Fearing Immigration: The Australian Coalition and the Return of Bad Habits

Killing political leaders – metaphorically and actually – often ushers in a silly season where the Mad Hatter presides over an imbecilic party.  Amidst coups, defections, dethronements and confusions on the right of Australia politics, we see ugly topics return to the fore with ghastly predictability.  The Liberals, the Nationals, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, are narrowing, rather than broadening the issues of debate.  A suspicious, anti-establishment populism, if we are to believe the astrologers in the ranks of psephologists and pollsters, has become vibrantly feral, and top of the list of concerns is immigration.

Incapable of even coming up with its own indigenous species of bigotry, the misnamed Liberals, now led by the underwhelming Angus Taylor, seem to be pinching a few ingredients from the MAGA larder of US President Donald Trump.  Freshly deposed, the former leader Sussan Ley seems to have had a plan simmering away to ban arrivals from “declared terrorist” zones of the world and impose more onerous surveillance measures on those visiting Australia.  (Everyone, the message goes, wants to make their way to Terra Australis.)  The draft, plagiarised proposal, called “Operation Gatekeeper”, would deny the grant of visas to anyone coming from areas controlled by loosely termed “Islamist terrorist groups”, a formulation sufficiently vague to hawk at the dispatch box.  The umbrella would be wide and ignore the capacity of governments to control their territories, covering 13 countries.   These include Afghanistan, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Somalia, Yemen and the Philippines.

Certain Liberal figures have scarpered from the proposal in a fit of disassociation.  “I never proposed any such policy,” complained Ley’s Shadow Immigration Minister Paul Scarr, having finally spotted the mad streak.  “I never agreed to any such policy.  I have a range of serious concerns with respect to any such policy.”  Others are biding their time, pretending courage as they court cowardice in seeing how the electorate acts.

The Nationals, unsteady, even fickle partners of the Liberals, also revealed some support for the plan.  As a country party based primarily on agricultural and mining interests, the city is their bane, and metropolitan politicians their beef. As the immigration agenda is apparently dictated largely by those smashed avocado, latte sipping interests, politicians representing rural Australia sometimes bark in resentment.  Easy to ignore the indispensable foreign workers who work the orchards.

Any program to keep out undesirable sorts was therefore to be embraced.  The party’s leader, David Littleproud, disclaimed the finality of Ley’s plan, though there had been a contribution from his party to it.   “We don’t want to import people into this country that don’t support our way of life and believe in it, and so what we’ve got to do is understand the real threats, the real threats that exist.”

Taylor has also mulled over the nature of hardening the significance of an Australian values statement intended to have more teeth than what is currently in place.  The current statement mentions, by way of example, respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy and the notion of the “fair go”.  English is also recognised “as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.”

There is now a cheap expectation that a statement of affirmation regarding Australian values should be made by non-Australian citizens, irrespective of what visa status they are.  Since no one has ever adequately articulated the meaning of an Australian value (values in a society originally penal in character are murkily derived and best kept for polite company), this is a shoddy exercise doomed to deserved, idiotic oblivion.  But the Liberal Party is in a state of panic, and shoddiness is being sought as a way of salvation.  Their primary vote is collapsing, and a genuine, anti-immigration party in the form of One Nation is hitting its stride.

Soldering on such a test upon Australian visa holders raises a few tangles. Abul Rizvi, a former deputy immigration secretary, proposes three handicaps.  First, how is one to judge whether an Australian value has been breached as opposed to the character test that covers cancellation or denial of visas?  The character test in the Australian immigration system is onerous enough as it is.  (Had it been applied equitably to Israeli Prime Minister Isaac Herzog, his visa would never have been granted.)  Second, those not living up to Australian values are also citizens.  Possessing citizenry is not the same as holding values inconsistent to the state.  Third, cancelling or denying visas to individuals can result in that harshest of fates: expulsion to the country of origin or a third country where there is the possibility of harm.

The Refugee Council of Australia found a troubling historical echo in the proposals by the Liberals, recalling the cool callousness of the Lyons government in 1938 to deny sanctuary to Jewish refugees fleeing Europe.  (A modest number were admitted, aided by the efforts of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society but the numbers came to a mere trickle, selected on the basis of whether they were of Eastern European stock or of the more assimilable Western variety.) “While no fair-minded Australian would ever support issuing visas to people involved in terrorism, applying an indiscriminate ban to everyone living in a region where terrorists are active is an appalling idea straight out of Donald Trump’s playbook.”

The carefree use of such terms as “Australian values” recalls the opinions of the overwhelmingly Britannic nature of a country fearing discolouration of its white bread constituency.  In September 1937, Prime Minister Joe Lyons stated in an election speech at Deloraine in Tasmania that British migrants would “enable us to retain to the full the British character of our population.  Our population is 99.1% of British nationality and we wish to keep it so.”  The following year, Australia’s Minister for Trade, Colonel Thomas White, infamously remarked at the Evian conference convened to discuss the fate of Jewish refugees that, “As we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging a scheme of large-scale foreign migration.”

Dredged from history, unearthed from policies rusted and tried, attitudes about immigration and race issue from the usual well of dissatisfaction, anxiety and concerns that explain local problems through a frosted mirror.  High house prices are not blamed on generations of Australians, including descendants of previous immigrants, who cornered the property market.  It’s immigrants of the wrong sort coming in and pushing the value up.  Rising suburban or urban crime rates (whether they are actually rising is irrelevant) are streakily attributed to the unwanted industry of undesirable immigrants.  But the value of immigrants, and the growth they provide Australia, are virtually incalculable.  The bigotry of those casting stones against them in malice and envy is.

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