Image from Nine News
By Situation Theatre 5/12/2019
There can be no clearer sign that our politics is every bit as sick as refugees languishing on Manus, nor any more obvious evidence of the urgent need for treatment to heal the wounds.
The Courier Mail reported Medevac Is A Win-Win For Morrison. The Australian declared Scott Morrison Gets Medevac Win. It’s no surprise that the Murdoch Press would echo Government’s framing of ending the year on a “win”.
The fact that it’s also not surprising that ABC News echoed this framing, and the SMH reported that by repealing medevac the Government had “restored its border protection regime”, is a depressing sign of the times.
What is surprising is that even The Guardian Australia reproduced this kind of morally bankrupt language, both in a preview article by Amy Remeikis entitled Coalition Looks To End Parliamentary Year With Wins On Unions and Medevac and Katharine Murphy’s post-repeal analysis entitled Medevac Repeal Gives Morrison A Political Win, But Prompts Intense Moral Discomfort. That these articles contained a critical perspective of the Government’s actions clearly place them in a different category to the rest of the coverage, but that Morrison’s sickening framing makes the headlines of a progressive publication at all, sans inverted commas, should be of concern.
Heard on @abcnews this morning that @ScottMorrisonMP sees achieving the passage of #Medevac repeal and Porter's union-busting bills as "two big wins to end the year on". That says it all. He sees degrading the health of refugees & crippling the rights of workers as "wins" #auspol
— 💧Aaron Dodd (@AaronDodd) November 24, 2019
Imagine seeing stopping human beings from receiving required medical care as a ‘win’? 😔😔@JacquiLambie #auspol #medevac What a shameful period this is for Australia.
— 💧🌏 Denise Shrivell (@deniseshrivell) November 24, 2019
There can be no more damning indictment of Australian society, our politicians, and the media that stopped holding them to account years ago, than that the repeal of such minimalist protections for fundamental human rights in the context of the authoritarian imprisonment and torture of innocent people could be predominantly interpreted as a “win”.
To really get a sense for the rapidly deteriorating health of our democracy, contrast this latest abomination with the public response to the equivalent strain of conservative politics in the late 1980s: John Howard’s tawdry attempts to use race and immigration to his electoral advantage.
On August 1, 1988, as Opposition Leader at the time, Howard called for Asian immigration to be “slowed down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb was greater”.
According to David Marr, in making the comments Howard “had not anticipated the wave of disgust that swept the country as he brought race politics to Canberra. Liberal voters were appalled. The liberal press was brutal. Shadow ministers crossed the floor to repudiate his shift in direction. He became a figure of ridicule, even contempt. Within months, Andrew Peacock was once again Opposition leader; Howard would spend the next six years plotting to get his old job back.”
Howard’s “One Nation” agenda to oppose multiculturalism, roll back land rights, and end affirmative action for Indigenous Australians, was soundly rejected and Bob Hawke’s plans to do the opposite were embraced.
Fast forward three decades and what course has racial politics run in this country?
Well, in recent years the Government has launched a military operation to turn back asylum seeker boats, commanded public servants to call such people “illegals”, separated refugee mothers from newborns, repeatedly hidden or distorted information about refugee treatment, triggered riots on Manus Island which left 77 injured and Reza Barati dead, shut down human rights enquiries into conditions on Manus, cut funding to the Refugee Council of Australia, failed to provide appropriate medical care for over a dozen victims of their torture regime which resulted in their deaths, and dismissed a report into the abuse of children in the prison camps as a “political stitch-up”.
They’ve been found to have breached the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on multiple occasions, refused to resettle refugees in crisis with the phrase “nope, nope, nope”, introduced two year prison sentences for detention centre workers who disclose information about the camps, refused to apologise for inaccurate claims that Save the Children staff “coached self-harm”, rejected New Zealand’s offer to accept 150 refugees, dismissed 2000 incident reports on Nauruan asylum seeker children suffering sexual abuse and self-harm as “hype”, and accussed refugees of deliberately harming themselves and inventing claims of sexual assault to get to Australia.
They’ve coerced refugees to return to their home countries where they risk arrest, persecution and torture, been praised by Trump for being more hardline on immigration than he is, attacked lawyers defending asylum seekers as “un-Australian”, denied safety fears of Manus prisoners as “complete nonsense”, saying they are “manipulated by activists”, fought court orders protecting suicidal children, attacked refugees for being unemployed and taking Australian jobs at the same time, warned against a “single act of compassion”, rejected calls from 6000 doctors for immediate evacuation of refugee children and their families from Nauru, breached multiple human rights laws according to a UN working group, warned against turning Nauru into a “transit lounge”, and dismissed medevac laws by slandering refugees as rapists, paedophiles and murders.
They’ve spent millions reopening Christmas Island to avoid transferring refugees to the mainland for medical treatment, warned that refugees would displace Australians from hospital beds, argued that they would “game the system”, claimed women are using rape and abortion claims as a ploy to get to Australia, tried to deport a beloved Tamil family during the middle of the night, terrifying two young children, described these children as “anchor babies”, and repealed legislation designed to provide the minimalist condition of appropriate medical care for the Government’s victims.
The punishment for this litany of human rights abuses?
Re-election in May and a current poll lead over the ALP.
The idea that the Government should try to re-frame their inhumanity as a “win” is to be expected. The idea that the media would be complicit in this representation, and the public would accept it, is a sure sign of the grave sickness at the heart of our democracy.
The stark contrast with the public response to a racist comment by John Howard in the 1980s shows just how serious the illness has become.
But the response to serious illness, if treatable, is not to give up. The response is assess the diagnose the underlying causes of the sickness and treat the patient accordingly.
And so the final word should go to Dr Nick Martin, who, writing in the Guardian yesterday, found necessary hope amidst the despair of our wretched national sickness:
To those who continue to push for the timely and humane treatment of refugees; please don’t give up. This cruelty must stop at some point. The enduring disgrace that offshore processing has become, a financially ruinous debacle that extorts vulnerable nations and exerts a terrible price on those who asked us for help must end. Australia is a country with a once proud history of accepting people who sought refuge by boat. Now it is seen as one who seemingly delights in punching down on those same people. This episode continues; I hope for some actual leadership to end this sorry chapter in our history.
