How The Right & The Left Will Spin The Biloela Family Decision

Today, the Biloela family will be given permission to remain in Australia and, from a compassionate perspective, that is an undeniably a good thing.

Today, rather than acknowledge the grace amongst us, Australia’s on-line combatants will sully that good thing.

From those bent on seeing the world only through a partisan political lens rather than a humanitarian one, we will hear the following types of statements.

From the Left of the spectrum:

· “This only happened because the Government was forced into it.”

· “It took way too long for this to occur and the Government should be ashamed.”

· “The whole situation shows the inhumanity of the detention policy and it needs to be scrapped.”

· “What about the dozens of other families who suffer in detention?”

From the Right of the spectrum:

· “The Government should never have caved to the bleeding hearts.”

· “This sets a terrible precedent in terms of other cases, including legitimate refugees.”

· “The situation will encourage human traffickers to go back into business.”

· “Decisions should be based on law not emotion and this family and others who arrive illegally should be treated accordingly.”

And on it will go with the combatant sides slinging rhetoric at each other until the next issue arises and everyone forgets about the Biloela family. Their use to the cultural warriors would have been expended after they are put in either the “win” or “loss” column.

I’m sick of this binary political pugilism. It’s stupid, simplistic and reductionist, and irresponsibly promoted by sections of the media and even by former Prime Ministers and other senior ex-politicians — Rudd, Turnbull, Hewson — who actually do know better but can’t resist the ratings or the clicks.

I’m tired of the seeming incapacity of those in Australia’s public arena to ever step out of their respective ideological characters. Sky News versus ABC News. Media Watch versus Gerard Henderson. IPA versus Grattan. We may as well give them blue and red uniforms and numbers on their backs.

I am saddened that neither the Left or the Right seem willing to credit aspects of the other’s worldview. The Left, for example, categorically rules out the Right’s capacity to show and act with empathy, even when it clearly does so, such as in the case of the Biloela family. The Right, on the other hand, attacks the Left’s historical commitment to greater societal equity as some new “woke-ism” and “a product of Critical Race Theory brainwashing”. It’s hugely intellectually dishonest because the loudmouth public protagonists on both sides actually privately know that the world doesn’t work in such monochromatic terms.

I am anxious that all this drives a very pragmatic, sensible and mainstream Australian electorate away from public discourse in general — which gives demagogues of both the Left and the Right more opportunity and more need to play to their increasingly micro-markets. Their role-playing only benefits them rather than civil society at large.

That is fundamentally unsustainable. That pulls at the respective edges of the social contract. That squeezes all else — such as considerations of genuine philosophy, history, economics and behavioural psychology — out of our public discourse in place of digital flag-waving.

But for some access to some column inches from time to time, I sometimes feel systemically powerless in all this. Some on the Left attack me for things like apparently defending the patriarchy. Some on the Right attack me for things like political correctness or not taking a sufficiently strong stance. But it’s all hugely predictable and I imagine I am not alone in being stuck in the middle.

So, my choice now is to be personally powerful. To control my own reality, my own feelings, my own relationships and behaviours.

Today, I will be happy for a young Tamil family and their very unique privilege and opportunity to prosper in this wonderful country, and I will pray for their child’s health. And, I will not listen to the hectoring of the cultural war’s combatants.