Why the political right demonises refugees
Subjecting asylum seekers to unspeakable horrors, and making no apology for it, has been a cornerstone of conservative strategy in Australian politics over the last two decades, and one which has paid considerable electoral and political dividends.
Despite the tiny number of people who arrive in Australia by boat – on average less than 1 percent of total annual migration – the right wing at times has been able to generate frenzy about the security threat supposedly posed by refugees.
For example, Liberal prime minister John Howard won the 2001 federal election almost entirely on the basis of whipping up hostility to refugees, and Tony Abbott’s “stop the boats” slogan was widely seen to have aided his 2013 election victory.
The politics of anti-refugee racism
The Liberals, along with radio shock jocks and right wing commentators in the press, have doggedly fuelled anti-refugee racism for a range of reasons. The first is the most obvious: to channel popular discontent with the state of society away from the government and the rich and towards a minority group.
By pointing the finger at refugees – some of the most powerless and marginalised people in the world – politicians are able to deflect disillusionment from those with real power in society. So when trains are late or overcrowded or when cheap rental accommodation is virtually absent, people are encouraged to blame refugees or migrants for putting too great a strain on the country’s limited infrastructure and resources, rather than laying the blame at the feet of governments or corporations.
Refugees supposedly taking advantage of the generosity or relaxed nature of Australia while “ordinary” Australians receive no such “special treatment” has been an enduring mantra used to defuse the significant tensions that simmer beneath the surface of Australian society.
These tensions, usually to do with legitimate concerns about inadequate public transport, poor working conditions, lack of job security and unsatisfactory public services, would otherwise create a problem for the wealthy CEOs and politicians who are responsible for privatising public services, sacking workers and trashing working conditions.
But for the Liberal Party and the right wingers in the press, attacking refugees is about more than just creating a scapegoat. It is also a strategy to create a sense of identity between people on the basis of putatively shared culture or values against those who represent a threat to “our way of life”.
Importantly for the right, this ideology undermines class identification by encouraging people to see the main division in society not as between those who control the wealth – major corporations, the wealthy and those who make the decisions about school closures or sending people to war – and those who have to work for them, but between white, mainstream, “middle” Australia and those out to take advantage or destroy it: refugees, radical Muslims, Indigenous people demanding land rights, people who don’t speak English.
At its most successful, this extends to those who advocate the cause of marginalised groups. John Howard, for example, constructed a “battlers” versus “elites” narrative. Battlers were the hard-working folk who were proud of their country, didn’t expect special favours and did all the heavy lifting for the nation’s economy. The elite were the university-educated inner-city sophisticated types, whose progressive social attitudes were derided as nothing more than a self-indulgent luxury.
Through this narrative, the right aimed to obscure the class divisions that are key to determining an individual’s standard of living, welfare and interests under capitalism, and to entrench a dismissive attitude towards social justice or fairness, relegating it to the preserve of out-of-touch middle class bohemians.
No-nonsense multimillionaires thus could be battlers, and poverty-stricken students could be elites: it all came down to your attitude to gay marriage and how you liked your coffee.
Similarly, the point of the broader anti-refugee nationalism of the Liberal Party is to encourage workers and the poor to identify less with each other and those otherwise disadvantaged in society, and more with the rich and powerful – a sentiment that does not arise organically from the material circumstances of the mass of working class people’s lives.
It thus strengthens the hand of both politicians and the corporate heads in their efforts to mould society more closely with their interests. Hostility or suspicion towards refugees can easily be focused on other social groups requiring dedicated resources, such as the unemployed, single mothers and Aboriginal people. Such a focus can disarm and distract the workers’ movement in the face of bosses’ ongoing attempts to erode working conditions and union organisation.
So anti-refugee racism is about divide and rule but is also about generating support on a nationalist basis for what has been the economic agenda of governments of all stripes over the last decades – cuts to public spending, pro-business, user-pays policies and erosion of rights at work. It also enables the Liberals to attract electoral support from a constituency that would not ordinarily identify with their pro-big business message, including from a section of the working class.
This helps to understand the crisis that the Abbott government finds itself in today. The 2014 budget has pushed the fundamental class division, that between bosses and workers, to the fore, resulting in a collapse in the government’s support. Its efforts to generate anxiety about terrorism have been unable to salvage the situation, and the lack of refugees arriving has hampered further efforts to subdue the anti-budget sentiment with divide and rule politics.
The political right now struggles to find a credible narrative or vision around which to rally support. This also highlights how anti-refugee racism can be effectively challenged: through rebuilding class consciousness [see page 7] and a broader understanding of how the right uses social issues to advance its economic agenda.
The strong state
The fact that refugees can be treated so brutally has other benefits for the right. It helps to lower the bar of what is acceptable conduct on the part of governments towards the powerless and disenfranchised. And it helps emphasise the enforcer role of the state, to the detriment of the notion that the state should improve the welfare of citizens and develop inclusive social programs.
The strengthening of the coercive aspects of the state has been an important part of ensuring social stability in the era of neoliberalism. As the implementation of a range of market-driven “reforms” has progressed over the decades – privatisations, cuts to social services, the intensification and casualisation of work – poverty increasingly has been criminalised
The prison population grows while the availability of public housing and other services diminishes. This has led to a situation in which the punitive functions of the state have been intensified, justified by “law and order” rhetoric about zero tolerance for crime and the need for individual responsibility and for the state to take a tough approach to those who fail to conform to the status quo.
Ever greater brutality is tolerated in the name of defending “Australian values” and supposedly keeping the community safe. And while refugees bear the brunt of this, it also strengthens the hand of the government against a range of groups and in relation to broader democratic freedoms and civil rights. If refugees can be illegally detained indefinitely without access to basic legal representation, so too eventually might Australian citizens.
For this reason, the militarisation of Australia’s borders and the trashing of human rights in overseas concentration camps should not be viewed separately from the domestic militarisation of policing, the increasing surveillance of citizens by the state and the attacks on Australian workers’ so-called entitlement mentality.
Abbott himself made the connection in a February national security address when he said: “There’s been the benefit of the doubt at our borders, the benefit of the doubt for residency, the benefit of the doubt for citizenship and the benefit of the doubt at Centrelink.”
The treatment of refugees in Australia is so cruel, and has been criticised so frequently by independent inquiries and prominent health and human rights experts, that many people end up bewildered or despondent in the face of the government’s unashamed continuation and escalation of its policies.
But the policies aren’t simply sadistic. They are part of a broader political project that has a rational logic: undermining social solidarity, dividing workers against each other, strengthening the hand of the state – and by all those means, helping the bosses get richer at everyone else’s expense.
