Labor's dilemma: progress on climate change is the hostage of xenophobia
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Version 0 of 1. Must child refugees remain incarcerated and brutalised if Australia is to return to a sensible climate policy? This is the horrible question now confronting all progressive Australians. By progressive, I mean those who understand the dangers of climate change and the imperative for Australia to play a fair role in reducing global emissions and who, at the same time, feel appalled that this nation can lock up asylum seekers in offshore detention centres to live, without hope, in sub-human conditions. Related: Can Bill Shorten win government without a boat-free policy? It's unlikely | Anthony Bieniak This is the hidden question roiling beneath preparations for the ALP national conference later this month. Despite strong opposition from Labor for Refugees, the conference is likely to endorse tow-backs, offshore detention and the whole infrastructure of systematic punishment. Recognising the party’s vulnerability on refugee policy, the Labor leadership is desperate to neutralise it as an issue in the election, which may be called this year. If it is impossible to detect daylight between Labor and the Coalition on refugee policy, on climate policy the gulf is wide. The Coalition – led by a man who denies climate science and has shown himself hostile to renewable energy, while lauding the benefits of burning coal – will do all it can to preserve the status quo and wind back policies introduced by the previous Labor government. Meanwhile, the ALP has committed itself to reintroducing a carbon price and a number of other complementary policies (even if those policies still fall well short of Australia’s fair contribution to limiting warming to two degrees celsius). So the calculus is this: if Labor is to win the next election and put Australia back on the path towards a sensible climate policy, then it must match the Coalition in promising to maintain the ruthless treatment of asylum seekers. For the conservatives, the hope is that Labor’s historical commitment to human rights will prevail, so that the Coalition can win the election and maintain both a pitiless refugee policy and a retrograde climate policy. Of course, Coalition leaders do not accept that their refugee policy is pitiless, let alone deliberately punitive, because they believe they are good people. They have made up the “preventing drownings” argument to bolster this opinion of themselves. The ferocity of the attacks on Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs can be understood only if we recognise that, in detailing the brutal facts, Triggs is exposing their self-deception and opening them to the possibility that they are not good people. The exquisite dilemma this situation poses for progressives has its genesis in the marked shift of public sentiment towards those seeking asylum on Australian shores. Although there has always been a strong undertow of xenophobia in Australia, the shift began some 15 years ago when then prime minister John Howard exploited it to brilliant effect with the Tampa affair, justifying the introduction of the Pacific Solution. In August 2001, Howard introduced the border protection bill, which Labor voted down. But by then an ugly anti-immigrant sentiment, already primed by the rise of Pauline Hanson, was on the loose. It was further inflamed two months later when the government manufactured a story about boat people throwing their children overboard. It went on to win the election it had been predicted to lose. Climate change policy in Australia has since become a hostage to xenophobia. It is no longer likely that the two goals of climate protection and a compassionate refugee policy can be met by electing a government both humane and serious about global warming. It is possible that the premise of my argument is erroneous and that the ALP could win the next election with a more humane refugee policy. Labor for Refugees has commissioned surveys in marginal seats that are said to show this is the case. Analysis of the influence of refugee policy on voting intentions suggests its effect would be small and that the number of voters abandoning Labor on these grounds would be matched by the number casting a ballot for them (probably instead of the Greens). But the surveys were conducted at a time when voters’ anxieties had been calmed. If the Abbott government were to make an issue of boat arrivals during an election campaign, as they most certainly would if Labor were to adopt a less cruel policy, then the survey figures are likely to be as reliable as the opinion polls before the recent election in Britain. In the lead-up to the next election we can expect the government to manufacture stunts, like the children overboard affair. Perhaps it will allow a few boats laden with unruly refugees to almost make it to shore, before towing them back as television cameras roll. The political damage to Labor would be immense if it could be portrayed as being soft on boat people. In the longer term, the only solution is to reverse the tide of xenophobia. SBS TV’s Go Back To Where You Came From strikes me as a powerful approach because it directly counters the government’s highly effective campaign to portray boat people as non-humans, more akin to dangerous animals. In the short term, there is only one glimmer of light in this awful moral imbroglio. The treatment experienced by asylum seekers depends not only on laws and policies, but on how those laws and policies are applied. Whereas the Coalition seems to take pride in punishing asylum seekers for attempting to seek refuge in Australia, we could expect a Labor administration to adopt a more humane approach, to implement with some compassion an inhumane policy. To paraphrase Richard Neville, those incarcerated on Nauru and Manus may discover that there may be only an inch between Labor and the Coalition, but it is an inch in which they can breathe. |