Government still using asylum- seekers in political game playing
We see a signature obsession with making life hellish, writes Greg Barns
CRUELTY is the hallmark of the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers. For more than two decades, governments’ treatment of people who seek shelter from persecution has been less than human. They have been used as pawns in a sickening political game called “border security.”
Last week the media reported on another example of this cruelty with reports about a Sri Lankan family in Kempsey, NSW who are now threatened with deportation because their father and husband has died of cancer.
This is not the only Sri Lankan family that is the victim of the signature obsession at the political and bureaucratic level in this country, which is making life as hellish for those who claim the right to asylum. There is a family jailed on Christmas
Island for over a year, placed there one assumes as punishment because they have taken Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to the Federal Court and won. This family, which include three children, is traumatised daily. We have witnessed the children being taken to school by security guards. There is no regard it seems, on the part of federal government, for the long term adverse physical and psychological harm inflicted on this family
The deliberate decision by government and our community to opt for cruelty over humanity is not confined to asylum seekers. Despite rhetoric and numerous talkfests in recent years, governments, particularly the Northern Territory, Western Australia and Queensland, orchestrate the industrial scale incarceration of indigenous Australians. Police forces and jailers routinely inflict assaults and other forms of physical and mental harm on individuals simply because of their skin colour. The rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody does not diminish and so far not one white jailer or police officer has been successfully prosecuted for their role in those deaths.
Celebrated University of Sydney academic and founder of the Sydney Peace Prize Stuart Rees argues that cruelty on the part of governments and the society of which they are part is driven by the need for superiority. In Cruelty or Humanity ( Policy Press 2020), Rees argues the “need to maintain the superiority or one group at the expense of another looks like the catalyst for cruelty. Embedded in state rules and cultural beliefs, assumptions about superiority give an entitlement to act against the supposed inferior beings, human or animal. The functionaries who represent states and cultures can assume permission to be cruel,” Rees writes.
Rees’s book chronicles the extraordinary number of examples of cruelty as policy across the world today. While in Australia we smugly and wrongly think that deliberate infliction of cruelty by the state is something confined to states like Iran, Turkey, China, and Burma, the reality is that so- called democracies participate in mistreatment of minority groups and those
people who represent a threat to the superior class. Think apartheid policies in Israel towards Palestinians, US migration practices towards Mexicans, UK Brexit attitudes towards desperate migrants in hellish refugee camps, and our own viciousness towards asylum seekers and Indigenous people.
Returning to the two Sri Lankan families, how else can we explain the federal government’s conduct towards them? The words of the great Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda in his poem The Dictator, which
Rees includes in his book. “Hatred has grown scale on scale, blow on blow, in the ghastly water of the swamp, with a snout full of silence. “The imagery fits.
One of the causes of cruelty as policy is the obsession with national sovereignty. As Rees argues, in “an economically and ecologically globalised world, the nation- state is increasingly dysfunctional and a source of so much cruelty. Discriminatory policies, solidified by walls, fences and well policed borders, encourage a siege mentality, aggressive nationalism and associated racism.”
The idea that a government department could write to a family that has just lost its dearly loved father and husband, and point them to the exit, is a powerful and unsettling example of the obsession with border that bedevils this country. As is the capturing and detaining of three small children and their parents on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia, locking up asylum seekers in hotels in Brisbane and Melbourne for months, or ministers refusing, as Alan Tudge did recently, to comply with court directions to release individuals from immigration detention.
The division of the world into superior against dangerous inferior explains the indigenous incarceration rate scandal ( indigenous Australians represent 27 per cent of the adult jail population). We invaded their land and cemented in this vast space our European culture and the notion that jails — like a border — keep us safe from the enemy. Cruelty as policy.