Philosophy.Com

the banality of evil

The news reports are saying that, Bill Farmer, the CEO of the Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs Department (DIMA), has just resigned and been appointed as Ambassador to Indonesia, just prior to the tabling of the full report of the closed Palmer Inquiry.

This is John Howard's way of handling his damaged bureaucratic and political goods: decorate and promote them. He did the same over the Tampa incident with Jane Halton, who was rewarded for her blocking work by being made CEO of Department of Health and Ageing. What counts is delivering the political imperatives demanded by the government.

What can we say of Bill Farmer and his routinized mandatory detention work that imprisoned a mentally ill Australian citizen, failed to exercise duty of care, and resists all the way to the Federal Court attempts to have mentally ill detainees referred from the Baxter Detention Centre to Glenside Hospital for treatment?

Hannah Arendt's book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, comes to mind. Farmer was a little man who just "followed orders". He is an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested in furthering his career, who has little sense of responsibility for the damage he has caused, and diligently works to ensure that the department often evades or ignores its duty of care responsibilities.

What Arendt's book does is highlight the banality of the perpetrators of evil rather than talk about the banality of the evil deeds. This would interpret Farmer as terribly normal, rather than being a cruel, savage, sadistic person.

By normality is meant that he goes home at night to tend his garden and water his flowers many miles away from the barbed wire of the detention camps. He goes on vacation, is enthralled by the beauty of an Australian landscape, makes children laugh. Yet he can still fulfil regularly, day in and day out, the duties of administering the public laws and regulations that mentally scar and torment the imprisoned aslyum seekers.

That normality does not mean that Farmer is not responsible for his actions. He is. The trouble is that he is not being made accountable for his actions.

The banality of evil can also refer to the routinisation of work undertaken by Global Solutions Limited in running the Baxter Detention Centre, and to the legal details of the juridico-legal basis of the regime.

Taking responsibility is the first step toward combatting the evil that is mandatory detention. Many in DIMA refuse to take responsibility.

Update: 18th July
David Marr's clear account of the banality of evil in the day-to-day administration of DIMA.

Marr also indicates that the department has been at loggerheads with the courts for years over a fundamental question:

"what tests officers must apply when holding people in detention for any length of time---for anything more than, say, a few hours or days. Is it enough to "reasonably suspect" the person is unlawfully in Australia, or must officers be much, much more certain?"

Immigration believes reasonable suspicion is enough. But that is not what the courts say.
Marr says:

"Every time Solicitor-General David Bennett, SC, has bowled the reasonable suspicion argument up to the courts in the past few years, they have declared it a no-ball. Most recently, in 2003, a full Federal Court of three judges headed by the Chief Justice, Michael Black, unanimously declared that suspicion is not enough. To hold anyone in immigration detention for any length of time, the department must know they are unlawfully in Australia."

The Immigration Department operated in defiance of that ruling of the Federal Court. In Corneila Rau's case DIMA officers never established she was unlawfully in this country.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 11, 2005 03:58 PM | TrackBack