Posing the unthinkable: Resettling refugees in Australia
In a recent ABC ‘Lateline’ program, Paris Aristotle of the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture said he had never anticipated that offshore processing facilities would become long-term warehouses for refugees without genuine resettlement options. Binoy Kampmark says his perspectives have shown a distinct lack of imagination.
“If we require a shield [against people smugglers] we should leave that up to Australian Border Force, our Navy, the AFP and our intelligence services.” Paris Aristotle, Lateline, Sep 5, 2016.
Unthinkable, that is, in Australia. Unthinkable to finally accept that the international pathways of asylum seekers and refugees can know no discrimination, and that each country duly receiving them should do all within their powers to facilitate their rapid process and exit into the community. Unthinkable to not shift the burden of processing and settlement to impoverished, or poorer countries.
Several outstanding features of international refugee law somehow taper out by the time Australian officials come to the party. That, for instance, of non-refoulement, explicitly prohibited by Article 33 of the UN Refugee Convention.
Officials in Canberra have for some years shown a certain indifference to returning refugees or those being determined as refugees to a place where they might fear persecution, torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, or arbitrarily deprived of life.
As pointed out by Jane McAdam, “Australia is the only country whose law explicitly says it is ‘irrelevant’ whether or not our non-refoulement obligations are engaged when removing an asylum seeker” (Guardian, Sep 6).
The corpus of international refugee law, in fact, has trouble getting a look in when it comes to Australia’s domestic legislation, which insists on designating “irregular arrivals” persona non grata. This sets the tone for the distinctly punitive approach towards those who end up in such legal lacunae such as Nauru and Manus Island. (The latter will, in due course, be mercifully closed as illegal under Papua New Guinea’s laws.)
The Migration Act 1958 (Cth) remains a poor excuse on that score, feeble in its nods to international precedents. That said, the odd provision does guide ministerial discretion, which is not tyrannically absolute. This was the case when the sordid exercise known as the Malaysia Solution came to a dramatic halt in the Australian High Court’s M70 2011 decision, which found the immigration minister’s decision to deem Malaysia a safe relocation destination for Australia’s refugees questionable.
Offshore detention became the obscene moral incentive to combat the idea of “people smuggling” when it was merely a political move to give the electorate the muscular impression that Canberra was regaining control of its borders. The language in combating such illegal arrivals became packed with military metaphors.
The camp solution was packaged by political spin experts as a moral conversion of the left faction in the Australian Labor Party then in power, after the deaths of 50 arrivals on the rocks of Christmas Island in December 2010.
Targeting an abstract market supposedly populated by ruthless criminals, Australia proceeded to attack those deemed beneficiaries of it. It could hardly be those making money from it. After all, Canberra occasionally sponsors smugglers to move refugee arrivals to Indonesia in atrocious conditions. As always, it was those essentially placed outside the protective frameworks of states that have long abandoned them who would continue to suffer.
On Monday, one of the architects of the ghastly program, Paris Aristotle of the Victorian Foundation for the Survivors of Torture, made the trite point that terrible miscalculations had taken place. It was evident that he lacked that worthiness of the Greek philosopher of his name, described by Dante Alighieri as being, “Il maestro di color che sanno” (The master of those who know).
Portrayed in Australian media as a gritty visionary with oodles of compassion (another convert to the Christmas Island deaths in 2010), his perspectives have shown a distinct lack of imagination, making much hay from the notion that offshore processing in poorer states would somehow be a good idea. And it would save lives.
“It was never envisaged,” he claimed gravely, “that we would leave people there for long, long periods of time without giving them a sense that we were working towards providing them with a decent resettlement outcome.”
Aristotle has, it would seem, been re-converted. Or he simply made a mistake. A closer look at it reveals otherwise: Aristotle remains, for all his grief, convinced that some form of processing in such theatres is permissible as long as it is done quickly. The line parrots that of the ALP, which has no desire to relinquish the “turn back the boats” policy or outsourcing Australia’s refugee obligations. Do not, in other words, come to Australia.
More shocks to the system will be needed; more successful legal challenges mounted against the offshore idea; a spate of gruesome whistleblowing revelations that further reveal the conditions of camp brutality and human degradation. A return to the normality of onshore processing and settlement is required; in other words, a return to what has become the unthinkable.
The original source of this article is Global Research. It is republished with the permission of the author.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Max Thomas
September 9, 2016 at 12:19 am
Unthinking the Unthinkable
Yes, 'people smuggling' was always "a political move to give the electorate the muscular impression that Canberra was regaining control of its borders." 'Dog whistling' was meant to awaken the deep anxiety that haunts Australia. We are alone in this remote south land, abandoned by our mother and fearfully unsure of our great friend. Ruined fortifications on our shores testify to suppressed fears of invasion by foreigners in boats: Russians, Germans or 'Reds' who sought to occupy the space beneath our beds. Irrational fear is a weapon that confers power on those unscrupulous enough to use it. In the current Boyer Lecture series: Fair Australia: Social Justice and the Health Gap, Professor Sir Michael Marmot discusses the 'causes of the cause' of social injustice. If we want to discover what it is that drives a normally generous and charitable people to ignore the plight of desperate refugees, I think we need to look deeper than the outward manifestations of xenophobia and the political opportunism it breeds.