‘Labour’: not another commodity

Opening Statement: Independent Inquiry into Insecure Work

Sydney, 28 February 2012

In 2009 the Uniting Church in Australia adopted a statement called An Economy of Life: re-imagining human progress for a flourishing world. This statement describes the Church’s concern that our understandings of progress and wellbeing are now determined by a global economic system geared to the making of profit for a few at the expense of both the current and future wellbeing of all people, especially the most vulnerable, and the wellbeing of the planet.

The statement was an expression of our concern that the economy, rather than being recognised as a tool to support our wellbeing, has become an end in itself: if something is good for the economy, then it is good, full-stop; and something is ‘good for the economy’ if it promotes continual growth in spending and /or profit. This system that prioritises economic growth above all other indicators of human and ecological wellbeing is now so deeply entrenched in our worldview that it becomes almost impossible for most us to even imagine any alternative. Those that do try to challenge this dominant worldview are most often charged with being hopeless idealists, dreamers and ‘out of touch’ with reality.

The Uniting Church will wear those charges because we do believe that another way is possible. Our vision for a different kind of economy arises from our faith in God’s will for a just, peaceful and reconciled world. And so we believe that we can shift our focus from the making of profit to the growing of healthy communities which support the flourishing of all people.

Work is critical in this endeavour. A Christian vision of ‘labour’ emphasises the role that work plays in providing meaning and purpose in people’s lives, connecting them to their communities and the wider society and giving them a sense of agency over their own life. People who suffer long-term unemployment, who experience injustice at work or whose work is demeaning suffer in many ways, and their families suffer too.

‘Labour’ must never be just another commodity in the economic sphere. A Christian vision of work has at its heart the need for people to find dignity in work and receive fair and just reward for their work; and while work is important, we must also ensure that work does not consume our time for leisure, the building and maintaining of relationships and participation in community life.

There is enough evidence, some of which we have drawn on in our submission, to know that in Australia we have serious problems with rising levels of casual work and under-employment. Casual employees now represent 25% of the Australian workforce – one of the highest rates amongst OECD countries. These casual employees are not protected by common law provisions or statutory regulations and despite the common belief that casual employees receive higher hourly rates of pay, only a small number in fact receive compensatory loading.

It is not surprising that 59% of casual employees would prefer to be in more secure work. The detrimental effects of casual work include poor economic security, the inability to secure housing, lack of training and skills development, a greater risk of moving into unemployment and work being prioritised over other life interests.

The Uniting Church is concerned for low-paid and vulnerable workers. Our submission has drawn attention especially to the plight of Indigenous Australians and refugees in the labour force – people for whom decent work and just employment rewards and conditions are absolutely critical for their health and wellbeing as individuals and as communities. We have also drawn attention to the continuing issue of gender discrimination and it is, of course, women who are already disadvantaged who suffer most the effects of casualisation and under-employment.

As a society we cannot begin to challenge the dominant destructive systems and structures that determine how we live together until we decide that we will accept the realities of life. Employment policies in this country will not change until our governments decide that they are ready to truly see what is happening. One of the most important steps in addressing the problems of insecure work in Australia is for government to change what they must know are the out-dated and ineffectual definitions currently used to monitor employment statistics. While we have seen some recent policy initiatives to help address gender inequity, there is more to be done here too. Reform of the tax and transfer system must not be relegated to ‘the too-hard basket’, attention must be paid to the plight of refugees in Australia, many of whom are highly skilled and experienced but who cannot find appropriate and secure work, and significantly the Government must abandon the ‘one size fits all’ approach to Indigenous policy and honestly engage with Indigenous communities in genuine consultation to discover local solutions.

Australia’s policies must focus on producing an economy that works for people and not against them, and that serves the interests of all in the community without sacrificing the needs of those already vulnerable. It is possible, we know what to do, but it needs to begin by naming the interests and confronting the powers. I urge the Committee to be courageous in its report. The Uniting Church in Australia will be standing with you.

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.

A few words on the assassination of Osama bin Laden

Assassination is not justice served, it is vengeance done. The world will not find peace while we continue to confuse justice with vengeance. This is not a time for celebration or any kind of pride in achievement, but one for deep reflection on who we have become and what kind of world we are doomed to leave behind if we don’t make radical changes.

We continue to spend offensive sums of money on the machinery and the politics and the business of war while billions of people struggle to live. Claims for the moral high ground, for the side of ‘right’, all too often couched in religious terms, are made to hide motivations that have more to do with power, greed, resources, land, and just plain hatred of those who are different than they do with what is ‘right’ and ‘good’.

We are suffocating the planet but many of us would rather turn our backs on science than accept the consequences of what the science is demanding of us.

If we stopped warring and began to spend as much money on the things that bring peace, if we stopped plundering the planet and began to appreciate the natural world as sacred gift, it is true we would have to make massive changes to the current organising principles of our economy (which are inherently destructive of our humanity), but just think of the kinder, gentler, flourishing world we’d leave to future generations.

But maybe we can begin by just speaking the truth. The US and its allies have spent billions of dollars with the aim of assassinating a single individual in revenge. They have achieved their goal. The war and the hatred will continue.

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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A More Hospitable Country?

In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is often identified as the God who cares for the exiled and the stranger. God brings justice to the oppressed and calls on the people of faith to extend the rights of citizens to refugees (‘aliens’) in their midst.

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Refugees are identified in the Bible with widows and orphans as the most marginalised people, the most at risk, and the test of faithful obedience to God was how a community and individuals cared for these most vulnerable people. Hospitality to the stranger therefore became one of the strongest moral forces in ancient Israel.

The Christian story continued to uphold God’s call to solidarity with the homeless. Mary and Joseph were forced to take Jesus and hide in Egypt as Herod sought to kill the baby Jesus. As an adult Jesus travelled through strange lands, choosing to spend time and share meals with the most marginalised and oppressed people of his society. Jesus called on people to love their enemies, give all they had to the poor, and offer hospitality to strangers. He taught that faithful obedience to God was marked by such deeds and that it would be how well people responded to strangers and to the poor that would identify them as people of faith.

It is in this tradition that churches in Australia have consistently spoken out against what Immigration Minister Chris Bowen this week admitted was the harshest detention regime in the developed world.

Ever since the shameful ‘Tampa’ episode in 2001, the response from some sections of the public and media, and from far too many politicians, to the arrival of asylum seekers by boat has been one of fear, suspicion, callousness and often hysteria. The level of attention and the shrillness of the debate have been out of all proportion to the numbers of arrivals which are, relative to other countries in the world, almost miniscule. The Liberal Party’s federal election campaign slogan, ‘Stop the Boats’, was one of the worst examples of the politicisation of vulnerable people we have ever seen in this country.

Australian governments have spent billions of dollars to ensure that asylum seekers who arrive by boat (onshore claimants) do not reach the Australian migration zone. There have been various policies applied to these asylum seekers and refugees that have aimed to punish them and deter others: offshore mandatory detention including the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ which saw people detained on Manus Island and Nauru, temporary protection visas, bridging visas with no rights to work or access healthcare or other support services, and being billed for their time in detention.

Such punitive policies are based on the assumption that some refugees are more worthy than others, that is, refugees who have applied for resettlement offshore are understood to be the ‘legitimate’ refugees while ‘onshore’ refugees are not. Under the Refugee Convention, however, refugees do not have a right to be resettled but everyone has the right to apply for protection and signatories to the Convention, such as Australia, have an obligation to assess all onshore claims for protection. As was made clear in a recent Parliamentary Library briefing note, “Resettlement therefore complements and is not a substitute for the provision of protection to people who apply for asylum under the Convention”. (Janet Phillips, 10 May 2010, Asylum Seekers and Refugees: what are the facts? Parliamentary Background Note, p. 5, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf)

Governments have also claimed that such harsh policies serve to stem the flow of boats but their impact in this regard is questionable. People flee situations of persecution and violence. The numbers of asylum seekers seeking protection in Australia will fluctuate as conflicts escalate or ease. It is a relief to finally hear political leaders making this point as Julia Gillard did when she announced the Government’s intention to release children and families from detention.

While recent changes have seen an end to such harsh and punitive policies as temporary protection visas, the ‘Pacific Solution’, the 45-day rule which left asylum seekers in the community destitute, and the billing of refugees for their time in detention, mandatory detention is the last frontier. This week’s announcement by the Government that it would work with churches and community service organisations to move families with children and unaccompanied minors out of detention, is a long-overdue first step. It came with an acknowledgement, at last, that there is no evidence that the detention of asylum seekers achieves anything other than to heap more trauma and abuse on already traumatised people. Julia Gillard and her new immigration minister are working hard to make this point and move away from the despicable rhetoric that has demonised vulnerable people and diminished Australia’s reputation as a civilised nation. We can only hope it continues.

This opinion piece was first published on the Religion and Ethics site of ABC Online, 18 October 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/10/18/3041539.htm?topic1=home&topic2=

Protecting ‘The Australian Way of Life’

A number of times I have heard Julia Gillard refer to the Labor Party’s commitment to protecting ‘The Australian Way of Life’. Every time she mentions it, it comes capitalised and in quotation marks.

The most recent occurrence was over the weekend when she was out on the hustings with Peter Garrett, announcing that should the Federal Government be re-elected they would hand back Malabar Headland to the NSW State Government for public use. This was, apparently, an excellent example of the Labor Party commitment to ‘protecting’ The Australian Way of Life (TAWOL).

It appears that TAWOL is best epitomised by families picnicking on parklands near the sea at the weekend. Hmmm.

The Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia,  also over the weekend, released the 2010 Australian Work Life Index. As it was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (‘A hard-working nation that’s losing its balance’, 1 August 2010), more and more Australians are experiencing a working life that increasingly impinges on the rest of their life. The work-life balance of many Australians is not healthy. Australians have accrued over $33 billion dollars worth of leave. I think that, at least for many people I know, a relaxed weekend picnic at a park overlooking the sea is more of a luxury than a way of life.

When I look around at TAWOL here are some of the things I see:

• the continued abuse by governments of the human rights of Indigenous Australians and Indigenous communities with no access to healthcare, running water and electricity
• overflowing prisons because it’s apparently better to be ‘tough on crime’ than it is to be focussed on rehabilitation and social inclusion
• $18 billion a year lost by Australians on gambling
• ANZAC Day as an occasion when young people around the country pay their respects to Australians who have lost their lives in wars by getting blind drunk (I know this as fact because I live in a suburb that has 2 pubs on every block)
• an ugly, soul-destroying, unplanned, ill-considered suburban sprawl that locks people into their cars for hours everyday
• a defence budget that is greater than any other department budget – we seem to be able to find billions for new fighter planes but finding a few million for health and education programs is much tougher.
• a political discourse of the disengaged and disenchanted that feeds off fear and plays on the small and insignificant while it refuses to engage with what will matter in the long-term (better to spend time playing on a weird fear of a few thousand asylum seekers coming by boat than tackle the legitimate fear of the climate collapsing)
• people who work too often on weekends
• already vulnerable and traumatised asylum seekers held in detention centres indefinitely because as a nation we seem to be incapable of imagining what it must be like to live in conflict ridden countries and suffer persecution. (Apparently The Queue is an essential aspect of TAWOL. Who knew?)
• welfare for those who work but not for those who struggle to work – let’s increase family tax benefits but ‘get tough’ on people who struggle to make ends meet on a pitiful level of unemployment benefits
• elderly parents who care for their children with multiple disabilities with little support from the community, desperate about what will happen to their children when they die
• small independent local businesses being swallowed up by large multinationals
• the rise of gated communities where we can be sure we only have to mix with ‘people like us’.

Are these the markers of TAWOL that our politicians are swearing to protect?

Or maybe they are thinking about our fabulously diverse multicultural and increasingly multi-faith society? Maybe they are promising to do all they can to foster a mature, vibrant society that upholds the dignity of all people, promotes justice and equity, celebrates and values its own diversity, values art and culture, science and scholarship across all disciplines, and promotes the development of green and sustainable cities and inclusive, life-affirming communities. This is the TAWOL that I value. Maybe they value it too and I’ve just missed it.

The campaign of the small

It seems like the debate (it really wasn’t) between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott last night has induced a severe epidemic of despondency around the country – political commentators and theorists, historians, church and community leaders, me and my friends and I am assuming probably you and your friends too. Pretty much everyone I am connecting with who is not involved in garnering the vote for one party or another is expressing some level of despondency about the state of Australia’s political life and the dearth of real leadership. The best that many can say about the election campaign is that it is boring.

For myself, I couldn’t wait until I could switch to watch the Masterchef finale. It was so much more fun. It was far more edifying.

‘Edifying’ may seem like an excessive descriptor for a reality television show but the behaviour of the contestants was a rare sight in public life. They were facing off against each other for a big prize, but they supported and encouraged each other and were genuinely pleased with each other’s success, even though they both wanted to win. This is not what we are used to seeing – in political life, on the sporting fields, in business board rooms. Grace and goodwill have become rare commodities.

How much better would the so-called debate have been had our political leaders determined to be creative, encouraging and  bold rather than small. There was nothing edifying about that political debate – not one half-decent vision offered for the future of this country, not one acknowledgement that the other party had ever done anything good in government that deserved to built on, not any hint that voters might actually be thoughtful people.

It was and continues to be the campaign of the small – small-mindedness, small little policy announcements, visions so small they are non-existent and very small opinions about us, the voters.

Come back Masterchef, I say.

When living with a paradox can destroy lives

I’m usually always up for a good paradox. They challenge the mind and serve to remind us that the world is not always easily understood. But we are living with a paradox that is causing serious harm and damaging many lives.

Today we heard that another soldier has been killed in Afghanistan.

On 18 June, according to Department of Immigration figures, there were 1951 asylum seekers from Afghanistan in immigration detention in Australia. Of these, 315 are children under 18. The figures don’t tell us how many of these are subject to the Government’s processing suspension on the refugee protection claims of people from Afghanistan. The suspension remains in place because the Government believes that at least some places in Afghanistan will be safe very, very soon and so they will be able to send more people back there than they grant protection visas to.

Soldiers and civilians are being killed every day in Afghanistan. The Taliban maintains strong control in many communities. It is NOT safe. I don’t see any of our politicians visiting Afghanistan without top level security, bullet-proof vests and helmets. When they start visiting Afghan political leaders to talk about trade, tourism and other more mundane matters of foreign policy, having left the helmets at home, then we’ll know it’s safe.

And furthermore, if we want our citizens to stop being killed in wars, we should stop sending them.

How about we stop spending billions of dollars on ‘defence’ (the single largest area of government spending) and spend those billions on international aid and development, especially peace-making programs?

But in the meantime, can we please put an end to this excruciating and destructive paradox? It is past time to start processing Afghan refugee claims and pull our troops out.