MrGareth’s Missives

n.

3. A 2013 American dystopian science fiction action thriller film 

I was of course aware of the comparisons made between the movie Elysium and the Australian Immigration issue before I finally sat down to watch it.  Not least because of Matt Damon's own effective "issue-jacking" efforts here in Sydney last year.  But the comparison was made all the more more pertinent by the circumstances of my viewing: the final stages of a long flight to Australia.  The film itself is not strong - with Jodie Foster's disappointing performance a stark low point.  But it does do an excellent job of abstracting the issue and thereby very effectively driving home the ugly reality in which we live - a reality the political debate clouds and disrupts on a daily basis.

Without spoiling it for anyone, the plot basically envisages a derelict planet earth ruined by disease, over population and abject poverty.  The wealthy have escaped this harsh environment to recreate their affluent lifestyles on a manufactured planet orbiting the earth.  Very early in the movie, the extremes to which the Elysians are willing to go to protect this privileged existence are illustrated by a scene where desperate earth dwellers, transported unofficially on spaceships by futuristic human traffickers, are brutally shot down in outer space.   

While a couple of events on the plane as we neared closer to Australia brought into clear focus the similarities between Australia and Elysium; I was struck just today by a story where asylum-seekers on a boat to Australia have been turned back by the Australian Navy and subsequently run aground off the Indonesian coast.  In a quite bizarre life-imitates-art irony, the language used in the film to describe the dichotomy of existences (e.g: a "caravan of illegal immigrants from Earth") has been echoed unknowingly by the new Abbott Government (the script pre-dates the policy).  Soon after taking power, in a distastefully cynical piece of semantics, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison ordained that what had previously been called "clients" now be referred to as "illegals".

As we came into land in Sydney, our screens all started playing what purported to be a "Welcome to Australia" message but was in fact a long list of strict prohibitions and regulations with which the Australian Government protects this far-flung idyll.  But more pertinently still, our plane was required to sit on the tarmac for half an hour while an unwell passenger was appraised for mandatory quarantine by Immigration officials.  While this has happened often on my arrivals in Australia; the Elysium message still resonating around my mind meant the Ivory-Tower security we have built, and seldom think twice about, seemed writ-large to me.

Like satire, Science Fiction is very good at abstracting an issue by removing it from the day-to-day and place it in new light.  Elysium's director had already achieved this very well with his most famous success: District 9.  What sat most awkwardly with me was my own reaction to the citizens of Elysium.  Their obvious contempt and rejection of their fellow human beings back on Earth was repulsive.  Meanwhile the oblivious nature of their luxurious existences in light of the mayhem down below seemed as offensive as it was soulless.  But they are - of course - us. However, the Abbott Government which has shrouded the execution of its immigration policy in secrecy and mis-information - will justify its anti-democratic and Kremlinesque clandestineness by telling itself that this is what we want, while telling us that it is protecting us from what we prefer to live in denial of.  Is this how we want the issue to be treated?

I don't want to be an Elysian.  I've always been uncomfortable with the stark contrast between the circumstances of my own emigration to Australia and those from other - dare I say it, non-Anglo-Saxon cultures - who would have arrived at the same time (as missives from those early years will attest).  While I was welcomed with open arms (a welcome I remain nevertheless grateful for, I stress); the fact that other arrivals who didn't arrive by plane, or from the West, and in desperate situations languished in detention centres.  Their claims for asylum were processed lethargically and ultimately they would only secure Temporary Protection Visas and not the 1st class citizenship I was quickly and easily granted.

I hope and urge that in 2014, the Opposition and Greens are able to use Parliament to legislate for more transparency in the Government's handling of this issue so we are all exposed fully to just how cruel and inhumane it is.  I hope also that a great deal more compassion is injected into the debate than currently exists - compassion the current Government, and particularly the Minister, seems bereft of.

While so much of the plot of the film is laughable, many of the performances woeful and reliance on special effects fails to obscure its undeniable B-movie character; its denouement certainly does remind us that we should regard refugees and asylum seekers as one-of-us and that in a parallel universe or distant future we could easily find ourselves in their shoes - there but for the grace of God go we.  I am sure were we to do so, we would find our Elysian behaviour quite abhorrent and enraging.