The Knight in Tarnished Armour: Australia’s Hypocrisy and the Iranian Footballers
Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Australia wears its albatross with pride; only ours is not a bird, but a shackle of our own making. We clasp it tight as we lecture the world on liberty, even as the stench of our contradictions follows us onto every stage. Do one thing, say another: it might as well be our national creed.
We are a country that genuflects to empire like a Stockholm Syndrome victim, mistaking servility for strategy. From Vietnam to Iraq, we’ve marched in lockstep with Washington’s lies; LBJ’s quagmire, Bush’s phantom WMDs, and now the atomic white elephants of AUKUS, submarines we can’t crew, dock, or afford. Sold to us by a former CIA director and a prime minister who still preens over his “very positive” chats with war criminals, these tin fish are less a fleet than a monument to our gullibility. Meanwhile, Pine Gap hums in the desert, a silent accomplice to double-tap missile strikes on Iranian schools, while our leaders clasp their hands and whisper, “But America is our friend.” Friendship, it seems, is just another word for complicity. We howl about Tehran’s theocrats, but clasp the hands of Gulf monarchies that only recently allowed women to drive and still subject them to male guardianship, and of Emirates whose gleaming airports; serving QANTAS routes the previous CEO was too cheap to cover with our own planes, are built on the backs of migrant workers arbitrarily detained and deported when they become inconvenient.
Yet for sheer audacity, nothing matches Australia’s current cameo on the world stage of perfidy, lies and betrayal. A nation that spent two decades perfecting the dark arts of imprisoning desperate people on remote Pacific islands now drapes itself in the cloak of liberation. Six Iranian footballers make for such a convenient photo opportunity. The young women, brave and defiant, refused to sing their country’s anthem, a hybrid of national pride and theocratic pledge. Iranian state TV calls them “wartime traitors,” a charge that can carry the death penalty. Their courage is real. Their risk is mortal. But what are we really offering?
Our MPs speak of rescuing Iranian women from patriarchal repression while presiding over a labour market in which Australian women still earn less than men for the same work, decade after decade, around 78 cents to the dollar across large employers. On paper, Iranian law recognises equal pay for equal work, even if the promise is routinely betrayed in practice. Here, we prefer a different hypocrisy: formal equality, entrenched pay gaps, and a political class that can’t abide women as leaders and only rediscovers ‘women’s rights’ when they can be weaponised against an enemy state.
The government that welcomed them with such hearty self-congratulation is the same government that, as recently as last year, was still sending asylum seekers to Nauru under the very offshore processing regime it inherited, and declined to dismantle.
The numbers are a ledger of shame. Between 2012 and 2014 alone, Australia transferred 4,180 people offshore, with detentions on Manus Island peaking at 1,353 souls in January 2014, and Nauru at 1,233 that August. The operators of the Nauru facility made a profit of half a million dollars per detainee in a single financial year. By 2022, the cost to Australian taxpayers had ballooned to over four million dollars per asylum seeker per year—nearly twelve thousand dollars a day, not to house them in comfort, but to ensure they remained stranded, stateless, and beyond the reach of our courts.
Leaked case files, Senate reports, and the UN document child abuse, sexual violence, self-harm, suicide, and murder by guards. One former detainee described his existence with a precision no politician has matched: “You can’t plan. You don’t know what the future will be. I feel like I can’t be useful in any way. I’m just wasting away here, without any idea of what my goals can be.”
Contrast this with the Iranian team’s reception: brave young women escaping repression, a democratic nation extending sanctuary, ministers speaking solemnly of liberty. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, the Shoppies’ Peter Dutton as far as our digital workhouse goes, tells Parliament it is a moment of “joy” and “relief,” posting photographs of the women smiling as he signs their documents.
What the happy snaps don’t show is the iron-clad exclusion that remains fully operational behind the ministerial grin; the turn-back tinnies, the offshore processing centres held in “enduring capability,” the legislation passed just days earlier that would allow Australia to ban entry to people from nominated countries for up to six months without individual assessment. That same law, introduced as the footballers were still in their Gold Coast safe house, would let the government stop people from those countries entering Australia even if they already held valid visas. Prejudice against some communities earns an envoy, a media conference and new funding; the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, appointed in 2024 with a three-year term reporting directly to the Prime Minister. Prejudice against those who arrive by boat earns them a tent on Nauru and a line item in the defence budget.
For years, our political vernacular has treated Muslims as a problem to be managed: Pauline Hanson can muse on national television that there are effectively no ‘good’ Muslims, and a prime minister can lecture Muslim leaders in language their communities condemned as inflammatory and divisive. Now, six Iranian women arrive as the acceptable exception; photogenic, grateful, politically useful, the ‘good’ Muslims who help launder a system that still quietly turns away boats and imprisons people whose only crime is to seek safety. We are not a compassionate country. The women can be assured of being treated as aliens and second-class citizens here, too; selective sanctuary for those whose stories photograph well, total surrender to the Israeli-Zionist lobby etched against One Nation’s Hanson and Tony Abbott’s Islamophobia.
Six footballers photograph fabulously well. Forty thousand do not.
The announcement to grant the players visas came after Donald Trump, currently carpet-bombing Iran at Israeli and Saudi request, as part of Regime Change R Us, the old CIA-Mossad Pentagon franchise called on Albanese to act, warning that Australia would make a “terrible humanitarian mistake” if it allowed the team to return. Albanese described their subsequent phone call as “very positive.” Let that sink in: a man waging an illegal war on a sovereign nation telephones the Australian Prime Minister to instruct him in the finer points of refugee protection, and our leader calls it positive. The theatre does not get richer than this.
Beneath the choreography lies a record soaked in cruelty, secrecy, and political manipulation. In 2004, at Alexander Downer’s behest, Australian intelligence planted surveillance devices in the cabinet conference room of Timor-Leste, one of the poorest nations on earth, newly independent and still counting its dead from the Indonesian occupation, to gain the upper hand in gas and oil negotiations benefiting Woodside Petroleum.
When an intelligence officer known as Witness K grew troubled by what he’d done and sought to expose it, Australia seized his passport, raided his home, and prosecuted him and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, in proceedings so shrouded in secrecy that the defendants were barred from knowing the evidence against them. Downer should have faced court. Instead, the whistleblower did.
Settle down, Albo. We do not become champions of freedom simply by granting asylum to those whose stories photograph well. The six Iranian women who chose to remain in Australia are brave, and their choice deserves respect. But Fatemeh Pasandideh, Zahra Ghanbari, Zahra Sarbali, Atefeh Ramazanzadeh, and Mona Hamoudi did not arrive here to validate our self-image. They came because they were terrified, and Australia happened to be where the tournament was held. This is a cheap stunt done solely to paint Iran as a dictatorship of religious extremists, unlike our allies, the Saudis or those nice Emirates people.
Trump’s ICE of course offers terror as good as you’ll find in anywhere. And his military machine is run by a Christian fanatic.
If we truly wish to reclaim the moral language we now so glibly invoke, we might begin by dismantling the machinery of cruelty we built in the name of border protection: the detention archipelago, the turn-back doctrine, the laws that treat visa-holders as threats before they’ve spoken a word.
We might begin by protecting, rather than prosecuting, those who tell the truth about what we do in the dark.
The knight in tarnished armour turns out, on closer inspection, to be wearing someone else’s armour, over a very old stain. And the albatross? It’s still there, heavy around our necks, part of those Australian values we lecture would-be migrants about.
Urban Wronski Writes 