The campaign to “stop the boats” has reached ugly new depths in the past month. The government held captive 157, mostly Tamil, asylum seekers in international waters for more than five weeks in the windowless hull of an Australian prison ship.
Facing a High Court challenge, it yielded to avoid testing the legality of its piracy. The human beings were taken first to the notorious and remote Curtin detention centre, before being deported to Nauru’s concentration camp.
More evidence is also emerging of the torture of asylum seekers in the camps. Dr Peter Young – the former chief psychiatrist of International Health and Medical Services, the private contractor responsible for medical care in the detention centres – told the Guardian: “If we take the definition of torture to be the deliberate harming of people in order to coerce them into a desired outcome, I think it does fulfil that definition.”
The recent Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry into children in detention revealed some of the horrid details. A three-year-old girl with epilepsy was stripped of her documents and medication upon arrival, then denied medication for months, causing her to slip into and out of seizures. A young boy had his hearing aids taken from him. Isolated, unable to communicate, he started to self-harm. Children are denied adequate clothing, forcing their mothers to stitch together mosquito nets as a replacement.
We know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in these camps.
Divide and distract
The purpose of all this is obviously to destroy the lives of refugees in order to deter others from exercising their right to seek asylum in Australia. And it’s a useful excuse to beef up the repressive military apparatus of the Australian state.
But it’s also a means to distract us from the Liberals’ broader agenda – epitomised by treasurer Joe Hockey’s class war budget, which serves the interests of the wealthy few and attacks the working majority, students, pensioners and the unemployed.
The government wants the headlines to trumpet that that the boats have been stopped, that Operation Sovereign Borders is achieving results, not that its budget is unfair and targets the poor. It certainly doesn’t want to read about tens of thousands of workers uniting, taking to the streets in a fight against the Liberal agenda.
The point of refugee bashing is not only to distract, but to divide us under the guise of unity. Rather than class unity across racial lines against big business and the government, they want us all to rally around the flag, to unite with the very forces that want to cut wages, privatise education, smash unions, gut pensions and destroy Medicare.
The more we focus on asylum seekers as the source of our problems rather than the actions of government or big business, the quicker they can enrich themselves at our expense.
That’s why one of immigration minister Scott Morrison’s first instructions to his department was to refer to asylum seekers arriving by boat as “Illegal Maritime Arrivals” in all official correspondence.
This dehumanisation and the abuse carried out against refugees also set a ruthless tone in Australian society that jeopardises everyone’s rights and civil liberties. If it’s permissible to brutalise refugee children, it makes it easier to strip the disabled of benefits. If thousands of asylum seekers can be imprisoned without charge or trial indefinitely, it makes it easier to target construction workers who stand up to reckless employers and speak out about unsafe workplaces.
The ruling class wants to crush any sense of social solidarity with the vulnerable and marginalised – decades of refugee bashing have helped them in this project.
