Moral Blackmail & Dystopia

This morning, the news came through that several women on Christmas Island had attempted, or were considering, suicide. They were under the desperate – and apparently futile – hope that, if they committed suicide, their children may have a greater chance of being settled in Australia.

The Prime Minister commented this morning, concerning this report, “I don’t believe any Australian – any thinking Australian – would want us to capitulate to moral blackmail.”

To consider the appalling desperation of a mother giving her life for her child as moral blackmail is beyond me, even allowing for the inability of our Prime Minister to think well on his feet. Blackmail is about the misuse of power, not when the powerless resort to self-harm for the sake of their children.

We have reached a place of moral dysfunction when this statement is not only made by our nation’s elected leader, but is unchallenged by the media which conducted the interview. I remember similar comments from this government’s previous incarnation when imprisoned asylum seekers were sewing their lips together in protest at their punishment.

We are on the verge of dystopia, where the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments’ mistreatment of asylum seekers now seems mild by comparison. The media is fond of using the adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” to describe political culture, but surely this culture of punishment, silence and obfuscation, of stylised renditions and carefully crafted deceit echoes the worst of what lies deep within us.

I am not pretending that the worldwide refugee crisis is a problem simply resolved. When mothers choose to die for their children, when children commit self-harm out of their own emotional disability, when grandmothers are imprisoned because of a politically tested slogan about protecting our borders – and when the majority of those focus-grouped appear to support this, who have we become?

I acknowledge the need to question how we prevent asylum seekers drowning due to unscrupulous smugglers; however, if our actions mean that people are dying in refugee camps overseas, or under the fist of oppressive regimes, is the problem solved or simply pushed up-stream and hidden from our compliant view?

Perhaps the greatest cause for despair I have is that I feel the need to compose this article, that I feel it needs to be said. I know that some who read this will want to find an economic, political, or even “christian” (note the lower case) denial of the issues I am raising, and that compounds my despair. This is not an issue in isolation – this affects us as we share our lives, build our relationships, care for those in need and seek help ourselves.

A calm, wise and gracious friend rang last night, on the verge of driving to Canberra, to protest, to scream and shout, to do something.

The solution is not to call for a new election, because the moral bankruptcy of the present government is built on the debt of the previous ones. We need to speak up, to act out, to pray with our feet moving. I need to do more than write this article and you need to do more than read it.

If we believe in a God with us, a God with those who are broken and God who, in resurrection acted to save and gave us hope for the world, then let us live like it.