Jeremy Cordeaux likes to point out the places where a government’s logic fails to join up. On this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, he raised one he finds genuinely puzzling: the gap between the countries Australia warns its own citizens to avoid, and the countries from which it readily accepts migration.
The Warnings We Give Ourselves
Jeremy began with the travel advisories. The government, he noted, keeps a list of nations it tells Australians not to visit, for their own safety, because those places are judged unsafe. It is official, considered advice, steering citizens away from real danger.
He ran through the roll-call quickly, a long list of countries under the strongest do-not-travel guidance. Whatever the particular reasons in each case, the common thread, in Jeremy’s telling, is instability, conflict or danger serious enough that the government formally warns its own people to stay away.
The Question Nobody Asks
Here Jeremy put his central question. If a place is judged too dangerous for an Australian to visit, he asked, why is there no matching caution about migration or travel in the other direction? The extraordinary thing, he argued, is that no reciprocal consideration seems to apply.
His reasoning was plain. Whatever makes a country dangerous to visit, the unrest, the politics, the tensions, does not simply stay behind when people move. To warn citizens off a place on safety grounds, while applying no equivalent thought to arrivals from it, struck him as a basic inconsistency in the government’s own risk assessment.
A Matter Of Consistency
Jeremy framed the point carefully as one of policy coherence rather than blanket exclusion. His argument was that a government cannot logically hold two opposite positions at once, calling a place unsafe in one breath and treating it as unremarkable in the next.
He suggested the settings could be reviewed quickly if the will existed, and admitted it might offend some people. But keeping Australia safe, he argued, is exactly the sort of priority that should override the fear of causing offence. Nothing, in his view, is more important than that.
Follow The Logic
For Jeremy, the travel-advisory question was really about applying one standard consistently. The government has already made the safety judgement; it publishes it every time it tells Australians where not to go. His point was simply that the same judgement ought to inform decisions in both directions.
He promised to return to the subject, framing it not as an attack on any group but as a challenge to the government’s own reasoning. If a country is dangerous enough to warn citizens away from, Jeremy argued, that assessment should not evaporate the moment the direction of travel is reversed.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
