refer to anyone and everyone; it's a great equaliser. But it becomes absurd when directed at the suffering supplicant, a term of derision rather than respect. When the Prime Minister says 'well, sir' he is effectively positioning that man as someone in the world of the absurd, whom he doesn't have to meet face to face.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams reflected recently on how people of religious faith should engage in the public sphere — whether they should be able to point to their religious commitments as sources for their political reasoning. His sense was that yes, religious people, although they should no doubt reason in terms approachable by everybody, should have no hesitation in pointing to the sources of their fundamental commitments. With regard to the issue of migration, Williams said he would begin by admitting that the deepest normative source from which his feelings and reasoning sprang would be the biblical image of hospitality.
As in many dimensions of our broader culture, in the Australian migration control debate, 'passion' is construed as opposed to 'reason'. But, to refer again to Williams' lecture, 'passion' in its classical (ancient or biblical) sense, is not opposed to reason (being attuned to the world), but rather to 'peace' or 'harmony'. In the debates on border control, 'harmony' means no information, no angst — only a kind of enforced conversational restraint presented as 'reasonable'. Thus the importance of Ingram's 'passionate' language — alongside practical proposals, 'passionate' language can unsettle uncritical pictures of the issue.
And here there is a role for religious people. As one Catholic migration worker recently emphasised, the very notion of catholicity should present profound challenges to the current border regime since the principles of universality and unity aren't realised in the practice of offshore detention: the policy of stopping the boats should be denounced — 'they have crossed our path and are our neighbour'.
Whereas the Coalition Government deploys the language of 'integrity', 'sovereignty' and 'transgression' to frame the issue, here we have the use of 'path' and 'neighbour'. In the biblical context paths are places of encounter, shared places where the stranger is met and discovered to be not so strange after all.
We need to be suspicious then of language that narrows the issue at hand. To quote Ingram, through 'turning back the boats', through offshore detention, we have placed ourselves in a corner from which 'we need an honourable way out, and we need a way out very soon'. One part of finding this way out is to open up the discussion to include vocabularies other than those of unchallengeable 'reason' and 'sovereign prerogative' — vocabularies that offer instead an imaginative grasp of larger connections.
Benedict Coleridge is a postgraduate student at Balliol College, Oxford University. Follow him on Twitter @Ben_Coleridge