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Witnessing the sense of relief from Australian-African activists at the outcome of the Victorian state election, I was not sure why I had a sense of déjà vu. Then I realised this collective exhale reminded me vividly of the sentiment from the LGBTQ community after the marriage equality survey results were announced.
Many who are appalled by the sufferings inflicted on people who seek protection in Australia under a policy for whose design and administration Morrison was responsible, saw his tears over the plight of Rohingya refugees as hypocritical. Both Morrison's tears and his critics' varying responses to them merit reflection.
Social media drove the Arab Spring, the story goes. If it weren’t for viral posts in Tunisia setting off a cascade of dominoes across the region change would never have arrived. For a brief period, the arrival of social media giant Facebook in countries with low connectivity or strict freedom of the press and internet meant change was afoot.
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. What is it that enables us to pass by damaged children, untroubled? The answer may lie in the quality of our moral imagination.
Under such conditions, it is hard to get people to concede that what they believe might be incomplete. No one wants to give anything up. This is an attempt to get people to give something up. Here is how to do it: ask what is the worst that can happen. Then accept that it may have already happened. But not to you.
If that is the world of politics then the cooperative energy and the graciousness seen in the Phelps cavalcade and the Liberal candidate are superfluous to requirements. As with refugees despatched to detention, the light and intelligence newly elected MPs bring to Australia will quickly fade from their eyes.
In London of the 1990s, I observed people sleeping under bridges, on doorsteps, in cardboard boxes. How they survived the winters, I never knew, and I suppose many didn't. Since the beginning of Greece's financial crisis in 2008 and the influx of refugees from the Middle East, similar scenes can now be seen in Athens.
This is not a matter of holding the moral high ground but of remaining grounded. Refugee advocates should support campaigns to bring people to Australia from Nauru and Manus, but as part of a more universal and explicit commitment to respect people who seek asylum.
The link Manne makes between Australian treatment of people seeking protection and the abiding cultural demand to control outsiders is illuminating, and his description of the 'Canberra mindset' is persuasive. But the resistance from the sector to negotiation about Manus and Nauru has more complex roots than Manne allows.
The EU is facing the consequences of its own actions. It will not link political violence to migration, and wishes to maintain its humanitarian façade, so there is little opposition to what Salvini and his ilk are perpetrating against human rights. The web is now so tangled it is no longer a mere issue of racism.
Australia has too many security and diplomatic interests in Iran to squander lightly. The fact its officials are willing to jettison these without getting anything in return vindicates the suggestion that the rather nebulous fact of relationship with the US features much more heavily in Australia's security calculus than its own interests.
What do the Liberal leadership spill and the Syrian War have in common? Both demonstrate how force of habit, like any other force built up over a long period of time, is very difficult to stop, even when the results are plainly self destructive.
133-144 out of 200 results.
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