Processing...

Uncharacteristically I listened to a bit of talkback this morning on the way to work instead of my audio books.  I guess I needed a reprieve from Madame Bovary.  I heard an interview with Abbott on the "processing" of refugees.  I am not sure what I think of Gillard's plan to "process" asylum seekers in East Timor, but I do know I hate the language used.  I have blogged about this before, but can't help commenting on it again.  Processing - a word associated with papers, not people.  Factories, not people.  Plastic cheese.  Not people.  Salami, not people.  Especially not people fleeing devastating regimes, starvation, persecution.  People whose very lives are dependent on finding asylum in a country supposedly willing to "give everyone a fair go".  When we start using words like processing in relation to people, we dehumanise.  Processing them sounds like not being all that interested in their stories.  It sounds like a lot of paperwork to find a way to send them back.  It sounds like deafness and blindness to injustice, in the name of Australia's "precious borders".  The lack of compassion just in language alone is appalling.  Part of me wishes that Marsden's imagined invasion of Australia really happened (Tomorrow when the war began).  Just so people like Abbott and other like-minded people on both sides of politics could experience what it is like to be on the outer, displaced, afraid, and to have lost everything.  Rant over.  For now.