No other country in the world has gone to such lengths to close its borders to those fleeing repression and terror than Australia has. No other country turns back leaky fishing boats packed with hundreds of asylum seekers and refuses to take responsibility for the consequences. No other country so openly violates its international obligations to refugees.
Days before the November 10 federal poll, the navy denied that it had told the government that children were thrown into the ocean by asylum seekers. Did the government lie about this incident to fuel its campaign to demonise asylum seekers? If this was a politically motivated lie, what else has been fabricated or covered up? Only a full and independent judicial investigation will uncover the truth.
Some have labelled Prime Minister John Howard's "Pacific solution" (in which Pacific island countries agree to detain refugees attempting to reach Australia) a new colonialism. There should be an investigation into what pressure has been applied to Pacific island governments to force them to take asylum seekers.
The most outrageous revelation involves the tiny Pacific country, Tuvalu, with a population of 11,000 people and with just 26 square kilometres of land. Four months ago, Australia refused a request to take in migrants from Tuvalu when global warming causes the rising sea to inundate the island state. Yet in recent weeks, the australian government has pressured that same country to take in refugees as part of the "Pacific solution". Tuvalu said no.
The Tampa incident heralded a new set of discriminatory laws for its policy of preventing all asylum seekers from making claims for refugee status on Australian soil. Yet disquiet over Australia's treatment of asylum seekers had already begun.
Over the past few years, there has been a increasing exposure of the appalling conditions in Australia's immigration detention centres — allegations of racist taunting, bashings and the use of lengthy solitary confinement.
A report prepared at the immigration department's request by Philip Flood, former Australian High Commissioner to London, was released in February. In March, the Commonwealth Ombudsman released a report on refugees in detention. Both reports confirmed allegations that detained refugees have been harassed and the detention centres mismanaged. They documented chronic overcrowding, lack of appropriate training for staff, racial abuse by staff, long delays in processing asylum claims which resulted in depression and suicide attempts.
Between October 1999 and November 2000, Australasian Correctional Management recorded 68 hunger strikes and 62 protests — 29 of them "major incidents" — in detention centres, but recorded only 15 official complaints by detainees for that period. The ombudsman's report documents persistent denial of legal access to refugees on spurious grounds.
Despite documenting some horrifying examples of life in detention, the reports did not make any radical recommendations. Yet both reports have been left to fade into obscurity without any action or implementation of their findings.
The case of six-year-old Iranian asylum seeker Shayan Bedraie, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to speak or eat, highlighted the plight of children in detention, and drew much wider attention to the conditions of detention.
It looks likely that there will be a Senate inquiry with a very limited brief. There is agreement between the ALP, the Australian Greens and the Democrats that it should only investigate whether the government lied about asylum seekers throwing children overboard. The November 15 Canberra Times urged that the inquiry also investigate "allegations of abuse of the Navy's proper information role during the weeks leading to the poll". In other words, the gag imposed on members of the navy and the media blackout of navy operations.
Australia's refugee policy has never faced such widespread criticism from across the political spectrum. It is fundamentally at odds with basic human rights.
In circumstances such as these, an inquiry that deliberately limits its scope to let Labor and the Coalition parties off the hook is not the sort of inquiry that's needed. It's not enough to have a committee dominated by the Labor and Coalition parties which wholeheartedly support the current framework and which will avoid criticism of the policy they have pursued.
What is needed is a thorough investigation of Australia's bipartisan refugee policy. Nothing less than a royal commission will have the power and authority to fully investigate the lies and cover-ups the government has been involved in, the extent to which the Howard government's policies and actions violate international treaties and conventions, and the extent to which they violate universal human rights.
From Green Left Weekly, November 21, 2001.
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