Asylum seekers are back on top of the news cycle again. It’s almost like those heady days when MV Tampa was anchored threateningly off Christmas Island. This time round there is a delightful little twist.
Rather than anxiously imagining the horrible wretches that threaten to penetrate our sovereign territory, viewers are instead invited to ponder the imagination - or lack thereof - amongst a representative sample of middle Australians who suffer from refugee anxiety.
The most interesting aspect of this undertaking is that Go Back To Where You Came From resembles an Escher engraving. All those years ago, the Howard government recognised that boat-borne asylum seekers could be used to stage an extremely successful political pantomime. It had pirate-like people smugglers, captured cargo ships, illegal immigrants, the Navy, the Army: a great ensemble by any measure.
Creating a security dilemma around “stopping the boats” allowed the conservative government to demonstrate itself to be bold, capable of dramatic, effective action to protect a pre-conceived national interest. The votes followed.
Now we are treated to a pantomime within the aforementioned pantomime. The series’ creators have evidently decided that conjured image is best countered with yet another conjured image. Spectacle shall be met with yet another spectacle.
It is an interesting idea, yet I feel one destined to fail. Certainly it may lay bare a few “realities” for those who continue to delude themselves about the lot of the average asylum seeker. However, I cannot imagine many epiphanies were experienced across Australia. This is due to the long running failure of the refugee lobby to recognise that:
a) reason has no place in this debate, and
b) most people are content to embrace a “virtual reality” firmly within the limits of their own parochial imaginations.
Reason is a lost cause in the asylum seeker issue. Counter arguments will not persuade many people that the sovereign borders of Australia are not as vulnerable as imagined nor that a small number of asylum seekers are no big deal.
This has been made abundantly clear by the support that wildly disproportionate policies to interdict and detain boat people have garnered over the years. In such a situation reason is turned on its head. It suddenly becomes reasonable to build remote camps, detain people indefinitely, and use epithets like offshore processing as though one was talking about cows and not people.
It would appear that a more intractable problem is at play. Many Australians are deeply insecure about the presence of unfamiliar asylum seekers within their imagination. The series displays this powerfully. Within their regular lives the participant Australian “characters” essentially have no contact with, or experience of asylum seekers.
Yet across the program, despite the repeated confrontation with hardship and injustice refugees endure daily, the Australians display an utter inability to relate to the refugees they do meet in any enduring, sophisticated, or self-aware manner.
The intimidating presence of asylum seekers was clearly illustrated in the first episode: If you come from an exceedingly mundane, undistinguished, over privileged, secure Australian background, how do you relate to someone who has been through hell and high water for a chance at what you take for granted?
In the exchanges of stories and experiences - the practice through which we create our social identities - most Australians (indeed any average middle-class westerner) have very little to compare to the “real life” experiences of those fleeing disaster.
The exchanges in the first episode, in which Roderick, Raye, and Raquel learned of the experiences of a refugee family, were indicative. Shocked into silent submission, fundamentally unaware of what to do, all three listened to stories of rape, murder, and violence. The result was horrible, their middle class anxieties were shown to be ridiculous and self-indulgent, they were out of their depth, and the gravest injury: the embarrassment that they had nothing to offer in return.
They had no story to tell of themselves, no experience that could possibly be acceptable or worth sharing in that situation, instead they could only titter nervously or remain mute. Their false pride in their cherished Australian identities suddenly became embarrassing: they had suffered no real hardship, walked no long road to freedom. By comparison the stories the Australians told about themselves revolving around a hobby farm, caring for dogs, playing cricket, and going to the pub made them look pathetic and infantile.
To my mind this is the greatest problem of all in the asylum seeker situation - the presence within our society of these few unfortunates challenges both our own identities and our society. Asylum seekers force us to consider the global inequality that we enjoy. To acknowledge that our mundane, stupid lives take place amongst suffering we know about yet constantly avoid.
The great anxiety asylum seekers create demonstrates how desperately we wish to avoid any disturbance to this “virtual reality”. As the travellers were drawn further and further from their comfort zone in the later episodes, it became clear they had to choose to rethink their attitudes or embrace prejudice in order to justify their unjustifiable privilege.
Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers demonstrates unequivocally that rather than undertake the painful process of confronting injustice, we will embrace cruelty to secure privilege.
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