The key to letting them stay

Posted on 17 February, 2016

We were seated next to a 15 year old New Zealand boy on a recent long haul flight from Abu Dhabi to Sydney.

He was returning home to start the new school year after a three-month exchange in Germany which he’d undertaken to immerse himself in the language and to improve his fluency. He was a great plane companion – don’t you always dread getting seated next to someone who is grumpy or who falls asleep on you? He did neither of these things.

Reflecting on his three months in Germany he told us one thing that stuck in my mind. He explained how all the high school gymnasiums right across Germany couldn’t be used by high school students because they were being used to house asylum seekers.

“That’s OK,” he said, “we just used the junior school gymnasium because they don’t use theirs all that much so it was fine.”

Just a normal kid from a regional town in New Zealand studying abroad who thought it was a sensible use of a communal space to house people who needed somewhere to live.

I’m a Radio National addict, I have it on all day. It’s a good way of not atrophying. Waleed Aly dedicated last week’s The Minefield to the issue. Aly is my favourite – what other guy can jump from playing philosopher to interviewing the latest celebrity to leave the jungle in I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here on the same day?

His question was: “How can we argue that as a society we are committed to human rights and are no longer barbarians if we make 267 refugees including 37 babies return to a place they will suffer further physical and mental harm?”.

The argument from our government answers that allowing refugees to stay here will mean that further boats will come to Australian shores – the old floodgates. That it’ll only encourage them and we don’t want that. We’ve stopped the boats and we want it to stay like that. Moot point.

To me that argument abrogates what our government is meant to do – assess complex problems on their merit and work out what to do about them. If these people will be further harmed by being forcibly returned to Nauru then perhaps the government should consider that.

In Australia immigration and refugee policy is an area where no one ever wins a lot of friends. In recent years as soon as a minister moves an inch to the right or left there is someone, somewhere happy to tear them down.

But maybe this is one where our leaders need to take a stand, listen to religious leaders and to our community, take a risk and say, OK, I was wrong, “Let them stay”.

Last year the German Chancellor Angela Merkel negotiated the relocation of over 1 million asylum seekers to her country. They are living in people’s homes, in churches and in school gymnasiums right across Germany. She may have made a wee small dent in her enormous reserves of political good will but she was hailed as the “leader of a continent” by Time Magazine when named 2015 Time Person Of The Year for taking the bold step.

Here in Australia it’s an election year. MPs think that they don’t want to scare the punters (sleeping dogs and all that) so they do nothing. Or they do what they think is playing it safe. Only now our social platforms are talking and media are reporting the widespread calls on the government to stop its petulance and just “Let them stay”.

Seems like it could be simple doesn’t it? Maybe it would be simple if it wasn’t so complicated, if we weren’t in a dreaded election year and if MPs were willing to commit to do something that’s right and then explain that decision to the community – even if they received a few angry tweets and Facebook posts from narrow minded and selfish constituents.

Jo Scard is Managing Director of Fifty Acres – The Communications Agency. She tweets at @scardjo