AUSTRALIANS are losing their way in the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, former Governor-General Sir William Deane said in launching this year’s Social Justice Sunday Statement.
The statement – A Generous Heart in the Love of Christ: Challenging Racism in Australia Today – was launched in Sydney on September 17 on behalf of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council (ACSJC) which has produced the document for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference (ACBC).
Catholic churches around Australia will mark Social Justice Sunday this weekend.
Sir William said reading the statement compelled the conclusion, ‘by any acceptable measure of Christian morality’, that Australia has failed in its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers today.
Sir William highlighted the section: ‘In Australia, the desire to exclude is expressed most clearly in a hostile attitude to refugees and asylum seekers.
‘The refusal to allow the asylum seekers on the ‘Tampa’ to land, the excision of parts of Australia so that those are now places where people cannot claim refugee status, and the detention for prolonged periods of people, including children, behind barbed wire fences in the most inhospitable parts of Australia are powerful symbols of Australian exclusion.
‘Those policies … have won the support of a politically significant number of Australians, many of whom themselves were once welcomed as refugees.’
ACSJC chairman, Bishop Christopher Saunders of Broome, in a message in the statement, said the document ‘traces Australia’s own story of welcome and exclusion, from the impact of the early white settlers on our first inhabitants to the development of a multicultural nation, but notes the recurrence today of widespread racial hostility and rejection, expressed most clearly in our attitude to prospective refugees and asylum seekers, mostly from the Middle East’.
Sir William particularly commended the statement to young Australian Catholics.
Bishop Saunders said the ACSJC agreed that the moral leadership publicly demonstrated by Sir William ‘is typical of the generous heart needed to challenge the racism which threatens the peace our nation longs for’.
