Recently, Australia’s Immigration Minister announced the impending deportation of a fifth Hazara asylum seeker back to Afghanistan since late 2014. In Europe, Syrians and Iraqis are being waved through while Afghanis are rejected at the border or repatriated. Why do we value some lives more than others?

There is distance in experience, we as observers and Others as victims, and with that comes the distance in our ability to understand their pain. For that reason it seems rather voyeuristic for the well-meaning masses to co-opt the private tragedy of Aylan Kurdi’s death and transform it into a moment of public grief. This is not our struggle. Aylan was not our child. He did not die in order for us to have an emotional and political experience. Yet that is exactly what is happening.

It’s easy to become despondent about the ‘worst humanitarian crisis of our time’. You become numb to the brutality, to the various daily atrocities, to the enormous figures dead, internally displaced or made into refugees. And that’s just in Syria. In Yemen, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan, the trauma of millions continues, unrelenting, day in and day out. It often feels like some kind of Kafkaesque dream: our own government seemingly gleeful in constructing and reinforcing a twisted narrative of ‘death cults’ and ‘unlawful entry, championing the use of hard power as a way to bring peace and stability to countries in turmoil.

Kevin Rudd has pre-empted the findings of a United Nations investigation into chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians in Damascus, finding Assad guilty of the ‘most flagrant breach of international law’. Rudd is no doubt familiar with what a flagrant breach of international law looks like.

Whether the newly adopted Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which was overwhelmingly approved in the UN General Assembly on 2 April, will be able to successfully eliminate or prevent the harms associated with the international arms trade, however, is uncertain.

When it comes to the mass uprisings in the Arab world, much of the Australian media has followed the US agenda. Our media pays close attention when an anti-US government faces mass protests – like in Iran.