Several times over the past year, people have asked me some version of the following question:

‘Why is border security such a big issue in Australia, given the facts?’

It’s a complicated question, with no complete, easy answer. Anthony Burke has given one response, which I strongly suggest you read. He suggests that ours is a fantasy debate, distainful of basic facts. But I’m increasingly convinced that part of the reason has nothing to do with the facts. Because ‘the facts’ have been given. Again and again. It’s just that they’ve never been received – by large numbers of people to whom they were addressed.

It’s not an information problem. There’s no shortage of high-quality information on border security, the politics of asylum, irregular migration, Australia’s migration history – you name it. And in 2011 it’s not like a concerned citizen has to understand how navigate card files or microfiche to uncover them. The Commonwealth and its many bureaucracies not only produce an abundance of exhaustive files, but many are available online. Any of the facts they contain can be checked against a burgeoning literature carefully authored by journalists and academics. This isn’t the X Files. You wanna know about Australia’s problems with its aliens and others? Just Google it. The truth is out there. And yet, all the googleable information in the world is no guarantee of knowledge. Why?

Knowledge and information are not the same thing. At the moment our pedagogues are obsessively boosting ICT in primary schools, handing out laptops and iPads. In my view they’re doing this because they’re convinced that information, technology and knowledge are same thing. But this depends on curiosity. In the hands of the curious, these iConic technologies can be powerful tools for knowledge. But in the hands of the bored, the disinterested, the distracted, the preoccupied, and the uninvolved – even if they have the know how to use them –  they are mere gadgets, attention dividing toys filled with Angry Birds. Curiosity is vital, because to turn information into knowledge you have to want to know. This is equally true of border security. A percentage of people never even begin seeking the information, because they don’t care to know. I’m pretty convinced this generalization roughly characterizes a large number of Australians; Peter Browne at Inside Story has been arguing this from an electoral perspective for a while. Just as the Melbourne Cup is hardly ‘the race that stops the nation’, border security, and its iteration of nation and race, is not compelling, or even interesting, for many Australians. They’re just not curious. Let’s call this group A, and leave them to their apps.

But another large percentage, the one that I think is decisive for understanding the ‘size’ of Australian border security, ‘don’t know’ for a different reason. It’s not that they’re not curious – it’s because they already do know. Today Tonight (TT) reminds them they know that the Commonwealth ‘is putting out the welcome mat for refugees’; that refugees make four hundred dollars a week; that refugees live in four-star luxury, in ‘refugee resorts’ where there’s no wire fencing, and no bars… except the one by the pool. For the sake of simplicity let’s call this group B.

Millions of others, myself among them, make up the final decisive group for understanding the political intensity of border security. Let’s call them group C. This includes dedicated journalists like David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, who have been chasing this issue for over a decade. It also includes committed academics, talking about this from perspectives political, sociological, psychological, economic, and legal, the careful fruit of patient research. This group is often well connected to the human rights and international law crowd, who’ve have made a number of very compelling normative arguments about how we ought to change things for the better. Then there’s those who work directly with asylum seekers, cleaning up the mess and trying to address the trauma: NGOs, legal aid, church groups, community leaders, prominent concerned citizens.

Like Groups A and B, the members of Group C are extremely diverse in their approaches and interests. They certainly have their disagreements. But in all the conversations I’ve had, what holds Group C together is what it knows, and what that means. What it knows is that the systems and processes our government subjects asylum seekers to makes people want to kill themselves. It ruins people. It is extremely costly. And it needn’t be so. But don’t take my word for it; watch this recent 4 Corners report. And if you don’t know who Serco Australia are, watch this quick, accurate, segment from Hungry Beast. And if, after watching that, you want to know in more detail about why an Australian Labor government with an avowed commitment to de-privatization gave the contract to Serco, which I questioned a while back, the detail has all been revealed. It’s all here. Like I said, there is no shortage of high quality information on all this.

After four years of careful research, based on the knowledge I have gleaned from the information, however imperfect, I am sufficiently convinced that what Group B knows is not the truth. Not true at all. Almost all lies, in fact. But let’s not confuse truth and knowledge. In this context, they’re two different things – and this is the important political point.

On October 24, a member of Group C rightly pointed the finger at some of these lies. Jonathan Holmes of Media Watch ran an excellent critical analysis of TT – a proper piece of real journalism, in that it involved asking important, uncomfortable questions and doing good research. Holmes has been doing a great job of this for years, too, as this report from 2009 on the conflation of asylum seekers, welfare cheats AND terrorists demonstrates. TT have been framing this category of person for years. It is patient, it is carefully pitched, and in my view it is deliberate and reflexive. They know what they are doing, they know that they are doing it, and they know how to do it. This is part of how power relations operate in the twenty-first century. Then, on October 27, Holmes wrote an impassioned op-ed piece for ABC’s The Drum. It took information, and presented it in a way that lent itself to knowledge; it made you curious, even if you weren’t before. If you were watching Media Watch. If you read abc.net.au. Which would would only do if you were curious, or you didn’t already know. Scratch groups A and B.

Go Back to Where You Came From was a noble and by all accounts semi-successful attempt by Group C to reach A and B. But it aired on SBS. That’s not SBS’ fault. It’s to SBS’ credit that they made it, they deliberately deployed commercial-style production techniques – and maybe it made a difference. But it also meant that, just like Immigration Nation and First Australians, just as noble, just as worthy, it ended up, mostly, going back to where it came from: it told those who already knew what they already knew. Just as TT tells Group B what they already know. Group B has no excuse for its ignorance, but it feels no need to provide one in any case. TT just issues clarifications and continues as they were, completely non-responsible for what they say and the effects it reliably has. And Group A just defriended an acquaintance who got all uppity about a footballer accused of doing something nasty to a woman in a pub.

I don’t want to disparage Group B. I know one of these people personally. She’s a very kind woman, not a fool. She reads the Herald Sun every day, mostly because she has read the Herald Sun every day for decades, and she tunes in to TT every evening, for the same reason. They tell her what she knows, she trusts. All of her friends know what is said and written to be true, too. Which is part of why they’re not curious, either about iPads, or about Media Watch. Too complicated, a bit boring, a bit threatening. Not interested. But when you ask her, she’s very clear on who she trusts to stop the boats, and the outrageous luxuries that refugees receive (while she and the people in her community are struggling to make ends meet).

A public sphere presumes a dialogue, and assumes the appropriate shapes to facilitate it. Ideally, the public sphere should be a dialogue marked by the rational sharing of information: we create a life-in-common by getting informed, contesting our opinions, then finally submitting to the better argument.  Increasingly our societies are made up of what could be described as public sphericules: self-inflating, self-referential bubbles filled with people who like one another because they all agree about what they already know-to-be-true. Crikey is part of one. Australia in 2011, like the US, like so many other ‘advanced’ countries, are in the grip of externalized internal monologues, a hyperindividuating mass self-communication whose overhwhelming interest, for each person, in each sphericule, is to bless their own bubble by confirming the already known. What do these metaphorical bubbles look like? How do they feel?

The bubbles are transparent, and through their walls you can see the shipwrecks of the world. They bob up and down according to the sentiments of their occupants. And as long as each bubble continues on its buoyant way, each passes the other like ships in the night. Or if they do bump into one another, there is a soft, pillowy sound, like two balloons on the surface of a swimming pool, tapping one another as the breeze blows them together for a moment. They are kept afloat by emitted gases, the by-product of the accumulating circulations that must be continued, at all cost. In the case of border security, there are at least two known bubbles floating somewhere on the Indian Ocean, and reported though unspecified others – ghost bubbles. An Indonesian fisherman who passed too close to one reported hearing the sound of Angry Birds.