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An Australian Sanctuary?

Last week I was in Tokyo where I spoke at a conference on Australian studies. I had remarked on what I believe to be the exemplary story of our post-Second World War history as a nation of immigration and cultural diversity.

Later, one Japanese scholar questioned me about the success of Australian multiculturalism. “What you see as success from inside Australia”, she said, “is slightly different from the view of Australia from the outside.” When I asked why that was so, the scholar said that it was difficult to reconcile Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers who arrive by boat with the notion of a welcoming, multicultural Australia.

This exchange sums up for me one of the tensions in our multicultural experience. If we have been so inclusive of those who arrive on Australian shores, why is it that there appears to be such deep political and public concern about certain outsiders? And might there be potential for issues concerning immigration to contaminate our social cohesion and cultural harmony?

These are some of the questions I will address tonight. And I would like to do so by exploring the idea of sanctuary – a notion that is often invoked in our depictions of an Australian way of life. It is an idea, however, that captures much of the ambivalence that exists today towards asylum seekers. An idea that throws light on both the inclusive and exclusive sides of Australian nationhood.

The idea of sanctuary

The idea of sanctuary is, of course, central to how we should treat refugees. For those refugees who make their way here, or try to, the country’s promise is indeed as a place of shelter from war, strife, violence and discrimination.

The idea of sanctuary has its roots in the Old Testament. Within the Old Testament, there are references to cities of asylum where anyone who had perpetrated an unintentional killing of another would be protected from the “avenger of blood”.

Recognized by the Roman emperors Theodosius and Justinian, the concept enjoyed the sanction of the Christian church from the fifth century CE. The church as sanctuary was protected under English law until the Reformation. Elsewhere in Europe, the church was treated as a sanctuary until well into the eighteenth century.

The contemporary understanding many Australians have of their country as a sanctuary is far from moralized or ecclesiastical. Rather, an Australian sanctuary connotes something of a lifestyle nation epitomized by sunshine and surf, backyards and barbecues, open spaces and easy living.

Thus, the word “sanctuary” appears frequently in the names of new residential developments such as Sanctuary Cove, Sanctuary Lakes and Sanctuary Grove. There is a contemporary suburban yearning – if not for master-planned communities then for a kind of cultural haven beyond the reach of all disturbance – though naturally one not too far away from a shopping mall.

I return to these cultural aspects of sanctuary a bit later, but for now let me say a little about Australia’s record in providing sanctuary.

We should begin with the fact that Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention. As a country, Australia has a legal obligation not to return someone to their country of origin if they are in well-founded fear of persecution.

It was very much the case that Australia has been a sanctuary for those escaping from strife. Australia took in hundreds of thousands of displaced persons from Europe at the end of the Second World War. In the late 1970s, Australia took in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing south-east Asia – a number bolstered by the many thousands who would arrive from the region through family reunion schemes.

In both cases, this offering of sanctuary meant significant change to Australian society. When the Displaced Persons’ Resettlement Scheme was introduced in 1947, it marked a cultural shift: until then, since the advent of the White Australia ideal, immigration policies had always prioritized taking in people of Anglo-Celtic heritage. When refugees from south-east Asia arrived in the 1970s, it was the first test of whether Australia was truly prepared for the practical implications of abandoning the White Australia policy.

The arrival of refugees has also made a significant contribution to Australian society – to our cultural, economic and civic life. In every field of endeavor, those who arrived here as refugees have made their mark. We need look no further than Governor Hieu Van Le, an inspiration to all those who have ever heard his story and to all who have had the pleasure of knowing him.

Or consider some of our achievers and personalities in sport, the arts and entertainment: Fawad Ahmed, Majak Daw, Anh Do, Luke Nguyen, Nam Le, Les Murray.

I was especially struck, earlier this month, while reading the BRW Rich List. Once I was able to get past the pages of alluring advertisements for Rolex watches and Louis Vuitton handbags, there it was on the page: names like Pratt, Triguboff, Lowy, Gandel. People whose families were either refugees or migrants who left their homelands.

But we shouldn’t judge the contribution of refugees to our society merely on the basis of some prominent examples. We should look at the overall picture.

Speaking in economic terms, the story is a positive one. The late demographer Graeme Hugo, in his comprehensive 2011 study of first and second generation humanitarian entrants, found the following: over time, unemployment and participation rates of refugees converge toward those of the Australian-born. Those who arrive as refugees often have high occupational mobility over time.

Granted, not all the findings were so positive: for instance, refugees face substantial obstacles to employment in their early years of settlement. Yet Hugo’s ultimate findings were very clear: refugees are successful members of our society.

It’s worth reflecting here on the contribution that refugees have made in particular communities – namely, those in regional and rural Australia. Earlier this year, AMES released a report on the experience of Nhill, a small town in north-west Victoria. Between 2010 and 2014, 160 Karen refugees from Myanmar have settled in the town. The Karen resettlement more than doubled the number of people in the town who were born overseas.

Those resettled found employment in the expanding Luv-a-Duck company in the town. Attendance at the town’s school had been in decline before the Karen refugees arrived; now that has been reversed. The total impact for the local economy has been estimated to be $41 million over the five years. Unemployment today in Nhill is 2.8 per cent. And the new arrivals have been welcomed as part of the local community.

The result of resettling Karen refugees in Nhill has been a success: a regenerative effect on an area that had previously been in decline.

The exclusive sanctuary

Let me return now to the cultural aspects of sanctuary. Such aspects are not always compatible with the moral aspects of sanctuary. In the case of refugees, it concerns the provision of sanctuary to an outsider. But where sanctuary is understood as a lifestyle, it becomes an object to be protected from outsiders.

There are numerous illustrations of this tension. Perhaps most notably, it is there in how public frustrations about infrastructure and urban congestion are linked with concerns about boatpeople arriving in Australian waters. Thus, there will be occasions when refugees are blamed for increased traffic in our cities – or for placing greater burdens on schools and hospitals.

Indeed, the desire for a certain cultural security isn’t necessarily sympathetic to cultural diversity and immigration. Population growth is perceived as a threat to a national lifestyle – a traditional Australian way of life. It is seen as a destroyer of a comfortable existence in the suburbs, with large, green backyards in which children could play cricket, climb trees and roam ‘free range’.(1)

The implication, though, is clear: in providing sanctuary to outsiders, we may end up undermining the cultural sanctuary we currently enjoy.

Scholars have provided some interesting accounts of this. For example, cultural theorist Suvendrini Perera argues there has been a shift in our population debates from a language of sovereignty and security to one of sustainability.

The opening decade of the millennium, dominated as it was by the Tampa incident, the September 11 attacks and the Pacific Solution, led population debates to be framed as ones about border protection. But with the marriage of concerns about quality of life and boatpeople, sustainability has been “mobilized into defensive and insular nationalist discourses”. In Perera’s view, “questions of population are always […] about race, ethnicity and the reproduction of the nation”.(2)

There are limits to this explanation, for it is just another way of saying that all debates concerning population must involve racist dog whistling in one form or another. Yet it seems odd and also dangerous to label anything and everything as racist.

This isn’t to deny that race plays no role at all. Reflecting on hardened public attitudes towards asylum seekers during the past decade or so, political historian Robert Manne has put it in concrete terms: were the majority of asylum seekers who arrive in boats white Zimbabwean farmers and their families fleeing from the regime of Robert Mugabe, rather than Afghan Hazaras or Iraqis, it would be “improbable, or so it seems to me, that public opinion would have tolerated their detention behind razor wire or their transportation to the hellhole in Nauru”.(3)

But not everyone who supports a hardline approach to boat arrivals is motivated by a xenophobic fear of Third-World-looking people.

For many, even the harshest or most draconian means of ‘stopping the boats’ is justified by the risk of death or injury that boat-borne asylum seekers face. Asylum seekers are, on this view, the victims of exploitation by criminal people smugglers and we should do whatever we can to stop the trade. Some Australians believe that a softer stance towards boat arrivals offends the idea of a ‘fair go’, by having the possible effect of disadvantaging refugees already awaiting resettlement in camps overseas.

It would be wrong, in other words, to suggest that race is the only factor that motivates an exclusive understanding of sanctuary.

One of the frequent exercises of analysis on all this is that of identifying exactly when hardened attitudes towards asylum seekers, particularly those who arrive by boat, first emerged.

After all, aren’t we the country that took in refugees after the Second World War in such dramatic numbers? That in the late 1970s took in tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the turmoil in Indochina? Haven’t we seen in the past four decades the emergence of a country that is resolutely relaxed and comfortable about its multicultural character? Why, then, all the hardline attitudes?

In retrospect, there were several reasons why those waves of refugee resettlement were successfully conducted. In the case of post-war displaced persons from Europe, their acceptance was central to the exercise popularly known as ‘populate or perish’.

The story of refugees from south-east Asia is slightly different. Given that Australians had fought alongside the forces of South Vietnam, there was a direct moral obligation to take in refugees who were displaced by the war – a point that seemed to have been appreciated by the Australian public.

Any public concern about accepting Vietnamese refugees might also have been allayed by the fact that the Fraser government embarked on an offshore program of resettlement. Of those who were resettled in Australia, about 56 000 refugees came via processing conducted in camps across Southeast Asia (combined with subsequent family reunion arrivals, the total becomes 190 000).(4)  ‘The key to this Australian triumph,’ Paul Kelly writes, ‘was converting the intake from onshore to offshore’.(5)

There was one other reason why Indochinese refugees were resettled without much rancor. And it explains much of the success of Australia’s multicultural reality over the past three or so decades. The reason is this: both major political parties agreed not to play politics with race.

From the time a planned migration program was introduced in Australia during the post–Second World War period, bipartisanship of a certain kind could be taken for granted. Neither side of politics would seek to make political mileage from immigration issues. The stakes were regarded as too high.

Which brings me to the exact point when Australian attitudes towards refugees hardened. The bipartisan political consensus broke down in the 1990s. Many would say that this coincided with the impact of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, though there were signs of this even before Hanson’s emergence. With respect to asylum, a ‘persistently negative attitude’ towards asylum seekers was given expression through the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992 as a deterrent to boat arrivals.(6)

Yet with Hansonism, there would be a palpable effect on public attitudes and public policy. Hanson herself proposed that those proven to be refugees should only be afforded temporary sanctuary from persecution in their homelands – a proposal that would be given effect through temporary protection visas. Those in favour of a more sympathetic approach to asylum seekers found themselves increasingly denigrated for being complicit in a ‘multicultural industry’.

Hansonism, and its subsequent impact, made it acceptable to politicise asylum seekers as part of a broader debate about multiculturalism, political correctness and national identity.

Our limits on exclusion

These developments in our political culture have made it harder to discipline, or limit, exclusionary tendencies. Yet, as it always has been, political leadership is vital. Political leaders set the tone for our society. Their role on this is paramount.

And where leadership on this is lacking, there is the very real risk that any hostility directed at outsiders may also assume the form of hostility towards fellow citizens. It may not be possible to quarantine social sentiments.

Not everyone, it must be said, will draw a distinction between an asylum seeker, a refugee, an international student, a migrant on a skilled worker visa, a first-generation Australian, or a second-generation Australian. I’ve even been told that it has sometimes been the case that Aboriginal Australians have been told to “go back to where they came from”. Clearly, there is a danger that of anti-refugee sentiments spilling over into general cultural antagonism.

On such matters, the law also plays a role. To be sure, we should not place all of our faith in legislation. Martin Luther King Jr, for example, once said that, ‘It may be true that morality cannot be legislated but behaviour can be regulated. The law may not change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.’(7)

Our laws can indeed set a standard for our conduct in society. They express our common values. They educate our sentiments.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Racial Discrimination Act. Enacted by the Whitlam Government, it was Australia’s first federal human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. Prior to 1975, there was very little that anyone could do if they encountered racial discrimination. Only with the Racial Discrimination Act could someone on the receiving end of racism be assured that the law would be on their side.

And over its forty years of operation, the law has had significant impact in human rights and public law. It set a precedent. The parliament has legislated not only to prohibit racial discrimination, but also discrimination on the grounds of sex, disability and age. It has also played a role in facilitating the development of Aboriginal native title.

It has also been a practical instrument. There have been more than 6000 complaints that have been successfully conciliated under the Racial Discrimination Act. The law does not punish people so much as it educates people about racial discrimination.

There has been perhaps one particular area where the legislation has been important in shaping our conduct in public life. Since 1995, the Racial Discrimination Act – through section 18C – has made it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate others because of their race. This prohibition on racial vilification was introduced following the recommendations of a number of major inquiries, including the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the National Inquiry into Racist Violence.

Section 18C is accompanied by section 18D, which protects freedom of speech in a number of categories. Anything that is artistic work, academic or scientific inquiry, or fair comment or reporting is exempt from section 18C, provided it is done reasonably and in good faith.

During the past eighteen months or so, we have had extensive public debate about section 18C. The federal government had proposed a repeal of the section, though following widespread public opposition decided not to proceed.

It was welcome that the government heeded public concerns about a repeal of section 18C. The very real danger of such a move was that it may embolden people to vent their prejudice and hatred in public – to believe that they could give voice to bigotry without any consequences.

It was encouraging, too, that so many Australians were on the side of racial tolerance. In April last year, a Fairfax poll showed that 88 percent of people believed it should remain unlawful to offend, insult or humiliate people on the grounds of their race. It is perhaps no accident that a similar percentage of Australians have consistently been found to support multiculturalism as a good thing for our country. Racial tolerance and multiculturalism go hand in hand.

That the protections of the Racial Discrimination Act were vulnerable, however, points to the limits of our laws. An act of parliament can be overridden by another act of parliament. Legal protections of rights may be vulnerable to parliamentary will.

By way of illustration, let me depart from the Racial Discrimination Act briefly. Currently, as we all know, there has been debate about proposed changes to the Citizenship Act. No bill has yet been presented to parliament but we do know that the Federal Government is considering laws which would empower the Minister for Immigration to revoke citizenship from dual citizens and possibly also other citizens.

I share the concerns expressed by many parliamentarians, legal experts and my colleagues Professor Gillian Triggs and Tim Wilson at the Australian Human Rights Commission. It is important, naturally, that governments take all reasonable and necessary steps to combat terrorism and threats to national security. But citizenship is the common bond that Australians share; if there are to be changes to our citizenship laws, we need to have careful deliberation.

We must adhere to a number of principles. Australia should not be depriving anyone of nationality completely – no one should be left stateless by any laws. And if citizenship is to be revoked, the magnitude of the act should be reflected in the procedure used. Namely, the exercise of such power should be based on a conviction rather than a suspicion, and would be best done through a determination by the courts.

Finally, we should consider the impact of any change to citizenship laws on our social cohesion. One of the risks is that a change could create an impression that there are different classes of citizenship. What we don’t want to do is make people who naturalise as citizens, or who are second-generation Australians, feel that their standing as equals is less secure than others.

Let me now return to the Racial Discrimination Act and the limits of legal protections against discrimination. For all that it does to act as a bulwark against racism, for all that it does to remind people that they can be assured equality and dignity regardless of their background, the Racial Discrimination shouldn’t stand on its own. As recent history shows, the Act is open to be suspended by another Act of Parliament.

There should be a constitutional statement about racism to support legislation. If we are to recognise Indigenous people in the Constitution, as I believe we should, this should be accompanied by the removal of clauses that permit racial discrimination. In my view, there should also be a guarantee of racial non-discrimination. 

Human rights and membership

The concept of sanctuary raises two sets of questions – one about human rights and one about membership. I now want to consider whether we can reconcile the two.

In terms of human rights, the legal and moral obligations that Australia owes to asylum seekers are clear. As previously mentioned, we are, as a country, one of the signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The Convention binds its signatories not to impose penalties on those seeking asylum on account of their mode of entry or lack of authorisation. Article 33 of the Convention imposes a duty of ‘non-refoulement’, which states that a refugee shall not be repatriated to their homeland if their lives or freedoms are threatened.

In practice, though, the manner in which signatory nations give effect to such duty varies. According to refugee scholar Matthew Gibney, ‘liberal democratic states publicly avow the principle of asylum but use fair means and foul to prevent as many asylum seekers as possible from arriving on their territory where they could claim its protections’.(8)

One reason is that the machinery supporting the international protection for refugees was the product of a very different world. It was devised in the years immediately following the Second World War, with the horrors of the Holocaust still fresh.

The drafters of the Convention wouldn’t have anticipated the scale of the global refugee population that exists today: the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates there are more than 40 million people who could be considered refugees (a figure that includes people displaced within their own country).(9)

Nor would they have anticipated the ‘globalisation of asylum’, the relative ease these days with which people fleeing strife and persecution in Asia, the Middle East and Africa can reach liberal democracies in the West.(10)

The case of Germany offers an especially powerful illustration of the practical difficulties involved in protecting the rights of asylum seekers.

Following the Second World War, West Germany adopted as its constitution ‘the Basic Law’, which enshrined the principle that ‘Persons persecuted on political grounds shall enjoy the right to asylum’. It was a deliberately wide interpretation of a right to asylum, reflecting West Germany’s founders’ conviction that there would never again be mistreatment of refugees on German soil.

During the 1950s and 60s the number of people seeking to exercise a right to asylum on German territory was small, averaging about 5000 a year. This quickly changed in 1980, as a result of civil wars in Turkey, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and elsewhere. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, along with the crisis in Yugoslavia, would see further influxes of asylum seekers.

Increasingly, the asylum clause in Germany’s constitution served to attract asylum claims from those with obviously weak claims for asylum, but who nonetheless had every reason to make an application to start a new life in the West.

By 1992, the number of annual applications for asylum had risen to 438 000. As philosopher Andy Lamey concludes in his book on the global refugee crisis, eventually the Basic Law’s asylum clause’s ‘most powerful effect proved to be negative, when it created an incentive for economic migrants to file unfounded asylum claims’. The experiment of enshrining a constitutional right to asylum, he argued, ‘must be judged a failure’.(11)  In 1993, the German Parliament, after a 13-hour debate, voted to radically reform Germany’s asylum law: its generous, legal protection of asylum seekers was consigned to history.

If there is a duty owed by political states to protect refugees, it clearly can’t be an unqualified one. This seems to be the lesson of the German experience and the experiences of other European countries, such as France and Italy, which introduced an asylum clause in their post–Second World War constitutions.

For all of the universalism that attaches itself to the language of human rights, any protection afforded to asylum seekers remains shaped by political realities. What is a universal right in theory may be a somewhat limited one in practice.

Which takes us to the other set of questions that I flagged earlier: those surrounding membership.

There can be a philosophical and political tension between human rights and national sovereignty. In a globalising world, communities are confronted with a choice between a universalism that makes no distinction between members and strangers, and a particularism that takes national self-determination seriously.

For cosmopolitan universalists, we are simply citizens of the world. Our citizenship shouldn’t be defined by our membership of national communities.(12)  Whether Afghan or Australian, Sri Lankan or Swedish, we are all entitled to equal, non-negotiable rights of liberty and security; these should trump any right that nations have to territorial integrity. Applied to asylum seekers, the cosmopolitan case places a presumptive burden on developed nations to relax their claims to territorial rights and accept more refugees.

As applied to asylum seekers and refugees, it is unclear how such universalism can work in practice. A cosmopolitan argument which emphasises the fundamental moral equality of human beings struggles to account for the significance of membership in a particular state or community.(13) 

Yet national membership still matters for the vast majority of people. Any discussion of distributive justice, encompassing decisions on how to allocate resources or share social goods, presupposes a notion of membership. What we do with membership – whom we decide to admit, and how – shapes all our other distributive choices.(14) 

A democratic value of political self-determination means that a community should have the right to exercise sovereignty over its borders. Any right of protection that refugees are entitled to enjoy requires co-operating nation-states to give it effect. The only scenario in which this wouldn’t be the case would be a world in which nationality has no ethical and political significance; a world in which there are open borders, with the free movement of peoples.

We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that being sympathetic to cultural diversity or to refugees means that we should support the radical idea of open borders. A multicultural approach exists firmly within a framework of national self-determination. It presumes a contract between citizens and their government in which immigration is in line with a community’s national aspirations.

Indeed, in historical terms, Australian public acceptance of mass immigration has been contingent on nation-building ambition. For example, during the past decade Australia has sustained high numbers of immigrants in part because there has been a points-based system of admission geared towards meeting the needs of our economy. Some have even argued that a strong border protection regime was in fact a prerequisite of a strong overall migration intake – though this is very open to debate.

But at its very essence, the Australian model of multiculturalism and immigration has been based on a value of citizenship. Those who settle here are expected, in time, to become Australian citizens. They are free to enjoy all the rights that come with citizenship, but are also expected to fulfill their obligations as citizens – to have loyalty to Australia, to be committed to our democracy, to uphold our laws and respect the rule of law. Underpinning all this is a certain assumption of trust and solidarity among citizens.

Imagine, then, the result if Australia were to adopt an extreme cosmopolitan approach and go the path of open borders. Would it still be possible to maintain such trust and solidarity – such liberal citizenship – were we to have open borders? There are good reasons to believe there is a certain point beyond which trust and solidarity in a multicultural society would become too difficult to maintain.

Here, it is worth being reminded of what Hannah Arendt referred to as the right to have rights. According to Arendt, this is what citizenship meant: the right to have rights. There is a clear and consequential distinction between citizens and foreigners. Citizens enjoy certain rights and protections that foreigners do not.

What makes a refugee vulnerable is precisely that they, for whatever reason, can no longer count on their government defending such rights as they possess. The most powerful claim they make is that of humanity, what Arendt called ‘the abstract nakedness of being human’.(15) But how do we enforce such claims if communities may be resolved to exclude them?

Conclusion

Grappling with questions about human rights and membership is just another way of looking at that initial contrast between the moral and cultural dimensions of sanctuary – the two modes in which we respond to the demands of protecting outsiders.

But let me conclude with this. Many mistakenly assume that a particularistic approach to questions of immigration leaves no room for considerations of justice for outsiders. But self-determination isn’t code for ‘rule of the mob’.

To endorse it isn’t to endorse the idea that a political community should merely follow the lead of public opinion on questions of whom to admit within its borders. It is only to say that we recognise the value that people in a community place on having a model of membership that they regard as legitimate.

At the very minimum, a liberal nation-state has a general responsibility to uphold basic human rights – it must be willing to accept refugees whose basic rights have been violated or are at risk of being so.(16)  States should accept ‘as many refugees as they can without undermining the provision of collective or public goods amongst their members’.(17) 

In the case of Australia, the notion of national sovereignty – or cultural sanctuary – can’t justly be invoked to close off certain obligations which we have willingly entered into as a country. By willingly choosing to sign the Refugee Convention, ‘Australia proudly said yes to refugees and yes to asylum seekers fleeing persecution’.(18)  In any case, if a debate about asylum seekers is to be guided in part by notions of popular national sovereignty, and by notions of national values, an Australian community must take seriously an ethos of fairness or a ‘fair go’. Such an ethos would mean little if we are incapable of extending it to those most vulnerable.

(1) Dick Smith, Dick Smith’s Population Crisis: The Dangers of Unsustainable Growth for Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2011.

(2) Suvendrini Perera, Graham Seal & Sue Summers (eds.), Enter at Own Risk? Australia’s Population Questions for the 21st Century, Black Swan Press, 218pp (+vii)

(3) Robert Manne, Making Trouble, pp. 124–25.

(4) Paul Kelly, The March of Patriots, p. 543.

(5) Paul Kelly, The March of Patriots

(6) Chandran Kukathas and William Maley, ‘The Last Refuge: Hard and Soft Hansonism in Contemporary Australian Politics’, CIS Issue Analysis No. 4, Centre for Independent Studies, Sydney, 1998.

(7) Peter Cosgrove, ‘Address on the occasion of conference marking the 40th anniversary of the Racial Discrimination Act’, speech delivered 19 February 2015, <www.gg.gov.au/speech/conference-marking-40th-anniversary-racial-discrim…;.

(8) Matthew Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 229.

(9) Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Asylum Trends: Australia, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Canberra, 2011, p. 2.

(10) Andy Lamey, Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do About It, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 2011, p. 21.

(11) Andy Lamey, Frontier Justice, p. 171.

(12) For examples of the universalist or cosmopolitan position, see Peter Singer and Renata Singer, ‘The Ethics of Refugee Policy’, in Mark Gibney (ed.), Open Borders? Closed Societies?, Greenwood Press, New York, 1998; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Allen Lane, London, 2006.

(13) Christina Boswell, The Ethics of Refugee Policy, Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot, 2005, p. 1

(14) Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, p. 31.

(15) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Allen & Unwin, London, 1967, pp. 299–300.

(16) See Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007; Chok-Kor Tan, Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism and Patriotism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

(17) Mark Gibney, Ethics and Politics of Asylum, p. 84.

(18) John Menadue, Arja Keski-Nummi and Kate Gauthier, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Centre for Policy Development, Sydney, 2011, p. 10.

 

Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner