When I first moved to Australia it felt like a pretty big deal. Sitting on the plane, I filled out my rotten-pistachio-green immigration card and ticked the box to indicate that I was moving across the ditch permanently. While the plane was landing I looked out the window at my new home, thinking about how I really should get around to googling what poisonous spiders look like and what I should do if I get bitten.
As soon as the wheels touched down I was ready to leap off the plane, immigration card tucked snugly in my passport. I was vaguely nervous about this part of my journey. I’d paid to take a second suitcase and it was filled with some of my most precious cargo: my nail polish collection and my sex toys. (Don’t be too worried; everything made it through just fine.)
Eager to check in on my belongings, I bounded up to Customs and presented my immigration card. I was expecting to answer questions about where I would be staying and perhaps make some small talk about the reasons why I was moving. At the very least, I expected to be welcomed to Australia.
In reality, none of the above happened. The bored-looking official glanced at my paperwork and waved me through the gates, where I picked up my bags and walking into the Australian sunshine. A few hours later I was drinking cider in a pub in Surry Hills.
On the whole though, moving here was one big shrimp-on-the-barbie-scented breeze
If you listen to someone singing the whole Australian anthem you’ll hear this in the second verse:
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
Ever since I stepped off that plane, Australia has shared those boundless plains with me. It was so easy for me to move here, with a long-standing Trans-Tasman agreement granting Australians and New Zealanders freedom to live and work on the other side.
But changes brought in by the Australian Government in 2001 drastically reduced access to governmental support for New Zealanders living in Australia, and this is definitely something I worry about. Were I to lose my job, need to leave an abusive partner, or give birth to a severely disabled child I wouldn’t be eligible for any temporary assistance from the Government.
On the whole though, moving here was one big shrimp-on-the-barbie-scented breeze. I earn almost twice the salary that I earned back home; I swim at the beach on weekends; and I can buy mangoes all year round. I’m living the Australian dream and I feel guilty as hell.
I feel guilty because I spent my flight to Australia reading NW and stuffing chips in my mouth, but over 1000 asylum seekers have drowned trying to reach Australia by boat in the last five years. I feel guilty because I was able to settle in a cute little terraced house with fragrant jasmine growing in the back garden, but asylum seekers live cramped in tents in offshore processing centres. I feel guilty that I go to work every day in a nice air-conditioned office while many asylum seekers in the community are unable to work. I feel guilty that I’ve been so lucky in the Lucky Country.
Photo: Unknown
Asylum seekers are a political football in Australia. Various policies have been put in place since the 1990s to deter asylum seekers from arriving here, by various incarnations of the Australian Government. Asylum seekers have been placed in mandatory detention in centres while waiting years for their claims to be processed. Detention centres have been established offshore, in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, where asylum seekers are unable to access Australian lawyers or legal services.
The lead-up to the election this year was peppered with then-Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s petulant cries that he would “turn back the boats”, and coloured by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s announcement of the Papua New Guinea “solution”. Under these arrangements, people who arrive in Australia by boat without a visa will never be eligible to settle in Australia, and instead will be sent to Papua New Guinea. Australians often refer to asylum seekers as “illegals” or “illegal boat people”, despite it being a human right to seek asylum.
As an outsider, I don’t understand. I can’t comprehend how we can treat desperate people so cruelly. I listen to people making jokes about how they wish they were on Christmas Island, so they could be guaranteed a bed and a hot lunch without having to go to work each day.
This article in the New York Times Magazine, described by editor Hugo Lindgren as the best thing he has ever published, paints the choice that asylum seekers make to move to Australia in a much clearer light. In the piece, an undercover journalist and photographer embark on a rickety boat from Indonesia to Christmas Island, and the message couldn’t be clearer.
This is the subtext to the plight of every refugee: Whatever hardship he endures, he endures because it beats the hardship he escaped. Every story of exile implies the sadder story of a homeland.
I’m not an idiot. I know that I get to live here for as long as I like because of the country I was born in. The majority of asylum seekers in 2012 came from Afghanistan, Iran and Sri Lanka. I’ve lived in Australia for a year and a half, and in that time I’ve seen an Aboriginal child, who didn’t look old enough to be going to school, sit curled up on the floor of the bus because nobody would stand to give him and his mother a seat. I’ve seen ads for housemates sellotaped to lampposts that specify “European preferred”.
I know that it’s not just about the country I was born in, but about the colour of my skin, about the colour of their skin. As a white New Zealander it’s acceptable for me to move here and eat mangoes on the beach, while gay asylum seekers detained on Manus Island are told they could be reported to Papua New Guinea Police and while torture survivors in detention centres are referred to by numbers and not their names.
Photo: Unknown
It’s easy to blame the treatment of asylum seekers on a racist Australia but things aren’t looking particularly rosy in New Zealand either. As Christos Tsiolkas writes in this nuanced piece for The Monthly, Australia doesn’t have a monopoly on racism. There’s nothing to be gained blaming the treatment of asylum seekers on a racist country and washing my hands of the issue, while I sit here as a white person benefiting from institutionalised racism in every sector of that country.
I choose to talk about asylum seekers and mandatory detention whenever I can. I retweet articles incessantly and I donate to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. I have hope for a future Australian Government that will make the Papua New Guinea “solution” null and void, and I have hope for the resistance movements that I see around me – movements that are getting stronger and louder despite the Government’s determination to release as little information as possible on asylum seekers. I have hope for a compassionate Australia, for we’ve boundless plains to share.
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