How to screen for ‘Aussie values’: Bring on the beagles and bugles

Sure, it’s rude to stare at the federal Coalition when they’re unlikely to win power until 2050, a year when they can tell us they were right all along in denying climate science. But, like an advent calendar, they give and keep giving, day after day. It’s what they call “staying relevant”. Today’s chocolate is an idea to increase “screening” for new arrivals to make sure they hold truly “Australian values”.

Home affairs spokesman Jonno Duniam said, “We need to do everything we can to ensure that we uphold Australian values ... There should be a way of ensuring those values are upheld in this process.”

What could this process consist of? A reboot of the Howard-era question about Don Bradman’s batting average?

The reliably entertaining Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie proposed a concrete solution: beagles that can sniff out evil ideas in suitcases. “We ask everyone who comes here to ‘declare’ any items which might harm Australia’s biosecurity every time they enter our country. We could ask them their views on our values and our laws as well.”

At first glance this could be dismissed as just more nuttiness to attract clicks, reassure the Coalition that they exist, and woo back the 18 per cent of voters who, according to polls, have fled to One Nation.

But the last resort of the scoundrel has cross-party appeal. In his slogan of “progressive patriotism”, the prime minister has put “Australian values” into political play, trying to pin an ALP flag onto what should, by definition, be a set of uniting beliefs. When Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke cancelled the visa of a South African neo-Nazi on Monday, using his already hyper-extensive powers, you got the sense that he would also like McKenzie’s beagle.

This country already requires visa applicants to sign an Australian Values Statement, which obliges them to respect the freedom and dignity of the individual, the rule of law through parliamentary democracy, equality of opportunity, a “fair go for all”, freedom of speech and religion, and many other things that homegrown Australians are free to ignore or repudiate. New entrants must be confused about being compelled to obey the principle of a fair go for all when they try to enter the housing market or find a school for their children.

Most confusing of all must be the “Australian values” held by our political representatives. The defining values of the Labor Party have for a century been double-dealing, backstabbing and selling out to the highest-bidding lobby. As the late Labor hero Graham Richardson said, politics is a game of “Whatever it takes [to get a state funeral]”.

For the Coalition’s part, any publicity is good publicity, even if it’s getting people to rubberneck while driving past a car crash. But why on earth would they want to draw attention to “values” so soon after the Morrison years?

Even from the impotence of opposition, the most prominent “values” on display are white-anting their own colleagues, denial of science, mischievous exploitation of racism (Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s comment about the ALP bringing in Indian migrants to boost their vote), plain stupidity (Sussan Ley’s attempted fatwa against a Joy Division T-shirt) and, when all else fails, the baseless self-regard of born-to-rule entitlement (the leadership aspirations of Angus Taylor). Or all of the above in a hat (Barnaby Joyce).

And yet so many of those values enjoy cross-party support, the newly screened migrant would be forgiven for thinking they are what make a true-blue Aussie. The Australian message our representatives convey at the border gates is: Do as we say, not as we do.

When the Howard government, in its dying days, sought to screen immigrants by asking them about Don Bradman’s batting average, there was conservative bewilderment about how a simple number could be contentious. How could anyone argue with 99.94, the ultimate incontrovertible value?

It turned out that few things could have been more contentious or, for that matter, risible. It was an unsubtle reminder of who was setting the rules of trivia that everybody, not just the bewildered immigrant, was required to know. And even for those who knew the number and knew their cricket, it was debatable whether 99.94 represented plucky colonial excellence or the win-at-all-costs ruthlessness that eventually led to Sandpapergate. The Bradman question was dropped after a year.

The very words “Australian values” are loaded with political suasion. Even if we want to be idealistic, we might say those values include respect for all people regardless of their birth; belief in education as a pathway to equality; care for our precious natural environment; stewardship of our good fortune for the benefit of the future; and freedom from entrenched prejudice.

But even the repugnant South African neo-Nazi Matthew Gruter and his fellow travellers maintain that, if he had been screened at the border, he would have argued that he was upholding all of these “values”. In fact, an article of faith of all anti-immigration movements is that they prize “values” (theirs) and “a fair go” (for them).

For the political right, an appeal to “Australian values” is an appeal to an imaginary past. That’s where they migrate to. One Nation is already there. The Nationals are close behind, pulling the Liberals with them.

For many progressives, on the other hand, the principles in the Australian Values Statement are not uniquely Australian. Equality of opportunity, respect for the rule of law, and freedom of speech and religion are human yearnings shared across the world, often by people who are forced to leave their homes because these values and aspirations are denied them. Does Australia have to screen them for the very values that brought them here? And yet, because this interpretation of values tilts towards their universality, the progressive is accused of being not nativist enough.

To wheel out “Australian values” with sniffer dogs and X-rays is an opportunistic tactic that victimises the other and gives political succour to anyone who wants to twist words to suit their agenda.

Surprisingly, given that it’s so threadbare you can see right through it, raw patriotism continues to tempt both sides of politics. In its essence it belongs to the past and gives home to the nostalgic and the backward-looking. For everyone else, it gives them something to rubberneck at while they go through the green light, past the beagles and X-rays, towards tomorrow.

Malcolm Knox is an author and regular columnist.