My Meandering Mind

Two days ago the Australian High Court made a very important decision, a decision which has crippled the Governments new Asylum Seeker policy of sending Asylum Seekers to Malaysia for processing.

The Media here in Australia has embraced the decision as symbolic of the Governments systemic failures and incompetencies, and they herald the Liberal party's very similar asylum seeker solution of processing people on Nauru as the best viable alternative.

It saddens me greatly how our major political parties and media consistently overlook the most simple solution to this problem. A solution which also happens to be the most cost effective and humane. In Community processing.

We profess to be a liberal democratic nation, yet when those who fear persecution overseas come to us for help we lock them away and lay doubt upon the sincerity of their predicament.

What if we allowed them to contribute to our society instead?

Supervised community processing would save the Government billions of dollars each year, there would be no need to provide all food, shelter and security as the community would shoulder this burden in a much more cost effective way. The cost of security compounds and constant surveillance, comparable to our prison system would also be avoided, with any anti-social behaviour by the asylum seekers able to be punished by the local police force.

This doesn't mean opening our doors to all those seeking a better life. Asylum Seekers who are found to NOT be genuine refugees would be sent back to their homelands, in the same way as is currently done. But they won't have burdened the Australian tax payer as heavily during their brief stay.

I remain hopeful that the High Court's recent decision will prompt the Government to consider a similar, humane approach to dealing with Asylum Seekers, and that the media's fearmongering won't stop all the good hearted Australians from accepting those who need our help.

Why does human society have a fixation with labelling everything? I get it, we want to make sense of the world and the best way to do that seems to be to sort everything into boxes. Sorted, labelled, dated and packed away. Ready to be brought out whenever a social situation calls for the appropriate use of our compartmentalised knowledge.

But what about all those things that just don’t quite fit into one of our predetermined categories?

The live music dvd that could just as easily belong to movies as music, the childrens toys that hover between the boxes of sentimental keepsake and vinnies throwout, Jeggings.

I guess the real question is, why do we find it so easy to place beings as inherently complex as humans into simple categories? Black or white. Straight or Gay. Married or Single.

Check the box corresponding to your sex, age, income, residency status, religion, political views, level of education, level of cynicism, level of frustration with the system.

We are constantly being told that we are entering a “new paradigm” of society, but it’s clear that we will only really enter the utopian future world when we realise that this “new paradigm” is just as confined by its rigid definition as the old, and that we cannot achieve the liberated and creative society we strive for whilst we are confined by the labels we impose upon each other and ourselves.