The Coalition's new asylum seeker policy is best described as a work in regress. It returns to the policy it put into practice when in government, adding new nasties that make it look tougher. The policy failed asylum seekers and Australian interests then and, if implemented, it would fail them again.
The core elements of the new policy are to reintroduce processing of asylum seekers outside Australia and to reintroduce temporary protection visas which excluded family reunion. A restriction on benefits would also be reintroduced. In addition those on temporary protection visas would be compelled to work, and efforts would be made to prevent asylum seekers from landing on Australian territory.
Offshore processing was harmful to Australia's interests previously because it depended for its effectiveness on the cooperation of other nations, but undermined the basis for cooperation. It expected other nations to receive those found to be refugees. Other nations sensibly believed that the protection of these refugees was Australia's responsibility by virtue of it having signed the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
The system also harmed Australia's interests because it corrupted administration. The judging of refugee claims was outside the rule of law and was arbitrary. Immigration Department officers acted as the moral equivalent of people smugglers, enticing uninformed and vulnerable asylum seekers to leave Nauru. According to Phil Glendenning, many who returned were killed on return to Afghanistan.
Even more important, prolonged detention is a cruel punishment for asylum seekers who, under the Convention, are guiltless in seeking protection in Australia. Patrick McGorry memorably described detention centres as factories for mental illness. They cause long term damage to people. Prolonged detention outside Australia, as in deserted areas of Australia, exacerbates the damage while keeping it out of the media. It does now to asylum seekers what the 'dark satanic mills' did to workers in the 19th century.
Temporary protection visas do little more than create anxiety, put lives on hold, keep husbands separated from wives, parents from children, and place more costs and burdens of review on the public service. Nor usually do conditions change in a short time for those who have been granted protection. Like prolonged detention and the exclusion of asylum seekers from income and the right to work, these visas are morally obnoxious because they are designed to make asylum seekers in Australia suffer, so that their suffering will deter others.
Pushing asylum seekers away from Australia's borders sounds attractive to those who like the sound of tough policies. But where do you push people to? If you are pushing people back on to someone else's land, the cooperation of the other nation will come only at a heavy cost, if at all. If you simply push people away, you will have to deal with the bad publicity that comes with their death.
In the late 1970s the Thai army initially pushed Cambodian refugees back on to Cambodian minefields, but was eventually forced by public opinion to desist. And the refugees still came because they faced even greater horrors in Cambodia.
To criticise the policy of the Opposition is not to endorse that of the Government. The suspension of visa processing, the prospective relocation of asylum seekers to harsh, isolated detention camps and the pressure to view Afghanistan and Sri Lanka as safe places of return, are unconscionable.
But the Coalition's policy on asylum seekers is worse. It appeals to prejudice about asylum seekers and not to the truth of why they come, to the truth of the relatively small burden they are to Australia. It is based on the systematic disrespect for asylum seekers, and not on respect for their humanity. It is designed to appeal to human baseness, not to human generosity.
It is also incompatible with the way, the truth and the life on which Christianity, and so Catholicism, is based. So as both an Australian and a Jesuit sponsored magazine, whose interest is in public life and whose moral centre is both Christian and Catholic, we deplore this policy.
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Andrew Hamilton is the consulting editor for Eureka Street. He teaches at the United Faculty of Theology in Melbourne.