Anthony Albanese’s refusal to assist Australian women and children in Syrian detention camps may prove to be the defining act of his prime ministership – not for its prudence, but for what it reveals about leadership, moral courage and the limits of political calculation.

Anthony Albanese has finally said something by which he will be remembered – far beyond his feat of winning office, and then of triumphantly securing re-election last year, or of any aspiration.

Regardless of how long he stays in the Lodge, or the circumstances of his leaving it, he will, for many people, be defined by his statements refusing any help or assistance to Australian women and children in Syrian refugee camps. It will be mentioned in most of his obituaries, in mentions in history books and be recognised in contemporary literature as a feature of a dull and colourless time. A Thatcherism, perhaps.

No reference to it will be to his honour. It will not be praised as evidence of earthy common sense, empathy with popular feeling, or instinct for social justice. But it will be seen to define his character and his meanness of spirit. A mirror to his political and moral instincts, the limitations of his vision and leadership and his incapacity to take the broad view and to see in events what the circumstances and the times require, rather than the political short-term.

He could reverse himself tomorrow, but the references to it would not disappear simply because he changed his mind. His announcement was just so typically him. Not even Scott Morrison had so deficient a sense of what might have been expected of a great leader at a moment of history. No Curtin, no Chifley, no Whitlam, no Keating and no Rudd – each in their way blind to opportunity – would not have missed this occasion, least of all by appealing to the base, the cruel and the unkind. No Menzies, no Holt, no Gordon, no Fraser and no Howard left Australians to die unprotected as a punishment for their mistakes.

Suppose that it is true – and provable – that all or most of the women involved gave practical aid to extreme terrorism. Albanese was not called to reach out and cuddle them. He could be holding his nose and preparing for a reception in Australia which held them to account. But he should not be abandoning them, even in the name of promoting greater safety for the rest of the population, assuming (and I do not believe this for a second) this were true.

Most of the women followed their men, with varying degrees of willingness and naivety. None are portrayed as those who pulled the men, most now presumed dead, into their doomed campaign. Many had married very young, and had limited autonomy, particularly among camps of fanatics. Albanese and the government have not been called upon to forgive them on behalf of the nation for any individual misjudgements they had made in getting there or for any signs of enthusiasm for the ISIS cause.

Some actions may yet draw accountability, and this had already been promised, regardless of Australian assistance in securing the women’s return. Even if each were childless, they should be repatriated because they are ours.

The children are wholly innocent and that is something more than an unfortunate consequence we cannot do anything about

But they are not childless, and their 20 or so children are not “guilty” of anything simply because of the actions of their fathers, or even of their mothers. Albanese cannot dismiss their plight, or their future, as an “unfortunate” but automatic consequence of their current location with their impliedly guilty mothers. They are Australian citizens, and Australia has obligations and duties to them. I would argue that we may even have moral obligations towards them even if they were not Australians, in the same sense that Australia has acquired moral obligations to people in Iraq, or Afghanistan simply because of the war there. But I do not have to argue that.

These children are innocents by any standard. Their rights, and Australia’s obligations to them cannot be dismissed as sad but “unfortunate”. If they die abroad, many Australians, including those with no sympathy for their parents’ decision, will hold Albanese personally, and other government ministers responsible.

They are suffering in very poor conditions in the detention camps and are exposed to jihadist propaganda the longer they remain. They are better off under our protection. Australia sometimes takes in Australians imprisoned abroad to serve sentences in better conditions here, but that is not seen as condoning their murders, drug crimes or frauds. The fact that some mothers may deserve continuing surveillance lest they become involved in further threats to the nation does not undermine their continuing case for our protection. A statesman (and on either side of politics) would see that. A political grub only focused on point-scoring would not.

Indeed, historians and obituarists will wonder whether the “lie in the bed you make” phrase was focus-group tested for perfectly representing the immediate and punitive instinct of the imaged average Australian. They were certainly not what thoughtful and decent Australians might think to be the sensible approach to a short-term problem with long-term implications. Was a part of the context of such testing a context of anti-immigration and anti-Muslim sentiment being whipped up by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and by the Liberal and National Parties trying to get some traction with an electorate which had rejected them? Was Labor being judicial or judicious, or simply pandering to the condemnation and contempt most Australians would feel for the cause of which the women had been a small part?

Pandering to views about aliens and the Other, and about welfare

Albanese’s tough sentiments echo on several battlefields. They play into an immigration debate which is, for many, including Nazis, not really about numbers but fear of the other, fear of the new, and fear of difference. It is also, bluntly, fear of the non-white, even if no one (or not many) says it. It’s not a reference to a serious debate about the size of the immigration intake because all the Australian ISIS supporters put together would not make a dent on the national population.

It also has its echoes in Australia’s means of social control, including new forms created by the national security state being assembled all around us. Even assuming that this state is “protecting” us from terrorism – a debateable matter – it is quite clear that this security and safety comes at a considerable social cost and causes social disharmonies at least as significant as those it is saving us from.

Coercive controls are not new in Australia, but the ones under the national security umbrella are less open to public accountability and put Australians under the control of police and counter-intelligence officials in new, opaque and unaccountable ways. Many of the leading actors do not inspire confidence in their judgment or discretion. The AFP’s farcical efforts involving some satirical posters invite questions going to the most senior levels of the AFP: does the organisation possess a single person of common sense? Did ASIO have its two-bob’s worth? I bet it didn’t or that the consultation did not go down from the top.

Albanese is by background Catholic and claims to be steeped in Catholic social justice theory, which pervades many cultures even when those who adopt it are not particularly religious or observant. It is not the only impulse operating in the public welfare domain. Labor also has strong background in the British co-operative’s movement, and from 19th century efforts to provide welfare to social groups living in desperate poverty, because of the social dislocation caused by the agricultural and industrial revolutions (and the Irish potato famine) and, particularly a massive drift to the cities. Worthy bodies, some of the middle class, and some associated with groups such as the Methodist Church formed to alleviate the poverty, provide health, housing and dignity, and some reform of social ills, such as alcoholism, prostitution and petty crime.

Many of those imbued with such charitable ideals became obsessed with the idea that providing too much relief and assistance might operate as a disincentive to self-reliance and provident behaviour. It might encourage fecklessness, or immoral behaviour. Thus, arose concepts of the “deserving poor” – those who through no fault of their own were temporarily down on their luck, and to be assisted, while the “undeserving poor” – were seen to be defrauding the system by failing to self-improve.

This tussle between feeding the poor, and mediating help to the poor through social controls, “mutual responsibility” and fear of loss of benefits is a continuing dilemma for public policy. It gave us the horrors of Robodebt, deliberate cruelty and arbitrary behaviour by administrators, and the notion of welfare as a discretionary benefit rather than any sort of right.

But it was not merely about punishing sloth and promiscuity and rewarding initiative and a positive attitude, but a debate about community building. Albanese, from the social justice side, is now marking his place (alongside the old Julia Gillard) of government generosity being a prize. Up until the 1970s, benefits for groups such as single mothers were withheld as a measure of social disapproval for promiscuity, thought by some, such as leading churchmen, to be a positive incentive for immorality. Indeed, I remember some of the campaigns for the supporting mothers’ benefit, in which opponents focused on moral judgements and accepting the consequences of their own actions.

Bullying and coercion by the state has never had much effect on changing behaviour

There is no necessary right or wrong between the approaches. But 150 years of social welfare experience has not established that one can reform behaviour by imposing controls and conditions on the poor, nor prevent social unrest and disruption. Nor is it a training module for stopping religious and political extremism, anti-social behaviour or sober habits.

My grandfather used to quote GK Chesterton as saying that those who wanted to restrict “charity” to the “deserving poor” failed to understand that “charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice". It is the undeserving who require it, and the Catholic social justice idea, but the idea, sadly, seems to have entirely slipped the modern Labor Party.

One should also take some care with the theory that the safety of the group is always to be placed ahead of the rights of isolated individuals. All too often that can lead to major injustices without appreciable improvements in the safety and security of the many.

The attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, for example, led to the internment of about 10,000 Japanese on the west coast of the United States (mostly US citizens) based on US intelligence research suggesting that these were of problematic loyalties. But popular panic and hysteria quickly saw another 110,000 interned, for excess of caution. Not only were these – including women and young children – removed to detention camps, but they were deprived of property they owned, and their land and jobs were taken over by other Americans. The US still lives with the problem that these arbitrary (and ultimately largely uncompensated) interferences with rights involved.

Remember, most of the bad decisions were made by politicians responding to what they thought was popular opinion. It was generally acknowledged that quite innocent people were being maltreated “just in case” and it was, of course, thought that, given the national emergency, it was better to act quickly rather than with scrupulous care.

These are just the sort of conditions that could occur here today – with a populist rounding up, say, of Chinese on the grounds that “some” might be spies or with other loyalties. Politicians or political advisers driven by opinion polls, or the hysteria of the moment, are greatly given to such extremes. Especially when they government is so secretive that most of the public has little idea of what is going on.

Why should we worry? According to the current system (or the very similar new one that Angus Taylor thinks he has invented), most of those affected are not really “real Australians” anyway. The mob, under the uncontradicted advice of Pauline Hanson, probably has reservations about their commitment to Australia and the Australian way of life. Perhaps we should care only about the rights of white, or Christian, or people with European origins. It might be “unfortunate” that a “few” other Australians might get a lesser service for their taxes, but we cannot take a chance.

If Anthony Albanese cannot lead with more civilised opinions, we are probably ruined anyway. It won’t be his opinions defining him. It will be his opinions defining us.

Republished from _The Canberra Times_ 28 February 2025