On Being An Expat Ashamed Of My Country

The last time I spoke to my dad he told me he felt ashamed to be an Australian.

This type of hyperbolic, off-handed remark is what you become used to hearing from idealistic, rose-tinted-glasses-wearing revolutionary students on university campuses around the country; young guys at the pub might spew that kind of remark out after a couple of pints and half an episode of the Chaser. I know I did. When I was a teenager I made three shirts that read ‘Un-Australian and Proud’. They referenced the series of ads made by the lamb industry in the mid-naughties that featured a dancing Sam Neill forcing some diatribe down our anemia-riddled throats about how not eating red meat made you Un-Australian. That was it for my vegetarian housemates and I. If we had to eat red meat to be Australian we didn’t want in, and we were going to make some stencils and tell all of Melbourne what we thought about it.

But my dad is a calculated man. A man who doesn’t mince his words is one whose divulges you take seriously. His delicate and metered choice of language took him around the world, so when he says something as blunt and unforgiving as this my ears prick up.

The events that unfolded on Manus Island over the past week and the irreconcilable death of Reza Berati have pretty obviously had a profound effect on the 40 percent of Australians who didn’t want the Australian government to “increase the severity of the treatment of asylum seekers”. My dad was among them. Over Skype he ranted about gulags, a comparison that has appeared many times in the media this week, and how Scott Morrison is a bastard. He told me via Skype, because we live on opposite sides of the world.

Germany, where I live, has a less-than-perfect track record when it comes to immigration and refugees. Last year, around 200 Syrian and Afghani asylum seekers were met by the screams of right-wing extremists as they began moving into their new homes, a shelter in Berlin’s eastern fringes. Just down the road the conditions in Germany’s refugee camps were being brought under scrutiny thanks to the dedicated and unrelenting body of refugees that had been camped out in Kreuzberg’s Oranienplatz for over a year. Their demands? Improve the state of Germany’s refugee camps to bring them to a standard that meets all of the basic human rights.

While far from perfect, Berlin remains a major hub for immigration – both for refugees and for expats. The city has started to make changes that welcome new migrants. Integration programs and language classes, affordable childcare and access to health and welfare systems are becoming more common. But these largely benefit the more privileged migrants to the city: in the borough where I live, 60% of the population have a migration history, while a staggering 73% of children lived in poverty less than half a decade ago.

Germany is a politically conservative country, which suffers from a percentage of the population that sees refugees as an ailment to the nation, just like in Australia. But when those conservatives speak up, the vitriol they’re met with, especially in Berlin, makes you warm inside. For many Germans, these groups and ideals dredge up a period of the past that the rest of the country has spent decades trying to recover from. So it’s shameful that reports from Australia manage to sound like something from a Siberian labour camp in the 1940s.

In a week where Kiev and Sochi were plastered across every front page, it was hardly surprising that few non-Australian Berliners knew much about Scott Morrison, Manus Island or G4S. Australia doesn’t really make waves in the media over here. I had to sit there, with my European friends, explaining what goes on in our home, girt by sea. And each time I’d slowly watch as their jaws dropped. Their eyes would widen, they’d shift uncomfortably in their seats.

I explained about the way our navy intersects those fleeing the most heinous regimes in the world and tows them away from safety. About how they’re placed in “offshore processing facilities” in countries that the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has repeatedly brought in to question over the past decade.  About how when they’re in these facilities they’re guarded by the same people that guard nuclear weapons and operate private prisons in at least four countries around the world.  And I told them how this week they killed a 23-year-old boy from Iran who came to meet his family in Australia. A boy that spent his time in the facility moving bugs and moths into the garden so they wouldn’t get trod on. I’m scared that in the morning I’m going to have to explain how the asylum seekers at Manus Island are now under the control of a former-Sri Lankan army commander. If it wasn’t so terrifying it would be ironic.

As I sat there explaining what my country does to those in the most desperate of need I started to feel the shame my dad felt creep through my body. It’s the same shame that thousands of people in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth came out on Sunday night to stand up against. It’s the same shame that a small group of us shared outside the Australian Embassy tonight in Berlin.

I can’t help but feel that these violations of human rights simply wouldn’t stand in Europe. I’ve watched a government be toppled by a people who’d had enough of being violated, just an overnight train-ride away from my apartment. The government killed dozens of its own citizens and were forced to feel the shame that my fellow moral Australians are feeling today. You kill your own in Europe and the world caves in around you. You kill someone who wants nothing more to be one of your own in Australia and you can cover it up with lies, election promises and by placing the blame on a vulnerable, desecrated group of people.

It’s time for Scott Morrison to follow in Viktor Yanukovych’s footsteps and fall on his sword. We don’t want violators of human rights making our decisions anymore than the people of Ukraine do.

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Sam is a Berlin-based writer and photographer from Australia. His pet-project is the annual journal of photography, This is the Same Ocean, and he Tweets from here.

Feature image taken by the author at the #LightTheDark vigil for Reza Berati, at the Australian Embassy in Berlin.