Posted by John, November 19th, 2009 - under Uncategorised.

Tags: Asylum seekers, Australian politics

Some of those who want to see a more humane approach to asylum seekers argue that they should be brought to Christmas Island for processing, rather than shunted off to detention centres in Indonesia. But such calls are deeply misguided.

Asylum seekers taken to Christmas Island would be incarcerated in a camp modelled on Guantanamo Bay, and denied basic rights like access to the legal system. Despite this barbarity, the pervasive assumption, even among many who stand for refugee rights is that mandatory detention is necessary, even if it’s just minimal to allow for “processing”.

In fact, Australia is the only country in the world to practise mandatory detention. The policy is the key plank in a long-standing system of state-orchestrated human rights abuse perpetrated upon refugees by successive Australian governments, both Labor and Liberal.

To mandate that all unauthorised asylum seekers be detained is itself a breach of the UN Convention on Refugees and a gross human rights abuse. But more importantly, it needs to be pointed out that things have not always been this way, that thousands of refugees in fairly recent history have arrived here by boat without detention. And the sky did not fall in.

It was only as recently as 1992, under the Keating Labor government, that mandatory detention was established. Before this, detention of asylum seekers was an option to be used with the discretion of Immigration officials. There was no policy of mandatory detention in response to unauthorised boat arrivals in the late 1970s.

From 1976 to 1982, around 2,000 people arrived here on boats from Vietnam. They were part of a mass exodus of almost one million refugees, fleeing the devastation of ongoing war and the persecution of Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese population.

Australia set up a program to resettle Vietnamese refugees languishing in camps throughout South-East Asia, and almost 95,000 were settled here in the next ten years.

But it was a decidedly selective process, whereby Australian Immigration officials would choose those refugees deemed most suitable: in other words, those most ready to contribute to the Australian economy through having valued skills or English language abilities. The burning question though was what to do with the 2,000 people who got here under their own steam on leaky boats.

Leading ALP figures Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam made their thoughts clear, arguing consistently that Australia should accept none of the so-called “boat people.” Foreshadowing future ALP government policy, Whitlam even called for them to be “disembarked into custody” – i.e. mandatory detention – pending their removal from Australia.

But as was the practice in those days, the “boat people” weren’t sent to the desert to be locked in detention centres. They were transferred directly to Migrant Hostels in the suburbs. Here, they were free to come and go, to look for work, and even to study at local colleges.

They had health checks while they waited for the Housing Commission to find them a place to live, and for the Immigration Department to organise their permanent residency.

Lan, who arrived as a 6-year-old “boat person” with her family, recounted her story:

We arrived in Melbourne in 1978 with almost nothing. We lived in a migrant hostel in Nunawading, which was quite nice. I particularly remember the food. We used to have our lunch packed for us and I still remember picking up my lunch in a paper bag before school. Many migrants weren’t accustomed to Australian food but we all appreciated that at least there was food.

Compare this to the words of a Woomera detainee, writing in 2002:

Imagine. They put a person in a small room in this condition. That cage is all things for him. He wastes his time, all days and nights, with depression, and fear, with sleeplessness and night dreams, without any good news about future, exactly like living between death and life. People are asking god a hundred times, please kill me god.

Mandatory detention is a vile form of torture, reserved for people who are already vulnerable. The whole regime needs to be junked and replaced with a system that grants human beings the basic rights of freedom, independence, housing and employment.

This article, by Liam Ward, first appeared in Socialist Alternative.