The Prime Minister made a major mistake on Monday when she said “I don’t think it’s the Australian way to have kids behind razor-wire.”
Whether it’s as a deterrent or something else, this has in fact, been the Australian way since the early 1990s. The announcement that more families and children will be moved out of detention centres was accompanied by another, that two new centre will be constructed near Adelaide and Perth.
The rhetoric of nationalism and security were once again set upon asylum-seekers.
The basic assumption in political and public discussion today is the same as it has been since at least the mid-1990s: that the main priority is to prevent boats with asylum-seekers aboard from reaching Australian shores.
As Dr Michael Grewcock put it, author of Border Crimes: Australia’s War on Illicit Migrants, in Australia refugees have “rights only enacted on terms agreeable to the Australian state.”
The federal government has just announced that talks with East Timor about its plan to locate a “regional processing centre” will continue, and there is no sign that this policy goal will change in the foreseeable future, despite the reiteration of their “no children in detention” policy.
According to the UNHCR Australia receives 1.6% of the asylum claims made in industrialised countries, and 0.4% of global claims. This small percentage of global claims represent about half the amount that were received here in the first few years of the decade. Given this small numbers of claims that are made here, why is this such a hot political issue? Where do these attitudes and the assumptions that underpin them come from?
Who controls the narratives surrounding asylum-seekers, who makes them what they are in our national consciousness? Public discussion is by and large shaped by a complex combination of politicians and the press. The agenda of both Labor and the Coalition at the current time is to ‘stop the boats,’ a goal which aligns very closely with the messages disseminated in tabloid newspapers and on talkback radio.
As Grewcock says, the “primary aim is to enable refugees to come solely on the government’s terms,” an aim that has been consistent since the end of the Second World War.
Different mainstream media outlets take different and sometimes shifting stances on asylum-seeker issues. Phil Gledenning, director of the Edmund Rice centre, singles out talkback radio shows as the purveyors of some of the more virulent attacks with talk of “asian invasions” and the like. Newspapers tend not to be as active in attacking asylum-seekers, but nevertheless participate in presenting them as a problem.
Even broadsheets – less know for their populist rhetoric than the tabloids. Recently both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian reported that boat arrivals clog Australian bureaucratic systems: asylum seeker security checks verloading ASIO, and prosecuting people-smugglers in the NSW courts respectively.
There is, according to Professor Sharon Pickering form Monash University, a “mundane deviance discourse,” an everyday, unremarked assumption that there is something wrong with seeking asylum, and with the people who do so. Even if they are not an active threat, the implication is that they are to be distrusted, segregated, evaluated and sent away if at all possible.
Every boat ‘intercepted’ suggests a hazard avoided by Australia, and that hazard is asylum-seekers.
A second myth found in mainstream media is that of the queue-jumper who bypasses proper, orderly migration channels.
The notion of the queue-jumper heavily influences negative community perceptions of asylum-seekers, especially among Howard’s “Aussie battlers.”
Australian society is heavily invested in the notion of the ‘fair go’ and anyone perceived as receiving special treatment is likely to be resented and mistrusted.
These critiques are sometimes expressed by refugees themselves, for example, earlier this year statements by an African refugee who said that arriving by boat was queue-jumping and unfair were published in The Sunday Times of Perth.
In the mid-1990s first Pauline Hanson and then the Coalition led by John Howard very successfully played the so-called ‘race card’ and presented multiculturalism as the political correctness imposed on the rest of the country – particularly ‘Aussie battlers’ – by left-wing, inner-city dwelling, privileged elites.
In doing so they made what is essentially a racial issue about class, and took a position which allowed them to erode the traditional support base of the Labor party. Howard’s policies – although it was Hawke and then Keating who introduced mandatory detention – have set the tone for most political approaches since. Labor, having dispensed with the ‘Pacific Solution’ is now seeking to institute a similar policy with its proposed processing centre in East Timor.
For asylum-seekers to be politically useful they need to be talked and thought about as an issue, not as people. One of the major effects of media coverage of people seeking asylum in Australia is that are dehumanised. Boat arrivals are reported, the people on board are only defined by what they are presumed to be doing. We rarely, if ever see their faces, hear their names or are told their stories.
If the exigencies of distance are one reason for this – Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island are far from the nearest news camera – that distance only makes the dehumanising of asylum-seekers easier.
Personal stories like Anh Do’s, told in part on the ABC’S Talking Heads on the 4th of October are very powerful, but they are, perhaps inevitably, the stories of people who have been recognised as refugees, not of the asylum-seekers whose claims are still being processed.
Grewcock remarks that once asylum-seekers have been “dehumanised in that way which the media does very effectively it is very easy to scape-goat them.” This is a process which is “very consciously driven,” he says, and “politicians feed on it.”
People-smuggling and asylum-seekers are intimately linked in the narrative of boat arrivals that currently dominates in the Australian politics and media. Asylum-seekers are guilty by association, and that association ties into to the idea that they are queue-jumpers, unfairly pushing ahead of deserving refugees who do not employ criminals to help them reach Australia.
By concentrating on people-smugglers and emphasising their criminality and the threat they pose to Australia the government, with the help of the media, create a priority that they can then be seen to act on.
The connections between media messages and public opinion are complex. While mass media was once thought to simply ‘inject’ an idea into the public consciousness it is now recognised that every individual in the audience decodes the messages they see and hear for themselves, and interprets them accordingly, forming their own opinions.
This concept is one of the foundations of a democracy like Australia – every individual can make their own decision and contribution. But this only works when different ideas and perspectives are publicly discussed. Overwhelmingly the narrative surrounding asylum-seekers in the Australian media is a negative one which simultaneously creates myths and leaves out facts.
We rely on what we read, see, and hear as the basis for our beliefs about them. When the two major political parties differ on how to achieve their goals rather than what those goals should be, it is often not easy to question them.
When the majority of the media do not speak to the damaging myths or omissions that draw a one-dimensional picture and create a one-sided debate it is even harder.
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