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Tony Abbott has said and done some awfully silly things in his time, but I doubt that he has ever inflicted more damage upon himself than with his self-indulgent claims to have a practical solution to the refugee problems of Europe. He hasn't had one here, and his recipe for Europe would be disastrous. He has hurt people and the physical fabric, but the greater damage has been to our moral base and any reputation we once had for international decency. A decade ago, Abbott made one of the more thoughtful Australian contributions to the discussion about the war on terror. He observed that it was much more a battle for hearts and minds than it was one of guns and territory. If western civilisation was to win a war against fundamentalist jihadism, it had to morally deserve to win it, not least by being better than those waging war against us. But this week he told British Tories that basic Christian values had to be sacrificed in order to save Christian civilisation. Decency and humanity to those fleeing from war and terror ought now be superfluous baggage. "Implicitly or explicitly, the imperative to 'love your neighbour as you love yourself' is at the heart of every Western polity," he said in his Margaret Thatcher lecture. "It expresses itself in laws protecting workers, in strong social security safety nets, and in the readiness to take in refugees. It's what makes us decent and humane countries as well as prosperous ones, but – right now – this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error." That error, to Abbott, is letting in, providing shelter, asylum and refuge to the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing from conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa. Most of that flight is to the west, but a tiny proportion dribbles east, towards Australia. His border policies, he made clear, had never been primarily about stopping refugees from drowning or about forcing them into orderly queues somewhere else. They were simply about keeping people out. Indeed Abbott seems to go further than John Howard's desire that "we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come." Saving folk from drowning is at best only a bonus, or perhaps a cover. A shelter, for example, for liberal and moderate politicians, whether of the Liberal or Labor parties, to pretend that our stop-the-boats policies are a regrettable but necessary means of keeping people alive, of saving them from death in the water. A shelter for the "orders are orders" stream in the bureaucracy. Behind this pleasant fiction, kept in place by strict military and very politically helpful censorship of what actually occurs "on water," Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd or Richard Marles, and the bleeding-heart but do-nothing grandstanders of the ALP Left can excuse their inaction on Australia's moral and legal obligations to the world. It is already being used to shame us abroad. One day the fallout will be such that future Australian policy, perhaps like Germany's today, will be as much guided by guilt at past awfulness, and repudiation of our awful recent politicians, as of strictly objective considerations of the requirements of the moment. By then, some of our present political, military and bureaucratic leaders will be facing very critical examinations by their descendants. The invasion of Europe by asylum seekers is not only by boat, even if thousands are drowning from ill-advised attempts to flee by water. The root cause is war, misgovernment and oppression in the nations from which the people come, but the surge is a consequence of the western interventions designed to stop the oppression, but in fact destined inevitably to make things worse. Our interventions have not only increased the area of war, and the number of people directly affected, but have bolstered the size, power and appeal of extreme jihadist groups, and sent millions fleeing for safety, security and refuge. That refuge should not be in the west, Abbott says. For starters, according to him, they cease to be "real" refugees once they arrive in a neighbouring country, such as a Pakistan, a Turkey, a Jordan or a Lebanon. "… In Europe, as with Australia, people claiming asylum – invariably – have crossed not one border but many; and are no longer fleeing in fear but are contracting in hope with people smugglers. "However desperate, almost by definition, they are economic migrants because they had already escaped persecution when they decided to move again. "Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives. It's not to provide permanent residency to anyone and everyone who would rather live in a prosperous western country than their own. "That's why the countries of Europe, while absolutely obliged to support the countries neighbouring the Syrian conflict, are more-than-entitled to control their borders against those who are no longer fleeing a conflict but seeking a better life. "This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go. "It will require some force; it will require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at our consciences – yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever. "We are rediscovering the hard way that justice tempered by mercy is an exacting ideal as too much mercy for some necessarily undermines justice for all. "The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in. Working with other countries and with international agencies is important but the only way to stop people trying to gain entry is firmly and unambiguously to deny it – out of the moral duty to protect one's own people and to stamp out people smuggling." Abbott is right in saying that government have a duty to protect their own people. That's why we maintain armies to protect us from foreign invasion, police forces to protect us from crime, and judges to protect us from government itself. In the modern age, those duties extend to combating terrorism, here or abroad. But it is stretching it to claim that this duty requires exclusion of whole classes of people or ideas, let alone the brutalisation of our immigration functions, or the incarceration of people who exercise their legal right to seek our help. Likewise, people have worked hard to condition us with the idea that people smuggling is the worst and most vicious crime of all, one that all governments have a duty to oppose. I think I am against ruthless profiteering from human misery (including, based on the records of performance, by some commercial tenderers for Australian concentration camp operations). But I am not sure that I would automatically condemn every person who has assisted another to escape from war or oppression, or to make a desperate bid for security. Indeed I can think of some to whom I would give money. Jews were saved from Nazi oppression by people smugglers, for example. So were Jesus, Mary and Joseph at the time of King Herod. One can take it that most boat people know of the risks of getting into leaky boats; that they do so in spite of the unchristian impulses of an Abbott may say something of their sheer desperation. This time about, thank heavens, there was no cant from Abbott about queue jumping. And if he was making cute points denying refugee status to anyone whose flight had extended beyond a single border, he was not disputing that most (at the original border at least) were refugees in convention terms. It is common for the hate mongers to imply that a high proportion are frauds, but this was not necessary for Abbott's argument. Most of the flood had been displaced directly by the wars, air raids or conflicts directly sponsored by western forces. Yet Abbott was simultaneously arguing that the intensity of war should be increased. This virtually guarantees that there will be more people to whom help should be refused, at least if they make for Europe or Australia. Western military organisations have done nothing to dispel the naive and silly belief that the conflicts in North Africa, the Middle East and the Hindu Kush can be won in armed engagements between "our" corrupt, brutal, cowardly and incompetent locals and "them." Western interventions, particularly of the type for which Abbott has been such a shill, have not succeeded. Indeed they have completely failed. And they have directly stimulated the rise and the success of the most diabolical jihadist movements, including their local manifestations (and popularity) in western countries, including Australia. There was no more effective recruiting agent for the ISIS than the antics of Tony Abbott, and the sequences of security scares and "announcables" he and a compliant police and security establishment provided. Don't we all feel a little more calm and relaxed now that he is not around? Forty years ago, Abbott was strongly committed to Australia's accepting refugees from communist oppression in Indochina. He was (rightly) scathing about the fears of some Labor folk that such people might be primarily composed of rich South Vietnamese war criminals hoarding gold, or, as Whitlam feared, future "Balts" automatically voting for right-wing parties because of their hatred of communism. As it happens, the acceptance of thousands of Indochinese, and, later Chinese and people from the Indian sub-continent has had clear benefits for Australia and for the Australians they came to join. There is no evidence that this country is having greater difficulties in integrating or assimilating people from Africa or people of Muslim extraction. Perhaps the most curious part of the affair involves some wondering just what is the western civilisation we must all be trying to protect from the onslaughts of refugees. Most given to discussing a legacy of a Judeo-Greek-Christian heritage running back thousands of years make at least some acknowledgement of the fact that the various national histories and cultures were much shaped by wave upon wave of invasion, flight and war from groups coming from the east, originally with little in the way of links to the old cultures. If ultimately most of these invaders adopted the philosophies and culture of the west, we can too easily omit reference to the history, culture and ideas they themselves put into the mix. Likewise, the mere mention of western civilisation or western values does not automatically cause a genuflection, even at home. Barbarities inside Europe over the past century give us little to boast about; barbarities by European countries in their colonies or targets are nearly worse. European jurisprudence – dare one say even Australian jurisprudence – has not been so pure, even in recent time, that one could comfortably lecture sharia courts on fundamental notions of justice and punishment. European religious conflict, intolerance and discrimination, even in recent times, has hardly provided a base from which to commend the virtues of secularism and law and order. Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought of western civilisation. He said it would be a good idea. He's probably right. This does not mean that there is no history, no culture or ideal worth defending, particularly against barbarians. But it hardly suggests that we begin the task by deciding to junk our moral base.

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