The Australian government has granted Bondi’s “bollard man” permanent residency. There are many of us, like myself and my Tamil family who know what it feels like to receive the promise of a permanent home in this country.
Stability. Security. Equal opportunity.
Those of us who have found refuge in Australia will be celebrating with Damien Guerot, just as we celebrate with anyone else who gets to enjoy all the promise that comes with calling Australia home.
People like Ahmed however, an asylum seeker living in regional Victoria I met through the Migrant Workers Centre, must wait with uncertainty, and beyond the grasp of any goodwill handed out by our government, albeit arbitrarily. A volunteer with his rural SES unit in the Central Highlands that has battled bushfires recently, Ahmed knows well the instinct that Guerot acted on when danger was approaching. That immediate reaction that reaches for a firehose, a bollard or a boat, to try to protect one’s self and others against genuine and imminent threats. It’s the same instinct that led my father to bring the six of us to Australia in the 1980s when fearing for life in Sri Lanka. Maybe you know it too, that instinct. The one that brings out the very best of the human spirit, not unique or limited to that courageous Damien Guerot.
A courageous spirit is certainly not uncommon among the many asylum seekers living in neighbourhoods from Biloela to Bondi, waiting anxiously for the security of a permanent home in a country like ours, as the problems devastating communities around the world reach our news headlines.
Tragedy of the kind we saw in Sydney has the power to bring that which is far very close. The humanitarian crises unfolding in other parts of the world has made many of us appreciate how lucky we are to live in the relative safety of this country, in spite of what we have seen closer to home in recent days.
There is a certain helplessness in watching tragedies unfold. We feel the aching frustration when our government claims that there are matters beyond their immediate field of political influence, however large and continuous our calls to action are. It hurts when we feel that our leaders are doing too little, too late for those whose lives truly matter to us. What’s fair is fair, just perhaps not over there.
Being able to celebrate the human spirit of a daring Frenchman was something within our government’s reach. This was fairness done on our behalf, it was done quickly, it was done arbitrarily. Also within the government’s reach is a pending deportation bill that would place nearly 400 children born in Australia in the line of the imminent threat to be separated from their parents or sent overseas back to countries where that which took place in Bondi is not an uncommon occurrence. Tragedies bring close that which can seem far.
The hand that rewards courage is the same holding the deportation bill which threatens to sentence so many would-be Australians who carry the same courage of our “bollard man” to an uncertain and unsafe future. Quite a far leap from an Australia that rewards courage in a way that’s fair, and in a way that respects equal opportunity.
In the immediate wake of this offer to Guerot from Australia Anthony Albanese was asked about Pakistani security guard Muhammad Taha, who also played a heroic role in Bondi, like many of his other colleagues, one whose life was tragically lost. Taha’s offer of a permanent visa seemed but an afterthought that emerged in the wake of celebrating our heroic Frenchman.
At a time when this country and many of its citizens are searching far and wide for signs of the “fair go” that we are promised in Australia, the arbitrary nature of the good will of our prime minister threatens to reinforce a well-worn myth of deserving and undeserving migrants.
Australia is on the verge of landing a national framework to address racism in this country and its implications in workplaces, schools and sporting fields across Australia. It is absolutely imperative that if the Australian government is genuine about the security of a socially cohesive, inclusive and fair Australia, it actively seeks to protect the fairness that underpins our values, instead of arbitrarily awarding certain heroes, while ignoring the hopes of so many other equally deserving heroes.
• Shankar Kasynathan is a former Tamil refugee. He’s an adjunct senior research fellow at the National Centre for Reconciliation, Truth and Justice, and deputy chair of the Migrant Workers Centre
