Politicians like to talk family. They talk about their own during campaigns, to establish their credential as human beings. They talk about ours, the 'working families' and 'family values' upon which socio-economies rest. There is even a party called Family First. But let's get real. We wreck families all the time.
Earlier this month, Border Force officials took without warning a Tamil asylum-seeking family from the small Queensland town of Biloela at 5am.
Nedasalingam and Priya were given ten minutes to pack, their Australian-born daughters (a toddler and a baby) hauled along with them to a Melbourne detention facility. Later flown to Perth, they would have been deported from there to Sri Lanka last Tuesday if it weren't for legal intervention. They were literally taken off the plane at the last minute.
This week, a paper tabloid and TV breakfast show (picking up from the tabloid) derailed the issue of Aboriginal child protection by proposing removals to white foster families. As South Sea/Darumbal journalist Amy McQuire sharply points out, this response is not only misplaced and alarming, but harmful. It stigmatises what ought to be restored, and strips agency.
If the usual defenders of family have said anything in defence of these families, I have not heard or seen it. Have they been defending only a certain kind of family all along?
That would be a pity. There is a lot to be said in terms of reorienting our society and economy around what makes all families flourish — including the ones that don't look like ours.
Most of our social problems are first located or sourced in the family: homelessness, substance abuse, gambling, youth detention, violence against women and children. These things are distinct and complex, but they also suggest failure in supporting families early on.
"It would be a pity if family were only some sort of morally prescriptive code, extolled only if it looks a certain way or is functional and privileged."
Our approach is still focused on the individual, 'problematising' them rather than understanding their context. It is not just that we take a silo approach but a reactive one, instead of being preventative or empowering. That might be why these issues are so intractable. We keep 'solving' the wrong end of the problem.
Teachers sense this in the limits of what they can do in the classroom, in how urgent it can be to support a struggling family. Students go home at the end of