Perhaps there is no way to reconcile the conflict between the universalist ideal of a world community based on the sense of common humanity, and the narrower idea of a bounded national community as expressed by Philip Ruddock: 'I don't believe in freedom that entitles people to ignore borders and simply decide, well I don't care what you think, I'm going to live amongst you.'
As Benedict Coleridge recently commented in Eureka Street: 'the liberal political-philosophical tradition ... rests on that idea of the bounded community where a liberal society might thrive if effectively safeguarded. And in Australia (and elsewhere) the concepts offered by the liberal tradition have been employed by both sides of politics to give a 'reasonable' varnish to inhumane migration control policies.' This is where we are today, after Kevin Rudd on Friday cut through the Gordian knot of boat people policy dilemmas with which his party has been wrestling since 2007.
One thousand one hundred fellow human beings have drowned since 2009, trying to come to Australia in small unsafe boats without our government's permission. They did not break any Australian laws, but were intensely resented by some Australians: how dare they try to join our bounded community? This national anger has played out symbolically in a subtle story of delayed rescues and avoidable deaths at sea, and in prolonged punitive administrative mistreatment of the 97 per cent who survived the perils of the journey.
In a thousand hurtful bureaucratic ways, we made clear our national desire to punish people who dared breach the borders of our national community. But finally, reluctantly, we have allowed most of them to settle among us.
This was always the Australian way of immigration: an initially narrow Anglo-Celtic community gradually, at times unwillingly, allowing a widening of the definition of what it means to be an Australian. It happened with the Chinese who came during the Gold Rush; the Jews and Greeks who came from Europe in the 1920s and 1930s; the East European displaced persons who came after World War Two; the Vietnamese and Cambodians who came after 1975; people from Middle Eastern countries who came in boats since the late 1990s.
Gradually, the idea of what it means to be Australian has widened. We became a successful multicultural country.
Now Rudd, with a cruel but politically brilliant stroke, has ended this bigger and more noble national idea of ourselves. We