The brutal dark side to stopping the boats

DARTH Dutton’s asylum stance combines fearmongering and dog-whistling, without a drop of humanity. What’s never mentioned is the men who have died in detention, writes Paul Syvret.

ANY lingering doubt that Peter Dutton has all the boundless empathy of a Sith Lord would have been dispelled last month when he warned that displaying a drop of humanity toward refugees would unravel the Government’s border protection efforts.

“It is essential that people realise,” Dutton said, “that the hard-won success of the last few years could be undone overnight by a single act of compassion.”

Get that? A single act of compassion — specifically in relation to the asylum seekers still held in indefinite detention on Manus and Nauru — risks undermining Australia’s efforts to use innocent men and women as a human shield. Compassion.

Clearly for Darth Dutton the imperatives of race baiting, fearmongering and dog-whistling for a domestic political audience override Australia’s moral, legal and humanitarian obligations.

As the “Super Saturday” by-election contests entered their final days this week, Dutton was at it again, warning that a vote for Labor was akin to a vote for open borders, a terror cell in every street, African gangs raging through the local bowls club, halal certified beer and a plague of frogs.

In the lead up to by-elections, Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton has been warning a vote for Labor is akin to reopening borders. (Pic: Mick Tsikas/AAP).

Only a Liberal government, with Dutton and his Border Farce minions, could be guaranteed to continue the regime of brutalisation and boat-stopping of which we can be so proud.

Why, Dutton mused, on his beat some 70 boats had been duly stopped, hundreds of people smugglers busted, “and I’ve not had a death at sea on my watch”. The missing caveat here is a death at sea that we know about, or in Australian waters.

Also absent, of course, is any reference to the 12 men who have died in detention — many of them driven to suicide — on Manus and Nauru since 2014. Nor is there any mention of the pitched court battles the Government has fought to deny sick children medical treatment in Australia.

And we have also overlooked a reminder to Australian taxpayers that the cost of keeping a single detainee in offshore detention is close to $500,000 a year — which does not account for the human cost of prolonged detention of people who have committed no crime.

Not content with the standard sovereign borders schtick, Dutton’s department has also been grumbling about the thousands of asylum seeker cases in our court system, with the backlog such that some applications are not listed for hearing until 2021.

These delays, the department opines, are providing “an incentive for some applicants to commence litigation proceedings to prolong their stay in Australia”.

No. The problem here is that this is largely of the Government’s own making. This is a government that has, under Dutton and Scott Morrison before him, stuffed around with the immigration system to the point where asylum seekers have been denied access to processing for years.

Protesters in support of doctors that refused to discharge asylum seeker baby Asha until a suitable home environment was found in 2016. (Pic: Liam Kidston)

Asylum seekers who have arrived by boat can only apply for protection after they have been invited by the minister, and cannot lodge an application otherwise. Bear in mind, too, that the Rudd government suspended refugee status determination for maritime arrivals in 2012, with this bar only being lifted for all asylum seekers by 2016.

At the same time legal-aid funding — in particular to the Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme — has been slashed, and access restricted, causing further delays. The Abbott government’s “fast track” processing initiative proved to be anything but, and saw the scrapping of the Refugee Review Tribunal at the same time as removing scope to apply for a ministerial determination.

This, in the event of a negative determination by the department, leaves the only effective avenue of appeal as the courts, creating a process that forces people into the judicial system. Dutton decided to up the ante again last year and announced a final short window for asylum seekers to apply for protection visas or they would be deported. Some 12,500 are still awaiting an outcome, while others will not be reviewed until 2021, eight years after their arrival.

And, as the Refugee Council points out, the Government has also changed the rules including “shifting the burden of proof to people seeking asylum; removing the references to the Refugee Convention from migration legislation; and removing the reasonableness test from consideration of relocation options for people facing persecution”.

Meanwhile, many, if not most, asylum seekers have been prevented from working during this time, and the Government is now poised to remove some 8000 of these from income support (about 85 per cent of Newstart) because they are deemed “work ready” regardless of skills, language, psychological trauma or other factors.

This is nothing less than a system of institutionalised brutalisation and abuse where human lives are used as expendable political capital.

Be ashamed Australia. And be angry.

Paul Syvret is a Courier-Mail assistant editor.

@PSyvret