As the Festival of Dangerous Ideas kicked off at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday morning, the mood in the Utzon Room was decidedly bleak. A two-hour forum asking ‘Can we solve the asylum seeker problem?’, held by Guardian Live and supported by Maurice Blackburn Lawyers to mark the Guardian’s Dear Australia video series on refugees, was just getting started, and MC David Marr opened with something of a dampener on the room’s enthusiasm.
Citing a recent Essential poll, which found that 60% of Australians believed the government was either “too soft” or “taking the right approach” on asylum seekers, Marr said that when it came to refugee policy, it was time to concede that traditional approaches to enact progressive social change might not be enough.
“I wouldn’t be a journalist if I didn’t think that reporting the truth doesn’t lead to change – maybe not right away, or quickly, but eventually. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, and frankly, it shakes my faith in what I do,” Marr said. “It used to be that when the boats went away our fears died, but that’s not the case anymore. The nation’s attitudes are set fast: stuck at cruel. The press and politics have failed to budge public opinion, and the courts have failed as well.”
It was to the good, then, that the forum’s focus was on new ideas and approaches, rather than the same old story. Instead of reciting the well-known litany of human rights abuses that defines contemporary refugee policy, the panellists on offer were tasked with presenting potential solutions to this notoriously knotty corner of Australian politics.
While the legal and intellectual pedigree on offer wasn’t in dispute, the panellists struggled at times to cut to the core of the problem. Familiar and well thought-out ideas on how to better treat asylum seekers abounded, but very few addressed their common obstacle – most Australians don’t want to treat asylum seekers better.
Jane McAdam, the director of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor centre for international refugee law at the University of New South Wales and a research associate at Oxford’s refugees studies centre, outlined what a principled asylum policy could look like. But when Marr pressed her on what would happen to a political party that proposed such a system, McAdam acknowledged that “it would never get off the ground” in the current environment.
The director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre, Daniel Webb, maintained that “slowly but surely, public opinion is shifting”, and proposed framing refugees more as a potential economic asset rather than a humanitarian responsibility, opening the door for private sponsors and a reallocation of the skilled migration quota to include refugees.
Shukufa Tahiri, policy assistant at the Refugee Council of Australia, who arrived in the country in 2006 after her Hazara minority family fled Afghanistan, spoke of the strange dichotomy between the welcome she received after she arrived by plane, and how her father was “treated with contempt and labelled an ‘illegal’” when he first arrived by boat.
Geoff Gilbert, professor of law at the University of Essex’s school of law and human rights centre, and editor-in-chief of the International Review of Refugee Law, pointed out the insular, demographically unrepresentative nature of much of the pro-refugee movement.
“Law is important, but the grassroots is where change happens. If you get out on the ground, you’ll actually move opinion. But it takes going out and talking to people, and not in a nice, self-selecting audience like you, who all probably read the Guardian,” Gilbert said.
It wasn’t until the second half of the forum that things really began to bubble. In another departure from the usual refugee policy talkfest, the audience was invited to put the panel’s ideas to the test in facilitated workgroups, come up with potential solutions of their own, and present the ideas they had come up with themselves to the larger assembly.
It was in this environment that new ideas began to emerge. One group, tasked with breaking the feedback loop between political leadership and popular opinion, proposed sophisticated, large-scale marketing campaigns and the delightful prospect of a “Refugee Wants a Wife” reality TV show to change refugees’ public image. Another, eschewing the media entirely, flagged more direct proposals such as pressuring politicians to visit offshore centres themselves and speak face-to-face with the people they’re detaining, or using virtual reality to give regular people an idea of what life on Nauru and Manus is like.
Representatives of Maurice Blackburn floated soliciting corporate sponsors to take on refugee work placements to give refugees a chance to live and work in the community, and Australians the opportunity to meet them first-hand. A fourth group came up with rebranding Australia Day as “Open Door Day” and normalising the practice of experiencing a suburb you don’t normally frequent, as a way of easing people’s insecurities around multiculturalism.
But the most well-received idea came at the end, and addressed the concerns Marr raised at the opening: commissioning research to actually understand how to change people’s minds on a political issue. There was a common acknowledgement that unless the refugee movement stopped talking to itself about itself and reached people outside its own bubble, its capacity to bring about lasting change was limited.
That, perhaps, was the most valuable thing to come out of the forum. The act of inviting people to actively contribute to the movement, rather than sit back and support the cause on social media, did more to excite attendees than the prospect of sitting through another speech from a refugee expert. If experiments such as these get similar receptions, David Marr may have less to despair about than he supposes.
