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July 18, 2005
The conservative response to the Palmer Report, in erasing any political responsibility for the injustices suffered by Cornelia Ray, downplays the existence, and nature, of the camps in the mandatory detention of asylum seekers in Australia.
Consider P.P. McGuinness, editor of the conservative magazine Quadrant, in his op. ed. in The Australian. He acknowledges that something has indeed gone wrong:
"In the Rau and Alvarez cases there has also been clear incompetence and cover-up by low or medium-level officials of mistakes that are not justifiable. In the Rau case it was obviously difficult to know that a disturbed individual deliberately lying about her name, speaking a foreign language and making no claim to Australian residency rights was in fact a resident, but there is no doubt that she was treated incompetently by DIMIA and other agencies, and without regard to her obvious illness. DIMIA's behaviour with regard to Alvarez seems to have been worse: it seems the officials involved knew early on that there had been an error, but this was not communicated to sufficiently high authority to have it corrected."
Incompetence and error is the theme. It is similar to the PM's line of a few mistakes having made by a good department. That closes off the political responsibility for the culture of denial and self-justification at DIMA.
McGuinness goes on:
"Neither of these cases is evidence of anything other than low-level incompetence - itself a serious enough matter, but not a matter of government policy."
Low level administrative incompetence? More than that is going on. As Andrew Bartlett observes:
"The Palmer Report was based predominantly on just one case, yet there are many many more examples of gross injustices perpetrated by DIMIA. I could list over 100 cases I am personally familiar with over the last few years that have involved huge suffering, major injustices, massive inefficiency, pigheaded inflexibility or what appeared to arbitrary factors determining decisions. Many of these have not been asylum seeker cases; many have involved Australian citizens or families. Some have been hard cases; some seemed to be the result of nothing but bureaucratic pettiness. But I have no doubt that every single one of them occurred in part because the law, backed up in a big way by Government policy and regular Ministerial statements, reinforced the notion that this was how our migration system is meant to operate." Palmer talks about departmental attitudes being promoted by by a culture in which the detention of suspected unlawful non-citizens is the paramount consideration of the policy towards asylum seekers? Is that detention not a key plank in government policy and ministerial direction?
McGuinness, realizing that DIMA's brutish culture and practices are just too bad to ignore, says that:
"There is always room for better treatment of those detained under the terms of a policy on immigration which demands that entrants should be screened in advance. Their detention is often more a matter of the bad advice they are given by lawyers, propagandists and moralists who have no compunction in using these people to serve their own purposes. The bad conditions of their detention, when they are not sheer invention, are difficult to correct when few will address themselves to the amelioration of the conditions rather than a radical and unacceptable, indeed impossible, change in policy."
'Bad conditions','amelioration of the conditions' 'sheer invention' represent a gloss over camps, barbed wire, high detention, solitary confinement, mental illness, 200 cases under review etc. etc. These signify a governance strategy of to transform the human into a non-human by producing the bare life of the camps. That is what erased by McGuinness.
True, McGuinness does recognize that there is a political debate about mandatory detention, detention centres and the treatment of detaineesin Australia. He says:
"The pity of the political debate about...[these issues]... is that it is a political debate: it is dominated by hatred of the Howard Government, hysterical point-scoring and pharisaical posturing. The result is that there is little prospect of any rational discussion about how to improve the humanitarian shortcomings that inevitably creep into any such administrative system, and which in the case of DIMIA seem to have had a corrupting effect on the behaviour of low-level officials."
The words 'hatred', 'hysterical point-scoring' and 'pharisaical posturing' is cartoon politics. It refuses to acknowledge that the Australian Courts have consistently rejected DIMA'S 'reasonably suspect' that the person is unlawfully in Australia. The Court's judgement is that the law states that if the department is hold anyone in immigration detention for any length of time, them the department must know they are unlawfully in Australia. There is a big legal difference between 'reasonably suspect' and 'know.'
DIMA is breaking the law and placing itself out the constitutional order. This indicates that the Howard Government does not respect the rule of law of a constitutional liberal polity.
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