Forced to do good

It is hard to comprehend how outrageous it is that a shameful political standoff on the offshore processing of asylum seekers has forced the Australian Government into a position where it has no choice other than to dump a harsh and punitive policy in favour of its own more just and humane policy.

Despite their best efforts, the Government and the Opposition have both failed to prosecute their preferred agendas. The Government painted itself into a political corner and the Opposition gave it no room to move, even at the expense of its own commitments.

To say that those of us who had long been advocating for justice, compassion and the human rights of asylum seekers were relieved and excited by the Rudd Government’s announcement in July 2008 of its ‘New Directions in Detention’ policy would be a gross understatement. The Immigration Minister at the time, Chris Evans, launched this policy in a self-congratulatory mood. The Government had ended the ‘Pacific Solution’ by closing the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, launched a review of the case of long-term detainees and abolished temporary protection visas, among other things. In his speech Evans said,

Labor rejects the notion that dehumanising and punishing unauthorised arrivals with long-term detention is an effective or civilised response. Desperate people are not deterred by the threat of harsh detention – they are often fleeing much worse circumstances. The Howard government’s punitive policies did much damage to those individuals detained and brought great shame on Australia.

Highlighting the devastating effects of long-term detention on vulnerable people and the “dehumanising” and unnecessarily punitive policy of indefinite mandatory detention, the Minister signalled a new era – that of “risk-based detention policies”.

A risk-based system sees people held for brief periods of time while health, security and identity checks are carried out. These can be done in most cases quite easily within thirty days. If an asylum seeker is assessed as not posing a risk, they are released into the community while their claims are processed. This is consistent with what happens in other developed countries. Indefinite mandatory detention is a system all our own. But the new Labor Government was committed, Evans said, to “reforms (that) will fundamentally change the premise underlying detention policy” – a policy that saw people detained “even though the department assessment is that they pose no risk to the community”. Detention, he said, was “too often the first option, not the last.”

An entire bookshelf could be filled with the multitude of published opinion pieces and commentaries having a stab at explaining how on earth the Gillard Government found itself in such an appalling situation with an area of public policy that they had been very clear about. They most obviously panicked – the reasons why they did have been more than adequately canvassed. My concern is to see them do the right thing.

I am so relieved that the Government is now forced to uphold its own policy. I am angry that it has come as a result of the Opposition’s appalling politicisation of asylum seekers and the Government’s inability to stand their ground in the face of it. The public debate has been shameful and ugly. It is entirely appropriate that the base politicking and the fear-mongering rhetoric have found their ultimate conclusion in a dead-end for those who have lead the charge.

How well a decent and humane policy can be implemented by those who have been forced to do it remains to be seen.

Border worship has produced an inhumane people trade

‘Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien, the orphan, and the widow of justice.’

All the people shall say, ‘Amen!’

(Deuteronomy 27:19)

Australian Christians across denominational boundaries (and many others) are grieving the loss of a moral heart in our country. I have heard expressions of disillusionment, sadness, and shame. Many are angry and may well be inclined to join the ancient chorus shouting “Amen” to the curse on those who would deny justice to vulnerable people.

Under the cover of one of the most aggressive ‘on message’ slogans Australian politics has seen—“smashing the people smugglers’ business model” (a shockingly crass economically utilitarian alternative to “stop the boats”)—the Gillard Government has brought us to a new and shameful low, for on Monday 25 July 2011 it became official – Australia now trades in people.

We have used ‘an ends justifies the means’ ethic to justifying a people ‘swap’. There are, unfortunately, numerous examples in Australia’s history of our governments mistreating people, ignoring or abusing people’s human rights and stripping already vulnerable people of their dignity. But the deal with Malaysia commodifies people in a way many of us could not have previously imagined.

The Government responds harshly and defensively to this criticism that they are trading people or treating people like commodities. The Prime Minister and the Immigration Minister are desperate for us to believe that taking 1000 refugees a year for four years from Malaysia, more than balances out those 800 we will send (and more in the future – already we are hearing the language ‘pilot program’). They talk up all the safeguards that have been built into the arrangement for our asylum seekers. Many times already we have heard that this deal could be the start of a conversation that may see Malaysia increasingly more committed to the international human rights regime.

The Government is most desperate however, for us to believe that the motivation for this ‘people swap’ is to keep people safe from the smugglers. Of course Julia Gillard and Chris Bowen were horrified and appalled by the loss of life on Christmas Island last year. It is hard, however, to ignore what lies just beneath the surface of their public comments – that this action will serve to redirect the response of the more compassionate Australians in their favour, and thus serve as cover for the base political motivation of one of Australia’s darkest moments.

Here is some of what we know:

• People put their lives in the hand of people smugglers out of a desperation that most of us who live so comfortably in Australia can barely imagine, let alone understand.
• People smugglers do take advantage of vulnerable people and people end up dying in tragic circumstances.
• Australians do not want people to die at sea.
• The Government has taken a political beating over asylum seekers who arrive by boat and they believe they have to neutralise it by beating the Opposition at its own game.
• The Gillard Government has made a deal with a country which has an appalling human rights record in order to steralise a weeping political sore.
• Too many Australians would much rather believe that there is an orderly queue of well-behaved refugees out there somewhere, than have to imagine the brutality, poverty and chaos that millions of others have experience every day.

Whatever special treatment it has managed to secure for our 800 asylum seekers and despite all the Malaysian Government’s guarantees, at the end of the day, the Australian Government (supported by what I can only imagine is a beyond desperate UNHCR in Malaysia) has decided to engage in people trading for base political gain.

Well, the end does not justify the means. Not for nothing have many people been comparing this deal with the issue of our ‘Australian’ cattle being sent to brutal deaths in Indonesia. Treating 800 people like they are ‘ours’ to ship to a better behaving Malaysia, is not a decent or humane act and is not justification for the potential of better behaviour in future.

In the online magazine, Eureka Street, in July, Frank Brennan wrote, “Why would a church group publicly endorse something it knew to be either unworkable or immoral?”. He also recommended that once the deal was done, “church groups or agencies as ever should work hard and pragmatically to make it work as best it can, minimising the adverse impacts on the most vulnerable including unaccompanied minors”. Of course those of us who can, will. But the churches must not keep silent about a policy and a deal between two nations that required the abandonment of our leaders’ moral compasses.

In the face of a few thousand desperate people turning up on our doorstep uninvited, we are the ones lost in a sea of political expediencies, failed responsibilities and moral impoverishment.

I believe that Julia Gillard, Chris Bowen and every member of Cabinet who gave their assent to proceed with this ‘solution’, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison and every member of federal parliamentary Liberal Party who indulged in the xenophobic dog-whistling of “stop the boats”, have now stripped themselves of any right they thought they previously had to refer to the importance of ‘basic Christian values’ in their upbringing or in their current world view.

Christianity must always own its history and continuing involvement in the slave trade, in apartheid, colonialism, oppressive imperialism and too many other acts of brutality on populations and individuals. These are expressions of a faith that has lost its way many times and whose followers must always remain vigilant to the evil that lies within us. But at the heart of Christianity lies God’s love for the creation and God’s call on the faithful to demonstrate that love with acts of compassion, generosity and hospitality. This call demands that we bestow on others the dignity which is inherent in everyone’s being as beloved children of the Creator. God’s will for the world is for justice, peace and reconciliation for all and for everything, and we have been invited to be God’s partners in this mission.

Those of us who claim to motivated by such values, by the Judeo-Christian tradition which places such central value on the practice of hospitality to the stranger in need, and by the Christian story of the man who ate with the outcasts, even if we do not claim the faith itself, cannot engage in acts that strip away people’s dignity, deny their agency and dehumanise their very being, and continue to make those claims with any integrity.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophets speak many times of God’s self-identification as the one who cares for the exiled and the stranger and the one who calls the Hebrews to a continual remembering of their own slavery and exile.

Christian faith teaches that each of us, created in the image of God (however we understand it) is precious and valued by God. Our responsibility as human beings is to recognise this in each other. Christian faith also teaches that those who have much in this life have a special responsibility towards those who suffer poverty, violence, illness, oppression and dispossession and who hunger and thirst (for justice and for sustenance).

These responsibilities are antithetical to punishing one group of vulnerable people to send a message to another group. They are antithetical to turning people in need away from our door because it is not convenient for us. They are antithetical to judging those who would take desperate risks to find safety and security. They are antithetical to shifting our burden on to others. They are antithetical to making deals to trade people, whether they are citizens or not.

Christians believe that we are made to be in healthy, vibrant, robust, grace-filled, forgiving, hope-full relationships with each other. When these relationships break down we have a responsibility to work for justice and peace that they may be restored. A broken world is not made better by further breaking.

As many others have written over the last few weeks, we are certainly failing to meet our international obligations under the spirit and the terms of the Refugees Convention and we are failing to meet our obligations as one of the wealthiest, most secure, democratic countries in the world. We have a tiny, tiny problem by world standards and we keep coming up with new and increasingly morally regressive deals with our less secure, less democratic and more impoverished neighbours to take that small burden from us.

Asylum seekers didn’t create a problem for us, we manufactured our own problem. The people with the problem are in fact the very asylum seekers who have had to flee their homelands in fear for their lives.

Daniel L. Smith Christopher is a Quaker theologian in the United States. His latest book is titled Jonah, Jesus and Other Good Coyotes. He is writing from Southern California and the ‘coyote’ in the title refers to those who smuggle people across the US-Mexican border. He has come to the conclusion that we have turned borders, especially national borders, but all the borders that separate us from each other, into idols – objects of false worship.

While Australia’s situation is quite different to that of the US-Mexican border, there can be no doubt that our ‘border’ has become an idol. We spend billions protecting it from the threat of invasion (although we’re not sure who would be interested in invading us right now) and from those who are not invited (even though we know they pose no threat and are only asking for help). We watch reality television shows about the protection of our border – for excitement and assurance; we watch television dramas set on the boats that patrol our island’s coastlines to keep us all safe. Our border is a sacred place that must be protected from incursion.

Smith-Christopher writes that because Christians are called to be peacemakers and agents of reconciliation, they are therefore called to violate those borders we have constructed which serve to keep us at odds with each other. He challenges us to follow in the footsteps of the Bible’s good coyotes – Jonah, Ruth, Jesus and others – who challenged and crossed the borders that had become excuses for prejudice and violence and which kept people from the exchange of the gift of God’s love.

Many Christians and non-Christians alike have written about the loss of compassion in the heat of the debate about asylum seekers. They are often derided in the scary stream of comments on blogs and opinion pieces as do-gooders, bleeding-heart lefties who have the luxury of not having to make hard decisions, who over-simplifying and exaggerate. These would be the polite responses.

I can only hope that I deserve to be called a ‘do-gooder’ because as a Christian, it is exactly who I am called to be. I dream that every Sunday churches all over Australia are sending forth thousands upon thousands of ‘do-gooders’ in our society. As for the charge of being a ‘lefty’, it is a reflection of the sad and impoverished state of public political debate in this country that ‘doing good’, believing in compassion, seeking public policy that causes no harm and holding a commitment to human rights or the environment are commitments which have become so readily politicised. It is true I don’t have to make hard decisions on behalf of the country, but God help me if I was ever to believe that the dehumanising trading of people was ever an acceptable option.

An edited version of this article was first published in ABC Religion & Ethics Online, 27 July 2011.

An angry note about Manus Island

On the 6 May 2011, the Uniting Church Assembly issued the following statement about plans the Government was exploring to re-open the detention centre in Manus Island – another God-forsaken place we have access to for the dumping of vulnerable people who we believe we bear no responsibility for. This even though we continue to lose young soldiers fighting against the very regime many of these asylum seekers are fleeing.

In light of what we are learning about the kind of culture that gives rise to such disturbing events like the London riots, the Government might like to think very very carefully about what kind of message they are sending about the important balance of rights and responsibilities.

Here is what we said back in May:

The Uniting Church in Australia is dismayed at reports that the Government is planning to re-open the detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, Uniting Church President, Rev. Alistair Macrae, said today.

“We are extremely concerned that the Government is proposing a ‘Pacific Solution Take Two’ that will shift Australia’s burden of caring for a relatively small number of asylum seekers onto one of our poorest neighbours,” Rev. Macrae said.

The National Director of the Uniting Church’s national justice and advocacy agency, UnitingJustice Australia, Rev. Elenie Poulos maintains that in addition to this, any plans to intercept asylum seekers in Australian waters and detain them in a third country would be a blatant abandonment of our obligations under the Refugee Convention.

“We have a responsibility under international conventions. Manus Island is a totally inappropriate location for the provision of adequate and appropriate legal advice and health care to people who are often already physically and mentally traumatised,” Rev. Poulos said.

“People detained on Manus Island during the Pacific Solution were forgotten – it was very much a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. Very few countries were willing to bail out the Australian Government and resettle refugees from Manus Island and Nauru. This meant people were left languishing in detention for years.”

The Uniting Church believes that the politicisation of asylum seekers and the continual misrepresentation of the arrival of asylum seekers as a problem, have inevitably created what is now a stressed and dysfunctional system.

“It is a sad fact that there are people who must flee for their lives from persecution and corrupt and violent regimes. The policy imperative is to meet our international obligations and provide safety where it’s required in a timely and compassionate manner,” said Rev. Macrae.

“Both the Opposition and the Government must shoulder the responsibility for the continual damage being inflicted on the health and wellbeing of already traumatised people and the hardness of heart that has developed in the Australian community towards people who come calling on us for safety and care. We can no longer claim to be the ‘land of the fair go’.”

Plans to re open this facility will also cost the Australian Government millions. “The Howard Government spent $1.3 million over 6 months to detain one asylum seeker on Manus Island,” said Rev. Poulos.

“A truly regional solution, which provides desperate asylum seekers a real alternative to engaging a people smuggler, is very different to Australia dumping our obligations on another country. It is crucial that the Government reveal more detail about its plan. With very little information about their plans and progress in multilateral talks for a regional processing framework, we can only be extremely concerned by the prospect of the reopening of Manus Island,” Rev. Poulos said.

And about the Opposition’s exuberant joy in the mess that’s been created, no-one should be listening to them. It is some extraordinary hypocrisy for them to claim any interest at all in the rights or welfare of asylum seekers and refugees.

Whose lives do we grieve? Human rights in Australia

I have been committed to social justice and human rights for a long time, but one particularly distressing event turned this commitment into a driving passion.

One day, some years ago now, in an election year, I awoke to hear that a Norwegian boat which had rescued a few hundred people needing care and safety had been denied entry into Australia. Not long after that I saw images of those rescued people being herded onto a military vessel, and taken to a place named after the season of peace and goodwill from which they would be taken to a failed state in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

I had seen disturbing and unsettling images of the fences around persecuted people before, but not until then did it start to make me angry. These faces behind the fences were not the persecuted in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan where brutal regimes and dictators ruled, but the persecuted ones from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, here in Australia, locked up behind our fences. And not just any fences, razor wire fences. And there were children behind the razor wire.

We were told that there were fences around ‘these people’ because they had broken the law. They had come to our country by boat – uninvited. We heard that they were probably terrorists. We were told that we should be afraid because there were hordes more of these people coming and they would be dangerous. We knew that they were dangerous and mad because we saw them throw their children into the sea.

I heard people around me calling for the persecuted ones to be kept behind the razor wire because they didn’t deserve to be here and they would take away all the things we valued in life, all the things that were ours – our homes, our jobs and our security. I looked at the people around me as they looked behind the razor wire and into the face of the children. But it wasn’t children they saw – they saw the enemy who would one day rape their daughters and kill their sons. They looked behind the razor wire into the faces of ‘illegals’, worse than criminals and deserving of treatment harsher than criminals.

Too many of us did not see asylum seekers in detention centres as people whose human rights were being abused by public policy and its implementation. We did not see it until we saw Cornelia Rau.

After this horrendous and eye-opening demonstration of policies gone bad, the Howard Government and then the Rudd and Gillard Governments all made some significant changes for a more humane system that also better reflected the spirit of international human rights law. But in 2010, in another election year, we found ourselves in danger of going back to where we were – with some politicians deciding that for the sake of electoral gain it is entirely acceptable to score cheap political points by demonising a group of vulnerable and already traumatised people.

In a brilliant essay which reflects on the post-September 11 world entitled ‘Violence, Mourning and Politics’ (in Precarious Life: The Powers of mourning and violence, 2004), the philosopher Judith Butler reflects on grief and loss and explores what basis for community we might find in our “vulnerability to loss and the task of mourning that follows”.

In the violent context of today’s world, she asks who is that we mourn for? who is it that we don’t mourn? She writes, “Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?… what makes for a grievable life?”.

I think it’s fair to say that many Australians do not grieve the lives that are decimated in our detention centres, not because of any intended malice but because we have so internalised the idea that some people in the world are less worthy than others that we can’t decipher the politics or deconstruct our own responses. The losses suffered by asylum seekers do not figure in whatever we understand as a community to be our shared human vulnerability to loss. We do not believe it’s necessary to take account of their experiences of loss. In fact, we seem quite comfortable allowing them to be punished for the losses they have already experienced.

Butler’s questions are a challenge for us when thinking about the kind of society we might want to be and I believe that, at its heart, human rights discourse is the best universal answer we have been able to come up with to her questions: who counts as human? whose lives count as lives?

I believe that the example of children in detention centres, on its own, is enough to convince that we cannot always be trusted to act justly merely by virtue of our own sense of being a decent, fair and civilised society. It is not a fair, decent and civilised society that allows a popularly elected democratic government to lock up children for years in complete disregard for their wellbeing.

There are other examples too, numerous ones that demonstrate the sometimes less than stellar values we exhibit as a society and the inadequacies of our laws. There have been laws made that have had discriminatory and detrimental effects (deliberate or unintended) on distinct segments of the population, for example, Indigenous Australians, people who are homeless and low-income workers. Other policies, particularly in the wake of ‘September 11’, were implemented with anywhere from inadequate attention to complete disregard for civil and political rights resulting in the impairment of the right to a fair trial and to freedom of speech and association. While we may have believed that such human rights were safe in Australia, it has become clear that they are not adequately protected.

We need to do everything we can to help ourselves. We need systems and structures and language that support the growth of communities which are vibrant, inclusive and safe places, places where people experience dignity and respect and are enabled to flourish as individuals.

Human rights discourse is the universal language we have developed (out of one of the worst chapters of human history – the Holocaust) to talk about our shared values and to describe the conditions necessary for the ensuring that we keep our eyes on the idea of the ‘common good’. It is expressed in law because the law is one of the best tools we have for describing a society’s values and keeping us accountable to each other.

When considering human rights then, you have no choice but to also reflect on questions of values, morality, and shared and individual responsibilities and accountabilities. When people’s human rights are abused, their dignity is abused and the common good is threatened. When we allow public policy to allocate levels of dignity according to a person’s perceived worthiness, then we have answered Butler’s questions in this way: not every life is equal; there are some who are not worthy of our grief. Within a Christian framework that answer is: not every person is created in the image of God; God’s love is conditional.

The current Government missed a rare opportunity after a recommendation by the recent National Human Rights Consultation (in line with majority public support expressed through that Consultation) to move towards a Human Rights Act in this country.

Australia is the only developed democratic nation without some form of national legislative or constitutional human rights protection. Some of the most vocal opponents to human rights legislation – white, middle aged, well-education, rich men – criticise it on the grounds that it will give power to minorities and legitimacy to their voices and they are right. It will. This is the point of human rights law. It demands of the government and the public service and the institutions and organisations that implement government policy, pay heed to the effects of legislation on those most vulnerable, those whose voices are rarely heard and whose needs are usually ignored.

The Uniting Church has, since its inception, voiced its commitment to human rights. In its Statement to the Nation at its inauguration in 1977 the Church promised that it would “oppose all forms of discrimination which infringe basic rights and freedoms”. It promised to work for an end to poverty, racism and injustice and to stand up for such rights as religious liberty, civil and political freedom, education and adequate healthcare for all.

Some Christian groups and individuals receive significant media reporting of their concern for how stronger human rights and anti-discrimination legislation might erode religious freedoms in such areas as employment and freedom of conscience. I understand these concerns, but the institutions of the church are strong and well-supported in Australia – we have the capacity to stand up for ourselves when we need to. It is vulnerable and marginalised people, those whom the Church is called to serve, whose lives will be improved by more robust human rights protections.

It is the responsibility of all of us to seek the common good: to help build a just, peaceful, inclusive and prosperous society, where all people are valued, where the first peoples of this land are respected as the precious soul of the nation, where civil liberties are taken seriously and where the diversity of religions, languages and cultures is regarded as a great gift; where everyone has a home, decent work, access to a good education and good healthcare and the opportunity to live meaningful lives free from fear, prejudice and violence.

In this endeavour, human rights is just one important tool at our disposal. But it is a necessary tool.

Human rights is an expression of shared hope and shared values, a language which enables people to talk across the usual divides of culture and religion and ideology about what it means to be human, about the values inherent to our very humanity and how we might be accountable to each other for upholding our humanity and the common good. It is not perfect and it’s far from sufficient but it does matter and it can make a difference. The time to do something about it is here. A culture of fear and division has held the soul of this country for long enough. We must recover our capacity to count everyone’s life as valuable and worthy. Life will be better this way, for all of us.

This opinion piece was first published on the Religion and Ethics site of ABC Online, 10 December 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/12/10/3090430.htm?topic1=home&topic2=

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A More Hospitable Country?

In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is often identified as the God who cares for the exiled and the stranger. God brings justice to the oppressed and calls on the people of faith to extend the rights of citizens to refugees (‘aliens’) in their midst.

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Refugees are identified in the Bible with widows and orphans as the most marginalised people, the most at risk, and the test of faithful obedience to God was how a community and individuals cared for these most vulnerable people. Hospitality to the stranger therefore became one of the strongest moral forces in ancient Israel.

The Christian story continued to uphold God’s call to solidarity with the homeless. Mary and Joseph were forced to take Jesus and hide in Egypt as Herod sought to kill the baby Jesus. As an adult Jesus travelled through strange lands, choosing to spend time and share meals with the most marginalised and oppressed people of his society. Jesus called on people to love their enemies, give all they had to the poor, and offer hospitality to strangers. He taught that faithful obedience to God was marked by such deeds and that it would be how well people responded to strangers and to the poor that would identify them as people of faith.

It is in this tradition that churches in Australia have consistently spoken out against what Immigration Minister Chris Bowen this week admitted was the harshest detention regime in the developed world.

Ever since the shameful ‘Tampa’ episode in 2001, the response from some sections of the public and media, and from far too many politicians, to the arrival of asylum seekers by boat has been one of fear, suspicion, callousness and often hysteria. The level of attention and the shrillness of the debate have been out of all proportion to the numbers of arrivals which are, relative to other countries in the world, almost miniscule. The Liberal Party’s federal election campaign slogan, ‘Stop the Boats’, was one of the worst examples of the politicisation of vulnerable people we have ever seen in this country.

Australian governments have spent billions of dollars to ensure that asylum seekers who arrive by boat (onshore claimants) do not reach the Australian migration zone. There have been various policies applied to these asylum seekers and refugees that have aimed to punish them and deter others: offshore mandatory detention including the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ which saw people detained on Manus Island and Nauru, temporary protection visas, bridging visas with no rights to work or access healthcare or other support services, and being billed for their time in detention.

Such punitive policies are based on the assumption that some refugees are more worthy than others, that is, refugees who have applied for resettlement offshore are understood to be the ‘legitimate’ refugees while ‘onshore’ refugees are not. Under the Refugee Convention, however, refugees do not have a right to be resettled but everyone has the right to apply for protection and signatories to the Convention, such as Australia, have an obligation to assess all onshore claims for protection. As was made clear in a recent Parliamentary Library briefing note, “Resettlement therefore complements and is not a substitute for the provision of protection to people who apply for asylum under the Convention”. (Janet Phillips, 10 May 2010, Asylum Seekers and Refugees: what are the facts? Parliamentary Background Note, p. 5, http://www.aph.gov.au/library/pubs/bn/sp/AsylumFacts.pdf)

Governments have also claimed that such harsh policies serve to stem the flow of boats but their impact in this regard is questionable. People flee situations of persecution and violence. The numbers of asylum seekers seeking protection in Australia will fluctuate as conflicts escalate or ease. It is a relief to finally hear political leaders making this point as Julia Gillard did when she announced the Government’s intention to release children and families from detention.

While recent changes have seen an end to such harsh and punitive policies as temporary protection visas, the ‘Pacific Solution’, the 45-day rule which left asylum seekers in the community destitute, and the billing of refugees for their time in detention, mandatory detention is the last frontier. This week’s announcement by the Government that it would work with churches and community service organisations to move families with children and unaccompanied minors out of detention, is a long-overdue first step. It came with an acknowledgement, at last, that there is no evidence that the detention of asylum seekers achieves anything other than to heap more trauma and abuse on already traumatised people. Julia Gillard and her new immigration minister are working hard to make this point and move away from the despicable rhetoric that has demonised vulnerable people and diminished Australia’s reputation as a civilised nation. We can only hope it continues.

This opinion piece was first published on the Religion and Ethics site of ABC Online, 18 October 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2010/10/18/3041539.htm?topic1=home&topic2=

Mandatory detention has had its day

Today the Uniting Church in Australia has again called for an end to the policy of mandatory detention for asylum seekers who come by boat. Here is what we said:

The Uniting Church in Australia has called on the Australian Government to urgently review the policy of the mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

The Director of UnitingJustice Australia, the Uniting Church’s national justice agency, Rev. Elenie Poulos said, “The tragic events at Villawood Detention Centre this week are a stark reminder of what the Government knows to be true: the prolonged mandatory detention of asylum seekers compounds the suffering of people who have already endured considerable mental and physical trauma.

“Deteriorating conditions for asylum seekers on Christmas Island, in Darwin and Curtin and in alternative places of detention, are an indication that quick action needs to be taken. Radical change is necessary if we are to avoid a re-run of the post-Tampa horrors of Port Hedland, Curtin at its worst, Baxter, Nauru and Manus Island,” said Rev. Poulos.

The Uniting Church in Australia has for many years been calling on successive governments to end the policy of mandatory detention for those who arrive by boat and commit fully to onshore processing.

Rev. Poulos said, “Instead of expanding the failed paradigm of detention facilities and offshore processing, just a small proportion of that money could fund alternative programs which allow asylum seekers – after health, security and identity checks have been done – to reside peacefully in the community while their claims for refugee protection are assessed. This is the current practice for those who arrive by air and then claim asylum.

“We have been pleased to hear the new Minister for Immigration, Chris Bowen, speak plainly about the complex, global situation of asylum seekers and the very small numbers who come to Australia compared with other countries”, said Rev. Poulos.

“We urge the Government to continue this move away from using asylum seekers to score cheap political points and call on the Opposition to do the same – the sloganeering must stop. As has always been the case, people’s lives are at stake.”

“In particular we encourage the Government and the Department of Immigration to bring this openness to the complexity of conflict and post-conflict situations to the situation facing Tamils in Sri Lanka and asylum seekers from Afghanistan. One sign of a civilised country is that we do all we can to ensure that people are not being deported to life-threatening situations. Surely if these were our own families we’d want a government erring on the side of caution.”

Rev. Poulos said, “The Uniting Church calls on the Government to take a stand for justice and decency. It is time to show the world that Australia is ready to stop demonising asylum seekers and prepared to do our bit to care for our neighbours in need.”

Mandatory detention is what happens when we fail to recognise, deliberately or out of willful ignorance, the right of people to come to Australia seeking asylum.

Mandatory detention is what happens when we discriminate against asylum seekers based on their mode of arrival.

Mandatory detention is what happens when we think there is some kind of orderly queue that only selfish people ‘jump’.

Mandatory detention is what happens when we fail to engage our capacity to empathise with people. What would you do after years languishing in a horrid camp in Malaysia and Indonesia? What would you do if the nearest UNHCR office was two countries away with your persecutors standing between it and you?

Mandatory detention is the result of politicians playing political point-scoring games with vulnerable human beings.

Mandatory detention is unnecessary and costs an enormous amount of money to implement and administer. Successive Australian Governments have spent billions of dollars on a system that is known by everyone to cause harm and which does not deter people from risking their lives to come here by boat. A fraction of that money could have easily covered the cost of a safe, secure and decent community processing program.

It is to our great shame as a country that we continue to implement policies that cause harm to people.

And for the record, children who are detained in ‘alternative places of detention’ are, for all intents and purposes, in detention. It is a clear breach of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.

We are a secure and wealthy country. The numbers of asylum seekers who arrive by boat are so small.

How pitifully small and sad are we, when we try to offload so few people onto poverty stricken countries in our region because politicians regard it as a ‘vote-loser’ to process them here on the mainland?

The Government is right to try to engage with countries in our region in a positive and productive way to develop a regional protection framework. The chances of it being a success will rest on whether we are seen to be taking our own moral and legal responsibilities seriously; on whether we are seen to be offering genuine leadership or merely playing to internal domestic politics.

Policies that have been proven to cause harm have no place in the kind of Australia that most of us would hope for. It is time to put an end to them.

It’s time to get tough!

Well, here it is – my first ever blog. And I have decided to write about something that has been bothering me for a very long time.

I’m not sure when it happened but somewhere along the line we seem to have decided that public policy in Australia would be good if we could call it ‘tough’ and bad if it could be described as ‘soft’.

I have always believed that the aim of public policy in a democratic nation state was to create, build, enable and enliven; to contribute to the development of a society that was safe, inclusive, healthy and prosperous; a society where everyone would be able to contribute according to their capacity and their dreams; a society that valued and encouraged learning, respect, the exercise of mutual care and concern, the growth of creativity and the flourishing of individual and communal imagination; a sustainable, compassionate and generous society. Obviously I was wrong.

The shameful debacle of the public policy debate around asylum seekers in Australia continues because the Labor Government – which started its term so positively in shifting (a little) to more humane and decent (as opposed to punitive, xenophobic and harmful) policies – has caved in to the pressure to re-present its policies as ‘tough’. Julia Gillard’s supposedly, but not really, ‘new’ policies will ‘wreck’ people smugglers. Wreck them, she said, wreck them! Them’s are fighting words. Those are words deliberately chosen to ease our anxious souls – we have no need to fear, the Gillard Government can be as tough as any!

But that’s not all. Paradoxically as our anxieties are meant to be eased, we are told that it is quite OK to feel anxious. How does that work?

I had always believed that a good leader was supposed to ease our anxieties, especially those based on ignorance and fear. Again, I’ve obviously had it wrong for quite some time.

Oh well, I will get back to trying to come to terms with those fabulously ‘tough’ policies designed to wreck things and people. I’ll try to work on my own ‘softness. I am far too much of a bleeding heart and we all know how bad that is: that is so bad that it deactivates any inherent capacity to be tough. It’s time to get tough on the bleeding hearts!

Here ends the first blog.