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If Fawad Ahmed debuts in this Ashes series, he’ll be celebrated as the hero of a tremendous story. If he’d come to Australia by a different mode of transport, he could face imprisonment or exile.
According to team sources on this tour, Ahmed is still very much in contention for these Ashes, and certainly for the return leg. It has been a long time since Australia has fielded a spinner with a real attacking edge. He could be the man.
If he gets his hands on a baggy green, prepare for a media avalanche.
We love stories of unlikely triumph against adversity. Our protagonist has all the requisite qualities: he’s humble, gracious, deeply talented. He escaped Pakistan with his life under threat, fought hard to be granted asylum in Australia, and could now triumph on an international sporting stage in a manner unthinkable only months ago.
In a similar vein, North Melbourne’s Majak Daw has attracted attention disproportionate to his AFL achievements, media outlets loving the story of how a boy who lived in Sudanese refugee camps until the age of 12 managed to reach the elite level of an entirely foreign football code.
But our tendency to lionise and romanticise these individuals throws into stark relief Australia’s split-personality relationship with immigrants and refugees.
Let’s look at Ahmed’s case. In 2010 the Pakistani leg-spinner arrived here on a short-stay visa to play club cricket in New South Wales, with the intention of applying for asylum once here after death threats in his native country.
He followed through with that plan after moving to Melbourne, and during his wait amassed a prodigious bowling record in Victorian club and grade cricket.
By the time his asylum application was rejected, he’d attracted the attention of the Victorian squad, and training with them led to net bowling for the Australian team as they prepared to face South Africa’s Imran Tahir.
Ahmed’s only chance to stay in Australia was via the unlikely source of ministerial intervention, but he was able to obtain it in November 2012 with the backing of Cricket Australia and the help of the publicity around his case.
From there he was selected to play Sheffield Shield cricket for Victoria and Big Bash League for the Melbourne Renegades, before Parliament expressly passed legislation in 2013 to allow his citizenship to be fast-tracked in time for Ashes eligibility.
Throughout the process, people associated with Cricket Australia and cricket generally have spoken in glowing terms about his bravery and persistence, and their admiration for him. The cricketing public has been welcoming and encouraging. In this context, ‘asylum seeker’ is applied as a badge of honour.
It all sits very uncomfortably with our broader national attitude. At the same time, even in the same editions, our newspapers have joined forces with political leaders in beating up anxiety about other asylum seekers heading our way, especially those by sea.
Historically, most asylum seekers arrive by plane, with passports and papers, just like Fawad Ahmed.
Yet for months and years, the focus has been solely on boats. The Opposition and the major papers discuss boat people in the language of water: flooding in, swamping us, a tide, an inundation. The sense is of refugees as an imminent threat to our way of life, rather than as individuals like Ahmed, just looking for a chance.
News Ltd hacks total the dollar value of toasters and kettles in refugee accommodation. A recent visit to Sydney yielded a Tele headline reading “Out of Africa”, with accompanying photos of the threatening black people who would supposedly form the next human tsunami.
In this debate, ‘asylum seeker’ becomes a pejorative, interchangeable with deliberately false terms like ‘illegal immigrant’.
Since the Tampa in 2001, boat arrivals have been key at every election. They will be especially so in the coming poll. Despite the low numbers of people involved, it’s an issue Australians manage to see as deeply personal.
Tony Abbott’s Coalition has campaigned on little else but ‘stop the boats’ through an entire parliamentary term, while Labor has responded by trying to occupy more ground that the Coalition would once have held as its own.
Kevin Rudd’s announcement yesterday that all boat arrivals would henceforth be resettled in New Guinea was the latest audacious bit of one-upmanship in an unedifying contest to see who can be the most hardline.
Talk of preventing drownings is disingenuous. It has been big in Parliament for the past couple of years, but the anti-boat franticness predates it by a decade. Rudd’s boat-stopping promise appeals to exactly the same sentiments and demographics as John Howard’s.
Nobody is prepared to try disabusing the public of its misconceptions: that people seeking refuge are nothing to fear, that the few thousand boat arrivals each year are a fraction of our annual migration intake, and a statistical blip in to Australia’s population.
To add some perspective, if the 7379 boat arrivals of 2011-12 repeated annually, it would take a bit over 3000 years for them to double our current population.
In the Bizarro World of our current political climate, Australia’s defining policy debate is about something that affects almost none of us personally. Most of us have never met an asylum seeker, much less had one steal our job or wife. But the issue comes down to a cussed matter of apparent principle, that people can’t just show up here if we didn’t already say they could.
Unless, of course, they bowl a handy top-spinner. So here we are, happy to claim national good-bloke status for helping Ahmed, while brushing off the idea that we ought to help what other people we can, or ought not resent them for presuming to ask for it.
There could hardly have been an asylum seeker in our county’s history to have better fortune or more assistance than Fawad Ahmed. His aid came from the same government departments and mechanisms that frustrate the identical wishes of so many others.
He reaped the benefit of professional sport’s profile in this country; of being a good spinner when we haven’t had one for years; even of being a wrist spinner to evoke subtle echoes of the glory days of Warne.
He showed bravery, and skill, and an incredible amount of willpower to succeed with Victoria and the Renegades, force his way into the Australia A side, and place himself on the verge of national selection. I have only respect for his achievements.
Yet if Fawad Ahmed by trade had been a fridge repairman or a chemical engineer or a street sweeper, if he hadn’t been in possession of a fizzing leg break and a well disguised googly, he could never have called upon the clout of a national representative body like CA.
There would have been no ministerial intervention, no profiles in the newspapers. He would have been deported back to the country where he feared for his life, just one more statistic to be used by people mouthing off about queue jumpers and freeloaders.
So the fates fall for thousands of others, even as we’re told to resent them and reject them and demand their stricter regulation.
In January this year, the asylum seeker Fawad Ahmed was selected in the Prime Minister’s XI against the West Indies. Yesterday, seven months later, the Prime Minister announced that no new boat arrival would ever find a home in Australia again.
If those who choose to board boats could fly like Ahmed did, they would. If they could find a queue, they’d join. If there was an orderly process, they wouldn’t risk their lives at sea. They know the price, enough of them have paid it.
But that’s not something Australians can collectively bring ourselves to acknowledge or address.
Instead, failing to see the unhappy irony, we move closer to a day when we may well fete our newest Ashes hero, an asylum seeker who bravely fled persecution from a foreign land, while intercepting a thousand others with identical stories, and sending them permanently to the dubious paradise of Papua New Guinea.