'End this evil system of detention'

[The following remarks by Booker Prize winning author THOMAS KENEALLY
were read out to the June 23 World Refugee Week rally in Sydney.]

I am disappointed
I cannot be there today to add my voice to yours. Like you, I consider
the compulsory detention of asylum seekers a tumour on the body politic
of the Commonwealth of Australia. It demeans our traditions of compassion;
it mocks any hope we ever had of being a moral force in our region and
in the world at large; and it causes the most inexcusable and most acute
suffering to those who are detained in the sun-struck gulags of our nation.
It presents a test we are failing. The wheels of our Molloch of a system
are grinding to dust the souls of brave and decent men, women and children.

Like you, too, I lament the success of certain false propositions about
this matter of detention of asylum seekers. These are propositions implanted
in the minds of citizens by the present government, and — I am sad to say
— allowed to remain there by the policy timidity of the Labor Party. There
are many, many such propositions. I would like to mention three in particular.

First is the proposition that the only alternative to the present system
is to “let just anyone in”. We here today do not stand against proper processing.
We would applaud such a thing. But the idea that the only option we have
is to detain people for years behind razor wire is repugnant, and its repugnant
nature is shown by the fact that other liberal democracies have avoided
adopting it.

A second false proposition is that detainees are queue-jumpers. Where
is this queue? At what geographic point is it sited? Outside which Australian
embassy? Outside the door of which Australian immigration official? Can
we reasonably expect people in far less happy places than this place of
ours, people terrified for their lives, subject to tyranny and immediate
and direct persecution, to know about or spend a moment's thought on the
idea of Mr Ruddock's fictional queue? And should we base a national response
to an international crisis of refugee-ism upon such a fantasy?

Human freedom is not a bus, which people will enter in order. It is
not a David Jones sale where polite people like Mr Ruddock do not jostle.
It is a preciously embraced, once-in-a-lifetime bid for liberty and the
light. And those who bravely seize that moment — how do we applaud their
human endurance, their courageous desperation? Like the gendarmes in the
music hall song, we lock 'em up. Indefinitely. Not by the day. Not by the
week. Not by the month. But by the year!

A third fake proposition is that the asylum seekers have done something
illegal. The Australian people have not been informed what the international
law on this matter is — international law that applies to all of us: That
anyone is entitled by law to claim political asylum, and that the claim,
however presented and voiced, is thoroughly legal.

So, our concerns here today: I, like you, am concerned that the process
of detention is administered by the Australian subsidiary of an American
company whose expertise is the management of prisons. It is a company which
lacks a policy on families and on children.

I, like you, am horrified that when a UN inspection team declares our
detention system the worst of its kind that they had seen, we deny the
validity of these independent arbiters, call them wrong-headed, and reject
their comments as an interference with Australian sovereignty.

And I, like you, accuse the Australian government of illegal imprisonment
of asylum seekers, and — in cases involving the use of isolation cells
and detention — of cruel and unusual methods.

Recently I sat among a group of young detainees in Villawood. The shortest
time any of them had been in detention was 20 months. The Commonwealth
of Australia has stolen their youth and yet laughs at the term “collective
depression” when the UN inspectors present it as what we know it to be
— a quite reasonable, sensible, factual description of the terrible state
to which the Commonwealth of Australia has reduced these people.

We have achieved, or the government has achieved in our name, a terrible
thing: The image of the tyrants and killers from which the asylum seekers
fled has been supplanted in the imaginations of the detention seekers by
the image of another tyrannous system — our detention centre system with
all its uncertainty, inconsistency, degradation and mental torture. And
the face of whatever tyrant asylum seekers have fled from has been replaced
by the visage of the man who is so responsible for promoting and sustaining
their present torment — an Australian, Philip Ruddock.

We are confident that if our fellow citizens were permitted to know
the reality, they would cry en masse for an end to this evil system.

Oh but, say the apologists, we cannot let the children go — they would
be separated from their parents! We say: Don't let only the children go.
After proper processing, and with proper guarantees of the kind which operate
in other societies, in liberal democracies from the Arctic region southwards,
even with us standing surety, let the families go. Pull down the razor
wire which disgraces our beloved earth!

One day your grandchildren will look back upon this era with incredulity,
and ask how Australians let this system flourish. And at least you will
be able to say what sadly I cannot, being absent today. You can say, I
was there, I was at Circular Quay the day we dislodged another strand of
that evil wire. I was there the day we gave the asylum seekers an added
fragment of hope. I was there the day we tried to alert our Australian
brothers and sisters of the viciousness being perpetrated here, in our
commonwealth.

Pull down the wire!

Pull down the wire, let free the souls.

From Green Left Weekly, July 3, 2002.

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From GLW issue 498