It is disappointing that both Labor and Liberal leaders are spruiking policy that taps into negative community feelings toward 'the other' when it comes to asylum seekers and a 'smaller-growing Australia'. This reinforces fear and creates division.
In Monday's Australian, respected commentator, Paul Kelly, criticised it as 'a dismal and disreputable stand driven by polling'. And in an opinion piece in The Sydney Morning Herald on 19 July, Tim Costello argued that 'an election fought on such an issue is likely to tear at the very fabric of Australia's egalitarian psyche and take us back to the very worst of the race debate that fostered the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation'.
Francis D'Sa, who features in this interview, offers an alternative vision embracing multiculturalism and religious pluralism, which are global realities today and will become increasingly so in the future. (Continues below)
D'Sa knows this reality well. He is a Jesuit priest and theologian from Pune in India, part of a Christian minority in a country whose majority is Hindu, but which also has large numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. He has become well known as a specialist in inter-religious dialogue, speaking and writing extensively on the appropriate theology that will promote understanding and good relations between different cultures and faiths.
D'Sa spoke to Eureka Street TV at a conference at the Australian Catholic University in Brisbane called 'Dreaming a New Earth: Indigenous Spiritualities and the Vision of Raimon Panikkar', and the interview is sponsored by the University's Asia-Pacific Centre for Inter-Religious Dialogue.
D'Sa is one of the leading scholars worldwide on the theology of Raimon Panikkar, who is a pioneer in promoting inter-religious dialogue. Panikkar, now 92 and only recently retired, was born in northern Spain of a Spanish Catholic mother and Indian Hindu father. After ordination as a Catholic priest, he was one of the first Western academics to go to India to study Eastern religions.
Panikkar has three doctorates, speaks a dozen languages, and is a prolific author, having written some 40 books, including a number of seminal works. On returning to Europe after many years absence, when asked about his faith pilgrimage, Panikkar answered with his now famous and often quoted reply, 'I left as a Christian, I found myself a Hindu, and I return a Buddhist, without having ceased to be a Christian.'
As well as being a student of