This was published 3 months ago
Opinion
Closed borders, locked out citizens: A new take on ‘national interest’
Waleed Aly
Columnist, co-host of Ten's The Project and academicSome time last year, perhaps as the Delta variant was ravaging India and the Australian government briefly banned its citizens in that country from returning home, a friend living overseas texted me a photo of his passport. Not of the ID page, but of the grandiose passage on the inside cover, where the Australian government:
requests all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer, an Australian Citizen, to pass freely without let or hinderance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need.
Protecting citizens as outlined in the Australian passport seems to have taken on a different meaning in practice.Credit:Shutterstock
The subtext was clear: Australia’s position was hypocritical and had shredded the meaning of Australian citizenship. If we were prepared to sacrifice a citizen’s most basic, defining right – to enter one’s own country – then there was nothing inviolable left of the bond between nation and citizen. Nor, given the popular support for Australia’s COVID-border policies, was there much left of the bonds between citizens.
I thought of him this week as Australia finally lowered its drawbridge to the world. The moment seems to have passed with only minimal fanfare – perhaps because the world is rightly focussed on a more important border saga at the moment – but I think it’s worth marking and contemplating for all the reasons my friend raised. We’ve now closed an utterly abnormal chapter in our history, but it might also have revealed us to be an abnormal country.
Not just because we banned some of our citizens from returning home for a time. We also banned our own citizens from leaving. If you somehow managed to secure a rare exemption to travel, you had to stay away for at least three months.
Under COVID, suddenly geography came to matter more than identity or values.Credit:Simon Letch
Meanwhile, we required every arrival to enter hotel quarantine for two weeks, and we put a weekly cap on the number of available places. All this meant flights in and out of Australia were scarce, very expensive, and often cancelled. The result was that we left many of our citizens effectively stranded abroad for months or even years. No similar country did anything like this. Indeed, very few did any single one of these things.
That has left us with some abnormal answers to who does and doesn’t qualify as one of “us” and in what circumstances. I’m aware that questions of Australian-ness usually invite pre-fabricated, politically determined responses. So, for example, people of one political persuasion might argue Australian-ness is cultural, covering those who sign up to “our values”. A different group might say “Australian” is code for a fortress of whiteness; paradigmatically hostile to migrants, non-citizens or other kinds of outsiders. But our COVID response is so interesting precisely because it confounds such one-dimensional accounts. Whatever truth they capture, they have been revealed as partial.
COVID required us to see people as possible carriers of disease. Suddenly geography came to matter more than identity or values. So, when the chips were really down, we did some unthinkable things. We found ways to house the homeless who we’d so often ignored. We subsidised the wages of non-citizen permanent residents, while we locked out our frequently-white expats. This sort of thing we did on the basis that it made good epidemiological sense to do so.
And perhaps it did. But these things are always subject to political values of some sort. It might have made epidemiological sense for other countries to lock out their citizens at times, too, but for most, the political meaning of citizenship meant that simply wasn’t an option.
Very few people, including citizens, were able to enter Australia while the borders were closed.Credit:Getty Images
Even our own border policies allowed travel exemptions for reasons that had nothing to do with epidemiology, such as travel on “compassionate or humanitarian grounds” or “in the national interest”.
What’s fascinating about the Australian case is not the epidemiological argument for it, but the fact that this epidemiology so effortlessly triumphed over the claims of citizenship. That can only be because deep down, we find shutting our border this way, even to our own people, an uncommonly comfortable thing to do.
That’s because the supreme Australian value now seems to be security. We are not a country of libertarian zeal like the United States that will happily choose freedom over safety. Given the right nudge, we will choose safety and security every time, and we will look to our government to provide it. So, our governments regulate risk so much more than their European counterparts, on everything from bike helmets to smoking.
When it came to something like terrorism, we accepted a quite radical expansion of state power with relatively little controversy. America, by contrast, which was at the epicentre of the War on Terror, had a much more profound debate about the erosion of citizens’ civil rights in the form of the Patriot Act, even as it was busy torturing non-citizens.
Every arrival to Australia, including citizens, was required to serve two weeks in hotel quarantine.
Our oft-cited “fortress” mentality should be understood in that context. It is not an end in itself or a pervasive state of mind. Indeed, Australians are keen travellers, open to the world and broadly content with multiculturalism when we are brimming with confidence. But the walls go up rapidly in the face of risk, when anxiety displaces our assuredness. At that point the usual rules are suspended and we will subordinate most things to security until we feel safe again.
COVID was a kind of anxious shock. And once in that state, we were less interested in the intrinsic value of things like citizenship, and more interested in assessing the threat of everything. Our enduring border restrictions were unavoidable while we were committed to a policy of COVID-zero because the border was the only way COVID could get back in. But more profoundly, COVID-zero was always an option we were likely to take for as long as we could because it is the path of maximum security.
And, as I argued to my friend last year, it worked. Australia’s COVID death toll is comparatively tiny. But was it a success? I’d say so, but I suppose it’s ultimately a question of values. It depends on what you think is important. Clearly, much has been sacrificed, including many Australians’ sense of belonging. That damage may even be long-lasting. We’re perfectly entitled to think it was worth it, of course, but that conviction is stranger than we might admit.
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