Larvatus Prodeo

There’s been a bit of a debate over the rhetorical dimension of the government’s messages about asylum seekers. Is Kevin Rudd playing bad cop to Stephen Smith’s good cop? With Senator Chris Evans as straight man, and loud denunciator of the evils of the opposition’s inhumanity… (They richly deserve the condemnation, though. Even Malcolm Turnbull looked embarrassed trying on his Howardian “we will decide who comes to this country” lines in parliament the other day).

The truth is that this scenario is probably about right. It’s all part of the Rudd government’s famous balancing act.

But the more important questions go unanswered. Why are no political leaders prepared to speak the truth about why there’s so much angst out there about asylum seekers in the first place. Why won’t commentators stop hiding behind characterisations of the issue as “emotional”? (And I heard two journos on the ABC radio this morning dancing around the topic, while seeming to pat themselves on the back over the cleverness of the phrase “the Indonesian solution”.)

Bob Ellis puts these questions plainly:

Am I alone in finding this bizarre? If letting “these people” in is a disastrous idea, can we name one, just one, who shouldn’t be here? Who has proved a bad citizen? Just one? If not, what are we talking about? Who are we protecting ourselves from? Why are we burning their rescuers’ boats? If the refugees were Swiss or Belgian or white South Africans or white Zimbabweans, would we be making this fuss? If there were votes lost taking them why did Peter Andren triple his majority in 2001, three months after Tampa, by saying we should let them in? Argued his case well, I guess.