Standing up when the Australian government won’t
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The events of the past week have been cause for growing alarm. President Trump’s morally reprehensible and constitutionally questionable Executive Order to bar Syrian refugees indefinitely, other refugees for 120 days, and visa-holders from “countries of concern” for 90 days, has been met with criticism from leaders everywhere. Well, nearly everywhere.
I’m an Australian citizen living in a typically tiny New York apartment around 100 metres from Ground Zero. It is impossible, in this part of Manhattan, not to be reminded every day of the atrocity that took place in 2001. So I was incredibly disheartened, though unsurprised given Australia’s own cruel treatment of refugees, to hear that the Australian government is supporting an immigration ban that will do nothing to increase safety and everything to increase division.
But when you pucker up to a demagogue in an effort to push your own foul agenda, you can never be sure of the results.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/827002559122567168
If, in supporting Mr Trump the Australian government is hoping to curry favour, it is truly naive. Trump does nothing that doesn’t suit Trump.
Australia should take responsibility for these refugees and resettle them in Australia. Like the U.S., we are a nation of immigrants, and to support Trump’s ban and inflict our own brand of cruelty on these vulnerable people is to deny our history and our future.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was quick to speak in positive terms about Trump’s immigration ban and provided this as one of the reasons for supporting it:
“The Australian government is working very closely with the administration and the US officials and we want to ensure that Australians continue to have access to the United States, as they have in the past, and people from the United States have access to Australia.”
Sorry Julie, not in my name. If my “access” to Donald Trump’s America is in any way linked to a policy that denies the world’s most vulnerable people the opportunity to seek asylum, then I will gladly relinquish that access.
These sorts of immigration policies create two classes of humanity: those who will be viewed and treated as individuals, and those who will be lumped together as a class by virtue of being a citizen of a “country of concern”, no matter any specific, legitimate claim to travel or asylum. This should be anathema to a party apparently founded upon a belief in individual freedoms.
Mr Turnbull’s government must decide whether it wants history to record that it aided a fascist president, or that it stood up for what is right. Its current complicity with Trump’s policies commits Australia to stand not with the American people, but with a tyrant who wants power over them.
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Originally published at shorthand.com.
