Our society has forgotten how to disagree with each other.

We’re bringing it back.

Welcome to our new section for the airing of opinions that don’t always fit the party line, but are worthy of discussion and thought. This section will aim to present two sides of an argument. 

We thought we’d start off with a controversial one. 

Turning Back the Boats - Stuart Southwell

I think we should have turned back the boats. 

Consequences are important in ethics. 

The ends don’t always justify the means, but the consequences cannot be excluded from ethical decision making. 

Welcoming the boats feels like the right thing to do. It feels warm and fuzzy. We see the stories of the refugees who are welcomed this way. This open embrace, however, has a dark undercurrent. 

Approximately 1000 refugees drowned trying to get to Australia on unsuitable boats and we don’t hear those stories.

The story of the lone child sent to safety by their parents who never made it. 

The story of the mother holding her baby above the water as they both drown.  Those stories are all at the bottom of the ocean. 

Stopping the boats feels wrong, but letting them come cost lives.

Allowing boats feels warm and fuzzy, but if our choices continue to allow people to die risking their travel, that is an unethical choice. 

The consequences cannot be ignored.

The ethical path is to swallow our moral “purity” so that others don’t swallow water. 

There are of course many caveats to this, particularly if the issue is not a binary choice. We should also of course do other things to take care of and support refugees in safe ways. 

I’d rather have a policy that is good rather than feels good. 

But is there a better way? - Bridget Allen

It is a heartbreaking thought to think of those who have died trying to make it to our shores.

It also chills me to think of those who in practice were locked up and the key thrown away. Those who were stripped of hope and humanity. Men, women and children who were so traumatised by their treatment by our country that death seemed like an escape.

So was it really a case of one or the other? A choice between deaths at sea or human rights abuses on our shores?

I contend that other alternatives existed. Perhaps I am an optimist but I think moral conviction and imagination can take us a long way.

One such alternative I recently heard of was an NGO group in Europe using rescue boats to save  those attempting dangerous passages to safer shores. And they delivered refugees to countries that for the most part dealt with them more humanely than we did. 

I do not think we properly examined more humane options before we "stopped the boats". There must be a better way than turning our backs to the immense suffering of those who have fled their homes.

But what do you think?