Any time you think the situation for refugees and people seeking safe harbor in Australia can’t possibly get any worse, it always does. This has been the safest bet in bipartisan refugee policy for as long as I can remember. No matter how pointlessly counterproductive or cruel the strategy for destroying the physical and mental health of refugees in our detention camps, there was always an Abbott or a Dutton out there trying to make it worse.
So you’d want to be well careful before declaring a change in the winds, but events of the last few weeks are cause not just for hope but for a surge of effort. This is obviously not because Scott Morrison — or whoever Labor’s spokesperson is — has had an attack of conscience. It’s because the enduring campaign for change is really starting to bite electorally.
Somewhere up ahead, there is a tipping point where suddenly political advantage comes from demonstrating humanity rather than working to extinguish it. At that point, change will happen fast.
We’re not at that point yet. The Greens and House of Representatives crossbenchers introduced a bill in mid-October to immediately evacuate children and their families to Australia to place them in medical care. With major party support, the bill could have passed the parliament in a single sitting day. In a less toxic political environment, there would be no need for a bill at all: the government would do it in one airlift. Instead, the government and “opposition” worked together to kill the initiative.
Nonetheless, there are spreading hairline cracks in the obscene armour of Australia’s migration policy, cracks that weren’t there a month ago.
Labor proposed a bill to make it easier to transfer imprisoned asylum seeker kids to Australia on a case-by-case basis, on doctors’ advice. Morrison opened the possibility of accepting Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s offer to settle people in New Zealand/Aotearoa, albeit with a malicious “you’ll never come to Australia” sting in the tail. Everyone is suddenly claiming they want to get at least the kids into Australia, but can’t because “reasons”.
The proximate reason for these shifts? Increasingly vocal dissidents within the major parties looking to abate some of the horrors unfolding on the prison islands. Determined Greens and independents arguing against the deadly major party consensus, and winning audiences. The reason the respective major party leadership teams may be listening right now? The political earthquake in Wentworth, where history got made and the creepy extremists who have hollowed out the Liberal Party finally got a lesson in realpolitik.
Perhaps the political benefits of destroying innocent people are wearing off. Perhaps the fading power of the most strident race-hate amplifiers in the Murdoch press and talkback radio has been noticed. Perhaps the dedication of thousands of campaigners and regular people around the country is at last moving the needle back in the direction of humanity. Most importantly, hearing directly from some of the people in harm’s way — people like Behrouz Boochani and Eaten Fish — has had an impact on the campaign of dehumanisation that is the primary enabler of Australia’s immigration policy.
The media and political impact of nearly 6000 doctors demanding the government cease deliberately harming children tips the scales further. Following their eviction from Nauru by local authorities, the normally apolitical Médecins Sans Frontières has joined the fight, further isolating Morrison and Shorten.
Another sign of the changing sentiment may be the preliminary attempts to rewrite history that always portend big policy shifts. Kevin Rudd’s tweet that “this govt is just cruel” for leaving people in detention for more than a year is a sign that his notorious 2013 “you’ll never be settled in Australia” announcement may be on its way down the memory hole. If political amnesia is what’s necessary for senior Labor figures to start campaigning against cruelty, so be it. Whatever gets people off the islands.
In a back-handed way, even the proliferation of abusive, pro-detention sock-puppet accounts online is a grim cause for hope. Someone out there somewhere has made the judgement that the Australian public is displaying insufficient amounts of hate for asylum seekers, such that they’re having to spend money to inflate it artificially.
It is way past time for cautious gestures, tactical zigzags and self-aggrandising tweets; people need to be evacuated to Australia, this afternoon, and given medical support, a settlement plan and restitution for what we’ve put them through. But we shouldn’t miss the importance of this moment, because these spreading hairline cracks are the results of years of work by refugee rights networks and their allies in and out of parliament, and most of all by the extraordinary courage of the people trapped behind the wire. The government knows that the more people know the truth, the less tenable its atrocities become, which is presumably why it blocked Greens immigration spokesperson Senator Nick McKim’s proposed visit to Nauru this week.
The tipping point is out there, and the simplest way to bring it about is to put the fear of god into the Labor Party that seats will continue to fall to Greens and independents until it shows some spine and withdraws support for these human rights abuses. That fear won’t come from inside parliament. It will come from the actions of each of us, individually and collectively, to tilt the table, to give our allies inside the parliament the momentum and the numbers they need to widen these hairline cracks and bring this thing down.
I truly hope you’re right, but I’m sceptical.
We’ve been at this point before, back in the early 2000’s when a couple of Liberal party MPs around Pedro Georgiou managed to push through some compassion and get kids released from detention centres. That point looked similar to now. Suddenly it seemed like the tide had turned with this motion even having majority popular support. But it really was just a blip on the downward spiral.
I really, really, really hope this doesn’t happen again. But I’m not overly optimistic.
Yeah, hats off to all the people who have put their careers on the line inside the immigration system to push this along. As well as the lawyers, medicos, activists, journalists and even clergy who have been immensely helpful.
Electoral politics has not really done much, beyond what little the Greens could do. I know there have been some very hard working ALP members (rank and file, not members of parliament) who have been trying to break the bipartisan consensus on torture island prison camps but internal process has been completely unable to do so.
Both major parties can only be brought kicking and screaming on this. They have always been the root of the problem and their only role in the solution will be to Fuck Off.
I agree with Scott Ludlam that the situation on Nauru and Manus is horrendous. The situation for refugees world-wide is horrendous. It’s also insoluble whilever the conditions exist that keep creating more refugees. The difference with Nauru and Manus is that these refugees have become Australia’s responsibility.
We have tried to keep them out of sight and out of mind for years, but it’s now becoming more and more difficult for us to ignore what we have been doing to our fellow human beings.
On the other hand, a question nobody seems to be asking is “would they have been better off not getting on that boat?” Are Nauru and Manus any worse than the Indonesian refugee camps?
Or is it just that they would have been easier for us to ignore if they had stayed in the refugee camps and been Indonesia’s problem instead of ours?
Thank you and well said Scott.
I’m sorry Scott. You can do much better than this.
Nothing in that diatribe hasn’t been said a thousand times before.
It’s intellectually vacuous to write asymmetric jeremiads about cruelty, horrendous conditions etc etc without being explicit about what system should exist in its place.
I don’t think open borders is workable but I respect anyone game enough to put it on the table.
Therein lies the challenge.
By all means get people out of Nauru and Manus Island-and acknowledge that people in some godforsaken refugee camp elsewhere will miss out as a consequence-but tell us what you’ll do when when the next boat slips through the net.
And one other thing. Whatever you think about the goings on up there, a medical emergency is one thing it isn’t.
Weaponising a term like that is irresponsible.
Foetal distress is a medical emergency. A ruptured aortic aneurysm is a medical emergency.
If doctors want to advocate for refugees that’s fine.
The over reach not so much.
Yes Kimba, because children suffering mental cruelty is so not a medical emergency, let’s leave them until they actually self harm, eh?
Intellectual vacuity truly lies in your own words Kimba.
I could see no reference in the article to ‘open borders’ , but you seem to jump reflexively to an extreme view, one so heavily propagandised by the LNP, conflating ‘open borders’ with the issue of allowing a few dozen refugee families with children confined to Australia’s tiny client nation, Nauru, for more than five years now, to be moved here.