Injustice is not an article of faith for all churches

This is a longer version of an opinion piece first published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 21 January 2013

In all the outcry about the broad exemptions granted to faith-based organisations in the Government’s draft anti-discrimination legislation, the fact that there are some faith-based organisations that think differently about such matters has been largely overlooked.

For some churches, freedom of religion does not mean the freedom to discriminate. Across many church agencies a commitment to non-discriminatory employment is keenly observed in the employment of teachers, ground staff, nurses or social workers. This commitment arises from some of the core principles of Christian faith.

On behalf of the Uniting Church in Australia Assembly (the church’s national council), UnitingJustice Australia has been engaging with the development of the consolidated anti-discrimination legislation since the Attorney General’s Department began working on it. Also, over the years, we have spoken to many federal politicians about the Church’s commitment to laws which uphold our international human rights obligations (including in relation to torture, mandatory detention, freedom of religion, the rights of Indigenous peoples, and the development of a Human Rights Act) and which support the building of a society where all people are treated with dignity and respect.

We do this because we believe that in the eyes of God everyone is of value; everyone is precious. The miraculous healing stories in the gospels, regardless of whether you believe in their literal truth or not, are demonstrations of a love that reaches out to those who are marginalised by prejudice and which challenges the systems, religious an otherwise, that force people to the edges of society where they have no chance of flourishing.

The Christian church has all too often failed to demonstrate this unconditional love. We have, over the centuries, perpetrated and condoned (often by our silence) prejudice, violence and abuse. We are still a long way from blameless.

It is no wonder, then, that many have stopped listening so that even when we do speak of our vision of hope, justice and inclusion, we are rarely heard.

 The Uniting Church is the third largest Christian denomination in the country and we represent one of the major mainstream Christian traditions. Yet, for the Government and the Opposition, on this issue, our voice seems to be irrelevant. I do not understand why.

This is a good piece of legislation and it will be improved with some amendments. It deserves to be passed and we will all be better for it.

All legislation which refers to human rights is difficult to draft. Balancing competing rights is not easy and balancing the right to freedom of religion and belief with other rights is one of the most difficult areas.

Like every other religious organisation, the Uniting Church believes we must have an exception to discriminate in the training and appointment of our religious leaders, and this may include school principals and community service agency CEOs as well as ministers and pastors. However, I do not know of a Uniting Church school or UnitingCare agency which would discriminate in employment for teachers, ground staff, nurses or social workers. This does not mean we are perfect but, as a Church, we are committed to the principle of non-discrimination in employment and we continue to work to ensure this is reflected in every aspect of our life.

The inclusion of such attributes as pregnancy and potential pregnancy in the exception for religious bodies and educational institutions I find offensive and dangerous – one can only imagine how this might be used against women! These must be removed.

UnitingJustice has also expressed, a number of times, our concern with such phrases as “conforms to the doctrine, tenets or beliefs of that religion” and “necessary to avoid injury to the religious sensitivities of adherents of that religion”.

A thesis could be written about the struggles within some Christian traditions about what counts for legitimate belief within orthodox Christian doctrine. Some of the most important debates we have in the Uniting Church are about which of our “beliefs” are core to the doctrine (orthodox) or reasonable expressions of theological diversity within the tradition. One of the things I love most about the Uniting Church is our capacity to live with diversity. But if we sometimes have trouble defining this, how fraught will this be for a secular tribunal or court to determine?

With regards to the second ground, I could give numerous examples of how different individual Uniting Church members are in terms of what offends our “religious sensitivities”. Personally, I have no expectation that my religious sensitivities should be any more privileged than the sensitivities other people may have about matters to do with sexuality, marriage or gender identity. The core issues here should actually be about mutual respect, care and the acceptance of the value of diversity for a healthy society.

Regardless of the legislation, the Uniting Church, its councils and its agencies will continue to uphold our commitment to non-discriminatory employment practices. Living God’s mission to love without distinction and work for justice and peace in the world demands this of us.

Forced to do good

It is hard to comprehend how outrageous it is that a shameful political standoff on the offshore processing of asylum seekers has forced the Australian Government into a position where it has no choice other than to dump a harsh and punitive policy in favour of its own more just and humane policy.

Despite their best efforts, the Government and the Opposition have both failed to prosecute their preferred agendas. The Government painted itself into a political corner and the Opposition gave it no room to move, even at the expense of its own commitments.

To say that those of us who had long been advocating for justice, compassion and the human rights of asylum seekers were relieved and excited by the Rudd Government’s announcement in July 2008 of its ‘New Directions in Detention’ policy would be a gross understatement. The Immigration Minister at the time, Chris Evans, launched this policy in a self-congratulatory mood. The Government had ended the ‘Pacific Solution’ by closing the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, launched a review of the case of long-term detainees and abolished temporary protection visas, among other things. In his speech Evans said,

Labor rejects the notion that dehumanising and punishing unauthorised arrivals with long-term detention is an effective or civilised response. Desperate people are not deterred by the threat of harsh detention – they are often fleeing much worse circumstances. The Howard government’s punitive policies did much damage to those individuals detained and brought great shame on Australia.

Highlighting the devastating effects of long-term detention on vulnerable people and the “dehumanising” and unnecessarily punitive policy of indefinite mandatory detention, the Minister signalled a new era – that of “risk-based detention policies”.

A risk-based system sees people held for brief periods of time while health, security and identity checks are carried out. These can be done in most cases quite easily within thirty days. If an asylum seeker is assessed as not posing a risk, they are released into the community while their claims are processed. This is consistent with what happens in other developed countries. Indefinite mandatory detention is a system all our own. But the new Labor Government was committed, Evans said, to “reforms (that) will fundamentally change the premise underlying detention policy” – a policy that saw people detained “even though the department assessment is that they pose no risk to the community”. Detention, he said, was “too often the first option, not the last.”

An entire bookshelf could be filled with the multitude of published opinion pieces and commentaries having a stab at explaining how on earth the Gillard Government found itself in such an appalling situation with an area of public policy that they had been very clear about. They most obviously panicked – the reasons why they did have been more than adequately canvassed. My concern is to see them do the right thing.

I am so relieved that the Government is now forced to uphold its own policy. I am angry that it has come as a result of the Opposition’s appalling politicisation of asylum seekers and the Government’s inability to stand their ground in the face of it. The public debate has been shameful and ugly. It is entirely appropriate that the base politicking and the fear-mongering rhetoric have found their ultimate conclusion in a dead-end for those who have lead the charge.

How well a decent and humane policy can be implemented by those who have been forced to do it remains to be seen.

Border worship has produced an inhumane people trade

‘Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.’

All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’

(Deuteronomy 27:19)

Australian Christians across denominational boundaries (and many others) are grieving the loss of a moral heart in our country. I have heard expressions of disillusionment, sadness, and shame. Many are angry and may well be inclined to join the ancient chorus shouting “Amen” to the curse on those who would deny justice to vulnerable people.

Under the cover of one of the most aggressive ‘on message’ slogans Australian politics has seen—“smashing the people smugglers’ business model” (a shockingly crass economically utilitarian alternative to “stop the boats”)—the Gillard Government has brought us to a new and shameful low, for on Monday 25 July 2011 it became official – Australia now trades in people.

We have used ‘an ends justifies the means’ ethic to justifying a people ‘swap’. There are, unfortunately, numerous examples in Australia’s history of our governments mistreating people, ignoring or abusing people’s human rights and stripping already vulnerable people of their dignity. But the deal with Malaysia commodifies people in a way many of us could not have previously imagined.

The Government responds harshly and defensively to this criticism that they are trading people or treating people like commodities. The Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister are desperate for us to believe that taking 1000 refugees a year for four years from Malaysia, more than balances out those 800 we will send (and more in the future – already we are hearing the language ‘pilot program’). They talk up all the safeguards that have been built into the arrangement for our asylum seekers. Many times already we have heard that this deal could be the start of a conversation that may see Malaysia increasingly more committed to the international human rights regime.

The Government is most desperate however, for us to believe that the motivation for this ‘people swap’ is to keep people safe from the smugglers. Of course Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen were horrified and appalled by the loss of life on Christmas Island last year. It is hard, however, to ignore what lies just beneath the surface of their public comments – that this action will serve to redirect the response of the more compassionate Australians in their favour, and thus serve as cover for the base political motivation of one of Australia’s darkest moments.

Here is some of what we know:

• People put their lives in the hand of people smugglers out of a desperation that most of us who live so comfortably in Australia can barely imagine, let alone understand.
• People smugglers do take advantage of vulnerable people and people end up dying in tragic circumstances.
• Australians do not want people to die at sea.
• The Government has taken a political beating over asylum seekers who arrive by boat and they believe they have to neutralise it by beating the Opposition at its own game.
• The Gillard Government has made a deal with a country which has an appalling human rights record in order to steralise a weeping political sore.
• Too many Australians would much rather believe that there is an orderly queue of well-behaved refugees out there somewhere, than have to imagine the brutality, poverty and chaos that millions of others have experience every day.

Whatever special treatment it has managed to secure for our 800 asylum seekers and despite all the Malaysian Government’s guarantees, at the end of the day, the Australian Government (supported by what I can only imagine is a beyond desperate UNHCR in Malaysia) has decided to engage in people trading for base political gain.

Well, the end does not justify the means. Not for nothing have many people been comparing this deal with the issue of our ‘Australian’ cattle being sent to brutal deaths in Indonesia. Treating 800 people like they are ‘ours’ to ship to a better behaving Malaysia, is not a decent or humane act and is not justification for the potential of better behaviour in future.

In the online magazine, Eureka Street, in July, Frank Brennan wrote, “Why would a church group publicly endorse something it knew to be either unworkable or immoral?”. He also recommended that once the deal was done, “church groups or agencies as ever should work hard and pragmatically to make it work as best it can, minimising the adverse impacts on the most vulnerable including unaccompanied minors”. Of course those of us who can, will. But the churches must not keep silent about a policy and a deal between two nations that required the abandonment of our leaders’ moral compasses.

In the face of a few thousand desperate people turning up on our doorstep uninvited, we are the ones lost in a sea of political expediencies, failed responsibilities and moral impoverishment.

I believe that Julia Gillard, Chris Bowen and every member of Cabinet who gave their assent to proceed with this ‘solution’, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and every member of federal parliamentary Liberal Party who indulged in the xenophobic dog-whistling of “stop the boats”, have now stripped themselves of any right they thought they previously had to refer to the importance of ‘basic Christian values’ in their upbringing or in their current world view.

Christianity must always own its history and continuing involvement in the slave trade, in apartheid, colonialism, oppressive imperialism and too many other acts of brutality on populations and individuals. These are expressions of a faith that has lost its way many times and whose followers must always remain vigilant to the evil that lies within us. But at the heart of Christianity lies God’s love for the creation and God’s call on the faithful to demonstrate that love with acts of compassion, generosity and hospitality. This call demands that we bestow on others the dignity which is inherent in everyone’s being as beloved children of the Creator. God’s will for the world is for justice, peace and reconciliation for all and for everything, and we have been invited to be God’s partners in this mission.

Those of us who claim to motivated by such values, by the Judeo-Christian tradition which places such central value on the practice of hospitality to the stranger in need, and by the Christian story of the man who ate with the outcasts, even if we do not claim the faith itself, cannot engage in acts that strip away people’s dignity, deny their agency and dehumanise their very being, and continue to make those claims with any integrity.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets speak many times of God’s self-identification as the one who cares for the exiled and the stranger and the one who calls the Hebrews to a continual remembering of their own slavery and exile.

Christian faith teaches that each of us, created in the image of God (however we understand it) is precious and valued by God. Our responsibility as human beings is to recognise this in each other. Christian faith also teaches that those who have much in this life have a special responsibility towards those who suffer poverty, violence, illness, oppression and dispossession and who hunger and thirst (for justice and for sustenance).

These responsibilities are antithetical to punishing one group of vulnerable people to send a message to another group. They are antithetical to turning people in need away from our door because it is not convenient for us. They are antithetical to judging those who would take desperate risks to find safety and security. They are antithetical to shifting our burden on to others. They are antithetical to making deals to trade people, whether they are citizens or not.

Christians believe that we are made to be in healthy, vibrant, robust, grace-filled, forgiving, hope-full relationships with each other. When these relationships break down we have a responsibility to work for justice and peace that they may be restored. A broken world is not made better by further breaking.

As many others have written over the last few weeks, we are certainly failing to meet our international obligations under the spirit and the terms of the Refugees Convention and we are failing to meet our obligations as one of the wealthiest, most secure, democratic countries in the world. We have a tiny, tiny problem by world standards and we keep coming up with new and increasingly morally regressive deals with our less secure, less democratic and more impoverished neighbours to take that small burden from us.

Asylum seekers didn’t create a problem for us, we manufactured our own problem. The people with the problem are in fact the very asylum seekers who have had to flee their homelands in fear for their lives.

Daniel L. Smith Christopher is a Quaker theologian in the United States. His latest book is titled Jonah, Jesus and Other Good Coyotes. He is writing from Southern California and the ‘coyote’ in the title refers to those who smuggle people across the US-Mexican border. He has come to the conclusion that we have turned borders, especially national borders, but all the borders that separate us from each other, into idols – objects of false worship.

While Australia’s situation is quite different to that of the US-Mexican border, there can be no doubt that our ‘border’ has become an idol. We spend billions protecting it from the threat of invasion (although we’re not sure who would be interested in invading us right now) and from those who are not invited (even though we know they pose no threat and are only asking for help). We watch reality television shows about the protection of our border – for excitement and assurance; we watch television dramas set on the boats that patrol our island’s coastlines to keep us all safe. Our border is a sacred place that must be protected from incursion.

Smith-Christopher writes that because Christians are called to be peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, they are therefore called to violate those borders we have constructed which serve to keep us at odds with each other. He challenges us to follow in the footsteps of the Bible’s good coyotes – Jonah, Ruth, Jesus and others – who challenged and crossed the borders that had become excuses for prejudice and violence and which kept people from the exchange of the gift of God’s love.

Many Christians and non-Christians alike have written about the loss of compassion in the heat of the debate about asylum seekers. They are often derided in the scary stream of comments on blogs and opinion pieces as do-gooders, bleeding-heart lefties who have the luxury of not having to make hard decisions, who over-simplifying and exaggerate. These would be the polite responses.

I can only hope that I deserve to be called a ‘do-gooder’ because as a Christian, it is exactly who I am called to be. I dream that every Sunday churches all over Australia are sending forth thousands upon thousands of ‘do-gooders’ in our society. As for the charge of being a ‘lefty’, it is a reflection of the sad and impoverished state of public political debate in this country that ‘doing good’, believing in compassion, seeking public policy that causes no harm and holding a commitment to human rights or the environment are commitments which have become so readily politicised. It is true I don’t have to make hard decisions on behalf of the country, but God help me if I was ever to believe that the dehumanising trading of people was ever an acceptable option.

An edited version of this article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics Online, 27 July 2011.

An angry note about Manus Island

On the 6 May 2011, the Uniting Church Assembly issued the following statement about plans the Government was exploring to re-open the detention centre in Manus Island – another God-forsaken place we have access to for the dumping of vulnerable people who we believe we bear no responsibility for. This even though we continue to lose young soldiers fighting against the very regime many of these asylum seekers are fleeing.

In light of what we are learning about the kind of culture that gives rise to such disturbing events like the London riots, the Government might like to think very very carefully about what kind of message they are sending about the important balance of rights and responsibilities.

Here is what we said back in May:

The Uniting Church in Australia is dismayed at reports that the Government is planning to re-open the detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, Uniting Church President, Rev. Alistair Macrae, said today.

“We are extremely concerned that the Government is proposing a ‘Pacific Solution Take Two’ that will shift Australia’s burden of caring for a relatively small number of asylum seekers onto one of our poorest neighbours,” Rev. Macrae said.

The National Director of the Uniting Church’s national justice and advocacy agency, UnitingJustice Australia, Rev. Elenie Poulos maintains that in addition to this, any plans to intercept asylum seekers in Australian waters and detain them in a third country would be a blatant abandonment of our obligations under the Refugee Convention.

“We have a responsibility under international conventions. Manus Island is a totally inappropriate location for the provision of adequate and appropriate legal advice and health care to people who are often already physically and mentally traumatised,” Rev. Poulos said.

“People detained on Manus Island during the Pacific Solution were forgotten – it was very much a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Very few countries were willing to bail out the Australian Government and resettle refugees from Manus Island and Nauru. This meant people were left languishing in detention for years.”

The Uniting Church believes that the politicisation of asylum seekers and the continual misrepresentation of the arrival of asylum seekers as a problem, have inevitably created what is now a stressed and dysfunctional system.

“It is a sad fact that there are people who must flee for their lives from persecution and corrupt and violent regimes. The policy imperative is to meet our international obligations and provide safety where it’s required in a timely and compassionate manner,” said Rev. Macrae.

“Both the Opposition and the Government must shoulder the responsibility for the continual damage being inflicted on the health and wellbeing of already traumatised people and the hardness of heart that has developed in the Australian community towards people who come calling on us for safety and care. We can no longer claim to be the ‘land of the fair go’.”

Plans to re open this facility will also cost the Australian Government millions. “The Howard Government spent $1.3 million over 6 months to detain one asylum seeker on Manus Island,” said Rev. Poulos.

“A truly regional solution, which provides desperate asylum seekers a real alternative to engaging a people smuggler, is very different to Australia dumping our obligations on another country. It is crucial that the Government reveal more detail about its plan. With very little information about their plans and progress in multilateral talks for a regional processing framework, we can only be extremely concerned by the prospect of the reopening of Manus Island,” Rev. Poulos said.

And about the Opposition’s exuberant joy in the mess that’s been created, no-one should be listening to them. It is some extraordinary hypocrisy for them to claim any interest at all in the rights or welfare of asylum seekers and refugees.

Thoughts on that ANZAC Day Twitter controversy

Today I’m back at work after a few weeks leave. Over the Easter and ANZAC Day long weekend I tried to maintain that holiday mood by only infrequently and warily checking out my Twitter feed. I love Twitter but for me, even though my account is my own, it does drag me to a ‘work place’. It serves as my personal news feed and while the views I express are my own (UnitingJustice Australia, the agency for which I serve as National Director, has its own organisational page), I do use it to promote the work of UnitingJustice and the Uniting Church more broadly. I try never to forget that even though I am expressing personal views they will be read by most in the context of the position I hold within the Church. It is the same with this blog.

On ANZAC Day, then, it was with some despair that I logged on to find a raging torrent of tweets condemning Jim Wallace from the Australian Christian Lobby for an earlier tweet expressing his view that gay marriage and Islam did not represent the Australia the ANZACS fought for.

Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for – wasn’t gay marriage and Islamic! (posted at @JimWallaceACL)

All of this has since received much media attention. By the end of that day, Rod Benson, who is probably Australia’s leading tweeting public theologian, had written a (very good) blog which is now also available on the (very good) ABC Religion and Ethics website http://bit.ly/flxait.

I am not as prolific a tweeter as Rod but I do like to engage as much as I can. Not wanting to lose that holiday feel, I did nothing more than publicly agree with Rod that the Twitter account in question appeared to be genuine (the question had been raised) and send this tweet to Julie Posetti, a Canberra-based journalism academic and high-profile tweeter:

@julieposetti Sadly too many think this is what all Christians think. But Jesus challenged religious bigotry & social custom that excluded.

It was not long before I was being challenged on Twitter to issue a Uniting Church statement condemning Jim Wallace’s remark.

This blog post is my personal response to those demands and to the debate that Jim Wallace’s tweet has stirred. I need to try keeping it succinct and so offer some dot points for information and consideration.

• I was not impressed with Jim Wallace’s tweet but nor was I surprised. His views on gay rights and religious diversity are well known. I have previously debated him on the program Sunday Nights with John Cleary on ABC Radio on human rights.
• I have been concerned for some time that while ACL says that it does not represent all Christians or speak for all the churches, the continuing engagement of many church leaders in ACL organised events feeds perceptions that ACL does. I am also concerned that our political leaders find it too easy and too convenient to regard it as some kind of de facto peak body. It is not.
• UnitingJustice and the Uniting Church’s National Assembly have well known views on such issues as gay rights, human rights, religious freedom and diversity. Anyone who cares to read about them can see various media statements, submissions to government and other inquiries, and church resource material, for example, those produced in the lead-up to the last election, on the UnitingJustice Australia website www.unitingjustice.org.au.
• I cannot unilaterally issue a public statement in the name of the Uniting Church. In fact, no-one can, not even the President or the synod (state) Moderators.
• While the Uniting Church is not afraid to declare different positions to those of our ecumenical friends on social issues and matters of public policy, the Church’s councils and agencies do not engage in public arguments with Christian leaders or public figures. We try hard to keep the issues at the heart of the media stories, preferring not to feed the media’s obsession with Christian in-fighting.
• The Uniting Church is deeply committed to its relationships with peoples of other faiths and works within the community to help build understanding, respect and acceptance.
• While UnitingJustice supports and champions the rights of the GLBTI community in society and within the Church, and the Uniting Church as a whole is rightly regarded as the most gay-friendly mainstream denomination in the country, it is no secret that there are some in the Uniting Church who would prefer it to be otherwise.
• It is also no secret that the official Uniting Church position on marriage is that it is for heterosexual couples only. This is not likely to be challenged any time soon but I am pretty sure (and hopeful) that one day it will be.

Now, specifically on Jim Wallace’s tweet, my reading of such sentiments is that they represent an ossified Christian theology that has very few resources to cope with the demands of a post-modern, globalised world. It is a theology that declares only one theological reading of our social world and so leads its adherents into a corner, fighting a rear-guard battle against the end of Christendom and social change in general. It is a theology that stands as a once and for all interpretation on Christian life and thought, failing to account for the fact that over the thousands of years of Judeo-Christian tradition, the Christian faith has survived because it is a living faith.

The Christian faith speaks of God’s indiscriminate and unconditional love for all people with stories that can and do travel to different peoples across cultures and throughout the ages. The stories have proved so powerful and enduring precisely because they are alive, open to constant reinterpretation in the light we what we continue to experience of ourselves and our world and our God. Because they speak to the deepest parts of our humanity they are stories, thank God, that will continue to live and grow with us as we learn and experience what it means to be human on this planet and what it means to be loved by a God of grace and justice.

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/EleniePoulos.

You can follow UnitingJustice Australia on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UnitingJustice.

Whose lives do we grieve? Human rights in Australia

I have been committed to social justice and human rights for a long time, but one particularly distressing event turned this commitment into a driving passion.

One day, some years ago now, in an election year, I awoke to hear that a Norwegian boat which had rescued a few hundred people needing care and safety had been denied entry into Australia. Not long after that I saw images of those rescued people being herded onto a military vessel, and taken to a place named after the season of peace and goodwill from which they would be taken to a failed state in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

I had seen disturbing and unsettling images of the fences around persecuted people before, but not until then did it start to make me angry. These faces behind the fences were not the persecuted in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan where brutal regimes and dictators ruled, but the persecuted ones from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, here in Australia, locked up behind our fences. And not just any fences, razor wire fences. And there were children behind the razor wire.

We were told that there were fences around ‘these people’ because they had broken the law. They had come to our country by boat – uninvited. We heard that they were probably terrorists. We were told that we should be afraid because there were hordes more of these people coming and they would be dangerous. We knew that they were dangerous and mad because we saw them throw their children into the sea.

I heard people around me calling for the persecuted ones to be kept behind the razor wire because they didn’t deserve to be here and they would take away all the things we valued in life, all the things that were ours – our homes, our jobs and our security. I looked at the people around me as they looked behind the razor wire and into the face of the children. But it wasn’t children they saw – they saw the enemy who would one day rape their daughters and kill their sons. They looked behind the razor wire into the faces of ‘illegals’, worse than criminals and deserving of treatment harsher than criminals.

Too many of us did not see asylum seekers in detention centres as people whose human rights were being abused by public policy and its implementation. We did not see it until we saw Cornelia Rau.

After this horrendous and eye-opening demonstration of policies gone bad, the Howard Government and then the Rudd and Gillard Governments all made some significant changes for a more humane system that also better reflected the spirit of international human rights law. But in 2010, in another election year, we found ourselves in danger of going back to where we were – with some politicians deciding that for the sake of electoral gain it is entirely acceptable to score cheap political points by demonising a group of vulnerable and already traumatised people.

In a brilliant essay which reflects on the post-September 11 world entitled ‘Violence, Mourning and Politics’ (in Precarious Life: The Powers of mourning and violence, 2004), the philosopher Judith Butler reflects on grief and loss and explores what basis for community we might find in our “vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows”.

In the violent context of today’s world, she asks who is that we mourn for? who is it that we don’t mourn? She writes, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?… what makes for a grievable life?”.

I think it’s fair to say that many Australians do not grieve the lives that are decimated in our detention centres, not because of any intended malice but because we have so internalised the idea that some people in the world are less worthy than others that we can’t decipher the politics or deconstruct our own responses. The losses suffered by asylum seekers do not figure in whatever we understand as a community to be our shared human vulnerability to loss. We do not believe it’s necessary to take account of their experiences of loss. In fact, we seem quite comfortable allowing them to be punished for the losses they have already experienced.

Butler’s questions are a challenge for us when thinking about the kind of society we might want to be and I believe that, at its heart, human rights discourse is the best universal answer we have been able to come up with to her questions: who counts as human? whose lives count as lives?

I believe that the example of children in detention centres, on its own, is enough to convince that we cannot always be trusted to act justly merely by virtue of our own sense of being a decent, fair and civilised society. It is not a fair, decent and civilised society that allows a popularly elected democratic government to lock up children for years in complete disregard for their wellbeing.

There are other examples too, numerous ones that demonstrate the sometimes less than stellar values we exhibit as a society and the inadequacies of our laws. There have been laws made that have had discriminatory and detrimental effects (deliberate or unintended) on distinct segments of the population, for example, Indigenous Australians, people who are homeless and low-income workers. Other policies, particularly in the wake of ‘September 11’, were implemented with anywhere from inadequate attention to complete disregard for civil and political rights resulting in the impairment of the right to a fair trial and to freedom of speech and association. While we may have believed that such human rights were safe in Australia, it has become clear that they are not adequately protected.

We need to do everything we can to help ourselves. We need systems and structures and language that support the growth of communities which are vibrant, inclusive and safe places, places where people experience dignity and respect and are enabled to flourish as individuals.

Human rights discourse is the universal language we have developed (out of one of the worst chapters of human history – the Holocaust) to talk about our shared values and to describe the conditions necessary for the ensuring that we keep our eyes on the idea of the ‘common good’. It is expressed in law because the law is one of the best tools we have for describing a society’s values and keeping us accountable to each other.

When considering human rights then, you have no choice but to also reflect on questions of values, morality, and shared and individual responsibilities and accountabilities. When people’s human rights are abused, their dignity is abused and the common good is threatened. When we allow public policy to allocate levels of dignity according to a person’s perceived worthiness, then we have answered Butler’s questions in this way: not every life is equal; there are some who are not worthy of our grief. Within a Christian framework that answer is: not every person is created in the image of God; God’s love is conditional.

The current Government missed a rare opportunity after a recommendation by the recent National Human Rights Consultation (in line with majority public support expressed through that Consultation) to move towards a Human Rights Act in this country.

Australia is the only developed democratic nation without some form of national legislative or constitutional human rights protection. Some of the most vocal opponents to human rights legislation – white, middle aged, well-education, rich men – criticise it on the grounds that it will give power to minorities and legitimacy to their voices and they are right. It will. This is the point of human rights law. It demands of the government and the public service and the institutions and organisations that implement government policy, pay heed to the effects of legislation on those most vulnerable, those whose voices are rarely heard and whose needs are usually ignored.

The Uniting Church has, since its inception, voiced its commitment to human rights. In its Statement to the Nation at its inauguration in 1977 the Church promised that it would “oppose all forms of discrimination which infringe basic rights and freedoms”. It promised to work for an end to poverty, racism and injustice and to stand up for such rights as religious liberty, civil and political freedom, education and adequate healthcare for all.

Some Christian groups and individuals receive significant media reporting of their concern for how stronger human rights and anti-discrimination legislation might erode religious freedoms in such areas as employment and freedom of conscience. I understand these concerns, but the institutions of the church are strong and well-supported in Australia – we have the capacity to stand up for ourselves when we need to. It is vulnerable and marginalised people, those whom the Church is called to serve, whose lives will be improved by more robust human rights protections.

It is the responsibility of all of us to seek the common good: to help build a just, peaceful, inclusive and prosperous society, where all people are valued, where the first peoples of this land are respected as the precious soul of the nation, where civil liberties are taken seriously and where the diversity of religions, languages and cultures is regarded as a great gift; where everyone has a home, decent work, access to a good education and good healthcare and the opportunity to live meaningful lives free from fear, prejudice and violence.

In this endeavour, human rights is just one important tool at our disposal. But it is a necessary tool.

Human rights is an expression of shared hope and shared values, a language which enables people to talk across the usual divides of culture and religion and ideology about what it means to be human, about the values inherent to our very humanity and how we might be accountable to each other for upholding our humanity and the common good. It is not perfect and it’s far from sufficient but it does matter and it can make a difference. The time to do something about it is here. A culture of fear and division has held the soul of this country for long enough. We must recover our capacity to count everyone’s life as valuable and worthy. Life will be better this way, for all of us.

This opinion piece was first published on the Religion and Ethics site of ABC Online, 10 December 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/12/10/3090430.htm?topic1=home&topic2=

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