Robert Manne, who for 40 years has been and remains a resolute voice for refugees, has recently reflected on the appalling dead-end of policy seen on Manus Island and Nauru. His argument for a realistic policy that would rescue people from this hell deserves serious consideration.
He believes that the present policy reflects an abiding Australian passion for cultural control. Initially directed at keeping out non-Europeans, it has been more recently directed against people who came by boat to seek protection. Control was built on deterrence, initially by mandatory detention, then by denying refugees permanent residence, instituting off shore processing, intercepting boats, and detention on Nauru and Manus Island. These measures have been supported by a majority of Australians.
In order to persuade policy makers to adopt a better policy, Manne argues, it is necessary to understand both the 'Canberra mind' which finds the present regime necessary and the opposition to it. The received political wisdom is based in the experience of influxes of refugees and of the measures taken to curb them. From 1996 to 2001 the Howard government introduced mandatory detention and temporary protection visas and in 2001 offshore processing and interdiction of boats. This proved effective.
But after the Rudd government stopped interdiction and halted off-shore processing, the boats again multiplied, with many people dying at sea. It introduced mandatory detention on Manus Island, after which the Coalition government reinstated interdiction and harsh deterrent measures. Boat arrivals stopped. For Canberra, the policy stopped the boats and saved lives.
Manne recounts that after some self-searching he broke from the opposition in arguing that refugee advocacy must accept the political reality that governments decide refugee policy and that no conceivable government will abandon interdiction or the possibility of offshore processing.
To change policy demands accepting that interdiction and offshore processing will continue, while persuading governments that keeping people on Manus Island and Nauru is not necessary for keeping the boats stopped. That would allow the initial transfer to Australia of those who are ill, acceptance of the offer by New Zealand to accept others, and over time the transfer of those remaining on Manus Island and Nauru.
Manne concludes by asking why these realistic proposals have not been endorsed by opponents of the government policy. His reflections raise two questions. Is his delineation of the history and current state of play of Australian treatment of people who seek protection accurate? And should those supporting refugees support the proposed policy and similar realistic policies? I shall comment briefly in this article on the first question, and have addressed the second in more detail here.
"The control and deterrence mindset is not simply toxic. It is cancerous in that it corrupts government and seeks to metastasise in those who must work with it."
The link Manne makes between Australian treatment of people seeking protection and the abiding cultural demand to control outsiders is both illuminating and perceptive. The passion to control is generated by and generates fear, and is never satisfied, as shown by the paranoid fear of a single boat arriving or of a single person returning from Manus Island. The increasingly dehumanising treatment of refugees expresses this anxiety. It suggests that any policy designed to relax measures which triple lock the doors against entry to Australia will be difficult to commend.
Manne's description of the 'Canberra mindset' is also persuasive, and particularly the way in which it associates the rise and fall of boat numbers with the relaxing and tightening of harsh measures to stop boats. Like him I found that linkage morally confronting. I was guiltily relieved that the number of boats and drownings diminished, though appalled by the means used to secure it. Certainly, the appeal to compassion for the dead has set in concrete punitive measures against the living.
Though accepting this link, I would like to see serious study both of other factors involved in halting the boats, and also of the received wisdom that any political party showing sympathy for asylum seekers is destined to defeat. In neither the Tampa election nor the defeat of Rudd was that view unambiguously tested.
Manne is certainly right to say that opposition to the government's treatment of asylum seekers is grounded in ethical convictions. I shall reflect next week on the corollaries of this. But I believe that the resistance from the sector to negotiation about Manus Island and Nauru has more complex roots than Manne allows.
In the first place, the mindset of control and deterrence continues to devastate the lives of many asylum seekers in Australia as well as on Manus Island and Nauru. The long delays in processing claims, the refusal of permanent visas, the cutting of support, the stripping away of access to law, the granting only of temporary protection visas, the delay in processing claims and the removal of benefits have affected the mental and physical health of people who sought asylum before the Rudd legislation came in force.
Refugee workers meet these people daily, and understandably set the evil of Manus Island and Nauru within the demand for a comprehensive reform of cruel legislation and regulation.
Second, the control and deterrence mindset is not simply toxic. It is cancerous in that it corrupts government and seeks to metastasise in those who must work with it. Governments infected by it inevitably come to regard and treat human beings as less than human, invent more ingenious ways of dehumanising them, and pressure others into compliance with their cruelty.
Emblematic of this corruption was the folding of the Immigration Department into the Border Force, headed by personnel from the Customs Department. Refugees were seen as parcels to be stamped and sent from place to place. As a result detention centres have been reconfigured as jails.
The mindset also displays itself in the bad faith shown by the government in response to litigation. When laws penalising individual asylum seekers are likely to be struck down by courts, the government withdraws from the case, but leaves the laws in place. The government has also consistently pressed refugee agencies to be parties to processes that deny client's rights and violate the professional standards of the bodies. Such actions are also designed to create divisions and mutual suspicion among agencies.
I believe that exposure to the harmful effects of the control and deter mindset on all people who seek asylum, and to the corruption that attends dealings with government, also need to be taken into account for the reluctance of refugee agencies, rightly or wrongly, to support enthusiastically partial reform of policy.
A final point about the relationship between government and refugee advocates concerns the polarisation of Australians on the issue. This also has been fomented by government through fake news, such as the story of people throwing children overboard at the time of Tampa, and the constant dog-whistling about Muslim refugees later. The dilemma this has posed for refugee advocates is that criticism of refugee policy immediately draws a hostile response and the controversy simply entrenches defence of harsh measures. It is difficult to engender reasonable public conversation about it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
Main image: Emotions spilled over as thousands of Melbournians rallied on the steps of the state library in coordinated, Australia-wide rallies protesting the High Courts decision regarding the 267 refugees facing deportation on 8 February 2016 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Chris Hopkins/Getty Images)