29 March 2015, Perth, Western Australia
Palm Sunday. On such a sacred day maybe it's worth us remembering a kind of odd question that Jesus once asked of his followers. 'If a child asks you for bread,' he said, 'will you give him a stone?' And on the face of it, a question like that's a bit of a no brainer, but it troubled his followers, I think. And it continues to trouble us now.
When children arrive on our shores, pleading for bread, for mercy, for safety, for refuge, do we give them what they desperately need or do we avert our gaze and turn them away and send them packing with nothing but a stone to weigh them down?
We're here, my friends, to call a spade a spade — to declare that what has become political common sense in Australia in the last 15 years is actually nonsense. And it's not just harmless nonsense. It's vicious, despicable nonsense. For something is festering in the heart of our community. Something shameful and rotten. It's born of a secret, I think. Something we don't like to acknowledge and something that we hide at terrible cost. You see, this is our secret. We're afraid. We're afraid of strangers. We're even scared of their traumatised children. Yes, this big, brash, rich nation, it trembles when people arrive with nothing but the sweat on their backs and a need, a crying need for safe refuge.
We're terrified. Especially if they arrive on a boat, we can no longer see victims of war and persecution as people like us. This fear has deranged us. It overturns all our moral standards, our pity, our tradition of decency, to the extent that we do everything in our power to deny these people their legal right to seek asylum. They're vilified as 'illegals', they're suffering is scoffed at or obscured, and our moral and legal obligations to help them are minimised or contested or traduced entirely.
Our leaders have taught us that we need to harden our hearts against these people. We can sleep at night, we tell ourselves, because these creatures, these objects are gone. We didn't just turn them away. We made them disappear. We weren't always this scared. We used to be better than this. And I remember this because I was a young man when this nation opened its arms, we opened our arms and our hearts to tens and thousands of fleeing Vietnamese. Back then we took pity on suffering humans. We had these people in our homes and our halls and our community centres. They became our neighbours, our schoolmates, our colleagues at work, and the calm, humane reception that we gave them reflected the decency of this country.
Now it's different. 15 years ago, our leaders began to pander to our fears. And now whether they like it or not, they are at the mercy of those fears.
In our own time, we have seen what is plainly wrong, what is demonstrably immoral, celebrated as not simply pragmatic, but right and fair. Both mainstream parties, as we've heard today, pursue asylum seeker policies based on cruelty and secrecy. A hardhearted response to the suffering of others is the 'common sense' of our day. But in the days of Charles Dickens, child labour was common sense. So was the routine degradation of impoverished women. The poor of Victorian England were human garbage, 'common sense' saw them exported offshore in chains to a gulag a long way out of sight. And these despised objects are our forebears. I have a forebear like that, my convict ancestor was a little boy. What's now known as an 'unaccompanied minor'. I've been thinking of him lately, and after reading of the degradation of defenceless women on Nauru and Manus island, I've been wondering how it could be that these things could happen in our time, on our watch, with our taxes, and in our name.
Until recently, we thought it was low and cowardly to avert our gaze from somebody who was in need. But that's where our tradition of mateship comes from, not from closing ranks against the outsider, but from lifting somebody else up, resisting the cowardly urge to walk on by. And when the first boat people arrived here in the seventies from Vietnam, we looked into their traumatised faces and we took pity.
Now we don't see faces at all. And that's no accident. The government hides them from us in case we should feel pity. Pity is no longer a virtue in this country. It's seen as a form of weakness. Asylum seekers are turned into cargo, contraband, criminals. And so, quite deliberately, the old common sense of human decency is supplanted by a new consensus — one that's built on suffering, maintained by secrecy, cordoned at every turn by institutional deception. This my friends is the new common sense.
But to live as hostages to our lowest fears, we surrender things that are sacred. Our human decency, our moral, right, our self respect, our inner peace. Jesus said, 'what shall it profit a man to gain the whole world only to lose his soul'. My friends, children have asked us for bread and we gave them stones.
Turn back my country, turn back while there's still time. Truly, we are still better than this.
Thank you
Recorded by Mark Tan and played on the ABC's Religion and Ethics report.
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