As Labor considers tougher migration measures amid pressure from One Nation and the Coalition, the legacy of Tampa still shapes how Australia treats refugees, asylum seekers and migrants.
Very few Australians citizens would have any idea about the terror sweeping through the families of people seeking asylum, on Bridging Visas or just here to learn. As the media casually speculate on why the Minister for Home Affairs. Immigration and Citizenship, Tony Burke, cancelled his scheduled announcement at the National Press Club earlier this week, those in his hair-sights are already being rounded up.
Late last week, I received a call from a migration lawyer, a lawyer with over 40 years’ experience. He was panicking. His client had received a standard letter from Home Affairs asking them to come in for appointment to assess their employment. When the lawyer and his client walked into the office, the door was closed behind them and there was no bureaucrat behind the desk, rather there was three Australia Border Force officers waiting to take the lawyer’s client into immigration detention. While this was underway, the client’s family was being taken from their home, bundled into a waiting car and taken into community detention.
The lawyer was in a panic because he could not believe this was the Immigration department. He was ringing me because he thought the men dressed in the black ABF uniforms were possibly criminals, or some form of secret police. He kept asking, “this can’t be happening in Australia, this can’t be real surely. I have never experienced anything like this”
His clients were the kind of family most countries are desperate to get. Both parents were hard working, mum volunteered at her little one’s school and their neighbours knew they could depend on them, their local church valued their company. They were paying taxes and slowly making their way through Australia’s labyrinthian visa processes with character references from school, church and employers. They were on a Bridging Visa.
But Labor wants to have an answer to a resurgent One Nation and this is it.
Burke was scheduled to give a speech at the National Press Club in Canberra on Thursday when he was going to unveil a new immigration policy aimed at lowering the number of arrivals and boosting departures to meet the budget’s forecasts for net overseas migration.
The Minister was working on a plan for a significant cut to net migration amid pressure from One Nation and the Coalition. This would include tougher family visa rules, a cap on backpackers in the country and restrictions on work and appeal rights of asylum seekers. The reason for the cancellation was rumoured to be internal divisions over the shape and severity of the cuts.
Labor has been here before. In a few weeks the ABC will air a three-part series, Tampa: The turning point, that documents the how, the who, the where, the when, of this maritime stand-off. Its forensic detail is enlightening. For those who thought they knew what was going on, it presents new information, and for those who have only ever heard ‘the Tampa’ referred to as short-hand for an historic event, it will clarify the scope, the depth and breadth of what happened over a week in August 2001.
However, the events of last week, the terrified voice of the lawyer who rang me late last week, and the terror rolling through so many families right now, underscore that the Tampa crisis/victory has woven itself through the DNA of Australia’s politics, our culture and I would argue, its soul.
Tampa transformed Australia from one kind of country into another and we are all reaping its harvest.
As we all watched the SAS board the Tampa with guns pointed at over 400 desperate men women and children, we had no idea we were watching Australia’s human rights obligations being reframed as a national security threat. But we should have.
Since then, we have careered into unchartered waters in our ongoing abuse of people seeking asylum and continue to breach international conventions such as the Convention Against Torture, the Rights of Children, and undermine the Refugee Convention itself.
The abusive nature of Australia’s on and offshore detention regime has been exhaustively documented in numerous reports including Protection denied abuse condoned. Last year, Nine newspapers reported that members of the Finks outlaw motorcycle gang were involved in a security operation managing former immigration detainees transferred to Nauru. Last month we learnt asylum seekers sent to Nauru by the Australian government were sometimes forced to forage in bins for food, despite the Commonwealth spending nearly $900 million to fund offshore detention in the last financial year.
In my book, Australia’s schism in the soul, I interviewed five psychiatrists, all of whom had worked for over two decades with people held in these camps. Among the questions I asked all of them was this: do these camps and the treatment people experience within them constitute torture? Five out five of these medical professionals said yes.
Australians know this even when we pretend not to know. We now know things about each other that corrodes threads of trust and solidarity. We know collectively we are willing to see the sacred core of children, women and men destroyed if it means we will feel more secure in our country, houses, employment.
This attempt to manage our collective anxiety by scapegoating refugees and migrants has failed – it always does fail. We are more anxious than ever. We are also more divided than ever and why wouldn’t we be. Would you entrust your family, your child to the Australian government or the Australian people?
Twenty-five years after Tampa we are more at sea than ever.
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
