Malcolm Turnbull has binned “Team Australia” and we have so many reasons to say “good riddance”.
Tony Abbott liked to use the term, which portrayed the Australian community as a pre-existing “team” which migrant communities had to show they wanted to join, an “us” deciding on membership applications from a “them”.
Turnbull is portraying the Australian community, the “us”, as it is, a diverse variety of faiths and ethnicities – where “no one can look in the mirror and say all Australians look like me”.
And “we” all have a desperate, pressing mutual interest in binding together against terrorism, particularly the kind motivated by the perverted interpretation of Islam that apparently convinced the schoolboy Farhad Jabar to murder a police accountant, Curtis Cheng, on a Parramatta pavement last week.
In this discussion words matter. I’m sure Tony Abbott wanted to do what he thought was best for community safety but those who know say this change in tone is definitely for the better.
First, Turnbull dialled down the volume. He gave an initial press conference in which he said he would do everything possible to keep Australians safe and it was crucial not to “vilify or blame” the entire Muslim community for the actions of a tiny percentage of extremists. And then the prime minister spent the week saying almost nothing.
He didn’t flag tough new anti-terrorism laws on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. He didn’t criticise Muslim leaders for not saying or doing enough to counter the violence, or not “meaning” what they did say. He didn’t tell Australians the “death cult” was reaching out to get them.
None of this should be shocking. A political leader reacting to a terrible murder and then letting the police and the intelligence agencies do their jobs. A political leader seeking to calm and reassure rather than inflame. A political leader following the advice of the police and security agencies to build bridges with the mainstream majority Muslim community.
But conservative commentators seemed to be pining for the old “death cult” days. It’s crazy political correctness, they said. No one was denying the obvious evidence suggesting Jabar had been influenced by people pushing a misguided interpretation of Islam. But because no one was making broad-brush statements about Islam’s culpability either they lined up to denounce the absence of sweeping religious denunciation.
One even argued that suggesting the Islamic community should be partners in combating radicalisation was like the “unthinkable” suggestion that men should be partners in stamping out the scourge of domestic violence – which I thought was the whole point of White Ribbon Day, but anyway …
The experts, the people who know a lot about radicalisation – which let’s face it, most columnists (including this one) don’t – say the new approach is more likely to help the police and the intelligence services and the anti-radicalisation programs work. The absence of sweeping statements, the attention to social policy and social cohesion as a part of national security, is more likely to help achieve what is obviously every prime minister’s primary goal – to keep all Australians safe.
Turnbull said this was the advice he had received from the police and intelligence agencies.
And it’s advice they have been giving for a while. “We will do all that we can to protect the community, but we understand we can’t arrest our way to success,” the director general of security, Duncan Lewis, told Fairfax Media in May.
“If there is indeed a silver bullet to solving the issue of radicalisation it is in the area of social cohesion.”
Academic experts such as Greg Barton, professor of global Islamic politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute, say the same.
“We are seeing younger and younger children being radicalised, and we are seeing the process becoming faster, and that puts it outside what Asio and the police can usually monitor,” he says. “It means we need the collaboration of the Muslim community more than ever.
“But the rhetoric they have been hearing is that they are to blame, or their faith is to blame and that jeopardises the trust that we absolutely need.”
And by clearly defining the inclusive centre of Australian society Turnbull is also redefining who is “us” and who is “them”, with anyone preaching hatred or inciting division, the Islamist extremists, or the anti-Islamic extremists, firmly in the latter category.
Careful to first make clear all Australians had to accept national values and the primacy of Australian laws, Turnbull then said on Friday: “People who try to tag all Muslims with responsibility for the crimes of a tiny minority and convert that into a general hatred of all Muslims are also undermining our national interest. Those who do that are making the work of the police and security services, governments who seek to prevent violent extremism, much harder. They also make the work of parents and community leaders who seek to prevent violent extremism much harder.”
With small anti-Muslim rallies starting, and Geert Wilders coming to Australia to launch the the Australian Liberty Alliance – with its manifesto to “stop the Islamisation of Australia” because “Islam is not merely a religion, it is a totalitarian ideology with global aspirations” – that is a clarity we sorely needed.
According to Barton there are a few more things Turnbull could do to cement the change. He is warning against rushing ahead with the Abbott government’s controversial laws stripping citizenship from dual nationals. The Coalition and Labor have now agreed to a set of amendments and the bill is listed for debate next week, despite the concerns of most constitutional lawyers that it may not withstand a high court challenge.
Barton says it would be better to put the bill “on the backburner” and come back to it at a “less charged” time. Given Turnbull’s general approach, the amendments are likely to go back to cabinet for reconsideration.
Meanwhile Turnbull’s redefinition of who is “us” and who is “them” could help the work of those trying to make “us” – in all our wonderful diversity – a bit safer.
