Sustaining the unsustainable

Concluding secret deals with Cambodia, a notoriously corrupt state, for the resettlement of refugees seeking asylum in Australia cannot remove Australia from its responsibilities and the UNHCR has said as much. Nor can returning Tamil asylum seekers to Sri Lanka without testing their claims be construed as anything less than an act of bastardry.

An expert international panel of Judges, academics, former diplomats and UN officials gathered under auspices of the Rome based Permanent Peoples Tribunal on 10 December, 2013, in Bremen and after an exhaustive process found that genocide against the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka continues. These facts were accepted by the 25th Session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in New York at the end of March 2014. 

Perhaps doing deals with rogue states might be justified if Australian security was at stake, but it is not. The party political imperative behind Australia’s asylum seeker policy has been a desire to hold onto power by acceding to the wishes of red neck electorates. A political framework for dealing with refugees, other than the one forged by John Howard, properly presented, might see fear driven ignorance recede. Instead this fear has been shamelessly exploited.

This cynical exploitation of ignorance presents a real challenge to the social fabric of Australia.

The Howard asylum seeker framework, adopted as policy by successive Labor and Liberal governments, failed to address the issue of people travelling to Australia by boat. It was always open to Australia to process off shore within a regional framework, it still is. However the policy of deterrence negates such an arrangement. Deterrence is predicated on the notion that it is possible to stop people fleeing adversity and seeking asylum. It is not. The issue can however be managed and managed in such a way that it is humane and lawful.

For all the money that is now being so wastefully and wilfully spent on cruel and unsustainable deterrence measures, it should not be beyond the range of limited imaginations to encompass the prospect of processing on Indonesia and bringing people to Australia in an orderly and caring manner.

With over 1200 deaths of asylum seekers, 200 dying in detention, with women and children detained on Manus and Nauru and with many if not most of the asylum seekers that have passed into Australian ‘care’ now permanently suffering chronic mental health issues, the time for a royal commission into Australian asylum seeker policies is overdue, particularly when set against the Abbott governments commission of inquiries into pink batts and unions.