Medivac is gone, less than a year after its arrival. It came down to the vote of Jacqui Lambie in the Senate, which she delivered to the government in return for a secret deal she tearfully claimed was a matter of national security.
Politics aside, what does this mean? For that, we need a short history.
The starting point is the Australian government’s policy of indefinite offshore detention for asylum seekers who try to come to Australia by boat, in place since 2013 with the support of both major parties.
Of the few thousand people who found themselves on Nauru or Manus Island as a result, about 500 still remain. The rest met various fates; several hundred have been medically transferred to Australia.
Prior to the passing of the medivac amendments in January this year, the path for sick refugees and asylum seekers (most of the offshore detainees have been granted refugee status) lay through the Federal Court of Australia. Border Force, and its medical contractor International Health and Medical Services (IHMS), was not an enthusiastic provider of medical evacuation, to say the least.
The on-the-ground reality on Nauru and Manus was (and is) a constant and progressive deterioration of the physical and mental health of the individuals being held there in awful conditions without hope, aggravated by their exposure to physical and sexual violence and generally degrading treatment by a system that is inhuman by design.
Add to that the self-evidently substandard medical facilities on these islands, and a crisis of medical trauma was inevitable. (Don’t take my word for it, read any of the multiple reports by international aid agencies, the Human Rights Commission or the UNHCR.)
Refugee advocates and lawyers (including my firm) took many cases leading up to the end of 2018 to the Federal Court, seeking mandatory injunctive orders forcing the Australian government to bring sick refugees and their families to Australia for assessment and/or treatment. The legal basis for this is negligence: the government owes a legal duty of care to these people to not cause them harm, and its system of detention is demonstrably doing exactly that.
As it played out, the government’s attitude to these cases was mostly obstructive in the early phases and then ultimately acquiescent. It was, at a practical level, like pulling teeth. Also worth noting that, when the government did fight, it kept losing in court.
This resulted in a large number of sick people making it to Australia for treatment. They’re still here, almost all in the community, subsisting with no visa, no work or study rights, and little hope for the future.
Medivac was an attempt to put the decisions about medical care in the hands of doctors (really, it was that simple). It was passed while the government was in minority, pushed by Kerryn Phelps and other cross-benchers with the support of Labor and the Greens.
The practical effect of the medivac bill was to reduce the delays from years to weeks in getting sick people here for appropriate care. It created a process where the trigger for medical transfer was a recommendation from two independent doctors. That then went to Home Affairs for review.
If the request was refused, an independent Health Advice Panel including the most senior doctors in the public service and nominees from the peak medical bodies would consider the case and could force the minister to reconsider on medical grounds. The minister retained an overriding discretion to refuse transfers on the basis of national security or serious risk to the community, in all cases. The final say still rested with the government, contrary to its rhetorical insistence.
Now that’s all gone, repealed in its entirety. In legal terms, the position will revert to how it was pre-medivac, with these critical medical care decisions back in the hands of bureaucrats and their contracted medical service providers. No element of independence is preserved.
In practice? We’ll all be heading back to the Federal Court.
I’ll make two final observations. One is that, during the year that the medivac system has operated, the boats did not restart.
The other is that it is now over six years since we started punishing people who have broken no laws by incarcerating them indefinitely in sub-human conditions far away from the reach of our national conscience. To them, the repeal of medivac will hardly come as a surprise.
Yet for our diminished society, even that tiny offering of charity was apparently too much to give.
I really can’t understand what the endgame of this policy is. As best I can tell, we’re leaving puddle in indefinite detention as a modern version of the heads on stakes outside a castle. What am I missing?
You’re assuming there’s a plan to this. My assumption is they’ve painted themselves into a corner and have no idea how to get out.
On the contrary, they know exactly what they want to do.
Despite having been a penal colony, too many of us refuse to recognise the dangers to us, to our future, of continuing the cover-up of institutionalised brutality in the Nauru and Manus Is. concentration camps and the whole “secure borders” neurosis.
Forgetting all that will of course be much assisted by their closure. Only when the smoke of climate change blew into their own lounge-rooms did many Sydneysiders wake up that global heating has arrived – though they have yet to wake up that it is not leaving.
See how eagerly haters who’ve spent a lifetime in a democratic society urge extreme and gratuitous brutality. abbott’s ‘Team Australia’ xenophobia is, through such as “Anti-Islam” group Reclaim Australia, fanning the flames of communal hatred – including physical attacks on Muslims and their places of worship.
Authority (Labor as well as Coalition) has promoted vilification of asylum-seekers. abbott implicitly endorsed similar vilification of Muslims; from the time of his regime, the dogs were let off the leash. Since abbott, Border Generalissimo-MP Dutton has taken over the smearing, with a more cautious move to vilify Chinese. Now, Dutton is clearly set to drive a tidal wave of deportations. Why any surprise? This happens wherever where politicians get a taste for dictatorship. Prisons need prisoners. Control requires oppression. Power is as insatiable as greed.
“Only when the smoke of climate change blew into their own lounge-rooms did many Sydneysider”
Yeah, thanks drop bear, I suspect we were onto it long before you and Jethro caught on.
It has long been an article of faith for me to vote below the line in Senate ballots for the pleasure of putting Erica last, no matter how many candidates. Not any more. You know what you get with Erica. Not with Lambie. I am disgusted by her swallowing the “national security” cordial. We are supposed to live in a democracy. This ‘look over there’ bullshit we are governed by is outrageous. It seems impossible but Lambie has perfected our cruelty to asylum seekers.
I have my doubts Jacqui really had security concerns aka Secret Spooks Business but am unimpressed she expects us to believe it. Will she repeat the claim outside parliament under questioning ?
Today’s Age alleges a possible deal for those still on the gulags to go to NZ. Maybe then they’ll have enough spare thinking space to work on the fly ins problem and this wacky privatised visa system to be run by some old mates. It just gets better.
The author lets the cat out of the bag when he states ‘that tiny offering of charity” – it should have nothing to do with charity.
It is a case whether there is a medical condition that warrants treatment not on site but in more resourced medical facility the standard only available on the mainland. The Phelps bill was flawed from the start [ seems to be the usual poor standard of legislation emanating from Canberra these days]. The detention inmates quickly saw the flaws [or their distant legal advisers did] and made use of them effectively. Most legislation is poor quality nowadays and is easily scammed and good luck to them – what the government needs is proper forensic medical advice – which it did not have before Medivac laws and during the Medivac law period. All the various legislation did was to alter the processes -not solve the issues at hand .
Band aids seem to be the only treatment modality in Canberra for all society’s illnesses.
Not being tortured as charity. Remind me never to ask you for anything. What do you do to be mean?
“The detention inmates quickly saw the flaws [or their distant legal advisers did] and made use of them effectively.”
As always the customary Rightist smear. Criminal banksters are welcomed to defraud us of billions with no such censure. But then what financial adviser would want to be supervised by the competent and qualified and their thieving thus prevented?
And yet you didn’t seem to point out the flaws…
Apologists for our fascist regime always drop a bomb like that and never hang around to “argue” their “case”.
The “evidence” resides with the case studies post Phelps – I think you will find.
So the big win for the LNP at the end of the year is to repeal Medivac! The country is burning, the economy is going down the plughole and this is all they have to celebrate. The LNP have forgotten how to govern.
Slimy, superficial, sanctified, saturated shithead politicians, not elected to intelligence, decency or empathy, are able to take home tax payer money and sleep well, despite this uncivilised filth. But, feel safe.