Article summary analysis methods and applications

Social Policy in Australia

One of the most important tasks that a citizen of any democracy has a duty to undertake is to serve as a watchdog for his or her government. The topic that was selected for this paper - examining the way in which the Australian government has addressed the issue of refugees - is an important one because it allows the "ordinary" person to gain an understanding of the ways in which the government works when it believes that it is not going to be scrutinized by the public.

All governments - including democratic governments like that in Australia - behave differently when they are aware that their actions will be public and when they believe that their actions will be known only to a few people within the government itself. This should not be surprising: This is the way in which people act in general. Many governments act in ways when officials believe that they are protecting national security in a way that does not bear public scrutiny very well. This is essentially what has happened with the issue of goats full of refugees arriving in Australia. They do not pose the sort of immediate threat to the nation that ships full of foreign soldiers would pose, of course, but an unlimited stream of poor refugees coming into the country does pose a real threat to the nation.

It is because of this sense that the government is acting in a clandestine manner that has outraged so many Australians, perhaps even more than the actions themselves, as is evident in the articles that were examined for the original paper.

There is also the issue - that is not raised in any of these articles - of the fact that citizens do not want to be associated with the difficult decisions that governments have to make. We want our governments to be honest with us, but we also do not want this because if we know about all of the actions of our government then we become culpable for them. We want our governments to protect us - from foreign armies, from refugees who (if they come in sufficient numbers) can break the social services system. But we also want our government to take care of all of the dirty work without involving us - even as we want to be informed.

The anger that is apparent in the articles used for this paper must thus be seen as arising from two different sources. One is these is a legitimate anger arising from the events in and of themselves: People believe that the government that they elected acted in their name that was far from civilized. But the other arises from a sort of cognitive dissonance, from the fact that most people understand that it is not fair both to expect honesty from their government and yet also expect to shield them from the realities of governance in the complex modern world. But simply because it is unreasonable to want two incompatible things does not prevent us from wanting them - and from being angry that we cannot have them.