On Tuesday, the Labor caucus again debated a motion seeking to re-set Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers away from pointless and unconscionable cruelty, and towards our core values of fairness, compassion and freedom. That would require the closure of the offshore detention centres at Manus Island and Nauru.
It is essential that Labor reconsider our support for government policy because over the last two years we have been confronted with report after report from credible sources that detail the commonplace violence, assaults, abuse and rapes suffered by asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru and Manus Island.
These men, women, and children are Australia’s legal as well as moral responsibility, since we cannot contract out of our international obligations towards asylum seekers. Yet the Australian government, acting on our behalf, has specifically designed a system to break people; vulnerable people who have already experienced terrible loss and trauma.
Labor’s national platform supports offshore processing, but not offshore processing under any circumstances.
The conditions necessary for Labor’s support include: no indefinite or arbitrary detention, and detention only as a last resort for the shortest possible time; that people in detention must be treated fairly and reasonably within the law; be provided with an appropriate standard of care in physical and mental health, as well as access to education services; that conditions of detention must ensure the inherent dignity of the person and must not cause harm; and there must be independent oversight of the detention system.
Those conditions are manifestly absent from our present system, which instead is marked by gross maladministration and deliberate cruelty.
To my knowledge, Australia is the only developed country to spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars with the objective of making desperate people as miserable as possible. That much we have achieved.
This week, Australia was effectively awarded the gold medal for cruelty at the UN Human Rights Council’s periodic review of our national human rights compliance, with the council’s member states almost unanimous in their criticism of our asylum seeker policies. One imagines this judgement is likely to weigh heavily on the minds of member states when it comes to casting their votes for the new membership of the Human Rights Council, for which Australia has nominated.
The tide is turning in terms of public thinking on this issue, as we saw with the strong global reaction to the picture of the small Syrian boy on the Turkish beach. Australians from all walks of life are expressing their dismay and bewilderment at our government’s conduct. Doctors and nurses are refusing to send children back to detention, priests and nuns are peacefully protesting in MPs’ offices against children in detention, and mums for refugees, grandmothers for refugees, Labor4Refugees, church leaders for refugees, and on Wednesday, more than 250 prominent Citizens for Change on Asylum Seekers, all have said enough is enough. All are saying, “Not in our name”.
They reject what Barry Jones has called the “negative bipartisanship” on this issue and are calling for Australia’s political leaders to close Manus Island and Nauru.
There is no relationship between the systemic cruelty of the offshore detention centres and the objective of saving lives at sea. A properly constituted, resourced, and supervised regional protection arrangement in places like Indonesia and Malaysia would mean asylum seekers could be kept safe throughout the assessment and re-settlement process. It is by no means an easy outcome to achieve – but it will never happen if we maintain the convenient lie that our Pacific gulags are hard but necessary, that keeping people in places that routinely inflict harm upon them is a case of being “cruel to be kind”.
If Australia is to be the principled and outward-looking nation of the “fair go” that we imagine ourselves to be – a human-rights-respecting country that leads the way in regional cooperation and a shared approach to common challenges like refugees – then we have to abandon the “out of sight, out of mind” (aka “nope nope nope”) approach that currently makes us all complicit in violence, rape and child abuse against our fellow human beings.
This means taking the politics out and putting the humanity back in. It would a be fine thing if Australia was selected as a member of the Human Rights Council on merit.