What Will It Take To Change Australia’s Mind About Asylum Seekers? An Interview With Julian Burnside

This piece is brought to you in partnership with the Carnegie Conversations talk series, which takes place at the Sydney Opera House on Sunday May 3. Julian Burnside, Peter Singer, Tony Windsor, Marcia Langton and more will be talking about big issues for a better future; for more information, head here.

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Here is a matter of fact: thirteen years ago in Maribyrnong Detention Centre, an eleven-year-old girl hanged herself with her bedsheet. Her family found her and cut down her strangling body, and she was taken to Austin Hospital in Melbourne, where she remained as a psychiatric inpatient for twelve months. When she was well enough to be discharged, she was taken back into detention.

This is the incident that taught human rights advocate Julian Burnside that his country had “betrayed the principles it once stood for”. It was a chance awakening for the Melbourne-raised barrister, who began his career in high-profile commercial law. Since that night, Burnside has represented refugees pro bono in dozens of cases, set up the twin organisations Spare Rooms for Refugees and Spare Lawyers for Refugees, won both the Sydney and Australian Peace Prizes, and been elected a Living Treasure — and in the last year has campaigned to take Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott to the International Criminal Court for their treatment of refugees.

All these years later when he tells the Maribyrnong story, he tells it just like that: these are the facts. A consistent theme in Burnside’s work is that the facts themselves should be persuasive enough to change our approach to policy and justice.

Just The Facts

Burnside’s trust in the efficacy of facts was demonstrated for one of the first times back in 2001, when he agreed to represent the 438 asylum seekers who had been pulled from their sinking boat by a passing cargo vessel named Tampa. Tampa’s captain had headed for Christmas Island, to seek medical assistance for the refugees on board. The then-Howard government did not want the boat to land and sent SAS troops to intercept it — which they did, with guns. But since Tampa had almost 500 unexpected guests on board, it well exceeded the number of people it was licensed to carry, and could not embark on another open-sea voyage. A stand-off ensued. Enter Burnside.

At the time, he says, he felt that “if the rest of Australia knew the things that I had learned, the Government’s refugee policy would not long survive”. In his Tim Costello lecture he told the audience “my reasoning … was that if only people who disagreed with me could understand the facts, they would come around to my way of seeing things”. And on a howling Sydney morning when he speaks to me from his office in Melbourne, he tells me he still thinks he’s right: “I do think that if Australians knew the facts, they would be slower to applaud what the government does.”

Burnside has  been conducting his own mini-social experiment to test this theory. Instead of ignoring his caps-peppered hate mail (“your diaTRIPE concerning ILLEGAL asylum seekers”), he replies with polite corrections of fact. He estimates that something as simple as “thanks for writing to me, did you know it’s not illegal to seek asylum?” converts about 50% of his correspondents. “That’s been one of the most memorable aspects of what I’ve been trying to do in this area. Seeing people change from abusive-aggressive to agreeing with you.”

@antigreenharris “Illegal”? What offence do they commit?

— Julian Burnside (@JulianBurnside) April 20, 2015

This kind of hard-nosed truthology is rare in the contemporary space of ethical and legal discourse, where a willingness to recognise moral ambiguity is often seen as an intellectual prize. “On the other hand…” has become a badge of cognitive honour, for speakers to show that they are open-minded and level-headed and ought to be let through the door. Moral objectivism, on the other hand, appears to be out of fashion; it smells of mothballs and wears hunting jackets with elbow patches and nobody wants to speak to it at parties. Of course, there’s good reason for this: a moral landscape made up of absolute principles can look suspiciously like the product of a lifetime spent refusing to adapt in the face of new evidence. But endless deference to other ways of seeing things also brings with it a national conversation made up of so many shades of grey E.L James could get us for copyright infringement: ‘public thinkers’ navigating icebergs of doubt and pragmatism, and broadcasters stringently airing both sides of a debate, even when one is demonstrably wrong. 

Against that backdrop, Julian Burnside’s work is a rare commitment to a moral true north. The story from Maribyrnong that moved him is not open to re-interpretation, by being fed through an apparatus of slightly altered ethical priorities. It’s not even, in the technical sense, an argument. It is simply true that, while in the care of Australian authorities, an eleven-year-old girl wrapped a sheet around her neck and hoped to die. Sometimes, there is no other hand.

An Uphill Battle

77% of Australians agreed with John Howard’s response to the Tampa. Fifteen years later, those numbers aren’t much changed. When the Abbott government floated the “turn-back” policy, it was met with 71% approval, and this time last year 28% of us thought the government was “too soft” on asylum seekers. Was Burnside being too optimistic in his assumption that spreading facts would change minds? “I don’t think I was naïve about that,” he answers. “I think I was naïve to think that getting the facts out there would be easy.” In part, he says,  this is because he’s fighting against some mollusced-on terms that are simply incorrect. “Illegals” is one. “I think if Australians knew and genuinely believed that boat people are not ‘illegals’, they would change their minds”.  Article 31 of the UN Refugee convention says that it is not illegal to arrive by boat, or without documentation, and seek asylum in Australia. And if you prefer an authority closer to home, Australia’s courts have agreed: in 2002 a Federal Court decision noted that asylum seekers have a “lawful entitlement” to come to Australia. Another fact. 

@DobsonJan @latikambourke Abbott is simply wrong. It is NOT illegal to turn up without papers and ask for protection

— Julian Burnside (@JulianBurnside) November 22, 2012

Burnside believes the term “illegals” owes some of its longevity to the timing of the Tampa case. The judge hearing the case eventually sided with Burnside, and ordered that the rescuees be allowed onto Australian soil — but he handed down that decision at 2:15pm on September 11, 2001. “Suddenly the fear was Muslim terrorists,” Burnside says. “It was only after that that Howard started calling them ‘illegals’, [and] Labor have never corrected the tag. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, I think Beazley thought it would be political suicide to say anything that could be construed as nice about Muslim boat people, and he didn’t change tack. He maybe could’ve later in the year, but he didn’t. So both parties have been locked in on the same rhetoric.”

Are Facts Alone Enough?

Burnside isn’t the first advocate to think that the facts of his case are themselves persuasive. Anti-smoking lobbyists thought proving the cancer link would stop cigarette sales, and climate scientists thought simulations of rising seas would get legislation — but both groups have watched their work trip and fall into that essentially human gap between knowing about something, and doing anything about it. As Quitline’s infamously gruesome anti-smoking ad says, “Everybody knows”.

Burnside understands this might be the fate for his cause, too: “I could be completely wrong about this. It may be that Australians are actually really vile people. It may be that as a nation we are prepared to brutalise innocent people in order to make ourselves feel better.

“I prefer to believe that that’s not so.”

In part, he says, this hope is vindicated by our reaction to children in detention. “Children have always been a soft spot. It’s hard to see a five-year-old behind razor wire, and think we need to be protected from her”. If the problem is that our moral compass about adult asylum seekers is obfuscated by fear and misinformation, then thinking about children clears the magnetic interference. “Remember the response when the Bakhtiari boys escaped from Woomera?” Burnside asks. Alamdar and Montazar Bakhtiari were 13 and 12 when they ran away from what they called “Woomera hell,” alleging that guards “push the children on the razor wire”. TV cameras captured them after their escape wearing backwards baseball caps, holding a Big Mac and a Coca Cola. They looked, says Burnside, like “any other kid”. He says that case highlighted “the moral distinction between mistreating an innocent and mistreating a criminal. You can call a child ‘illegal’, but it doesn’t make you believe that they’re a criminal.”

Burnside has spent almost fifteen years trying to spread facts to change minds. In the face of such unflinching poll numbers, that’s got to feel like a Sisyphean task. “There are plenty of times when I think I will probably not see my view prevail,” he admits, “and since I’ve spent most of my life being pretty results-orientated it’s surprising that I keep going at it. But for me, standing up and doing something about it is imperative because the situation is so bad. And it occurs to me that with my final breath I want to be able to say ‘I’m glad I tried’ rather than ‘I wish I’d done something’.”

This week, a five-year-old girl who has been detained in Nauru and Wickham Point was diagnosed with PTSD.  Her story has ghoulish echoes of the girl from Maribyrnong: she is a minor in detention, psychiatrists have said she needs urgent care, she has tried to kill herself before, and the government wants to put her back into detention. It’s hard not to share Burnside’s hope that the explanation is Australians just need the facts. The alternative is that we have them, and we just don’t care.

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Julian Burnside will be speaking at the Carnegie Conversations talk series, ‘Ideas for A Better Australia’, at Sydney Opera House. Also appearing is ethicist Peter Singer, retired politician Tony Windsor,  leading Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton, Senior Fellow at the IPA Chris Berg, writer and novelist Benjamin Law, social researcher Rebecca Huntley, and more.

The talks take place on Sunday May 3, from 10am – full day and single tickets are available from here.

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Eleanor Gordon-Smith studies at the University of Sydney, debates internationally for Australia, and tweets from @therealEGS