We’re used to refugees splitting the parliamentary left in Australia. For nearly 20 years, we’ve watched as Labor is torn between its vestigial principles and its existential dread of the Coalition’s right-populism, perennially unable to hold a consistent position.

This, among other failures, has seen them permanently cede a quarter of their primary vote to the Greens, who say the right things but haven’t been able to do much to change policy or its implementation.

As a result there’s been no effective institutional opposition to the general drift of refugee policy towards abject cruelty, undemocratic secrecy, and tinpot neocolonialism.

In Labor’s case, they’ve more than once hastened our journey down this path. Let’s never forget who started mandatory detention, who re-booted the Pacific Solution and who decided that no one arriving by boat would ever settle in Australia.

But in the last week, the same issue has seen chasms open up in the right. A single image of a drowned boy half a world away has made the “stop the boats” consensus among the Coalition and its fellow travellers appear complicated and fragile.

We can see the problems it’s causing them by considering the public positions of two LNP members of parliament from adjacent electorates in North Queensland.

The member for Herbert, Ewen Jones, has outdone even the Greens in his demands for generosity. He says that we should immediately accept up to 50,000 Syrians. He said his electorate, centred on Townsville, would be willing to do its part.

Jones indicated his stance was based on a change in community feeling around refugees, after images of the drowning of Alan Kurdi circulated around the world.

In Dawson, which begins in Townsville’s southern suburbs, George Christensen is doubling down on his hostility to refugees. He’s adopted the same disingenuous line peddled by Eric Abetz, Cory Bernardi, and the hard right’s media warriors: if we must accept refugees they should be Christians, who are the most persecuted group.

Yet if this concern to rescue their fellow Christians were sincere, it would surely have been a crisis before late 2015. At this late stage the erasure of Christian communities under areas of Islamic State (Isis) control has been virtually completed; in Mosul, the Christian centre of Northern Iraq, the faith has been all but extinguished, its adherents killed or driven away.

As someone who grew up on the border of these two Queensland electorates, I can tell you that there’s no magical line separating two wholly different cultures with different political values. Christensen is not hardening his position because the citizens of Mackay share his obsessions, and Jones is not moving because Townsville is an oasis of liberal tolerance.

Rather, Jones is sticking his head up because, like people around the world, North Queenslanders have been affected by the human consequences of the Syrian civil war. He’s reacting to, or has been emboldened by, a genuine surge in public comment on the issue.

This development has exposed views like Christensen’s for what they are. For a long time, hardliners have been able to pretend that they represent the unspoken views of a silent majority. Now they increasingly look like an extremist rump.

In fact, the way in which the hard right has doubled down on its anti-refugee rhetoric in recent days has been useful, in a way. At last, they have begun to clarify their position on the kind of society they would like us to live in.

And, would you believe it, it bears little relation to what most Australians would accept is ordinary decency.

Along with the usual parliamentary suspects, conservative opinionistas like Paul Sheehan and Miranda Devine have reacted to the Syrian crisis by reiterating their opposition to Muslim immigration.

Devine warned against repeating the “moral vanity” that led to the settling of “[i]lliterate Lebanese Muslims from impoverished rural areas”. According to Sheehan, “There is no chance the electorate wants to import the Sunni-Shia schism into Australia”.



Andrew Bolt has become particularly florid. On Monday he accused Pope Francis of colluding in Europe’s suicide by calling for parishes, monasteries, and sanctuaries to take in refugees. Taking in more refugees from Syria, he claimed, would “dilute Christianity” in post-Christian Europe, and “place Christians and Jews in more danger”.

Putting aside Bolt’s extraordinary arrogance in thinking he would know better than the Pope on what is good for the health of Christian Europe, it’s worth noting that his concern for Christianity here all but tips over into anti-Catholic sectarianism.

He goes further, though, writing that Pope Francis is “the man predicted in Jean Raspail’s brilliant and brutally confronting 1971 satire (or indictment), [The] Camp of the Saints”.

Let’s be very clear: The Camp of the Saints is an apocalyptic novel detailing the “invasion” of Europe by third world migrants, a favoured text of white supremacists. Anti-racism group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls it “a racist fantasy” which “characterises non-whites as … monsters who will stop at nothing to greedily and violently seize what rightfully belongs to the white man”.

Raspail cast tolerant, liberal Christians as the villains of his novel: “thousands of everyday priests, ready and willing to poison the minds of millions of idiots. Bleeding hearts puking out gospels galore.”

In 1982, Raspail said that “the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction if we hold fast to our present moral principles”.

It’s an explicitly racialist work that sees non-white immigrants as dangerous pollutants, and tolerance towards them as the harbinger of civilisational suicide. The Camp of the Saints is a wellspring of the kind of ideology that inspired Anders Breivik. So why is Andrew Bolt praising it on the Herald Sun’s website in the context of a refugee crisis?

The steady drip of Bolt’s nonsense has perhaps inured many of his colleagues to just how extreme his views really are. It bears saying that it’s hard to imagine someone with these views, these connections, and these sources being employed on a mainstream newspaper in many other Western democracies.

It would be easy to overstate the compassionate turn in the Coalition’s stance on immigration. In the global context of millions of displaced people, 12,000 refugees is vanishingly small. But even a tiny shift like this seems to have been enough to provoke figures like Bolt to reveal exactly what their deepest political beliefs are like.

With the illumination provided by this crisis, we can see that an influential group in Parliament and the media publicly espouse beliefs that are deeply reactionary and socially dangerous. They give succour to those for whom racial and cultural “purity” is an article of political faith, as we have witnessed in the emboldened hard right protest movement, Reclaim Australia.

Some of these people are supporters of the prime minister, Tony Abbott. They have in the past and may again induce him to implement policies that reflect their beliefs.

In implementing the most punitive refugee regime among advanced democracies, the Coalition claimed the mantle of common sense and “true” compassion. As it turns out, common sense turns out to be more protean, and more difficult to read, than the self-flattery of political professionals allows.

Tony Abbott may have papered over this fissure with an emergency intake and a few bombing runs, but the split in right wing opinion is gradually opening wider. Perhaps the refugee issue, which the Coalition have so adroitly manipulated for so long, will become an existential crisis for them too.