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By Andrew Murray SM
A consistent theme during the celebrations of the anniversary of the Snowy Mountains Project last year was gratitude at the
opportunity that the project had given to people from all parts of the world to settle in Australia and to make good.
In interviews, person after person spoke about how grateful they had been that nobody had
worried about where they came from or about what difficulties might have affected their past. All that mattered was that they worked hard.
These people have become good citizens, and part of what has made
them so is the welcome they received when they first arrived in Australia.
This was not a new experience for Australia. At the beginning of European settlement, many convicts, who had been condemned in
Britain as unreformable and of a bad class, became model citizens when freed and granted land in the new colony. In fact, it is a principle of life that when people who have lived in difficult circumstances are
given fresh opportunity they often flourish. If this giving is accompanied by generosity, they remain grateful in their allegiance to whomever was generous to them.
It seems to me that this lesson is one that
we as a nation and especially our Federal Government need to learn again in relation to asylum seekers and refugees.
Instability and internal war in parts of the world will ensure that Australia will be
obliged to accept refugees from different parts of the world for some years to come for reasons both of justice and international convention. This is happening at present and involves not only those chosen by
immigration authorities in distant camps but also those asylum seekers, such as the ‘boat people’, whose arrival in Australia is unauthorised.
At present we treat these people in the worst possible way, yet
we will no doubt expect that those who stay will become the best possible citizens. Granted that a wide ranges of issues and problems, some of them intractable, surround the questions of asylum and refugee status,
there still seems to be something fundamentally wrong about the way in which we treat unauthorised entries, even if we judge this only in terms of our own long-term interests.
Practices like long-term
mandatory detention, detention of children, granting of only temporary protection visas to proven refugees, placement of detention centres in remote areas so that humanitarian support is not available, long delays,
uneven treatment of people with similar cases, installation of high security fences and razor wire and criticism of charities that have supported refugees released into the community all seem designed to ensure that
people, whom we will expect to become good citizens, will have nothing to look back on in gratitude.
Many of these measures are simply punitive and attempts to stem the flow of asylum seekers. The government
could do better, if it better understood human nature.
Fr Murray teaches philosophy at the Catholic Institute of Sydney.
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