As long as we accept injustices perpetrated by the Morrison Government, claiming "this is not who we are" is disingenuous at best, writes Dr Jennifer Wilson.
Whenever a fresh injustice is perpetrated by the Federal Government under the leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, cries of “we are not this,” and “this is not who we are” and “this is not us” and even, “it’s un-Australian” erupt in the public space.
These eruptions of disgust and denial are understandable. We find ourselves increasingly bereft of language adequate to describe the anger and fear we feel when we are once again forced to confront our powerlessness, manifested in the form of legislated abuse and profound harm, either of ourselves or others we care about, personally or collectively.
The examples are many:
- Robodebt;
- mandatory detention of asylum seekers and refugees, including children;
- the Indue card;
- efforts to deny access to the NDIS for those who need it;
- the suite of punishments visited upon the unemployed; and
-
ongoing, racist brutality towards Indigenous citizens.
With every fresh assault on humanity launched by the Morrison Government, there is a fresh wave of protest that these assaults “are not who we are.”
However, brutality is indeed who we are and it has been so since Invasion Day. What has changed is that we are now brutal towards a much wider range of people. Our focus has expanded. Our brutality, seeded in the very first days of colonisation, has flourished, acquiring a warped egalitarianism that now embraces a vast and varied demographic.
The common denominator shared by those abused by our elected representatives is that they are viewed as in some way lesser, or lacking, and so can be mistreated with impunity.
It might be skin colour. It might be poverty. It might be disability. It might be gender. Whatever is regarded by the current hegemony as a weakness to be despised, is fair game for persecution by the state.
This is who we are. It has always been who we are.
It’s no coincidence that under the influence of Scott Morrison (mentored by former Prime Minister John Howard and one of the world’s most powerful Pentecostal pastors Brian Houston) we have witnessed an unprecedented escalation of brutality. For example, Morrison is the architect of Robodebt. In a blatantly racist move in 2011, Morrison also urged the Liberal Party to capitalise on anti-Muslim sentiment in the community to win votes, echoing his political mentor’s astute manipulation of terrorist fears in the so-called Tampa election of 2001.
The Prime Minister has considerable form across a spectrum of perceived difference brought about by disadvantage, misfortune and victimisation — difference despised by the powerful and their enablers and framed by them as parasitic and undeserving.
A psychological interpretation of these attitudes might be that many of us fear vulnerability, in all its forms. Those who unwittingly demonstrate vulnerability of any kind confront us with its reality and the possibility that our own good fortune might at any time desert us or be taken away. These confrontations are uncomfortable, frightening and all too often, enraging. Many of us living comfortable lives don’t want to be reminded that the continuation of our comfort is always uncertain and conditional. Far easier to blame those who are living differently for their differences and grant ourselves an illusionary sense of individual self-determination and control.
Our Federal Government frequently punishes those who are in any way vulnerable because it does not seem able to tolerate what it perceives as weakness of any kind. Compassion, as the powerful former Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, instructed us, must be guarded against.
And let’s not forget the empathy training undertaken by Prime Minister Morrison and his Government because apparently they didn’t have any and thought a crash course might remedy that unfortunate lack.
Morrison is also a member of a Pentecostal religious cult that believes material disadvantage is the deserved consequence of lack of belief in God. Indeed, Morrison is the leading representative of the confluence of neoliberalism, neo-fascism and Christo-fascism in Australia, as well as in the global Pentecostal community. He is, regrettably, the man for our times. In Morrison, we see the opportunity for the coming together of secular contempt for those perceived as lesser than, and the religious delusion that disadvantage of any kind is a concrete manifestation of a disapproving and dissatisfied deity. It is a marriage made in hell.
While individually many of us might protest that “this is not who we are,” collectively we cannot, because obviously, it is “who we are”. Brutality has been central to our white way of life since colonisation — brutality has always been part of “who we are”.
If we are to see ourselves as a society we have to own all aspects of that society, we can’t cherry-pick. Just as individually a fully realised person accepts their capacity for destructive and cruel behaviour, so must a society. The denial of our capacity for darkness and the projection of it onto others is self-defeating.
This is who we are and until we can acknowledge this as a society, change for the better will continue to elude us.
Dr Jennifer Wilson is an IA columnist, a psychotherapist and an academic. You can follow Jennifer on Twitter @NoPlaceForSheep.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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