So, last week the High Court upheld the Australian government’s right to hold people in immigration detention indefinitely. There are two remarkable things revealed by this litigation: first, that on the Australian statute books is a piece of legislation that allows a person to be kept behind bars for the term of his or her natural life, not because of their having been convicted of some terrible crime, or for any other reason justifying their segregation from the community on grounds of their own, or others’, safety, but simply because they tried and failed to obtain permission to reside here, as a refugee or otherwise, and the Australian government has had no success at sending them somewhere else. (The Court’s decision appears to say that as long as the government still maintains a present intention that the person be deported, the person can be detained, notwithstanding that no deportation is imminent, or even likely, and not just in the short term or indeed for any reasonable length of time.)
The second, and even more remarkable, thing is that this government has been prepared to go to the highest court in the land in order to enforce such a law and have its validity upheld. In other words, it sees nothing wrong with pursuing as a legitimate policy the action of keeping a human being in incarceration (call it immigration detention if you will, but in my book a gaol is a gaol) until that human being dies. One could suggest that this is the sort of ruling behaviour against which Australians have on many occasions gone to war, including in the very recent past. One could also suggest that, surely, instances of people having no country which is prepared to accept them (or, in the case of one of the parties before the High Court, being in effect stateless, ie, having no “country of nationality”, in the words of the Refugees Convention) would be rare, or at least sufficiently rare that it would cause very little practical harm to quietly send them off into the community on some legitimate basis until such time as they could be sent away. We may be inundated by stateless Palestinians, I suppose, but somehow I doubt it. Australia is proceeding to send very negative messages to prospective refugee arrivals as it is; a small handful of legitimate exceptions, on humanitarian grounds, is hardly likely to cut across those messages.
It is all very sad, not to mention cruel, and, as Justice McHugh said in his judgments in each of the two cases, “tragic”, and, anyway, my mind keeps turning to the Italian, Jewish, Chinese, Vietnamese and all the other communities around the nation who have, over successive waves of immigration, helped to make this country stronger, more prosperous, more multicultural, more interesting, more culinarily (?) adventurous ...
Does it really make sense to turn a handful of desparate persons into “non-persons”, keeping them in custody at the public’s expense, when they could be living amongst us, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps, as previous generations would have said, and becoming responsible members of this thing we are proud, most of the time, to call Australian society?
End of sermon.
