Three recent developments in Australian treatment of asylum seekers are best studied for their symbolic value. They communicate clearly a dispiriting reality that underlies them.
The situation of asylum seekers on Nauru is a symbol of shambolic policy making. The proposed excision of the Australian mainland is a symbol of ethical jobbery. And the repatriation of asylum seekers without informing them of their rights to claim asylum is a symbol of despair.
You can tell bad policy making by the trail of broken human lives it leaves behind it. Bad policy made on the run almost always disturbs and damages human lives. The image of asylum seekers held in tents in the heat of Nauru, many on hunger strike and at least one now in risk of death, will surely be followed by images of people withering from depression and resentment and needing medical care to heal what has been wantonly broken.
The policy goal is to stop the boats, or to put it more kindly, to discourage people from coming by boat. The asylum seekers have been placed on Nauru before proper preparations can be made in order to ensure that they gain from coming by boat no advantage over other asylum seekers left in Indonesia. Their lack of advantage will encourage others not to make the boat trip.
The Government has yet to announce the precise exchange rate between the currencies of misery and lack of advantage.
So Nauru and Manus Island will hold people who were not stopped by the policy from coming by boat. If the policy actually increases the number of people arriving by boat, as it may, it will have achieved precisely the opposite to what it intended, at great cost to people and in resources.
This is not to mention the further details of the policy yet to be devised: the adjudication of their claims, any review there may be, and what will become of those found to be refugees. One may assume that these processes will be designed to ensure that the asylum seekers have no recourse to Australian law. Both people and the process itself will sink into a morass of arbitrariness. This is not the mark of good policy.
The excision of Australian mainland from the immigration zone simply extends legislation already in place. It is conceptually clever, displaying the same intelligence as the slicing and bundling of financial derivatives that gave us the Great Financial Crisis. There it allowed banks to make money without actually breaking the law.
The excision of Australia from the immigration zone enables Australia to renege on its commitment to offer asylum to those facing persecution by redefining Australia. The use of mind displayed in this game turns trust and justice into dust. This comes from the policy manual composed by spivs and mainchancers.
The repatriation of Sri Lankans without explaining to them their rights as asylum seekers is a symbol of despair in policy making. It is an exercise in naked power.
At the heart of good policy is the use of mind, of discriminating justly between those who should benefit from the policy and those who are not entitled to do so. Australia’s subscription to the UNHCR Convention on the Status of Refugees commits Australia to offer protection to refugees who flee from persecution. Refugee policy decides which claimants are fleeing from persecution and how protection can be given them speedily and efficaciously.
To deport potential refugees without allowing them to make a claim is not an exercise of rational policy making but a confession of hope abandoned of ever acting reasonably and rightly. Power is all.
The heart of these three changes to Australia's treatment of refugees lies in an excision: not the fictive excision of migration rights from Australian territory, but the excision of mind and heart from the Australian body politic.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.