The Nauru solution is staring us in the face
WHETHER they want to hear it or not, Australians have a clear message for the government when it comes to protecting our borders and holding children in detention, writes Claire Harvey.
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IF you have a brain, you know Australia needs to protect its borders.
If you have a heart, you know children do not deserve to be held prisoner.
And it’s these twin truths which our politicians are only now beginning to grasp. It is possible, and we as Australians are intelligent enough, to hold the two notions in our brains at once: protect the borders, and set the children free.
We want people-smuggling to be crushed, but we do not accept that any child — or any refugee, for that matter — should be forced to live without hope of a better future; without the possibility of finding a permanent place to grow up, to have a passport, to be a citizen, to vote, to get a job, to travel, to start a family.
Poll: Get kids off Nauru - but don’t bring them here
For way too long, the debate about asylum-seekers in Australia has been artificially split between the extremes. At one end, there’s Peter Dutton saying no mercy can be shown to asylum-seekers without dismantling the entire border-protection system. At the other extreme, the Greens say Australia is an international rogue state in breach of our United Nations commitments for even having turnback and offshore detention policies.
Both those arguments are offensive.
The truth is obvious to everyone, apparently except politicians.
When Australians emphatically agreed with Tony Abbott that it was time to “Stop the Boats” in 2013, we did not for one second believe we were consigning children to lifetimes in limbo.
This wasn’t what we signed up for. And if the federal Coalition didn’t understand this before the Wentworth by-election, now it has been scrawled on their rear-view mirrors in purple lipstick: Protect the borders, and set the children free.
Because if the voters of Wentworth tell us their priorities are climate change and the children on Nauru, then you can bet the very same thoughts are in the minds of voters in Warringah, North Sydney, Bennelong, Kooyong, Berowra, Higgins, Bowman and Mayo. If that’s not the conservative base, then what is?
We commissioned a poll from YouGov Galaxy this week that shows a staggering 79 per cent of Australians believe we should accept New Zealand’s offer to resettle 150 refugee families per annum, with priority for the 50-plus children still on Nauru.
I haven’t seen a poll result that emphatic since we asked voters whether they liked vaccination or not. Guess what? They really do. And politicians didn’t know until we told them.
And the thing about today’s poll is that the very same group of voters strongly support strong border protection policies, and 24 per cent of them say sorting this issue would make them more likely to vote for the Coalition.
The theme of our times, I think, is that politicians are about 10 years behind the social progress of Australians on most issues.
They didn’t realise, until they saw the results of the marriage equality plebiscite, that every family in every electorate now has a gay grandchild or second cousin.
They don’t understand that we all think it’s laughably weird that the Liberal Party can’t find a single woman out of the 12 or so million of us ladies out here in real Australia who might make a good future leader.
And now they don’t understand that voters are not going to punish them for finding a humane solution to the plight of children stranded on Nauru.
I spoke to two of Australia’s most expert and astute mental health professors about this story this week: Ian Hickie and Pat McGorry.
Both are also remarkably crisp analysts of public policy. And both, with long careers of psychiatric and strategic expertise, say exactly what the 1000-plus ordinary Australians in our poll say: protect the borders, and set the children free.
“Australia is socially progressive and economically conservative. It’s not that hard,” Hickie told me. “This is why people are entirely frustrated with government. We’re not simpletons.”
I desperately don’t want to see another child die in a people-smuggling boat capsizing at sea.
But I also don’t want to see a child kill themselves on Nauru because they are tortured by the despair of their parents, and the growing fear they will never have a place to call home.
Australians know that the parts of the border protection regime that worked — turnbacks and offshore detention — have nothing to do with indefinite captivity on an island that doesn’t want these people.
And, by the way, if it’s OK for these refugees to be sent to the United States, why not New Zealand?
So say it with me one more time, just in case the politicians still don’t get it: protect the borders, and set the children free.