Why didn’t you come home when you were told to?

Because I wasn’t told to. The advice given to Australians on the 17^th March 2020 was clearly aimed at people on holiday, not people in the middle of 2 year work contracts, with the ink barely dry on a new lease. While the Department of Foreign Affairs warned that “you might come in contact with more people than usual… in crowded airports,” I was grateful we’d got the internet connected a week earlier, as I scrambled to organise distance learning for my four high school classes. What airports? We weren’t anywhere near airports. The instruction to come home wasn’t for us.

DFAT warned Australian citizens that the countries they should return from had medical systems that “may not be as well-equipped as Australia’s or have the capacity to support foreigners”. On that day I had a dental appointment booked to correct a cosmetic issue with a front tooth. The bill came to less than the cost of a takeaway dinner, laughably inexpensive by Australian standards. Over the past three years my partner and I have a running joke about the incredible standard and low cost of dentistry in the Netherlands. Clearly the warning by DFAT about “overseas medical systems” unable to cope and unwilling to treat me (a *gasp!* foreigner) was not aimed at those Aussies with dental appointments in Europe.

The only people he could have been talking to – the only people agile enough to change plans and jump on planes and dutifully heed the warning – were people on holiday.

As I write this, there are nearly 40,000 Australians registered with DFAT, trying to get back into their country. I have watched that number stagnating since May 2020. Limits on the number of people allowed in each week, and airlines frequently bumping people – at the last minute! – to higher bidders have left Aussies stranded all over the world. People who had to pack up apartments and give notice at work, or to their children’s school, before booking a flight with zero guarantees of actually getting them home.

It seems fairly obvious why we “didn’t come home when [we] were told to” but for many people grumbling in comment threads or shrugging without sympathy in letters to editors, the fact of Australian expatriation across the globe is very difficult to comprehend.

I have faced this unique brand of Aussie incredulity before. When I moved to Sydney from Hong Kong in 2007 to start uni, I went to get a driver’s license. The application required 100 points of ID. My passport was worth 70. “Do you have have your Medicare card, love?”. No, I didn’t. Mum and I decided to trek across Parramatta to see if we could get that sorted. At the Medicare office the woman behind the counter was very suspicious. I am white (this shouldn’t be relevant, but unfortunately it is), and even then had a vaguely Australian accent thanks to over a decade of Australian International Schooling. 

“What do you mean you haven’t lived here since you were five?” I looked at her blankly. I just hadn’t. I’d lived 12 years in another country, even though I had been born in Australia, to Australian parents and had a Australian passport. Said passport had granted me entry to a dozen or so countries across the globe but apparently was not sufficient to allow me access to any of the basic infrastructure of Australian society. “Why did you leave?” the woman asked me, perturbed. I told her about my Dad’s work. She was still ruffled. She could not give me a Medicare card without 100 points of identification. Did I have a driver’s license?

I imagine that lady is one of those who comments on news stories about the thousands of stranded Aussies. It is simply untenable that these locked out citizens would whinge about gambling on commercial flights, homelessness and visa expiry when they were duly warned that the Australian borders were closing, that travel would become difficult.

It hasn’t been that difficult though, has it? It hasn’t been difficult for tennis stars (though they claim it was), it hasn’t been difficult for 1000 international students granted exemptions, or clutches of foreign investors arriving as they please while Aussies couch-surf, playing roulette with endless flight cancellations. It seems as if the only thing a person needs to do to get into Australia is to have the cash to grease all the cogs in the hotel quarantine and flight cap machinery, punted by the federal government to the states. 

But still, why didn’t we come home when we were told to?

…because we thought Australian citizenship meant something… though all those “fuck off, we’re full” tatts annually displayed on 26th Jan should have warned us: it means access to an exclusive club with a strict maximum capacity.

…because we thought Australia was a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights… though, lets be honest, they have a track record of ignoring that when it comes to issues related to desperate people trying to enter the country, or lay claim to their fundamental rights as native sons and daughters.

…because we didn’t think they’d be still fumbling around with the fact of their citizens scattered across the globe almost a year after that first ominous warning about “crowded airports”.

…because we’re lucky we can sign another contract, renew our visas, organise another lease, continue our expatriation while we wait for Australia to keep its most basic promises: our right to access the land whose coat of arms emblazons the blue passports laying dormant in our bedside tables. 

We could fork out the cash it takes to jump a queue of tens of thousands. We could pay for a pair of the first or business class tickets which have pulled the proverbial rug out from under whole families left stranded at the last minute by commercial airlines scrambling to cover the cost of huge planes with only 30 people on them.

We could pay to push ahead of others, but we won’t. To do so would be would be to deny that primal Aussie principal, deep in the core of our souls, below the sunscreen and the smashed avo and the adoration of bizarre animals: the firm belief in a “fair go”.

Uniquely Aussie in syntax, this catch-all phrase encompasses “mutual respect” “compassion for those in need” and “equality of opportunity for all”. Can someone please tell ScoMo to go read the Australian Values Statement?