The Iranian soccer team is a feel-good story that perfectly suits Trump

Imagine for a moment that the war in Iran broke out before the Asian Cup started, before the Iranian women’s soccer team had left for our shores. Imagine also that a group of them had responded to that war in a way that angered the regime, such that the threat to their lives is the same as what they’re facing now. What would we say in that situation if the federal government decided to cancel their visas, fearing that once here they might claim asylum?

This week, the Albanese government introduced a bill into parliament that would allow it to do exactly that. It even did so on the very same day it granted these women asylum. The latter was an enormously feel-good moment, all beaming smiles and national pride. The former went mostly unnoticed. And that means we’ll hardly notice the tension between them, or that the smiles were adorning something thoroughly exceptional. This week’s bill wasn’t news, partly because it’s just so routine: the resting pulse of our attitude to asylum seekers.

That pulse doesn’t quicken, even where several of the standard objections to asylum seekers don’t apply. The new bill targets people who already have visas; that is, people we’ve already cleared for arrival, whose documents are in order, who’ve passed whatever character tests we might have applied, and who can travel here perfectly safely. They’d be subject to whatever further security checks apply to asylum cases. And their relationship to whatever queue exists for asylum seekers is no different to that of the women we welcomed this week.

But the thought of turning those women away was, rightly, intolerable. The Albanese government began work on accepting them immediately, albeit quietly, and it had near unanimous political support. Only One Nation demurred, which I suppose gets points for consistency. But that tiny objection was obliterated when Donald Trump weighed in, demanding Australia resettle them, saying the US would take them if we didn’t. This is a president, we should remember, who has banned anyone coming from Iran entering the US. He’s also sent at least three planes of Iranians back to Iran, some of whom were political dissidents, converts to Christianity, or from ethnic minorities. Several were pleading for their lives not to be returned.

I know we don’t do international law anymore, but that sort of thing was once called a violation of “non-refoulement” obligations. Put simply, a country cannot return people to a place where they face a real risk of persecution. And here, we should be abundantly clear: violating this is not remotely a Trumpian invention. Australia has done it for decades. Sometimes we send them back to places our own travel advice says no one should be going, like Afghanistan. People like Salwar, who was on the MV Tampa. He was returned, then slaughtered a week later when some Taliban dragged him out of his house and choked him to death with barbed wire.

This isn’t an isolated case. Figures are almost impossible to know, but 11 people were murdered upon being returned to Afghanistan during the Pacific Solution years for being “Australian spies”, according to a Monash University database. A report from a refugee support organisation found nine were killed after being refouled to Sri Lanka. No doubt there are more. And that’s to say nothing of the scores more who’ve been beaten, tortured and imprisoned.

These were not deemed outrages. These were not unthinkable, except in the sense that we never gave them a thought. Accordingly, they could never work their way into our hearts the way the Iranian women soccer players did. Those women, we saw. We saw their defiance in refusing to sing the Iranian anthem. We inhabited their galling predicament as they weighed up the impending threats to their lives with the retribution that might be enacted upon their families back home. We grasped their anguish, which likely drove one of them ultimately to change her mind, withdraw her asylum application and return to Iran to whatever fate awaits. That is, we saw them as human rather than as abstractions.

All true. All genuine. All vitally important. But also incomplete. It doesn’t explain the immediate full court press we saw across the political spectrum, including online, reaching all the way to Trump. This was not a case like the Murugappan family from Biloela, who won over a community after years of living among them, and finally gained permanent visas as a matter of ministerial grace. As human as they were, these soccer players become something altogether more symbolic: characters in a story many wanted to tell, especially on the right of politics.

That story is heavily focused on the obvious evils of the Iranian regime, and the people who seek liberation from it. It’s not a new story, but it is a newly stressed one because it is a central plank in the case for the war Trump is currently waging, on the understanding that the liberation’s greatest hope comes in the form of American bombs. Before this war, even as recently as January when mass protests erupted in Iran, that story mattered less. Trump himself was still returning Iranians at that time, even as he cheered on those protests.

That’s what so many other people in similar situations lack: a role in the story we want to tell. The Albanese government’s new bill ensures that will continue. Those people will remain utterly faceless, utterly abstract, occasionally statistical. Their stories won’t travel across the ocean, and won’t make landfall in our imaginations even if they do. Perhaps these women’s situation is so singular that it could have overcome even this. Perhaps the idea of us barring entry to a soccer team playing in our own tournament would have been too absurd a spectacle. Like we were going out of our way to ignore them, when we’re much more comfortable doing that as a matter of course.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author and academic.

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