906 Inhumane Australian Policy
How we came to
be so cruel to asylum seekers
It is made abundantly clear in
the world press that Australia has been shockingly cruel to asylum seekers and refugees ...
The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times
Below I reprint an essay by Robert Manne in which he deals in painful detail with the shameful history of how Australia became the world leader in making the lives of asylum seekers miserable. This is a lengthy article ... if you're Australian, read it.
Manne invokes the phrase "The Banality of Evil", to show how Australia has sunk deeper and deeper into the quagmire of first wanting to save lives of those who potentially would drown when trying to come in boats to seek asylum, then detaining them offshore in Nauru and Manus island, and finally robbing them of their humanity as we insist on imprisoning them indefinitely in inhumane circumstances.
Myself, I am ashamed to be a citizen of a
country - while Australia is appointed to the UN Human Rights Council (HuffPost)
- whose “chronic non-compliance” with, and disengagement from that Committee’s work is “completely off the charts” ... the UN Human
Rights Law Centre.
from The Conversation
This is an edited extract of a talk delivered to the Integrity 20 Conference
at Griffith University on October 25, 2016 by Robert Manne
If you had been told 30 years ago that
Australia would create the least asylum seeker friendly institutional
arrangements in the world, you would not have been believed.
In 1992 we introduced a system of
indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers who arrive by boat. Since
that time, we have accepted the idea that certain categories of refugees and
asylum seekers can be imprisoned indefinitely; that those who are intercepted
by our navy should be forcibly returned to the point of departure; that those
who haven’t been able to be forcibly returned should be imprisoned indefinitely
on remote Pacific Islands; and that those marooned on these island camps should
never be allowed to settle in Australia even after several years.
How then has this come to pass? There are
two main ways of explaining this.
The first is what can be called
analytical narrative: the creation of an historical account that shows the
circumstances in which the decisions were made and how one thing led to
another. I have tried my hand at several of these.
The second way is to look at more general
lines of explanation. I want to suggest five possibilities. These general lines
of explanation are not alternatives to each other but complementary. Nor do
they constitute an alternative to explanation by way of analytical narrative.
Rather, they attempt to illuminate some of the general reasons the story took
the shape it did.
Immigration absolutism
It is very common to explain the creation
of Australia’s uniquely harsh anti-asylum seeker system of border control as a
partially disguised return of the old racism of the White Australia Policy.
This now seems to me mistaken. Even though there have been occasional political
hiccups: Blainey 1984; Howard 1988; Hanson 1 1996; Hanson 2 2016, one of the
more remarkable achievements of Australian history is the seamless
transformation of white Australia to a multiracial and multicultural society
since the early 1970s.
Nor is there evidence that Australians
are hostile to non-European refugees selected by the government. As I observed
as a refugee advocate in the late 1970s, it was easier for the Fraser
government to settle 70,000 Indo-Chinese refugees from the camps of South-East
Asia the government had selected than it was to allay public fear or anger over
the 2,000 Vietnamese who arrived in Darwin spontaneously by boat.
There is, however, another aspect of the
White Australia Policy that is usually overlooked: its absolutism, the almost
100-year conviction that not a single person of non-European stock should ever
be permitted to settle in Australia. In my view it has been the absolutism,
embedded in the so-called Australian immigration culture of control, rather
than the racism of the White Australia Policy, which helps explain our recent
policy history, now animated by a new absolutist ambition: that we should
strive for a situation where not even one asylum seeker boat reaches our
shores.
Party politics: Howard’s curse
It is obvious that the Tampa “crisis” of August-September
2001 was the most important moment in the creation of Australia’s contemporary
asylum seeker policies. There is no need to rehearse what happened once again.
For obvious reasons, the creation of the offshore processing centres and, even more
importantly, the use of the Australian Navy to turn back asylum seeker boats to
Indonesia was crucial for the future.
What, however, is less often discussed is
the way in which the Prime Minister, John Howard, spurned the bipartisanship
over asylum seeker policy offered him by Kim Beazley, and the long-term
consequences of his political opportunism. During Tampa, Beazley supported
every radical measure taken by the government. Memorably, he said this was no
time for “carping”. The only bridge too far for Beazley was a bill that denied
that it would be a criminal offence for a border control official to take the
life of an asylum seeker.
Howard seized on that remark. For the
purpose of the 2001 election and in the election campaigns of 2004, 2010, 2013
and 2016 (with 2007 being the exception), the Coalition has profitably been
able to accuse Labor of being weak on border protection. It was not only Tony
Abbott who based his prime ministerial credentials on the success of his border
control policies. In the last election campaign, Malcolm Turnbull used the
trope of Labor’s weakness on border security as the one populist element in
what was essentially a non-populist election pitch.
The consequence of this has been that
over the past 15 years the chance of an even remotely humane reform of the
system carries with it the chance of severe electoral punishment for the Labor
Party. The only hope now for a return of some humanity to the policy is the
willingness of a Coalition government to initiate such reform, or to offer
Labor bipartisanship in trying to work together to find a less cruel and
ruinous policy. I call the last 15 years of opportunistic partisan contention
over asylum seeker policy “Howard’s curse”.
Bureaucratic inertia: automaticity
The history of anti-asylum seeker border
control policy is a history of deterrence measures. The first two that were
tried — mandatory detention and temporary protection — failed, at least as
measured by the absolutist standards of the immigration authorities. The second
two measures that were introduced by the Howard government in the spring of
2001 — offshore processing and forcible turnback to point of departure —
succeeded. Between 2002 and 2007, virtually no boats reached Australia.
What is interesting about this history is
the force of bureaucratic inertia, the continued expansion of the system in a
way that was unrelated to evidence or experience. It was clear by the second
half of 2002 that the combination of offshore processing and turnback had
successfully stopped the arrival of asylum seeker boats. It was also clear by
late 2013 that the combination of offshore processing, naval turnback and now
Kevin Rudd’s July 2013 addition, no settlement in Australia, ever — which I
call “Rudd’s curse” — had once again successfully stopped the boats. Yet in
both cases this fact had no influence in softening policy with regard to the
earlier deterrent measures — mandatory detention and temporary protection —
which had by now been rendered entirely redundant. The ends had been achieved
by other means. Yet the earlier means were nonetheless retained.
How is the purposelessness of this
cruelty - which is presently rendering the lives of 30,000 refugees or asylum
seekers in Australia miserable — to be explained? In his analysis of post-totalitarian
Czechoslovakia, The
Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel outlines in some detail a system that
no longer serves any interest — where within the system both the relation of
different measures to each other and the relation of means to ends had long
been forgotten by everyone. He calls the engine that drives this system
“automaticity”.
Despite the fact that no asylum seeker
boats now reach Australia, in essence because of the success of the turnback
policy, the mandatory detention system is maintained, refugees are granted
temporary visas that offer no hope of citizenship or permanent settlement; some
asylum seekers who cannot be deported are still locked away indefinitely;
refugees and asylum seekers who have been sent to offshore processing centres
are left to rot there permanently. The force of bureaucratic inertia, the reign
of automaticity, helps explain the purposeless cruelty of so much of the
current asylum seeker system.
Groupthink
There has been only one time in the
history of the anti-asylum seeker border protection policy where deterrent
measures were dismantled. Rudd abandoned both offshore processing and turnback,
although his government retained mandatory detention. At the time I thought
this partial dismantling a risk. I now think it a mistake.
The consequence of the dismantling of the
two most successful dimensions of the deterrent system was the arrival between
2009 and 2013 of some 50,000 asylum seekers by boat and more than 1,000
drownings. Because of this experience, a curious mindset, which was already
present in the Howard years, came to dominate the key policymakers and
immigration public servants during the period of both the Abbott and Turnbull
governments.
The mindset suggested that if even one
brick in the asylum seeker deterrent system was removed, the entire building
would collapse. By now the Immigration minister, the Immigration Department and
the relevant Defence officials all agreed with each other that large numbers of
boats would return if even the slightest change was allowed to be made to the
anti-asylum seeker edifice that had been constructed over the past 25 years.
Let one example of this strange mindset
suffice. Late last year doctors and nurses at the Royal Children’s Hospital
announced that they would not return the handful of gravely damaged children
under their care to a detention centre in Melbourne.
The Minister, Peter Dutton, responded by
saying that the result of their irresponsible behaviour would be naval officers
pulling the bodies of dead children from the ocean. The Minister apparently
sincerely believed that freeing a few children from detention in Melbourne
would send an international signal to the people smugglers that would see a
return of the boats and the drownings.
This was telling evidence of how far by
now officials in Canberra have lost touch with reality. Officials now believe
that one act of human decency will lead to an armada of asylum seeker boats
setting out for Australia. One reason for the purposeless cruelty of the
current asylum seeker policy is, then, the severe case of groupthink - the
willingness of intelligent people to still their critical capacities in the
interest of conformity — that now afflicts Canberra.
The banality of evil
At present more than 2,000 men, women and
children are slowly being destroyed in body and spirit. Some are being
destroyed because they have been marooned on Nauru and Manus Island for two
years or more. A small number of refugees or asylum seekers have been
imprisoned for several years in Australia because of the existence of an
adverse ASIO file, or because Iran will not accept involuntary repatriation.
Among the families of those who were brought from Nauru to Australia for
medical treatment, 300 now live in daily, crippling fear of return.
I am certain that the Immigration and
Defence officials who are responsible for administering the policy are not
sadists. There is thus something further about our willingness to inflict such
cruelty that needs to be explained.
The most important idea in Hannah
Arendt’s Eichmann
in Jerusalem is the banality of evil. The idea is usually misunderstood. In
essence what Arendt tried to explain was how evil acts might be perpetrated by
conventional individuals because of their blindness, their loss of the capacity
to see what it was that they were doing. Arendt’s idea helped explain how the
atmosphere created within Nazi Germany allowed the most extreme of all
state-sponsored acts of political evil to appear to a conventional character
like Eichmann to be normal.
The extreme context from which the idea
emerged does not mean, however, that the concept of the banality of evil cannot
illuminate far smaller matters. A detailed moral history of Australia’s
asylum-seeker policy since the introduction of mandatory detention in 1992 has
not yet been written. What it would reveal is the process whereby the arteries
of the nation gradually hardened; how as a nation we gradually lost the
capacity to see the horror of what it was that we were willing to do to
innocent fellow human beings who had fled in fear and sought our help.
Recently an inmate
on Nauru set himself on fire and died. Dutton argued in response that
people self-immolate so they can get to Australia. It took 30 years of brutal
behaviour for a remark like this to be possible and for Australians not to
notice how truly remarkable was the Minister’s brutality.
Our current uniquely harsh anti-asylum
seeker policy is grounded in the absolutist ambitions that can, in my view,
best be explained by Australia’s long term migration history and its associated
culture of control. It has become entrenched because of the force of
bureaucratic inertia that has seen the system grow automatically while any
interest in, or understanding of, the relation of means to ends has been lost.
And it is presently maintained by an irrational but consensual mindset that has
Canberra in its grip: the conviction that even one concession to human kindness
will send a message to the people smugglers and bring the whole system crashing
down.
Because of these factors, the prime
minister, the minister for immigration and the senior officials of immigration
and defence are presently allowing the lives of some 2,000 human beings to be
destroyed on the basis of faulty but unquestioned speculation, and of another
30,000 in Australia to be rendered acutely insecure and anxious for no purpose.
They are willing to allow this to happen
because they no longer possess, in the Arendtian sense, the ability to see what
it is that they are doing, and because the majority of the nation has become
accustomed to thinking of what we are doing as perfectly normal.