Margaret Atwood has once said that men’s greatest fear is being laughed at, while women’s greatest fear is being killed. Many women are familiar with this saying, but interestingly, most men I asked professed to have never heard it before. Maybe it’s such an embarrassing truth, that our primal, childlike dread of being mocked can force us to behave in irrational ways.

The latest line the Morrison government is putting out to repeal the medevac bill is that refugees are laughing at us. Rubbing their hands with glee and taking us for mugs. Unsurprisingly, this line seems to get the most traction with men – with many women rather uncomfortable with this distinctly macho rhetoric.

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The medevac bill repeal is set to be debated on Wednesday, and how you feel about this question says far more about you than any other issue in Australia’s history and will continue to have ramifications for you and even your descendants for decades to come.

Unlike marriage equality or global warming, which balance what ethicists call “competing goods”, that is, concerns about family values, workforce or the economy, the medevac bill is a different beast entirely. People need urgent medical care and doctors have said so. Normally this would be a no-brainer. But we are told these individuals are laughing at us, taking us for mugs according to Scott Morrison, gnashing his teeth with all the bluster of a pre-match footy coach or a sergeant preparing for battle. And that grabs us at that visceral part where other arguments fail to reach. They have become the enemy that must be beaten. The “preventing deaths at sea” line has been abandoned, as everyone is now aware that navy ships are permanently stationed in the Indian ocean to thwart boat arrivals and equally, the lack of a “queue”, orderly or otherwise, in war-affected regions is also well-established.

We turn on our televisions at night and see wretched images of grown men crying in a rubble that was once their home, having watched their wives brutalised by soldiers and their infant child smashed beyond recognition. The same empathetic part in all of us that quickly rallies to help bushfire victims cries for the anguish these men must feel and the terror of the women and children. Until they dare to turn up on Australian shores and miraculously become conniving gamers.

That anyone would ever leave their engineering, medical or accountancy position in Iran and drag their family and entire life savings across a perilous journey simply to laugh at Australia is a patently absurd notion. But it’s one that grabs many of us.

Whatever your personal view of immigration, before the medevac bill there were 12 deaths in the offshore detention centres. Since then there have been none – and yet, no further boat arrivals. The sky has not fallen in.

There are many people whose lifestyle choices we don’t agree with. You might feel people had other options rather than to flee a burning village and jump on the first plane or boat out of there. International human rights organisations would disagree. In either case, we cannot penalise those whose choices are different by effectively consigning them to a potential death. That’s beyond nasty and frankly says far more about our own values rather than those of the individual concerned.

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I am a committed pacifist, yet as a doctor I will never charge veterans or their families. I don’t agree with fighting in wars, but I have the utmost respect for those who put their lives on the line for our country and they deserve to be recognised and honoured for this. Our different ideas of a “common good” leads us to different choices.

Yet so many of us are prepared to accept refusing urgent medical care for these already traumatised people – and the sole “competing good” here is that we don’t like being laughed at.

Having reviewed almost 500 medical records of people held on Nauru and Manus Island – the head injuries from machete attacks, the infections, the gang rapes and the heart conditions – I am confident that not a single one of these people are laughing any more than the victims of the bushfires or any other disaster are. Even suggesting the latter would be considered crass in the extreme.

But to think that they might, and worse still, to act on that fear to the extent that many more could die suggests something particularly grotesque about the current Australian dialogue.

Think about how you will justify this to your future generations.

• Dr Barri Phatarfod is a Sydney GP and founder of Doctors for Refugees