Last week Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, along with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, used the UN refugee summit as an occasion to tout Australia's asylum seeker policy as an inspiration for the world.
Both men emphasised "secure borders" and supposed "extraordinary challenges to our sovereignty" to defend a policy that the UN itself has already deemed to be contrary to human rights.
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Ruby Hamad explores refugee narrative
Writer Ruby Hamad deconstructs the language used to discuss asylum seekers and refugees.
This rhetoric of framing desperate people who try to enter Australia by boat as threats who divert humanitarian assistance away from "those who need it most", which I presume is a euphemism for "real refugees", is how successive governments from both major parties have managed to gain the support of a significant portion of the Australian population for the increasingly untenable treatment of people in our detention centres.
Language is powerful. Indeed, as the British science writer Richard Doyle has said, "Language is such a powerful lens for shaping reality that we frequently forget it is a tool at all, and take it for reality."
Doyle's words sprang to my mind when I was asked to host a panel event deconstructing the language Australians used to discuss asylum seekers and refugees at the Melbourne Writers Festival earlier this month.
Humans like to think we are rational creatures, that our opinions are shaped through critical engagement and free thinking. In truth, studies have repeatedly shown that our perception of the world around us is informed largely by the words used to describe that world to us.
For example, a Stanford University study discovered that when crime is framed as a disease (e.g. "plaguing our community"), individuals favour preventative solutions such as after-school programs and preschool. However, when crime is framed as an adversary (e.g. "fight crime"), then subjects thought harsher punishments were the solution.
Even something as simple as asking an individual if they intend to vote can produce different responses depending on the framing. In another US study (where voting is not compulsory), participants were asked one of two questions:
1. Whether they would vote in an upcoming election, or
2. Whether they would be a voter.
Just over half of those asked question 1 responded "yes", compared to 87.5 per cent of those asked the second question. What's more, 96 per cent of the second group actually went out and voted.
This is how powerful word choices are: simply shifting the question from one of action to one of identity influenced respondents enough to shape their reality.
Canberra has proven to be very adept at making us forget people seeking asylum are individuals.
And when it comes to our policies on people who seek asylum, the government is clearly constructing a version of reality it hopes we are all fooled into mistaking for the real thing.
For the last decade and a half, people seeking asylum and refuge on our shores have been cast by our politicians as "threats," "illegals," and "queue jumpers."
Because these are highly emotive arguments trading on fear, they are almost impossible to counter with facts. No matter how often human rights and refugee rights organisations remind supporters of the government's offshore policy that it is not illegal to seek asylum, that Australia has obligations under international law, and that there is no queue, these facts fall on deaf ears and the misinformation continues.
And so too does Australia's offshore detention policy.
For those wondering why so many Australians don't seem to care about what is happening in these centres, if history has taught us anything, it is that people will tolerate the most obscene mistreatment of fellow human beings – if we are led to believe they deserve it.
This is why objectification and dehumanisation through language is the first stage in any form of oppression. We have already experienced that here when Australia was falsely declared Terra Nullius – uninhabited by other humans.
And we have been seeing this dehumanisation ever since the Children Overboard scandal when the then-Howard government falsely declared that asylum seekers were throwing their kids into the sea. This is Dehumanisation 101.
It is not all that surprising then, that in a poll taken two years ago, 60 per cent of Australians wanted the government to "increase the severity of the treatment of asylum seekers." As columnist Jamila Rizvi noted on the festival panel, Australians can be very welcoming – in a one-on-one scenario.
But Canberra has proven to be very adept at making us forget people seeking asylum are individuals, instead gathering and then isolating them so they appear to us, in the words of author and panellist Arnold Zable, as faceless "hordes" intent on attacking our way of life.
This is why people seeking asylum have been subjected to such incredible cruelty for such a sustained period of time with the approval of so many Australians; because we have mistaken the government's language for reality.
Thankfully, the tide is beginning to turn. A recent poll by the Australia Institute found that 63 per cent of Australians now think that those who arrive by boat should be allowed to settle in Australia.
This is partly thanks to media pressure, to the efforts of refugees themselves to tell their stories, including Abdul Karim Hekmat, a former detainee now working as a journalist, who was on the festival panel reminding us that these are ordinary people being treated in incredibly cruel ways.
And it is thanks to the works of other Australians who have made it their business to change the narrative by challenging the popular rhetoric. Australians like Madeline Gleeson, a human rights lawyer who has just published Offshore, a vital book outlining exactly what is happening on Nauru and Manus Island.
Words matter. When we speak about human beings in language that transforms them into objects, then we start to believe they are objects and we rationalise the cruelty we inflict on them.
The challenge now is to change the narrative, to use words in a way that respects the humanity and dignity of those we are treating as less than human.
Judging by Turnbull's and Dutton's performances at the UN, this is something the government has no intention of doing. It is then, up to us the public to, as author and human rights advocate Arnold Zable told the Writers Festival audience, start speaking "the language of decency when talking about people seeking asylum."
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