Government MPs Have Turned The Syrian Refugee Crisis Into Another Excuse To Rant About Muslims
Making a humanitarian catastrophe about your weird bigoted obsession is pretty low, especially now.
Besides gearing up to re-enact ’80s classic Top Gun and begin airstrikes in Syria, the government has just announced Australia’s response to the European refugee crisis. In a Coalition party-room meeting this morning, the government agreed that Australia will take 12,000 Syrian refugees on top of our current annual humanitarian intake of 13,750, prioritising “women, children and families,” and grant them permanent residency. We’ll also be giving $44 million to the United Nations Human Rights Commission to help process refugees and maintain existing camps in various Middle Eastern countries.
While that’s a much lower figure than institutions like the NSW Parliament believe we can contribute, it’s a good first step — 12,000 people get to rebuild their lives in stability and safety, and the UN gets some much-needed cash to help people still stuck in camps. But, being Australia in 2015, the government didn’t manage to reach that decision without indulging in a good dollop of racism first. The idea that Australia should prioritise — or only accept — refugees who are Christian in any humanitarian intake has been bubbling away for a little while now, and today it came to a very nasty head.
About ten percent of Syria’s population are Christian, and the country is also host to numerous religious and ethnic minorities distinct from the Sunni Muslim majority. The ostensible argument for prioritising those minorities ahead of others is that they’re in greater danger of being targeted by ISIS and other extremist groups for their beliefs.
But as people like Shadow Treasurer Chris Bowen have pointed out, people in those minority groups are pretty likely to make up a large part of any refugee intake anyway. Muslims make up the overwhelming majority of the people killed by ISIS, and it doesn’t particularly matter why someone’s threatening to cut your head off.
It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, then, that the politicians pushing hardest for a mostly-Christian refugee intake are also the ones who don’t like Muslims very much. Government MP George Christensen, who’s made a bit of a name for himself as the human equivalent of a rotting mango over the last little while. Christensen famously derided the #illRideWithYou campaign as “pathetic” after the Sydney siege in December, and rocked up to speak at a Queensland Reclaim Australia rally back in July.
Christensen’s been vocal in his opinion that we should be taking Syrian Christians over others, claiming that ISIS terrorists might be disguising themselves as refugees in order to travel covertly to Western countries, and that refugees may take Australian jobs. Labor MP Graham Perrett, whose southern Brisbane electorate has a heavily multicultural population, had some pretty choice words for Christensen’s theories on Twitter this morning.
@GChristensenMP If you have a look at yourself in the mirror you’ll realise how easy it is for people to pose as Christians.
— Graham Perrett (@GrahamPerrettMP) September 8, 2015
It’s not just Christensen who’s been running the line that we should take Christian refugees over everybody else. Wild-eyed First Crusader who fell into a time portal and popped out randomly in the present day Cory Bernardi has strongly backed the push, while senior government ministers like Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Employment Minister Eric Abetz have floated the idea too. It’s been widely reported that government backbenchers urged the government to take “no more Muslim men” during Coalition party-room discussions on the crisis.
Senator Abetz argues for Christian minorities to be prioritised in Australia’s refugee intake #auspol #migrantcrisis pic.twitter.com/7htjYT1cgU — Primrose Riordan (@primroseriordan) September 8, 2015
Labor, to their credit, have been pushing back pretty hard against that line of thinking; Opposition Leader Bill Shorten told reporters in Canberra this morning that Abbott needed to rein in the “irresponsible right-wing fringe dwellers” on the government backbenches and emphasised the need for Australia’s humanitarian policy to be universal.
“Some of the comments I’ve seen a couple of Mr Abbott’s Liberal MPs make, they’re not internet trolls speaking anonymously,” Shorten said.
“This is elected members of parliament feeding off the most base, the most ignorant, the most racist parts of Australian political life – and Mr Abbott has to stand up and defend these refugees. There’s no point in bringing refugees here if we’re not going to defend them when they’re here.”
Happily, it looks as if the government’s resisted the temptation to turn a refugee aid program into yet another opportunity to make Muslims the go-to boogey monsters of Australian politics. In a press conference this afternoon, Abbott said that while persecuted minorities were being prioritised, those minorities were of all faiths and were being focused on because they were less likely to ever be able to return home.
“There are persecuted minorities who are Muslim, there are persecuted minorities who are non-Muslim. It’s those that can ever really go back that we’re focused on,” Abbott said.
Education Minister Christopher Pyne backed that sentiment up, saying that the government would be maintaining Australia’s existing non-discriminatory humanitarian arrangements.
“Religion is not the issue here, the issue is persecuted ethnic and religious minorities,” Pyne said. “We have a colourblind policy when it comes to humanitarian support and that will not be changing.”