Australia As A Global Citizen Essay

What is defined as a global citizen? They’re considered to be people or countries who understand their obligations at a global level. Over the past 50 years the countries of the world have become increasingly interconnected. With this, there has been an increasing awareness that only global cooperation can solve problems including poverty and epidemics, stop wars, and reverse environmental degradation and climate change. As the globe battles with these underlying problems, Australia’s partake, even the smallest amount, is fundamentally important, especially with its stance currently as being the 15th richest country in the world. However, in recent years Australia hasn’t demonstrated, in a few of these global issues, the true values and morals of being a good global citizen.

One of Australia’s biggest moral wrongdoings that has been continued to be overlooked is the providing of safety for refugees. Under the article 14, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it states that everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. It is not in anyway, shape or form illegal to seek asylum from maltreatment. Australia is obliged under international law to: offer protection, give support, ensure that any individual is not sent back unwillingly to the country of their origin. A report made by

the International Human Rights Watch in 2015 addresses the poor conditions of detention centres, the indefinite detention of individual refugees, and the practice of using enhanced screenings on asylum seekers who arrive by boat, that are also not provided with adequate legal representation or have not been given the right to appeal. Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, the high commissioner for Human Rights, quoted as outlining Australia’s refugee policies for “…leading to a chain of human rights violations, including arbitrary detention and possible torture following return to home countries.”   Is this how good global citizens act towards their neighbouring countries?

The next biggest problem within Australia is our environment. Climate change could potentially and most certainly impact our world’s most important valuables such as our oceans, animal species and even human lifestyles. With pollution leading to global warming and climate change, these changes not only will affect the weather, but changes also threaten jobs, agricultural production, water supplies, industries, human lives and ultimately, the survival of all species and entireties of ecosystems. Australia is among one of the largest polluters. Across all developed countries, Australia has the highest rate of per person greenhouse gases and our emissions continue to rise. In spite of Australia having only about 0.3% on the world’s population, we admit about a staggering 1.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this we continue to ignore the ongoing problems within our environment. For Australia to implement a national reduction of pollution we must not only reduce carbon by at least 25% by 2020 and at least by 90% by 2050. We must also maintain a price on carbon to reduce emission and drive renewable energy development which raises the question as to why the carbon tax was demolished. Australia has not yet vitally promised that it will do as much as it can to save our environment.

However, in saying all of this, Australia isn’t entirely a “bad country” as such, there are multiple different ways in which we do act as good global citizens. Australia is very stable and culturally diverse as a nation, in saying this, we are not at all perfect.

Australia is home to one of the world’s oldest living cultures, with Aboriginal communities established nearly 60,000 years before European settlement. Today, Australia is one of the world’s most multicultural countries, rich in Indigenous (this has been very controversial however) and immigrant cultures. Australia is a highly successful and affluent nation, ranked second in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report in 2015. Australia’s economy is consistently ranked among the strongest globally. Just last year Australia’s two-way trade in goods and services was worth nearly $670 billion dollars. That sounds like an adequate global citizen, doesn’t it?

In conclusion, Australia does not morally act as a good global citizen.

However, this doesn’t entirely suggest that we don’t have certain attributes about us that make us a good nation because we undoubtedly do but not very often, in this case, the bad outweighs the good. In many ways, you could argue that refugees and climate change only make up small sectors of our reputation but those are only to name a few and there are defiantly more issues within Australia than those such as the mistreatment of aboriginals, budget cuts to foreign aid etc. Overall I strongly stand by the opinion that Australia does not act morally good as a global

citizen.