Of dogs and people
Guest Post by Jana Perkovic
May 20
On Mother’s Day, Maria Tumarkin wrote what I thought was a heartfelt and effective plea for a more humane immigration policy, describing what it meant not to be able to take care of your parents. It was published in the Age, SMH and on National Times.
Apparently many Australians thought otherwise. The comments have since closed after reaching the count of 82, and they depict a truly frightful state of affairs. Even subtracting a large number that must have come from Andrew Bolt’s blog (he called her confused about who has actually done the abandoning), the sheer concentration of vitriol, xenophobia and selfishness left many of us aghast. I am writing about it not so much to comment, but because we are living in truly frightening times if reactions like these are not worth dwelling upon.
Tumarkin’s central point was that bringing parents to Australia costs first-generation Australians $60,000 in fees and 15-18 years in waiting. This is much longer, and much more expensive, than any other type of immigration, and concerns our closest family members. If I may be so euphemistic, those among us who spend Mother’s Days waiting deserve a modicum of sympathy.
But Tumarkin’s biggest rhetorical mistake was to take for granted that family bonds matter:
Kevin Rudd can argue that the family is ‘'the most critical social institution of all’‘ but be blissfully unaffected when the institution of ’‘migrant’‘ family is ripped to shreds by the children’s inability to take care of their parents – a sacred duty in most cultures, perhaps even in Australia’s.”
But the comments show another, very different place, in which people proudly boast of not giving two hoots about their own family, let alone someone else’s. The statements range from the garden-variety selfishness of my-problem-is-not-your-problem, or why-should-the-taxpayer-suffer (‘old people are expensive, and living longer’ and ‘I dont want your parents, I want my own kids’), to the proud assertions that other people don’t matter, not even when they’re one’s own family (from the highly privileged ‘[I] would not presume to impose my elderly parents on Australia. If I feel the urge to care for them, I’d go back to America to do so’ and the haughty ‘People who accept citizenship to Australia should be ready to accept to costs, and they should let their citizenships of their former countries of origin expire [sic]’ to the curious ‘The relatives can visit and go back. My child was very scared from some of them dressed in a tribal wear on a few cases’).
I wouldn’t call this a population debate. To try to identify underlying ‘issues’ would be to imbue it with measure and reason it simply doesn’t have. Despite the economic-rationalistic arguments of finite resources and taxpayers, this is not a rational debate. It’s not really about our immigration policy, about the size of the population, about how best to use Australia’s resources, or about climate change. It’s a nascent public hysteria, all the more dangerous because it’s an election year. And its hostile edge seems to be a response to the idea that perhaps we owe something to the previous generation, be it here or overseas.
As summarised by one of the commentators:
The ties to one’s parents are not sacred in Australian culture, nor is it dinned into our heads that children’s lives are predestined to be spent looking after them. Far from it. Perhaps people wanting to come here should think of that first. The friend mentioned here sounds like a case of the youngest daughter being expected to act as unpaid carer/companion for the parents – something that died out in Anglo-Celtic culture decades ago.
I don’t want to get tangled up in the notion of big and loving ethnic families as opposed to the nuclear Aussie one – it’s a divisive, smug argument, and ultimately distracting. It is true that family-for-migration-purposes is a much smaller unit than usual: even brothers and sisters are ineligible for family reunion visas. But what is the logic behind comments such as ‘While my father saw his parents just once more before they died 20 years later … the thought that his new country should throw around gifts like offering residency to his parents out of “compassion” would be completely absent from his thinking.’
What is being said here? That family separation is good? That everyone benefitted? That it was character-building suffering we should all subject ourselves to, regardless of advances in intercontinental travel? There is a strong hint of sadism here, very similar to the way generations of Victorian era adults tied, beat and emotionally stunted their children, on the pretext that they, too, were brought up this way.
Such parenting would now unequivocally be considered abuse, ostensibly because we have progressed in the field of ethics. However, our sense of responsibility for children has apparently not extended to other ‘useless’ members of the society. One comment called it an expression of ‘a very Australian thing: to put money ahead of not just compassion but human decency’. Does the knowledge, experience and wisdom of our aging parents count for nothing? What about community work, their grandparenting roles, their neighbourhood presence? Are we only ‘useful’ while we pay tax, as the Bolt-army is suggesting? Were our mothers useless in the time they spent outside of the workforce, raising us? This is a country in which even the health benefits of pets have been converted into dollars. Is that the argument we need to make first?
I am not advocating filial piety – we’ll always be free to hate our parents – but if we think that it’s OK to publicly state that caring for your parents is un-Australian, we have a huge problem. Do we really think that we owe our parents nothing? That the schools we attended, cities we lived in, institutions we worked for and safety nets provided for us were built from scratch using nothing but our own taxes? That the people who raised, fed and clothed first-generation Australians have in no way contributed to this place? Are we really that small-minded, that selfish?
How different this is from a country like Croatia, in which the Constitution makes a note that ‘every member of the society must take care of the young, the elderly and the needy’ – providing that fundamental benchmark against which certain behavior, such as not helping a person attacked on the street, can be judged morally wrong. The presence of such clauses in European constitutions probably explains the fact that they are missing the entire complex of public risk and safety laws that plague Anglo-Celtic countries, with their ‘long-ago died-out’ social ties. If we have collective responsibilities, we can also have collective faults and collective achievements. If we don’t, as we apparently don’t in Australia, then there is no collective fault for, say, Tampa or the Stolen Generation, and no collective achievement of, say, excellent public schooling or universal maternity leave. We become just a lot of people who don’t like their neighbours, their relatives, their fellow citizens. And the rhetorical ‘working family’ seems more and more to mean just ‘my family’, not yours too.
It is symptomatic that this article comes a mere week after Catherine Deveny’s column for The Age was replaced with Graham Reilly uncontroversially talking about the transcendent joy of owning a dog, a hobby which costs Australians about $25,000 per dog in total, the same newspaper recently reported. What makes that sum somehow understandable, rather than wasteful of our scarce resources (because of which we cannot take more useless people on board), is that the bill is footed privately. You can have meaningful relationships with whatever form of life, as long as you pay for it yourself, the moral of the story seems to be.
But when it comes to the family, even that is too generous. If you aspire to share your wealth with your family, sorry, you are just not being ‘Anglo-Celtic’ enough for us.
Jana Perkovic is a researcher at the University of Melbourne on the matters of city and culture. She blogs about theatre, urban and cultural policy on her website, Guerrilla Semiotics, and co-edits Spark Online.
An earlier version of this piece appeared at Guerilla Semiotics.
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Comments
20 May 10 at 14:36
I am in complete agreement with you on the gobsmackingness of those comments – if not certain that they can be thought of as representing widely held views – but I really don’t see what the connection is with domestic pets and your opinion about whether dogs are worth the money people spend on them.
...20 May 10 at 17:57
Hi Laura – this is a question of discourse, I would say. What can and cannot be said in print? What values can we publicly uphold?
The two columns are very similar. They both talk about care, about relationships based on affection, not utility. If we are going to slap them with a price tag, both aging relatives and pets are conventionally understood as useless. They are both as much of a drain on our precious resources as anyone. But Reilly’s column was perceived as the epitome of non-controversial (not least because it had to replace Deveny’s). Tumarkin’s was quite controversial. What is the difference?
...20 May 10 at 21:23
I think the anxious commentary is being fuelled by two things. One, which you & Tumarkin point out, is the notion that the elderly are a great financial burden on society. The second is that migration should be defended against, rather than embraced as vital to the inter/national economy. I suspect it’s the intersection of these two that’s sparked such a one-sided response.
Although I agree completely with Tumarkin I felt her article could have been clearer – e.g. “When inter-generation cycles of care-giving are fatally disrupted, untold damage is done to families and the society at large.” An intuitively just statement, but sweeping & unexplained.
I think the argument would be more persuasive, too, if it remained personal, instead of attempting a case for the good the elderly impart to society – undoubtedly they do. But I feel it’s more powerful as an emotional plea than a rational one – having family around you is such a basic human need.
...21 May 10 at 9:05
Immigration of people of all ages and backgrounds should be encouraged on the condition that they can support themselves. The whole point of immigration is to keep the country’s population at a level that is economically sustainable. If people leave their families behind, then that’s a choice they’ve made. Unless their elderly parents can support themselves why should taxpayers foot the bill?
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