All the news out of Manus over the past week confirms Moira Rayner's and my own grave forebodings.
Morrison's initial statement on 17 February that detainees had broken out of the Australian-run detention centre overnight, and that one death had occurred outside the centre, were found to be false, a fact finally admitted by him on 24 February.
Three important pieces of independent reporting from persons connected with Immigration or the now-ended G4S management operation between 21 and 26 February paint a consistent, grim picture: of disturbances that G4S had predicted, if asylum seekers were given bad news on the failure to process their refugee applications; of G4S's failure to control the ensuing events; and of the PNG government failure to control its own police and public surrounding the centre.
These sources are: the transcript of former interpreter Azita Bokan's interview with Richard Glover, ABC Sydney on 21 February; Mark Davis' interview on SBS Dateline program on 25 February with former migration agent Liz Thompson, who denounces interview process on Manus as a 'farce' and 'charade'; and Tara Moss' compelling account on 26 February 'Manus Island — an insider's report' from a trusted G4S source.
Over the past week of Parliament, we have seen the strange and distressing spectacle of Labor timidly criticising the Government's handling of the issue. It would have been the perfect opportunity for Labor, proceeding from these very disturbing revelations, to decide and announce a change in policy: to say that Kevin Rudd's PNG solution had now been found unsustainable, that Australia cannot persist with a PNG-based deterrence system that leaves people to be killed in uncontrolled armed attacks on an Australian detention centre that cannot be protected by Australia, and that Australia cannot therefore meet its duty of care at Manus.
Labor could be saying, 'We would have preferred an orderly regional burden-sharing and processing solution, and as a step towards that we tried to mount a Malaysia solution, but we were blocked from that by the Opposition and Greens. We see now that the PNG solution is just too dangerous to support any longer. Manus must close, and detention and processing centres in Australia must reopen. The present numbers of detainees allow this to be done, and it should be done before more people die.'
This would be the moral policy for Labor at this point. Decent people in the community would support it. The tragic death of Reza Barati provides sufficient trigger for the policy change, if Labor is brave enough to make it. If not, we will continue to see Labor leaders Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek standing shoulder to shoulder on the Manus issue with Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and Janet Albrechtsen. Not, I think, a good place for Labor.
Both Plibersek and Albrechtsen are reported to the effect that one death at Manus is less awful than hundreds of deaths at sea. Albrechtsen drew the explicit comparison with 1100 deaths at sea under Labor.
But there is an important distinction to be made here. The deaths at sea under Labor — a matter on which I have written extensively — were not the clearly foreseen outcome of a deliberately harsh and dangerous offshore deterrence regime, but a result of policy irresolution and conflicting signals to the border protection agencies. As I wrote in my 20 February article:
Labor's problem — and we see it again in its first responses to the awful news from Manus — is that it is neither principled enough nor brutal enough. It suffers from conflicting objectives: in government it wanted to deter, but to stay within the law and decency as far as possible. So it sent mixed policy messages to the Border Protection Command, ADF, and Australian Maritime Safety Authority ...
The Coalition's message is brutal and clear: we will stop the boats. To do this we will break international maritime and refugee laws, jeopardise Australia's relations with Indonesia, and stand at arm's length and watch as major avoidable violence and human rights abuses take place in PNG. Because all this bad stuff reinforces the deterrent message we are utterly determined to keep sending.
By endorsing the continued operation of Manus after the death of Barati, Labor leaves itself complicit in the Coalition's brutal, deliberately violence-provoking, deterrence policy. It leaves itself with nothing useful to say.
There is an alternative. Labor can continue to support strong non-lethal deterrence. It can, if it wishes, support OSB's present towback policies, using giveaway lifeboats to preserve lives of people who are forced back: illegally in my view, a view shared by a growing number of Australian legal experts, but at least it can be said that under the Coalition's five months of turnback, hardly any lives have been lost.
Would closure of Manus and reopening of detention centres in mainland Australia provoke an upsurge in asylum seekers paying people smugglers to make the voyage? My immediate answer would be no, because OSB's turnback policies are working to deter voyages. Labor could craft a position that essentially supports present OSB turnback practice, but rejects the murderous status quo in Manus.
If Labor does not make this policy change now, it will be supporting an Abbott-Morrison policy of knowingly goading desperate people into rioting, knowing that they will die as a result of uncontrolled PNG police and public responses that neither our Immigration Department nor its management contractors can control. It would be maintaining a bipartisan policy complicit in the killing of people whom we have a duty of care to protect.
To conclude: Dinesh Perera, a former Sri Lankan army officer involved in the suppression of the Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka, was in charge of the centre at the time of the riot. It is possible that he was the source of the initial false advice to Morrison that the rioting, injuries and death had taken place outside the centre. Fortunately, there was enough independent reporting to force Morrison to correct his initial statement. Yet Perera has been reappointed head of Manus by the incoming management contractor, Transfield. And Labor, under its present policies of supporting the Manus model, cannot question this.
There is still time for Shorten to change Labor policy.
Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Cambodia and Poland and author of several books including Reluctant Rescuers.