What face do we show the world?

I cannot help but be fairly outraged by the groping consensus to process asylum seekers off-shore, which essentially means bullying another country to deal with people who are our responsibility.

There are thousands of people around the world who live in the most extraordinarily dangerous places – because of war and civil strife, because other people don’t like their religion, because they are caught in drought and floor, because they are poor or because they are enslaved.

For many of these people – men, women and small children – the only way they can survive is to flee the place where they are and find refuge in another country. To live with a minimum of safety and well-being – things we take for granted – they have to leave the place of their birth and culture and move to a strange place.

Politicians talk about people ‘jumping the queue’, insisting that people who seek asylum and take risking trips by boat are pushing other people out of an orderly line. How do you take a place in a line when there is no Australian embassy in your country, and because of war and poverty you don’t have papers, and because of the threats to your life you don’t have much time to wait for the slow processing of your application – you may be dead before you get a reply.

Australia has signed a treaty with other nations. We have agreed that people may come to this country seeking asylum. We have agreed that it is our right to determine if they are genuine refugees. We have agreed to take a certain number each year.

Matthew’s gospel tells us that because king Herod was worried about threats to his throne, he set out to find and kill Jesus (2:13). The family fled to Egypt. Fortunately they didn’t have to visit the Egyptian embassy in Jerusalem, fill in papers and wait for months, because in his anger Herod slaughtered all the children two years and under who lived around Bethlehem (2:16). Joseph, Mary and Jesus became asylum seekers.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser has called the recommendations of the Houston report into the processing of asylum seekers as racist, and says it will lead to the needless punishment of some of the most vulnerable people – including children – in the world. Because the children would be held in detention overseas, the Minister for Immigration would no longer be their guardian, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child would mean nothing.

Luke Bretherton has recently suggested that the debate between open and closed borders is an unhelpful one. One open under-values a sense of place, and the other over-values the nation as a closed political community. He argues, rather, that we should see borders neither as filters nor fences but as the face we turn to the world which tells them what sort of country we are. (Luke Bretherton, Filters, fences or faces? Asylum seekers and the moral status of borders. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/06/3535073.htm)

I think the present debate and decision shows a very poor face to the world, and does not speak well of who we are as a nation. It creates false crises for political purposes and because politicians actually will not show moral leadership. When Fraser was PM  246,000 refugees came into Australia. Our current humanitarian intake is 13,750 a year.