Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible.

– Edward Said

Our moral compass is broken. We crushed it ourselves, under our steel-capped boots, driven to frenzy by a particularly decrepit brand of nationalism injected into our arteries by increasingly depraved governments and the gleaming apparatus of a well-oiled media machine. It’s a junta of the soul, enacted by a craven bastion of pasty doughboys with a sprawling set of fetishes for the minutiae of old-school Australiana. They pine for a bygone era that exists only as fractured memory — an era of fibro townhouses, unlocked front doors and exclusively white faces.

The United Nations has declared Australia’s sputtering detention centre regime as an affront to human rights. In these bleak torture camps, refugees wallow in their own filth and are routinely denied basic medical care even as their food and water is harshly rationed. Pregnant women are relegated to dirty cells and told to ‘lower their expectations‘ when they inevitably miscarry. Homosexual asylum seekers, held in a virulently anti-gay jurisdiction where Australia is free to ignore its limp commitment to cosmopolitanism, are constantly threatened with exposure. To call these island hellscapes detention centres is a deep moral insult to the proud and noble tradition of detention centres worldwide.

We’ve been fooled. We’ve been fooled by men who, loving both the freedoms of a liberal-democratic state and the institutionalised horrors of autocracy, have managed to cobble together the worst elements of both. Let no-one ever tell you that freedom and nationalism are somehow compatible. Colonialism has entered its final stage: desperate possessiveness. The Anglo-Saxon majority of Australia, not content with having seized the country and built its Pacific empire upon a vast Aboriginal grave, wants to keep the spoils of its long, bitter colonial war. Multiculturalism is fine and good, as long as migrants prop up the economy from the confines of their Western Sydney enclaves. When they encroach violently on the sacred space of our sight and mind, then we have problems. The only solution, as with all things, is stubborn contrarianism.

How did we get here? How did we manage to integrate a systemwide affinity for degrading torture into a liberal Western state? The hatred didn’t materialise with the blank-faced proselytising of Tony Abbott, nor with the nebbish verisimilitude of Scott Morrison. I wouldn’t trust either man with the coaching of a primary school soccer team, let alone the re-engineering of Australia’s ideological system. The thinner struts of our compassion towards those less fortunate snapped even before Howard, with his cowardly race-baiting and caustic fuck-you-got-mine individualism. The seeds for our torturous anti-refugee state germinated long ago.

We’re never more content than when we’re writhing with fear before the Next Big Existential Threat. We want to crush it between our fingertips like soil. We want to destroy it, to liquefy it, to catapult it into the Sun. We disregard the ignobility, the savagery of the cause by hammering the rough edges until the whole crooked enterprise fits within our broken ideology. We’ve become like Babylon, a prosperous state fortified behind great and impenetrable walls. Our fate — given our continuing trajectory toward shit and terror — is not dissimilar.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED?

Our refugee program emerged, somewhat miraculously, from the swampy mire of Australia’s early century racism. We should never forget that it was the Left who brokered the White Australia Policy; with the labour unions fearful of an influx of cheap workers from the Pacific Islands and Indochina. John Curtin, builder of the great Australian welfare state and nominally an economic and social progressive, once said:

This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race.

To suggest that Labor’s 2010 about-face on asylum seeker policy was a cataclysmic reversal of philosophy reveals grand ignorance of history. They’ve gone retro. They’re dusting off the vinyl for the original LP pressing of Racist Labor Policy, Vol. 1 and are giving it a few spins. Geopolitics hipsters, with their crinkled old maps and smug knowledge of 19th-century sea border disputes, would be loving this classic Labor legislative revival. Real vintage, they’d say. This is frickin’ rare.

I’m continually assailed in my day-to-day life by sneering, pug-faced conservatives who insist that there never was anything called ‘The White Australia Policy’, actually, as if that fact liberates them of retroactive responsibility for our potpourri slush of pre-multicultural racist legislation. These people need a mealy-mouthed bureaucrat to etch the words WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY across The Constitution in cow’s blood before they’ll even consider accepting a hint of collective blame for our country’s hostile racial climate.

The restrictive immigration policies were dismantled throughout the fifties and sixties. We signed the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951, an act which continues to motivate right-wing attempts to build a functional time machine with more urgency than the possibility of drowning baby Hitler. Loosened restrictions on Asian immigration in conjunction with the end of the Vietnam War spurred a flood of Southeast Asian refugees to our shores. Of course, Vietnamese migrants form a strong, irreplaceable backbone for our working economy now. But the trade unions and the conservatives hooted and hollered at the time. Even Whitlam, our most progressive Prime Minister, who worked to tear down the rusted scaffolding of our most racist laws, said:

I’m not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us!

Whitlam was a race huckster as much as any Prime Minister before or after him, but the crooked compass of pragmatism pointed in the right direction, and he allowed a large influx of Vietnamese refugees — including about 2,000 unauthorised boat arrivals. His Liberal successor after he was knifed, Malcolm Fraser, was equally as magnanimous. These were halcyon days — the right-wing accepted them as escapees from a Communist state, and the Left, becoming more defined by social progressivism, wanted the White Australia Policy dead. Indeed, Fraser is now one of the most outspoken public advocates for refugee rights. His opinions have not changed since the seventies, but the knuckledragging troglodytes that make up Australia’s conservative establishment have marched perpetually rightward, making him look like a bona fide Trotskyist by comparison. Bully for them.

Australia had a refugee system it could be proud of — quick, efficient (and cheap) onshore processing and open doors. It’s all grim fantasy now. The Right would have us believe that we exist now at a seminal and heretofore unknown point on the continuum of history; a calamitous clash of civilisations between the noble West and the savage East, personified by the oncoming horde of largely Muslim asylum seekers. It’s all very boring and shrill. There is a reason why there are no conservative comedians worth thinking about. They have no sense of scale or purpose. Their rhetoric is as a sledgehammer to the face, delivered repeatedly. The popular discourse on race, immigration and asylum in this country is no different.

How I wish this welcoming attitude toward our global war offal continued. It’s folly to assume that Australia felt genuine compassion toward Vietnamese boat people in the seventies. What is more likely that the Australians treated the issue as minor — which, in the grand scheme of immigration to our country, it was. It still is. What refugees in 2013 must contend with is a new, reimagined Australian identity — a Frankenstein’s monster of paralytic jingoism, war fetishism and the mother of all persecution complexes. It will be a tough beast to destroy.