Phelps bill the worst kind of technocratic fantasy

Independent Member for Wentworth Kerryn Phelps.

The Phelps bill for offshore processing represents the worst kind of technocratic fantasy.

The bill, put forward by independent MP Kerryn Phelps, would allow asylum seekers held on Nauru or Manus Island to be transferred to the mainland on the advice of two doctors. A second panel of doctors could review the decision. Ministerial discretion would be limited to cases involving national security.

The Phelps legislation is draped in the livery of compassion but at its core is an old political fallacy: that enlightened government is preferable to representative government.

In an era where both major parties have shown a chronic inability to deal meaningfully with the nation’s problems the appeal of such an idea is obvious. The temptation to take intractable

problems out of the hands of feuding politicians and give them to well-meaning technocrats has a surface-deep appeal. Of course, why stop at offshore processing? Why not delegate energy policy to a panel of experts? Or tax reform? Or . . .

As incompetent or as cynical as our major parties may be, ultimate responsibility for who enters the country must remain with elected officials. This is not just because immigration goes to the heart of sovereign authority. It is because doctors are patently unsuited to the task at hand.

A doctor’s interest extends no further than his or her own patient. A minister’s interest is to the community, to the parliament and to asylum seekers as a whole. Doctors give no thought to consequences beyond those which affect their patients. Ministers weigh competing goods – the need for compassion against the need for deterrence.

That we have found ourselves dealing with a backlog of asylum claims is the fault of the Labor Party, who in dismantling the defunct, but symbolically important Pacific solution in 2008, fired the starter gun on a historically unprecedented wave of boats. It is difficult to overstate what a catastrophe this became. With the possible exception of the decade-long impasse on energy policy the crisis it unleashed stands as the single greatest failure of public policy in a generation. A total of 50,000 people came by boat, 1200 died, billions were squandered - all as a direct consequence of a single government decision.

But as we prepare to watch the parliament emasculate itself part of the blame must surely lie with the Coalition.

By failing to act swiftly to resettle the asylum seekers held on Nauru and Manus Island, the Coalition set itself up for the backlash it now faces. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton calculated the public would wear the prospect of hundreds of asylum seekers marooned indefinitely offshore.

One should be wary of commentators who claim to know “the mood’’ of the public. Politicians, in my experience, are much better weather vanes of public feeling than the people who write about them. But the alacrity with which the government is now emptying the facilities on Nauru suggests Dutton knows he has badly miscalculated.

Now the government is scrambling to avoid a humiliating defeat on the floor of the House and institute measures that would appease the crossbench, the Greens and Labor. It is an ungainly spectacle, one whichever way it goes will telegraph vacillation and weakness to the millions of refugees still in the region.

That said, I doubt the Phelps bill will instantly restart the smuggling trade. Nor will the community be overrun with rapists, paedophiles and terrorists. The asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus are among the most heavily vetted in the world. But it will end offshore processing. That’s not government spin. That is the unanimous view of the national security community.

“It will leaves us with boat turnbacks,” one senior official told me recently. “If we lose them, we’re f-----.’’

That conversation, by the way, predated the publication in this newspaper of ASIO advice warning of the consequence of the Phelps bill.

The Phelps bill also assumes the infallibility of doctors. It assumes there is a mental health epidemic on Nauru and Manus and that doctors will always separate their clinical judgments from their moral ones. How do we know this? Because doctors have told us so. But much of the information we have on the health situation on Nauru has come from organisations which are hopelessly conflicted in their role as both advocate and service provider.

Consider Medecins Sans Frontieres. For 11 months, MSF was providing medical services on Nauru before its staff was kicked out by the Nauruan government under accusations of bias. MSF is a fine organisation, but it makes no secret of its activism. On its website it runs a statement “strongly condemning’’ offshore processing, which, it claims “is the real cause of the situation of mental health distress among refugees and asylum seekers on the island’’.

Does anybody seriously think MSF staff on Nauru aren’t inherently compromised by the corporate view of their employer? In what other realm of public policy would such an obvious conflict of be tolerated? The government is right to want to empty Nauru and Manus. But it should be done methodically and by politicians who are accountable for the long-term consequences.

Paul Maley is National Security Editor