Strange. So strange. On Friday, while everyone was making jokes about Border Force, I was panicking. Yes, yes, I know. You lot who got off the boat in 1788 were all making jokes and organising flash mobs and responding to tweets. You were all behaving as if you own the place, had a right to your spot in the world.
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That was not me. Me, I just burst into tears. I was thinking: “What if they find out?” A complete hyperventilating overreaction. Until it’s not.
There are weeks and days and sometimes months where I never think about being Jewish, or at least when I never think about having been born to two practising Jews. When I never think about the embodied privilege of looking like everyone else. I’m more beige than white. I’m more likely to be asked how I keep my tan, as code for: “Are you some kind of wog?”
And there are days like last Friday. If you are a person who has ever experienced racism, you will know how I feel. My own identity papers don’t mark me as Jewish. But you could take a look at me and make a call about my heritage. And people do.
And that’s what the Border enForcers planned to do. I have no confidence – at all – in the excuses made since Operation Fortitude fell apart last Friday. If anyone on earth believes this was a low-level sign off, please hand over your Pollyanna pills, I could do with them.
Police have been able to use stop and search for nearly 10 years if they thought you were up to no good. I’m not entirely sure exactly how you had to demonstrate you were up to no good – but the educated money last week was on racial profiling.
Mark Finnane, an ARC Laureate Fellow and a Griffith University professor of history, comforts me. “I think the anxieties that were created by this incredibly clumsy procedure, especially the media release, tapped into a whole range of historical and everyday experiences, calling up memories of Nazism, Stalinism and any other authoritarian regime. That’s why people responded with such concern,” he said.
Good. I was not hyperventilating. I wasn’t overreacting. Finnane says the government has created a war-like situation, where there are “inevitably elements of wedge politics.
For a very long time, I used to freeze whenever anyone in a uniform came near me. I am the only person I know who has what feels like a heart attack when pulled over for an RBT. And believe me, it’s not because I’ve been drinking.
Finnane describes the government’s approach this way. “It’s a significant departure from the old ethos of the department of immigration, which was about nation-building and settling in. That’s quite different to now where they have played an increasingly coercive role, since Tampa.”
But what happened on Friday was at least in the public eye. At the same time, in another part of Australia, Border Force was also in operation. Not playing Fortitude, playing Abaci in the Northern Territory. This time, they were in cahoots with Sex Crimes Division.
Together, they decided to target 19 businesses including massage parlours to see if they could find sex workers and those who had breached their visa conditions. It’s illegal to operate brothels in the Northern Territory, although you can be an escort or provide escort services but not on the premises. No news of any arrests yet. Nor of any deportations. Just constant harassment of people who don’t fit the norm. People like us.